Up Till Now Page 24

  In response he began drinking. “There I was with no wife, no kids, I needed a friend and I found one.”

  When I brought T.J. Hooker to life I focused on the one word that I thought best described him: angry. Angry about the laws that made his job tougher. Angry about the Miranda rights for suspects. Angry about all the rules instituted by do-gooders who didn’t understand life on the streets. He had to comply, but he was angry about it. Hooker was a conservative cop placed in a liberal setting, and at its best we were able to successfully represent that conflict. Had I met Hooker I would have liked him; he had a good heart, strong ethics, and even when he disagreed with the law he always upheld it.

  The way Hooker came about was unusual. Most series are in development for several years before they get rejected. Even if a pilot gets made, only a few of them ever get on the air. But in the early 1980s legendary producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg were ending their partnership and still had a guaranteed commitment for one more show from ABC. They hired a top TV writer-director, Rick Husky, to create the show and write the pilot. It took him only a few weeks, he remembers. The biggest problem he had was coming up with a name for the character. He was a Civil War buff so he called him Hooker after General Hooker. He couldn’t come up with a first name that felt right, so he called him T.J. because “It was better than no first name.” Only much later did I become Thomas Jefferson Hooker.

  Within a couple of months we were making the pilot. That’s how fast it happened. Initially the show wasn’t supposed to be T.J. Hooker. It was an ensemble show called The Protectors, featuring a grizzled police sergeant and the group of eight young cops he’s training. According to Rick Husky, it was supposed to be Dallas, with cops. Each week another one of those cops would be featured. One of the reasons I took the part, in fact, was because I wouldn’t have all the pressure of starring in a series. Most weeks I’d just be a supporting player. But the response to my character was so strong they dropped that premise and focused on Hooker. They did not, however, raise my salary.

  The show was an immediate hit. The New York Times called Hooker “the kind of character who would have been unthinkable for television just a couple of years ago...T.J. Hooker is a fascinating creation.” But I knew we’d struck a chord even without reading that review. We used to film on the streets of Los Angeles, we’d have all our production trailers parked in a row, and before the show went on the air people would stop to watch and they’d point me out and I’d hear them say, “Oh, there’s Captain Kirk.” The night after the show went on the air, literally the night after, I heard people saying, “Oh, look, there’s T.J. Hooker.”

  Hooker was an interesting character. He was a tough, conservative Los Angeles cop forced to deal with the new rules of a changing society, things like Miranda laws and understanding the root causes of crime, and didn’t like it at all. When he joined the force the rules had been pretty straightforward; the good guys take the bad guy into the back of the station until he confesses. Instead, as he says sadly, “There’s a war going on out there in the streets and, from where I stand, the bad guys are winning.”

  You know how much fun it is to play a character like this? What made Hooker’s character so interesting to me was that he remembered the old rules of law enforcement: of course I understand you robbed that bank because you have no self-esteem. Boom, taste my nightstick. Yes, I know your addiction is a disease and you couldn’t help mugging that person. Boom, say hello to my nightstick. But Hooker had to do his job under the new rules—and chafed at it like a stallion with a bit in his mouth.

  And it wasn’t just modern law enforcement, it was modern life. Hooker was always railing against “parents that don’t care, kids that lack discipline,” against gambling and a permissive society. As his partner Romano described him, “Hooker’s just a little backward. He’s not used to dealing with modern women.”

  I rarely had time to do any research for the parts I played. For Kirk, who was I going to talk to? For Incubus, I couldn’t understand anybody. Well, perhaps I did research modern women. But before we started filming Hooker I did spend two days with LAPD officers from the North Hollywood station to try to get some ideas about their procedures. For example, a captain showed me how to pat down a perp. They made me lean against a wall at a forty-five-degree angle, arms outstretched, legs spread wide. Standing in that position, I asked, “What happens if I resist at this point?”

  That’s when the captain, standing behind me, rammed his knee into my crotch. He explained, “They may get a little loud, but by this time most of them cooperate.”

