More Powers to Ya!

One of those actresses who seemed to appear on every television show during the '70s until landing her own hit at the end of that decade, today's featured star has been in the business for over fifty years now and has seemingly done it all, from feature films alongside big names to hours and hours of television and then to the stage, where she explored new ground for herself. In addition, she has devoted herself to the cause of exotic animals, tirelessly carrying on work that was started by one of her significant partners years ago. As of this writing, she's pushing seventy and has practically the same body as she did when she entered the biz! And the face, while it has been tweaked here and there, has mostly escaped the scary form that so many of her contemporaries' mugs have taken. We're referring, of course, to Miss Stefanie Powers.

Born Stefania Zofya Federkiewicz right in good ol' Hollywood, California to parents of Polish-American descent, she seemed tailor-made for work in show business from the start. Her parents divorcing when she was still a child, her stepfather's last name of Paul helped to sheer off some of the unwieldy moniker she started out with. As noted in another post here at The Underworld, she was part of the local ballet class that included Jill St. John and Natalie Wood. Later, she attended Hollywood High School where one of her classmates was the ever-so-slightly older Nancy Sinatra.

An outgoing and athletic type of girl, she was a cheerleader and later took an interest in the unlikely avocation of bullfighting, taking on her first match at the age of twenty! Shortly after, she became an honorary member of the Mexican Bullfighters Union and eventually invested in a breeding farm.

Her zesty personality and talent in school productions brought her to the attention of Columbia Pictures where she was signed as a contract player at the tender age of fifteen! She was groomed by the studio in all departments so that she would be ready to perform when they were ready to utilize her in the right project. As the '60s dawned, she adopted the cutesy name of Taffy Paul and began appearing in adolescent roles on such TV shows as The Ann Sothern Show, Lock Up and Bat Masterson. She kept this stage name for her film debut, which was Tammy Tell Me True, the second of three films featuring the title character (Sandra Dee was Tammy in the second and third films, replacing Debbie Reynolds, who had originated the part.)

For her next film, a far bigger showcase, she took the name that she would be forever associated with: Stefanie Powers. The film, Experiment in Terror, was a black and white thriller directed by Blake Edwards about a creepy extortionist who calls bank teller Lee Remick up and tells her to steal $100,000 or he'll harm her and her younger sister (Powers.) As Glenn Ford attempts to track down the cretin, Powers is kidnapped and held captive in exchange for the loot. It was the first of many times Powers would play a kidnapping vicitim in her career! Tame by today's standards, it was considered a bit of a nail-biter in its day, though it is not as enduring as Cape Fear, which came out that same year.

Also in 1962, Powers was part of the sprawling young ensemble found in The Interns, a medical soap opera all about doctors in training and the nurses and others they love. The title characters were played by Michael Callan, Cliff Robertson, James MacArthur, Nick Adams and Haya Harareet (of Ben-Hur fame.) Powers played a nurse in love with MacArthur. (Could there have possibly been a less flattering lobby card issued of her?!) Senior doctors were played by Buddy Ebsen and Telly Savalas! Most astonishing now is how ungodly much the doctors smoke incessantly throughout the film. Rounding out the year, she found herself working with Sandra Dee again in If a Man Answers. The frothy comedy, produced by Ross Hunter and starring Dee and her real life husband Bobby Darin, was about a series of romantic misadventures between a socialite and her photographer husband. Powers portrayed a pert, but glamorous, school friends of Dee's who complicates the marriage when she starts posing for pictures taken by Darin. The fluffy film (in the Rock & Doris mode, though few could touch them when it came to quality) wound up getting more attention from Cesar Romero's Golden Globe-nominated supporting role than anything else. I do like the way Stef looks in these various still shots, though.
Occasionally, Powers would be farmed out on TV guest appearances such as on Bonanza where she played Calamity Jane, but she still remained busy in features for the time being. 1963's Palm Springs Weekend was another ensemble movie, this time a frolic rather than a drama. She was loaned to Warner Brothers to play Troy Donahue's love interest. Other names in the cast included Ty Hardin, Connie Stevens and Robert Conrad.

Next she played the daughter of John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in the rollicking western McLintock! The estranged couple battle it out while petulant Powers romances The Duke's real life son Patrick (playing someone not Wayne's son in the film.) A semi-remake of The Taming of the Shrew, it included some eye-opening spankings of O'Hara and Powers with a coal shovel! The climax has O'Hara tearing down the street in her bloomers before half the cast winds up in a massive mudhole.

