Robert Brown  
In His Own Words Interview

Part Two
   August 14, 1998

On line fans submitted these questions to Robert. I sent them along in written form and Robert answered verbally via tape recording.  Transcribed by Patti, with LaDene's help!  An extra special THANK YOU to LaDene for the edits, correct spellings of the German names and for sharing your invaluable theatre expertise with me! And of course a big thank you to Robert for his willingness to do this interview!

What was your dream role?
Another good question! Dream role…I guess I've played a couple of them. Ah, I'll have to pass on that, it's too profound. I don't know, I can't really answer because I've played a lot of roles, oh, Hamlet included.

What do you like to do on a day off?
Well, my life is a day off. Always a day off, except when I was working full time in a play, which I haven't done in years. Or film, television, which I did for years. My voiceover stuff, that's only an hour, an hour and a half at a time for a session. So, even at the times that I am working I have time to go to a nice restaurant, stop to see a friend, stop in to see my daughter, in Los Angeles before I return home. It's about two hours in and two hours back, from where I live, in the country, which is about 100 miles each way. So, my day off is when I go into work to make a buck, a buck and a half maybe, and have a pleasant day. I go to Musso Frank's which is a wonderful old place on Hollywood Blvd. It's in a rotten neighborhood now, but it's a place that I go too. Then jump in the car and hit the freeway and get home before the rush hour. Maybe 2 o'clock I'm on the freeway. I do live my life pretty much the way I want. You know I'm so lucky! How is it that most folks work full time, they have hours to put in doing something, and I do what I want to do, I write. I'm in front of the word processor for 8 hours some days. It's tiring! It's work, but it isn't work. (Here comes the cat, he wants to be petted, I'm going to continue talking though.) I can honestly say that my days are my own, my life is my own and that's my day off. I guess when I stopped having to think about being a professional actor, that was work. I thought about it as work, not play. So, when I'd get a day off I would use it as such. Usually rest, party maybe.

You've had a fascinating life; have you thought of writing your life story?
Yes, I have! In a way I'm doing it. I'm doing short, short stories, two or three pages, of various incidences. They're called "Short- Short Stories" in its form. They published me the other day in a book called "Horsing Around, A Community Of Voices, Santa Barbara Anthology". I got this at a bookstore, I didn't even know I was in it! They didn't tell me. I submitted it on the advice of my wife. They wanted just a couple of pages about horses or horsing around. Thousands of people applied and 175 writers and photographers were chosen.
I was writing my biography, and then I stopped because Burgess Meredith, a good pal of mine, was having difficulty with his biography, which is titled "So Far, So Good." He asked me to help him because he was having trouble and we're friends and I had a similar early career as his, with the same people. His close friend was Franchot Tone and I was in a play with Franchot and knew him and Guthrie MiClintock and Kathryn Cornell were very close friends. All deceased, of course. And Maxwell Anderson, he was the first playwright and won awards. We had much in common even though he was many years older than I, twenty five years older. So, I went down to Malibu often and would help him with his stuff and remind him of things and write some things. Then I just lost the need to do my own story. But, I started doing it this way, not on purpose. I belong to a writer's group and this is what we do at the group. We write a story every week. But, I think I will write my biography when I get better at it. I like writing, very much. My story? Gosh, I've had a good life. It's interesting looking back. My memory is keen for yesterday, but I don't know what the hell I had for breakfast this morning. My memory is not good for today, but for years ago it is.