  Stars were twinkling in my eyes as another officer added, “His whole life is flashing before his eyes.”

  “Yeah,” I squeaked, remembering suddenly why I didn’t do research. Eventually the cast included Adrian Zmed as my young hot-headed partner, James Darren as another veteran cop, and Heather Locklear played his partner, a female street cop who often worked underclothed...undercover. Actually, I think the most difficult problem faced by the writers each week was creating another plot that forced Heather Locklear to take off most of her clothes. Until I did this show I can honestly say I did not know how many criminals hung out at female mud-wrestling emporiums or how many stool pigeons insisted on meeting in the privacy of a strip club.

  Heather Locklear joined the cast for the second season. The producers had decided to add a beautiful woman to the cast to attract a very specific demographic group: every man in the world. Rick Husky was looking out his office window one afternoon when this gorgeous blonde came out of Aaron Spelling’s office and walked by. He immediately went into Spelling’s office to find out who she was. “That’s the girl I want for Hooker,” he told Spelling.

  Spelling shook his head. “No, you don’t,” Spelling said. “She can’t act. We just had her on a Matt Houston and she just doesn’t have it.”

  Rick Husky had seen her walking. He knew she had it. “That’s who I want.” Spelling tried to talk him out of it, but Husky insisted and Heather Locklear joined our cast. She was a sweet, nice, and beautiful young woman, who worked very hard to become a good actress. So good, in fact, and so popular that several months later Aaron Spelling added her to the cast of his new show Dynasty.

  For several years she was working simultaneously in two hit series. That must have been some walk. Only once was there any kind of problem with Heather. On several shows Heather did not wear a bra. Finally, one of the top executives told Ken Koch, an associate producer who eventually directed several episodes, that he had to go down to the set and tell Heather that she was going to have to start wearing a bra. Koch had been in the army, when he got an order he followed it—although admittedly he’d never been given an order like this in the army. But he went to the set and took her aside to explain, “You know, in your profile shots, you’re not looking like, you know, the Heather Locklear that everybody wants to see and the beautiful woman you really are.”

  I believe Heather was taken aback. And so she asked Ken in a soft voice, “Are you going to speak to Bill and Jimmy and have them stuff socks in their crotch so it makes them look like they’ve got big dicks?”

  Ken admitted he hadn’t thought about that. About a week later we were shooting the tag, the last scene after the bad guys have been caught, at Marina del Rey. When we finished we were all walking toward the camera. It was a good shot. When they cut Heather kept walking, right up to Ken Koch, and she told him with a big smile, “You know, didn’t Bill’s dick look bigger?”

  We had a really good cast and crew. I really bonded with both Adrian Zmed and Jimmy Darren. That was important, because we spent a lot of time locked up together in a cop car. Jimmy Darren, I remember, was afraid of birds. All types of birds. As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, as soon as we found out about that we were all very sympathetic. The writers, for example, immediately started adding action scenes that took place on rooftops. We’d be running across the rooftops of Los Angeles in the middle of the summer. Nothing stopped
Jimmy—except a pigeon. A single, unarmed... unwinged pigeon was enough to make him pause. As soon as he saw a pigeon he’d start to cower. He’d been jumping from rooftop to rooftop, tackling bad actors, doing whatever stunts were necessary, until he confronted...a pigeon.

  Birds? Who could be afraid of birds? Now heights, that’s a real fear. Hooker wasn’t afraid of anything, Shatner hated heights. Even building roofs, so between Jimmy Darren and me those writers worked overtime to get us up on roofs.

  Adrian Zmed had a lot of talent. In addition to being a good actor, he could sing and dance. He also had a terrific sense of humor. Many of our shows ended with me chasing the bad guy by myself and bringing him down, then seconds later Adrian would come running up to me. I’d tell him, “Get an ambulance, Junior.”

  So one night we were filming this climactic scene and I chased the perp down an alley and brought him down. Heeerrrrrrrrre comes Adrian. Breathlessly, I told him, “Get an ambulance, Junior.”