1964 brought The New Interns, a sequel to The Interns from two years prior. Don't let the smiles to the left fool you. Now a wife married to a novice doctor (played here by Dean Jones instead of the original James MacArthur), her character has, for some reason, been transformed from a perky, friendly girl into an unbelievably shrewy pain in the ass who is hard to lend sympathy to when she discovers that she and her husband are incapable of conceiving a child.

In 1965, she was part of the splashy, gaudy, wonderful Love has Many Faces, a slick soaper about an heiress (Lana Turner) who has married a former gigolo (Cliff Robertson) only to carry on with another one who turns up dead. Powers plays the dead boy's jilted fiance who travels to Acapulco to see for herself what has happened. She winds up catching the eye of Robertson, much to Turner's dismay. In a climax that was right up Powers' alley, the cast dressed in bullfighting gear and attended a match. There's already a whole post devoted to this deliciously bad film here, so I won't continue on, but I'll post this shot of Stef and hunky Hugh O'Brian (who she had little to do with in the film) enjoying some fishing while on location.

Powers next traveled to England to make the thriller Die! Die! My Darling! (originally called The Fanatic) with the legendary stage actress Tallulah Bankhead. I won't go on about it now because, like Many Faces, there's a whole post here devoted to the movie. It remains an Underworld favorite.

After an ill-fated stab at romance with Eddie Fisher, Powers began seeing another young actor who she would eventually marry. Lockwood had been the star of two series that only lasted one year apiece, Follow the Sun and The Lieutenant. He and Powers did an episode of Love, American Style together while married. Though in 1968, he would land a role in the sci-fi sensation 2001: A Space Odyssey, he was never able to attain household name stardom.

In 1966, Powers was among the sizeable cast of Stagecoach, a bloated, color remake of the 1939 John Ford/John Wayne classic. Playing a snooty, pregnant passenger on the title vehicle that has to wend its way through Indian territory, she landed pretty far down in the billing with costars including Ann-Margret, Red Buttons, Mike Conners, Alex Cord, Robert Cummings, Van Heflin and, in his final feature film, Bing Crosby. For some reason, she failed to register much in her role, as if she'd given up in the face of the face more showcased A-M. However, like all the other major players, she did have her portrait painted, in character, by the legendary artist Norman Rockwell. Not many people considered the film an improvement on the original, though, and many diehard fans greeted the new version with the same basic reaction as this dead cavalryman to the right.
Far more important to her recognizability as an actress was an offer to star in her own TV series. The popular spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had inspired the creators to develop a spin-off show featuring a female agent called The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. While it stood to reason that the show would be a hit, and Powers was the subject of a major press machine publicizing the project, it would up not satisfying its target audience. The character she played, April Dancer, though outfitted with some gadgets and weapons, was ultimately sort of helpless, relying on her male partner Noel Harrison and failing to ignite the sort of interest that was found in, say, Diana Rigg on The Avengers.

One thing the show did do was capitalize on a few of Powers' skills. For example, one episode featured bullfighting and others called upon her mastery of foreign tongues. Powers is fluent in at least six different languages. The role was played on the parent show by Mary Ann Mobley in one episode, but Powers was ultimately chosen for the series itself. One amusing bit of worthless trivia, a TV Guide article on the show listed Powers at 117 pounds while this paperback book puts her at 108.

While still appearing on TV as April Dancer, Powers was in movie theaters as part of a film with many interesting actors. Warning Shot, starring David Janssen, had a roster of costars that included Lillian Gish, Joan Collins and Eleanor Parker, to name a few. Intended as a TV-movie, it was released on the big screen instead. A tight and trim little mystery, it's fun mostly as a spot-the-star exercise.

It would be 1970 before Powers appeared in another feature film. She was becoming busy on television (appearing as a guest on the caper series It Takes a Thief starring one Robert Wagner.) The film Crescendo, opposite James Olson, was a Hammer Studios chiller about a music student who goes to live in a French villa with the widow of a famous composer who is the subject of her thesis. While there, she is surrounded by mysterious goings on and sinister people and, eventually, some gory murders. The film is notable for containing a nude scene of Powers, but shortly after its initial release, it was cut in order to obtain a less restrictive rating. Thus, some viewers see her in the altogether and some don't, depending on the print.

1970 also brought work at the Disney Studios where she took part in the maritime comedy The Boatniks. As the proprietor of a sailing school, she played love interest to coast guard ensign Robert Morse. Their relationship is complicated by the arrival of a trio of jewel thieves, Phil Silvers, Norman Fell and Mickey Shaughnessey. At least she also got to work with veteran actor Don Ameche who appeared as Morse's demanding commander.