What's your favorite joke?
Well I guess my favorite joke is the one I most recently heard:
A man is walking on the beach, Santa Barbara. He has his shoestrings untied they're dangling around his neck. His socks are in his pocket. His trousers are rolled up above his ankles and he's walking in the water at the waters edge, looking out to sea. Looking at the horizon, quietly, hands in his pockets, just splashing the water, walking along. He notices up ahead of him a bottle, coming in, washing out again. Coming in on the beach and the tide taking it back out. And as he got to that place, the bottle washed up further to the high tide line and stayed there. He went over to it and brushed it off. It was a beautiful bottle and he wanted to see what the label said. This "shoooo" sound, this flush of smoke and of air whistling came off the top of this bottle and there was a Genie standing in front of him.
He stepped back and the Genie said
"Oh no! Please, please, don't be frightened! I'm a Genie! I'm a friendly, friendly, Genie. I'm here to give you your wish, whatever it is you wish for."
He said "Whatever I wish for?"
The Genie said "Yes, your wish! What do you wish for?"
He said "I can't think, you so frightened me, I can't think."
The Genie said "Okay, what were you thinking about while walking along, looking out at the ocean? Do you remember that?"
He said "Oh yeah, I remember that. Sure I remember. I was looking out over the ocean and Hawaii's over there. Over on the horizon, that's Hawaii. I've always wanted to live in Hawaii. I always wanted to be there. I've just dreamed of it all my life." The Genie says "Why don't you go?" He said "Well, I can't. I'm terrified of flying, even being hypnotized. And the Doctor thought I would have a heart attack if I attempted it under sedation, so I can't."
The Genie asked, " What about a boat, a ship?" He said "No, I can't. I have this inner ear displeasure and the Eustachian tube gets unbalanced and I become violently ill. I've tried, but I can't. It's terrible! So, I know what I wish for! A bridge from here to Hawaii. I love to drive."
"You want me," The Genie says, "To build a bridge from here to Hawaii? Do you know how difficult that would be? My God! What were you thinking right before that? Please!" The man said "Oh, yes, I remember. I was thinking I'd love to understand my wife, I'd love to understand women."
The Genie looked at him and said "Oh. How many lanes do you want on that bridge to Hawaii?"

That's my favorite story because it's the one I remember, the one I just heard.

Your favorite sports team?
Again, I think I told you earlier, I don't have favorites. I have them just for the moment, just for the day! Even watching tennis matches, I choose the player as I think he's doing. Sometimes I want the underdog; sometimes I want the top dog to win. I don't know, I'm odd, I guess. I've never been struck with the bug for sports, as a fan.

You're quite a traveler; what's your best traveling tip?
Well, I imagine, travel light. Pack in a light suitcase. Clothing that can be laundered easily and look good. Something that you can wear in a good restaurant or out wandering around, comfortable shoes. Get the cheapest ticket you can get. Spend time to find the least expensive way to do it.

Your father came to this country in 1912. He wasn't a Titanic survivor, was he?
No, he wasn't. He was just a man who came.
He was on the Mauretania, I think, which was one of the large ships. I think it did sink.
(Note: It was the Mauretania's sister ship "Lusitania" which sunk with passengers aboard when it was torpedoed by a German Submarine in 1915. The Mauretania was dismantled in 1935.)

What do you think about the fact that so many people still remember HCTB so fondly, watch videos of it, and participate in a fan club?
I'm overwhelmed and have been since the beginning when I first was doing it. I'd see people looking at me in a different way then other actors that I knew, even famous ones. Much more famous then I was, or celebrated. I think the character was so well constructed, it probably suited me or something, I don't know what it was. But, I am very moved by it. More than anything else, I'm moved, I guess that is the word. Touched by the generosity of the people, by the sweetness of their comments. It's very rich, a very rich emotion. I don't think of the show at all, it's in my past and I really don't think of it except when someone talks about it. Then I try too remember it as best I can. I lived it, you see and I don't look back to relive it except when someone talks about it and asks questions. But, I feel privileged that so many people enjoyed it and it's a great tribute to an actor to be remembered fondly. I'm grateful to all of you, indeed.

Do you remember witnessing a near crash of two airplanes, and being interviewed on the news about it? Are you aware that we HCTB fans recognized your even from that brief clip?
You know, it was in Tucson, Arizona or somewhere where my wife Elise was having an exhibit at a gallery. We flew into Tucson or wherever it was and we were the plane that they almost collided with. Right outside our window, there came a plane and just missed us. It was beyond scary! It was startling! As we landed, someone recognized me.
He said "Were you on the plane?"
It was one of the members of the press, they were down there waiting for us to land. They were happy to see me but I thought it would be wise to not have an interview then, to get out of the airport. Have them come to the Gallery and have them help my wife get a little bit of public relations going. They came to the exhibit and interviewed me there in front of the place. I remember it very well, I didn't know it was on national television, I thought it was just a local station, but I guess not.
Yes, I do remember it. I was close to being knocked off by a small plane flying in the wrong corridor.

