You might think the number one British single today in 1967 is …
The number one single today in 1974:
Today in 1980, Grease was no longer the word: The musical closed in New York, after 3,883 performances.
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On another occasion, Franciosa threw a tantrum and stalked back to his trailer, phoning the unit manager to say he wouldn’t come out until he saw his psychiatrist. The doctor arrived and disappeared into Franciosa’s dressing room, finally emerging to announce the star would return to work after lunch. Perplexed, the unit manager asked what the problem was.
“His problem?” the psychiatrist asked. “He’s crazy, that’s what his problem is.”
For Norman Lloyd, the stage and film actor who produced four Franciosa episodes, the end had come a year before, during production of a gothic tale about a lost Shakespeare manuscript, a sort-of homage to Jane Eyre. (Peggy was, unsurprisingly, kidnapped.) At one point, Franciosa blithely announced he was going to perform a monologue from Henry V during the show.
A furious screaming match ensued between Franciosa and Lloyd, with the latter finally storming off the set. “I was on my way back to the office,” says Lloyd, today a hale 103, “and thinking, ‘I have to get out of this, this is ridiculous.’ This guy wants to do Shakespeare, and he can’t speak English properly.”
In the end, director Leo Penn agreed to film the Henry V bit — then edited it out. But Lloyd, who would go on to play Dr. Daniel Auschlander on the ’80s medical drama St. Elsewhere, broke his contract with Universal rather than endure the madhouse that the Franciosa set had become. “I don’t think it was any secret that he was on something,” he says.
By the time filming of “Billy Baker” commenced, gossip about Franciosa’s drug use was commonplace. Worried, Sheinberg assigned a staffer to tail him. “It’s one thing if you send a script to an actor on Thursday and start shooting on Monday and the actor turns to you and says, ‘It’s a piece of shit and I am not doing this,’” he says. “It’s quite another if you can’t find the actor.”
Rita Thiel, a German fashion model who was by then seriously involved with Franciosa and would become his fourth wife, accompanied him to Vegas. There, she often overheard the crew joking about his habit. “There would be all of this gossip going on: ‘Oh, you know, he’s probably going in his trailer to take something,’” she remembers. “That really hurt me.”
She admits that Franciosa went through a period where he was coping with what she calls “his demons,” but insists there were many days when shooting went fine. Sammy Davis Jr. gave impromptu concerts in his palatial suite; Franciosa arranged for Rita to meet Elvis Presely. She contends that Franciosa’s erratic behavior in Vegas wasn’t the result of drugs but rather a tactical effort by the star to get himself fired. “It was the third season,” she says, “and I think he already had so much hostility from people not having his back, especially friends, people he used to hang out with.”
Things quickly disintegrated. Franciosa became paranoid, believing that he was being shot in an unflattering manner; one day, he insisted on filming a scene in which he swims in the hotel pool in the rain, then comes out, sits by the edge in the lotus position and simply grins silently for a full minute. Director Barry Shear did his best to mollify his star, often to little avail. “They gave in a lot,” says Saint James, who remained agog at Franciosa’s talent, even as she watched him unravel. “And when you’re in a scene, and you’re doing 15 takes, and the one that the other actor finally gets right is not anything close to your best, and it’s after midnight …” She trails off. “What face do you put on after take three, after five, after eight?”
“Tony got into some fit and punched someone,” remembers Carla Borelli, who also co-starred on the episode. “It was quite a scandal.” Before filming concluded, Franciosa was fired.
“They love you, love you, love you,” says Saint James. “They’ll break their backs for you. And it’s, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘Yes sir,’ and then they’re, like, ‘We’re done.’ And then you might as well be dead.”
The remainder of “Billy Baker” was scotch-taped together with body doubles, solo scenes of Saint James and heavy padding with Vegas acts shown in their entirety: a staggering 13 musical numbers and three comedy monologues. To top it off, there was that scene of Franciosa swimming in the rain. NBC, desperate to stretch out Franciosa’s appearances, ran the episode in two parts — three hours in all. But even though he would continue to show up in the opening credits, Franciosa never filmed another scene. And without its No. 1 attraction, the series began to limp toward cancellation. It was Game over.