The year 1971 was made up of several TV-movies, that period being a great one for amusingly pat, yet arresting , ninety minute gems. Five Desperate Women had her trapped on an island with four other ladies and a questionable Robert Conrad. Sweet, Sweet Rachel, the pilot movie for the series The Sixth Sense, centered on ESP being used to catch a psychic using telepathy to commit murder. Paper Man (a surprisingly prescient concept) had Dean Stockwell and a group of other college students creating a person that only exists on paper so that they can run up bills under his name and use a (huge!) computer to cover their tracks. Trouble is, someone decides to start killing off the people involved! She rounded out the year with a role in an Ellery Queen mystery pilot starring Peter Lawford as the sleuth.

Appearing on the big screen again in 1972, she was the unlikely love interest to Lee Van Cleef (close to two decades her senior) in The Magnificent Seven Ride! This fourth movie in the series (by now purely exhausted) was both inferior and close to being wildly inappropriate. Powers played a widow trapped in a Mexican village where she and sixteen other women have been brutalized and repeatedly raped. Yet, when the Magnificent Seven arrive, the ladies get all goo-goo eyed over them and Powers starts to fall for Van Cleef when her husband's barely cold! Powers' marriage to Gary Lockwood ended this same year.

This was about the time that Powers became a heavily familiar face to TV viewers. She did five separate appearances on Love, American Style, appeared on Banacek, The Mod Squad, The Sixth Sense, Barnaby Jones, McCloud, Marcus Welby, M.D., four different episodes of Medical Center. You can pretty much name it. She also did an update of the famous Topper films for TV called Topper Returns. This one starred Roddy McDowall as Topper and had Stefanie and someone named John Fink as the ghostly couple (in this rendition, still in their 1940s guises and bemused by the advanced 1970s.)

The '70s being a primo period for disaster, she was one of the passengers caught in a broken down tram in Skyway to Death. Then it was back to the Disney folks for Herbie Rides Again, the first sequel to The Love Bug, to be followed by several more. This one starred Ken Barry and had Powers playing an airline stewardess caught up in Herbie's misadventures. Again, she at least got to work with an esteemed film and stage veteran, this time Miss Helen Hayes, though was hardly a prestigious project for either one of them. Thankfully, she didn't have to take part in Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo or Herbie Goes Bananas (or Herbie Gets his Oil Changed??)
You know, I like Stefanie Powers a lot. Always have. This is not to say that she didn't appear in a fair share of complete drek. Falling squarely into that category is one of the worst movies I have ever seen and, trust me, I've seen a LOT! Gone With the West is a total and complete mess, despite a cast that includes James Caan, Sammy Davis Jr. and Aldo Ray. She plays an American Indian (who somehow has a Spanish accent) and, though the movie is dreadfully written, shot, edited and scored, she is far from the worst thing in it. Even this is considered better than her next one, though, a dastardly comedy called It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, a slapdash project that somehow managed to involve Anthony Newley, Lloyd Bochner, Issac Hayes, Yvonne de Carlo and John Candy!

Much work on TV continued until she landed a series of her own. The Feather and Father Gang had Powers as a Los Angeles attorney who utilizes her con man father (played by Harold Gould) to help sting various bad guys into revealing themselves to the law. For it, she was given a somewhat more cosmopolitan look than she'd been displaying in recent years. Gould (a veteran actor who would later play Miles, Rose's boyfriend, on The Golden Girls) and Powers got a fair amount of press and commercial publicity for the series, but it failed to catch on and was gone after just over a dozen episodes.

Powers had done quite a bit of guest star appearances and appeared in many telefilms, sometimes with titles so close to each other as to be absurd. For example, she was in No Place to Run in 1972 and then Nowhere to Run in 1978! One of the very best ones was a harrowing drama called A Death in Canaan, which cast her as a crusading woman attempting to vindicate a teenage boy who's been accused of viciously murdering his own mother. As an eleven year-old, I caught this (based on a true story) one and it stuck with me forever after. Brian Dennehy and Conchata Ferrell costarred while Paul Clemens (Eleanor Parker's son in real life) played the teen.
1979 found Stef in quite an unlikely role, that of a WWII entertainer turned art heist participant in Escape to Athena. The unbelievable cast included Roger Moore, David Niven, Elliott Gould, Telly Savalas, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Roundtree and Sonny Bono! Believe it or not, the film actually attempts to be taken seriously despite the inclusion of some of the participants. It does not succeed particularly well! Gould and Powers play man and wife. Gould is excruciating as he could often be during this period while Powers is called upon to strip for Nazi commandant Moore(!) She, as a trained swimmer, is then required to don a wetsuit and take further part in the plan. The whole thing might have been better off as a two-part episode of Fantasy Island, though at least some of the comedy was intentional.