  Adrian looked at me and shook his head. “Why don’t you get your own damn ambulance,” he said, then turned around and walked out of the shot.

  Well. That certainly was interesting. I was truly surprised. There was absolute silence on the set—until Ken Koch started laughing and then I realized I’d been set up. And started laughing.

  Each episode adhered to a pretty strict formula: really bad guys, beautiful women, and plenty of action. Our criminals were always total “skels,” or as Hooker described them, maggots, scavengers, vermin, creeps and scum, slimy, unctuous killers and rapists, really unpleasant human beings, men so completely lacking any redeeming qualities that in one episode they actually cut off the head of a teddy bear belonging to a teenaged prostitute trying to go straight—so whatever Hooker had to do to get them off the streets was acceptable. Each week Hooker faced some sort of dilemma: Should I inform on a cop who froze at the last minute to save a pregnant woman? Did a female cop I trained get shot and lose her leg because I didn’t train her well enough? There was always some sort of humorous by-play between Adrian and myself that continued through the whole episode; Adrian gets a brand-new computer to pick the winners of horse races, Adrian is going to show me how to use modern sales techniques to sell my daughter’s organization cookies. At some point in many episodes I ended up at Valley Hospital. Usually a colorful informer provided information that led me to the bad guy, anybody from a Rasta conga player to a blind news dealer to a friendly pawnshop owner. On the path to justice I always encountered a beautiful woman, from the prostitute with a heart of fifty-dollar bills, to my ex-wife, to a beach filled with bikini-clad girls, to the daughter of the victim, to the female cop who invited me to her place to “show him her calculator.” To gain more information either Heather had to take off some clothes or Adrian and I had to visit a place where women were taking off some clothes. There was always a lot of action, we tried to include three action sequences in each episode, and almost always ended with a chase scene. And we concluded with a humorous tag: the horse I picked by guessing number four beat the horse selected by his computer, my daughter wins the award for selling the most cookies—which I sold to all the people in the precinct who were going to show me how to sell cookies.

  I once asked a detective who’d seen the show if he thought it accurately reflected reality. He smiled and said, “You guys can cram more police work into an hour than I do in a year... Some days I go all day without a call.” Well, that wouldn’t make a very interesting show, Hooker and Romano sitting in their police car eating donuts. What do you want to do today, Vince? I don’t know, Hooker, what do you want to do? T.J. Hooker was an action show. There was at least one chase scene in every episode, either I chased a bad guy on foot or in our car or both. On foot I’d somehow manage to keep pace with the bad guy. Even though I was wearing my uniform and carrying all my equipment, inevitably I’d have to jump over a chain-link fence or a brick wall or climb a ladder onto a roof, roll over the hood of a car, then make a leaping tackle, after which the perp and I would roll down a slope or near the edge of the roof, but almost always I caught him and cuffed him. And without losing my breath. In the car, it seemed like every time Adrian and I got a call to rush to a location where a crime was taking place we happened to be going in the opposite direction, because we always ended up doing a squealing U-turn in the middle of the block. Generally our criminals were terrible drivers; for special effects we drove cars off buildings, we drove them into lakes, we drove them through fires, and we crashed them, so clearly there was a budgetary reason our perps drove terribly beat-up cars. Every few shows we had a tremendous explosion; we blew up a lot of cars in five seasons, we blew up a yacht—once we even had a getaway car crash into a gasoline tanker to give us two great explosions. Unfortunately the special-effects people put a little too much gasoline in the tanker and it exploded in a cloud of flame that went right over the heads of the sound crew. Dangerous as can be—but it looked wonderful on film. After that the philosophy of the special-effects people became, why use only one gallon of gas when you can blow up ten!

  We probably had the highest body count on the network; at least one person got shot in every episode. People were constantly leaping between buildings and often falling off rooftops. On one show I put on a fireman’s coat and raced into a burning building to save two kids; on another episode I grabbed onto the strut of a small plane taking off and held on as I became airborne.