Franciosa’s remaining episodes were filled by guest actors such as Robert Culp and Robert Wagner, their characters Dillon in everything but name and swagger. “They didn’t rewrite,” Saint James says. “They were just waiting for Tony to come back.” Only he didn’t.
As it was, the third season had already gotten off to a rocky start: The Nixon administration had ordered every TV series to produce an anti-drug episode, resulting in arguably the series’ worst program ever, a feckless Stack story about a group of recovering teenage addicts. It was Bochco’s first solo TV writing credit. Writer Phil DeGuere called him after the second commercial break and said, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
Realizing the curtain was coming down, Hargrove took some risks. In one episode, a Mamas and Papas-type Greek chorus sings spooky tunes in between scenes; in another, flashbacks show Barry as an Old West gunslinger wrongly judged by history.
But it was with an episode titled “L.A. 2017” that The Name of the Game may have made its most lasting mark.
Spielberg was a wunderkind who’d just directed Joan Crawford in a gripping installment of the Rod Serling anthology Night Gallery. Sheinberg wanted Spielberg to direct “2017,” but got pushback from Dick Irving, who he says “acted like I had suggested Adolph Hitler. And I said, ‘What the hell is this? Do you think I get a commission on Spielberg or something? I am responsible for Universal. I wouldn’t suggest somebody I didn’t think was a good idea.’” After Crawford called Universal chief Lew Wasserman to personally lobby for the young director, Spielberg was hired.
The script, by Philip Wylie, centered on Glenn Howard waking from a car accident to find himself transported into a postapocalyptic Los Angeles. The episode’s dark edge and creative pedigree became Name of the Game lore. That particular show, Spielberg remembers, “appealed to me because it was a cautionary tale about a future United States, no longer a country but now a corporation. But I was ambitious with it and got in trouble with the executive producers for going into overtime, incurring many meal penalties.”
The Name of the Game’s final episode aired March 19, 1971. Stack would later insist that the banning of TV cigarette advertising, in 1970, had killed the show — and that it might have stood a chance if only he’d been allowed to star solo. “There arrives after a certain amount of time a matter of ego and identification,” he said in 1975. “It’s my show. I work so hard; therefore I want the credit, or I want the blame. I don’t want to be lumped into a package with two other guys.” He would find a new generation of fans as the booming narrator of NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries; Barry also reinvented himself, playing on Broadway in La Cage Aux Folles. (Stack died in 2003; Barry in 2009.) Saint James went on to co-star as Rock Hudson’s meddlesome spouse on McMillan and Wife, where once again she was kidnapped regularly.
As for Franciosa, Rita says that after leaving the show he detoxed alone, “just locked himself in a room, and just got rid of it all” — a Method actor to the end.
Franciosa would star in two short-lived ABC series. He suffered a heart attack in the living room of his rustic Brentwood cabin in 2006 and died shortly thereafter.
“Funny enough, I think he was quite proud of [the series],” says Rita, today still a wispy, ravishing brunette. “He wished it would have been different, whatever his issues were. But I think he liked it very much.”
Today, The Name of the Game is television’s Atlantis. It is a program that virtually no one has viewed since the Nixon administration. And most of its real-world traces have simply vanished. All, that is, except one.
Spielberg’s most enduring memory of the program revolves around a particular doomsday scene. “We shot the Los Angeles River,” he says, “and in futuristic font painted serial numbers above a sluice gate that has just enough room underneath it to allow our futuristic car to make its entrance. Weirdly, that gate is still visible from my office window on the Universal Studios lot. It has survived 41 years of erosion and flood-stage conditions.”
If only The Name of the Game — a cosmopolitan and cocky series ahead of its time — had, too.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 