Fortunately, a far more popular project was on the horizon by now. Aaron Spelling was planning another in a long line of successful television shows and wanted to pair Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood in this one, a contemporary spin on Nick and Nora Charles, a society couple who keep finding themselves ensconced in mysteries (frequently including murder.) Wagner was onboard, but it was decided to go with someone other than his real life wife Natalie. Eventually, Powers, who had worked with Wagner on his show It Takes a Thief, was mentioned (after bandying about Suzanne Pleshette and Lindsay Wagner as possibilities) and ultimately won the role.

From the start, chemistry between the leads was magical. The show Hart to Hart was a success and offered viewers a marriage that had never lost its spark. Wagner and Powers were wealthy, elegant, clever and inventive. Their in-house butler Max, played by showbiz veteran Lionel Stander, frequently pitched in along with narrating the memorable opening credits. Set to pulsating music, he introduced The Harts, referring to Powers as, “gorgeous” and she was. Her once rather tautly-drawn features had relaxed into an elegant, sophisticated visage. Then he said, “I look after them, which ain't easy. 'Cause their hobby is... murder!” (Later, due apparently to some dunderheaded viewers who might thin that the leads were killers, the line was changed to, “ 'Cause when they met, it was murder!” This made absolutely no sense at all... The show wasn't about when they met and it wasn't murder, in any case!) Lovable canine Freeway rounded out the foursome of regular characters.

Anyway, the crimes involved in the show were incidental. What drew viewers to the series was the glittering repartee of the lead couple. They were very much in love, but not above teasing each other, and were typically given sexy bits of dialogue, often courtesy of frequent writer Tom Mankiewicz whose father Joe was a tremendous writer-director. Powers was dressed by Nolan Miller, who would later make a huge splash with Dynasty. It was a light, sometimes silly, but endearing, program with a degree of class that tended to be lacking in the late '70s. She was nominated for an Emmy twice and for a Golden Globe fives times, one for each year the series aired.

Though there was never any romantic involvement between R.J. and Stefanie, they became closely identified with one another due to the magical chemistry they had created together on the show. They frequently appeared together on awards shows or other special occasions. Considering that Wagner claims to have had a longstanding sexual affair with Barbara Stanwyck and we cannot see his hands in this snap, I will leave it up to your imagination as to what was giving Babs this startled expression at an industry event!

Both stars received major blows to their personal lives during the run of Hart to Hart and would lean on each other at times for emotional support. Natalie Wood's mysterious and sudden death by drowning was a living nightmare for Wagner while William Holden's death due to an accident paired with alcohol abuse was a heartbreak to Powers. She and Holden had enjoyed a lengthy and fascinating romance during the mid-to-late '70s that included world travel, particularly to regions of Africa where Holden was working hard on preservation causes.

Running until 1984, Hart to Hart kept Powers busy. When it ended, she began working in a string of TV-movies and miniseries (the '80s being a major decade for that format.) There was Mistral's Daughter, all about a Picasso-esque painter (Stacy Keach) who compromises with the Nazis during WW in order to continue working; a decision that will come back to haunt him. Then there was the hilarious Deceptions, all about vastly different twin sisters (both played, of course, by Powers) who decide to swap lives on a lark and then wind up unable to switch back as soon as they'd wished. Costarring Barry Bostwick and Brenda Vaccaro (and including an appearance by Gina Lollobrigida!), it boasts some beautiful Venice locations, solid acting from Powers and some hilariously hideous '80s hairdos.

Powers never worked on a primetime soap, but got as close as she ever would when she took a role in the Jackie Collins trashterpiece Hollywood Wives. The gargantuan miniseries boasted a wonderful assortment of performers indulging in every conceivable type of nasty behavior. Powers' character was mostly above it all, married to Anthony Hopkins (!) and hobnobbing with Candice Bergen, Angie Dickinson, Rod Steiger, Suzanne Somers and many others. More serious endeavors included At Mother's Request, about a woman who coerces her sons into killing her parents, and Beryl Markham: Shadow on the Sun, based on a true story concerning a renowned hunter, horsewoman and aviatrix.

After many such endeavors, she and Robert Wagner (who had kept in touch and had even toured in, what was for a while a tremendously successful play for popular couples, Love Letters) decided to revisit their old series. 1993 brought Hart to Hart Returns. Jonathan and Jennifer Hart, almost a decade older than they were at the end of the original run, but still looking quite attractive, were back to solving mysteries, this time in two hour TV-movie events.