  I did many of my own stunts. I became extremely proficient with the SB24 side-handle nightstick. In fact, after watching me use it during one scene a crew member said, “Oh, now I understand why they refer to it as a billy club.” Okay, maybe they didn’t and I made that up. But it certainly could have happened. In more than thirty years my career had progressed from a sword to a stick. Actually, the movements were surprisingly similar. Both weapons were used to block blows, to attack, to fend off, and to bring down the enemy. A police instructor worked with me to get it right. I could twirl that stick and oww! Those memories hurt. Obviously I had to learn how to use it and as every officer knows you bang yourself up pretty good learning the correct way to use it.

  In doing the show I gained tremendous admiration for police officers. In most cases it’s a difficult and thankless job. It is the thin blue line that keeps civilization from falling apart. That’s why a bad cop is such a detriment not only to the police force, but to democracy. People working in law enforcement really liked this show. At times they would try to explain to me what the job was all about, what it meant to them, how tough it was. For whatever reason, they felt they could open up to me, that I would understand. Maybe they just wanted to make certain we got it right. But I’ve had several experienced police officers admit to me that on occasion they would see something going down and they would just get out of the way. They would drive off to avoid being involved, often because they didn’t want to go after people breaking certain laws with which they didn’t agree. One officer in particular told me about the dilemma he faced in breaking up drug deals. Was it worth risking his own life to save a drug dealer? They wanted me to truly appreciate the problems they faced every day on the streets.

  I saw it myself very late one Friday night as I was being driven home from a downtown L.A. location. We were about to turn when I looked out my window and saw two men and a cop facing off. All three of them were in a crouch, the cop’s hand near his gun. A cop and two bad guys, right out of a movie. Just frozen like that in my memory forever. The car turned the corner and I was out of there, never to discover what it was about or how it ended. But that scene so accurately described the job of a policeman for me.

  Only once did I get to touch the reality of the job. I was wearing a uniform—obviously for me it was a costume—and crossing the street when a jeep that was stopped at a light got slammed from behind. The jeep suffered no damage, while the car that hit it had a crumpled hood. Both drivers jumped out of their cars. I saw what was about to happen and at best we were going to have a California traffic ja
m. I don’t know what made me do it, but I decided to intervene. I...

  . . . Star Trek handkerchiefs, towels, address books, cameras, welcome mats, picnic items including paper plates and cups, telephone calling cards, handheld electronic games, stereo headphones, laser disks, sunglasses, school supplies, flight log books, certificates, medallions . . .

  . . . saw that the jeep had no damage so I forcefully told the driver, “There’s been no damage to you. Get back in your car and move along. Go ahead.” And he listened to me. I’m certain he didn’t recognize me. I told the other driver, “It was your fault. You got a little damage. Come on, move your car, you’re blocking traffic.” He, too, got back in his car and did as I ordered. And just for an instant I’d felt the power of the uniform. It was an oddly educational experience.

  Cops really liked me. It has always been fascinating to me how people assume an actor has the same philosophical beliefs as the character he or she is playing, and Hooker was no different. Many people assumed that in my private life I was the same reactionary person I portrayed. Throughout my career I’ve always tried to keep my philosophical and political beliefs to myself, partly because as a Canadian citizen I’ve felt like a guest in America and, being polite, I didn’t feel it was my place to advocate loudly for my own beliefs. But I don’t speak Esperanto, I’ve never conquered Mesopotamia, I’ve never beamed up, and I’m not Thomas Jefferson Hooker. That didn’t stop police officers from believing that I felt like many of them did. Which led to an unusual situation.

  A small group of cops visited the set one day and asked if I had ever heard of Bo Gritz. I hadn’t. Bo Gritz, it turned out, was widely known as a Vietnam veteran who believed the North Vietnamese continued to hold American POWs and had dedicated his life to finding them and rescuing them. He’d been there and come back. I read quite a bit about him and realized it was an amazing story. “I’d love to meet him,” I told these officers.