There were eight of these in all, several on ABC and the rest on The Family Channel, a now-defunct cable station (I'm sure it morphed into something... ABC Family maybe?) By the early '90s, ostentatious glamour was a rare thing, so The Harts tended towards more casual clothing and settings, but occasionally would drag out the tuxedos and ball gowns. (One of the telefilms had Wagner's old pal Joan Collins as a guest, so you knew there was going to be some glitz in that one!) Powers also remarried in 1993 to a man named Patrick Houitte de la Chesnais, but it only lasted until 1999.

When William Holden died in 1981, Powers took up his cause of conservation and wildlife preservation/protection. She and his existing partners, from a property he had long supported, created The William Holden Wildlife Foundation. The 1,800 acre ranch and education center in Kenya houses thirty-seven species of animals who were in danger of extinction due to over-hunting, poaching and population encroachment. The foundation has also built four libraries at several African schools. This dedication to the cause is remarkable in that she and Holden had actually ended their relationship prior to his death, but the devotion to these animals and the land had stayed important to her nonetheless.

Powers also had branched into stage acting, several of the projects being musicals, in an effort to explore otherwise untapped challenges. Aside from Love Letters (which had won her The Sarah Siddons Award), some of the shows she appeared in include Mame, Applause, The Vagina Monologues and, rather surprisingly, The King and I, in the role of Anna Leonowens! One of her moved beloved projects was a West End London production of Matador starring John Barrowman. Powers played an Ava Gardner-esque actress. A severe downturn in tourism caused by the first Persian Gulf War helped lead to an early closing for the show and the cast album was canceled the day before it was to be recorded.

In an almost unbelievable chain of events, considering how closely identified Powers has been with Wagner for three decades, some sort of misunderstanding occurred between them and their desire to work on further Hart to Hart mysteries. The seeds of it were planted when Powers felt that five years of touring in Love Letters was plenty, but Wagner wanted to keep doing it. His current wife Jill St. John took that over, so no harm, no foul (unless you count Wagner dissing Stefanie's acting over Jill's in his auto-bio.) Wagner next took exception to the fact that Powers wanted to pursue a stage opportunity when there was all sorts of money on the table for more Hart movies. He accused her of betraying him and the crew and their fans (she had made, after all, EIGHT movies - not six as his book states - and longed for new pastures.) Finally, when she suggested another reunion movie about ten years after that, he balked, saying he wasn't about to give Angela Lansbury a run for her money in senior crime-solving. Whatever...
Powers, though, has always been known for her sunny personality no matter what events befall her. Having worked with some of the most notable personalities Hollywood has to offer, whether in her feature films, TV-movies or during her five-year tenure on Hart to Hart, she has probably seen it all! She wrote and released an autobiography last year (which I have yet to read. I tend to be a good two to three years behind on those!) and has developed a cabaret act which she performed in both L.A. and New York City. (See sepia-toned shot above.) Now sixty-eight, she continues to stay active with her wildlife causes and with her acting career. She also attends many social functions (such as the premiere of I Love You Phillip Morris, at which these shots in black were taken. Lookin' good, lady!) She's a hit in The Underworld as much for her distinctive voice and method of speaking as she is for her beguiling personality and lovely looks. Somehow, despite a career that's lasted over half a century, I don't think she's altogether finished yet. Hopefully, she can find a vehicle to further show off her many (some yet untapped) talents.

Pilots' License

Thanks to a discount chain recently deciding to offload a number of television series on DVD, I’ve been able to snatch up a nice little sampling of shows from one of the eras I treasure the most, the 1970s (and a tad from the lates '60s.) Having been born in ’67, I missed out on the bulk of these programs when they first aired, though some of them I was later able to see, if not always in the earliest parts of their initial runs. Today, I’ll be focusing on some amusing or otherwise interesting (to me, anyway!) tidbits from these and other shows that have caught my attention in the transition from the pilot episode to the regular series.

Most diehard fans of The Golden Girls are aware that the pilot episode for that show included a character never seen or heard from again after the pilot. Coco, the resident cook/helpmate, was intended to be on site as a sort of smart mouth or a sounding board for the three leads Bea Arthur, Betty White and Rue McClanahan. Estelle Getty, who was also featured in the pilot, but in a different type of wig than would later be used, was initially only going to be a recurring character. Once it was discovered how magical the chemistry was between the four ladies, there was no longer any need for Coco (played by Charles Levin) and he was removed from subsequent episodes, with Getty promoted to permanent costar. (And she was given some wonderfully blunt and hilarious lines in the pilot almost stealing the show!)

Considering how many fun moments in the show revolved around cooking, home repair and money problems, it’s clear that it was the right move to not have hired help on hand. Besides, the dynamic was just off with this person around. Whenever I see the pilot, I am struck by this big ol’ queen in the studio audience who is practically rupturing himself laughing and hooting uncontrollably, almost stopping the show at times. (It’s a miracle that Bea held it together.) It was clear that the show was going to appeal to a gay audience and it did, though Coco was not getting the same laughs as the other “girls.”

Also in the pilot, the hallway leading back to the lanai, in this episode only, actually leads to Blanche’s bedroom! Blanche was still a bit of a work in progress at this time. She is referred to as Blanche Hollingsworth, not Devereaux as it would be from then on. She also has no real southern accent, the director of the episode disallowing McClanahan to affect one! Thankfully, this would be repaired in the very next episode. (McClanahan and White had switched roles only a short while beforehand, though they both soon found their respective grooves.)

Dorothy also relates to Rose that she was from Queens. Hereafter, she would always be a Brooklyn girl. For more about Bea, Betty and Rue and their careers overall, you can click on their names at the right and find little tributes to each of them!
Another show with female leads also had an additional male on board for the pilot. Did you know that Charlie’s Angels originally had another man in the cast besides Bosley (and the disembodied voice of Charlie?) Insulting as it may seem now, it was felt in 1976 that viewers would not accept the premise of three female private detectives doing all of their own dirty work and investigating without “help.” So David Ogden Stiers, truly a bizarre choice, was added to the mix as Scott Woodville, with the intention that Bosley would stick more to the office work and Woodville would be on hand as a backup in the field for the ladies. In retrospect, this is all quite jarring to see. It was more than obvious in watching the ninety-minute pilot (with commercials) that the character was superfluous and an unnecessary distraction from the capable and lovely ladies, so he was gone by the first “real” episode. You can see David (Bosley) Doyle's utter boredom here as Woodville even operated the slides and worked the speakerphone! The pilot featured electronically-closing drapes and a more grand-looking office area with a raised, virtual "stage" for the slide projector.
One fun thing about the pilot for Angels is the presence of Tommy Lee Jones in a very early role. Aside from a bit in Love Story (billed there as “Tom Lee Jones”) and a couple of very obscure movies, he had only done some TV acting; a stint on One Life to Live and primetime shows such as Barnaby Jones and Baretta. In a couple of years he would emerge as a motion picture leading man and eventually an Oscar winner for The Fugitive.
The ninety-minute inaugural episode didn’t have the traditional opening credits, but instead showed each of the ladies busy with some sort of sporting activity only to be interrupted by a phone call (from some amazingly well-placed phones!), by which Charlie would call them to work. The now famous silhouette of the three female P.I.s in an action pose had not yet been invented and instead the commercials were bumped with a shot of three individual day-glo silhouettes of the gals, each in her own outfit from the phone calls and each with her hands in prayer formation. (Kelly in a bikini, Sabrina in riding gear and Jill in tennis-wear.) By the way, if you're wondering why Kelly's silhouette has her legs crossed, it's because Jaclyn Smith (always lovely in my estimation) was declared bow-legged and, at least at first, care was often taken to cover this up via clothing or poses.

Police Woman, one of the series that many felt laid the foundation for the existence of such a show as Charlie’s Angels, was all about the experiences of a lady cop, played by Miss Angie Dickinson. The pilot for Police Woman was actually featured as a 1974 episode of the high quality anthology series Police Story, a great program that typically featured individual dramas that had no connection to each other from week to week. In the episode The Gamble, we meet Dickinson (here named Lisa Beaumont, but in the subsequent series to be re-dubbed with the somewhat more vibrant Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson) and her fellow cops. Officers Styles (Ed Bernard) and Royster (Charles Dierkop) would continue on with her on Police Woman, but the primary costarring character of Crowley was not played by Earl Holliman in the pilot. Here, the role was essayed by none other than Bert Convy! Once the series was in preparation, it was decided that a slightly more physical and rough-edged type of actor be used rather than the urbane Convy, so western and crime movie veteran Holliman won the part.
Dickinson’s character Lisa/Pepper had a little autistic sister she visited, offering the opportunity for the character to show her nurturing, sensitive side, but this was quickly abandoned after only one more episode as Dickinson could convey this aspect of her role without such a device and the idea of forty-three year old Angie with a preteen sister seemed preposterous. (The girl in the part was the daughter of a producer! For once, nepotism lost out before too long.)
Ninety-minute pilots were a frequent method of introducing series in the 1960s and ‘70s. It gave the writers time to introduce all the characters and still have a fully fleshed-out story. A slightly longer running time also meant that audiences might begin to identify with or like the characters presented enough to warrant tuning in next time for a regular series episode. 1968’s The Mod Squad was introduced this way, with three once-wayward, now-upstanding young people fighting crime, mostly amongst the teen and twenty-something set. Their boss on the show, Captain Greer, was played by Tige Andrews (pronounced like “tie”, but with a hard g on the end, short for Tiger, believe it or not!) One of countless men to go prematurely bald, he was originally given a toupee that was swept back off the face, but only for that episode. By the time the regular series began, he’d been given a shorter and more youthful, combed forward wig. This series’ theme song, by the way, was a rousing, driving, brassy one, surprisingly composed by the same man (Earle Hagen) wrote the themes for the vastly different The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show!

Hart to Hart, a show that began in 1979, started things off with a two-hour pilot. This way the episode could be shown as a two-parter in syndicated reruns. The memorably energetic and dynamic theme music was nowhere to be found during the opening credits. Instead, there was a practically gag-inducing melody that was far more whimsical. Though, mercifully, they are never once heard during the program, there were actually lyrics written by Leslie Bricusse to this discarded theme song and we pray that they and it never see the light of day again. Some chase music (written by Mark Snow) found later in the episode was turned into the opening theme song for the subsequent series.

In the pilot, Robert Wagner is depicted as a fabulously wealthy, self-made man, the head of Hart Industries. He must also be one of the thriftiest millionaires ever, because, in one scene, he is about to kick in a door and the camera reveals that the bottom of his shoe has a gnarly hole in it!!
This pilot has a very rare and unusual distinction to it. It features Stefanie Powers as Mrs. Hart, Wagner’s wife on the show, Natalie Wood (in a cameo as a southern belle on a studio lot), his real life wife at the time, and Jill St. John, the woman who would later become his wife after the untimely death of Wood! Even more bizarre is the fact that these three ladies, in real life, were students in the very same seven-person ballet class as little girls. Wagner’s TV wife and two of his real life wives had known each other since pre-puberty! (Nat is on the far left. Chubby-cheeked Stef is on the far right and Jill, in ponytails, is to her right.)

Powers shared remarkable chemistry with Wagner and, apart from the regular show which ran four five seasons, the two of them did the play Love Letters together and reunited in the mid ‘90s for eight Hart to Hart reunion TV-movies. Producers originally wanted Wagner to do the series with real life wife Wood, but she was still enjoying a career in feature films and didn’t want to be tied down to the grind of a weekly show. Her walk-on role was merely for fun. St. John seems to have bought up all of the blush for miles around and is extremely heavily made up throughout the episode. Still, she and the other ladies were proud of the fact that not one female under thirty-five appeared in the pilot in a major role, rare for TV at that time (and now!)
Guest-starring as the operators of a mysterious and sinister spa were none other than Roddy McDowall and Stella Stevens, seven years after their teaming in The Poseidon Adventure. (It shouldn't be hard, considering where you are and who the webmaster is, to figure out whether or not I find this casting fun!) Good friends, they had appeared in the 1973 film Arnold and worked together in things up to 1995 when they did the sci-fi cheapie Star Hunter. Sadly, he would be dead of lung cancer by 1998.

Most of us know about how All in the Family’s first two pilots had a different Mike and Gloria and how the first Star Trek pilot initially had Jeffrey Hunter as the Enterprise’s Captain. But how about The Love Boat… Ever heard of Captain Ford, Doctor O’Neil or Gerry, your cruise director? These characters were played by Ted Hamilton, Dick Van Patten and Terry O’Mara along with “imposters” Teddy Wilson as Isaac the bartender and Sandy Helberg as Gopher, the yeoman purser in the very first 1976 TV-movie The Love Boat. In the second movie, The Love Boat II, Bernie Kopell (still called Dr. O’Neill, but now with an extra “l”), Ted Lange and Fred Grandy were on board, but Quinn Redeker was Captain Madison and Diane Stilwell was Sandy, the cruise director. It wasn’t until the third TV-movie The New Love Boat that the familiar team of staff was completely assembled and ready to sail the seas together. Incidentally, that second Love Boat movie featured an extra crewmember that was never seen or heard from again, Amy the lounge entertainer, played by Candice Azzara. In the cyclical, cannibalistic world of TV production, she happened to have been Gloria in the second pilot for All in the Family (when the family name was Justice, not Bunker!)

Some folks may be aware, though the vast majority probably are not, that there was a spin-off of Bewitched produced in 1977 called Tabatha (that’s how it was incorrectly spelled in the first pilot.) The first attempt for that series was written and directed by Bewitched producer (and husband of Elizabeth Montgomery) William Asher. Somehow, in the span of just five years, the little girl from Bewitched was now a young woman living on her own in San Francisco! Played by Liberty Williams, she sought to live a normal live in the workforce while little brother Adam, a warlock, interfered. The format proved unacceptable to the network and so the project was completely retooled and recast!
The result was a short-lived series, now correctly called Tabitha, starring pert, perky Lisa Hartman and handsome Robert Urich. This time, Tabitha was the younger sibling and somehow her baby brother Adam was older than her and already an established TV exec while she went to work as an intern at the same station. This poor tragic show (that virtually everyone involved with the original, including Asher this time, steered well clear of) limped along for eleven episodes before going “poof!” The Kravitzes did make an appearance in one episode and Dr. Bombay showed up, but it was hopeless. The opening credits for the series actually showed the original Tabitha (Erin Murphy) in some old snapshots.

Pilots often seemed to offer up just a tad more skin than the actual series would later reveal. Perhaps it stemmed from an effort to grab executives’ (or focus groups’) attention and make them take an interest in what was occurring on screen. Unless I’m mistaken, Uncle Bill (Brian Keith) never again took another visible bubble bath on Family Affair following the introductory episode. There was also a marked difference in his hair after the pilot, with his unkempt dishwater blonde and gray locks being replaced by unkempt bright golden blonde ones! Regarding nothing, one of the things I loved about this show was Keith's string of glamorous, sophisticated dates.
The first regular episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (the two-hour pilot having been released as a feature film) had Gil Gerard enjoying a spacious bath while visiting a wealthy planet. (I know that the first episode of the series isn’t always the same as the pilot, but if you think a distinction like that is going to keep me from posting a shot of ol’ Gil in the tub, then this must be your first visit to The Underworld! LOL) Though he was often unzipped halfway during the first season, he was rarely shirtless and never again seen bathing. By season two, Mr. Gerard was experiencing a weight gain and began wearing a jacket over his snug costumes. Years later, his quest to lose the considerable weight he finally ended up gaining and reclaim his health became the subject of several news and entertainment programs.
Probably the biggest example of a pilot episode showing skin is Starsky and Hutch. The 1975 series kicked off with a ninety-minute pilot that found ways for the gentlemen to strip down several times. Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) was shirtless twice while Hutch (David Soul) stripped down three times. In fact, this is the episode in which the guys are shown wearing those gold-colored little towels along with their shoulder holsters and nothing else. That shot was used in the opening credits for years and was even parodied in the big screen, Ben Stiller-Owen Wilson remake, but ironically, because of the running time of the pilot, was very rarely shown in syndication. Most of the iconic shots to be found in the opening credits were from the rarely seen pilot! What’s funny is that as the detectives were about to shoot the scene with the towels, they began to strip down and are shown behind a piece of furniture, removing their jeans. Only, Glaser is accidentally shot from the side just before tossing some jeans in front of him as if having just removed them, but yet is clearly still wearing them! This set of pictures is from one continuous shot. Oops.

Less shy is Soul, who opens the pilot episode with a boxing sequence in a gym. Cut to the locker room and he is shown showering after his tete-a-tete with a punching bag. He shows, perhaps, a tad bit more hip than viewers were used to seeing then. No big deal except that as the camera moves to the changing area – in one continuous camera move – where Glaser is conversing with attendant Gordon Jump, it becomes quite clear in the background that Soul was ACTUALLY bare-assed naked in the shower. He (in an admittedly far away and unfocused shot) is seen crossing the doorway to get a towel and is quite obviously wearing NOTHING! Frontal nudity on America’s TV screens in 1976, ladies and gentlemen! (As long as one had a 60” high-contrast television! LOL) Once he makes it up to Jump and Glaser, he's even sporting a little tent for a few moments, obscured off and on for a while by Jump's handing of all the dirty towels. Must See TV, indeed!

Later in the episode, the guys are drenched to the bone during a stakeout and go to a laundromat to dry their clothes, requiring them to wait it out wearing only some towels. At this rate, it’s no wonder that people began to sense homoeroticism in the series, though it was rare from here on in for the gentlemen to be this unclothed. Hutch was occasionally shirtless in the locker room and did take another couple of showers, but none this revealing. In any case, these scenes do help make the pilot easier to watch.
This pilot for Starsky & Hutch featured a different Captan Dobey, the superior officer of the detectives. Gravel-voiced Richard Ward initially played the role that would later be handled by the more familiar Bernie Hamilton. Antonio Fargas’ Huggy Bear was right there from the start, however, though he became a bit less criminally active as the program progressed.
I hope you got a little kick out of this trip down television’s memory lane. Leave a comment if you wish to recall any particular details of your own regarding a pilot and the series that followed. I’ll leave you with another image or two of Mr. Starsky and Mr. Hutch demonstrating their perfectly normal affection and man-love. (Even the stars later admitted that the series was about the love between these two gentlemen, albeit completely straight and aboveboard.)