Are you aware that you are an incredibly attractive man, and will you marry me?
Yes! The answer is yes I will marry you and I am not aware that I am an attractive man. Thank you! But before I marry you, I've got to ask my wife if it's okay.

What was your favorite practical joke played on the set of HCTB?
Well, again, jokes for me were impractical. I wanted to help run a smooth ship. We did horse around from time to time, but not often. I can't think of any practical jokes that I played. I think I was the butt of a lot of them. What happened many times, things would go funny, bloopers you know, that sort of stuff. The cameraman and the producers saved those outtakes for the wrap party at the end of the season each year, and it seemed that I was the butt of them. They didn't maybe save the other folks, not many anyway. I guess I couldn't have been the only one that made a fool of himself. But, I was in most of those outtakes.

What show that's on today would you like to guest star on?
When I was acting, I didn't want to guest star on any show. My vanity was so great it was either mine or none.
It is always difficult with various episodic things that I did. It was a hard job. Hard enough to come onto a different set and they were busy with their own stuff. Very few stars or producers were generous of spirit and remember how hard it was when they would come onto another person's set. The welcoming committee was not great. You were just another chunk of skin and bones. I hope I was different. I tried to be respectful of an actor coming on board for the first time.

Did you have a favorite episode or character on HCTB?
You know, as I said earlier I haven't seen them. I did watch, well, I can't remember the last one I've seen. I never kept a library of them. I think Bridget does, a lot of people do. Once they were done they were in my memory that I had done them but I moved on to the next one. I just didn't do that. I'm a collector of antiques and art objects. I've got a crowd of thousands of books, but I just do not collect my stuff. I don't know what it is, I guess it's just the years of being a stage actor, the performance is over and you just go on to the next performance. Many times I would watch myself and think that I should've done that better, that sort of thing. So, I was never a very good audience. I don't have an answer to that.
I have a lot of thoughts about the people I've acted with, but I can't think of any outstanding characters.

Do people often ask you about the episode of Star Trek you did? How did you rate that experience? What would you think of Lazarus reappearing on one of the current series?
I remember that very, very well. On my birthday, Nov. 17, I got a telephone call direct to my home. It was the producer, the headman of the series that created it. I'd met him once years ago and he was very complimentary about a pilot I did with William Shatner. He and I co-starred in a series about two immigrants coming to America, one from Sweden and one from Ireland. He as the Swede and I was the Irishman. It got great, great press. The pilot was played on a one time basis because the producer of the studio, Dick Powell, had died. He was suppose to have taken it too New York to get it on for the new season. Well, his death stopped the whole process and they didn't do it, as a result we missed the pilot season. It was played on the air though and that is how Shatner got his job, through the pilot we did.
So the phone call came to me and he asked what was I doing now. It was about 5 o'clock at night and I was at the my beach house in Malibu and he asked if they could come out and visit me, the producer and the director, and the casting director. I didn't know what it was about but I said sure. They arrived about 6 p.m. and I was cooking dinner for myself. I was in the middle of a divorce at the time, I was alone, my daughter was away at school, I think. I fixed them some pasta and they had a script and asked me to please look at it.
I said "Let's have dinner." And we did.
Now, it's getting dark and they said "We want to hire you. You'll be working tomorrow morning, you have to get there about 6 a.m. because we're replacing John Barrymore Jr. who worked yesterday and didn't show up for work today. We can't find him, he just took off, we don't know why. It's important and I'd appreciate it." Said this big shot.
Barrymore was the great John Barrymore, one of the premium actors of the 20's and 30's and into the 40's. An acting family, Lionel and sister Ethel.
I said, "Sure, I'll be there."
I drove back with them to a motel nearby to Paramount studios, it was a junky motel. But I could get to the studio in the dark the next morning to be fitted for a costume and makeup. I barely looked at or read the script, forget learning lines. I didn't understand the script anyway because Science Fiction is a mystery to me, I've never been interested in it, still to this day I'm not. But, there I was, having to act the strange character. It was the most painful job, I've almost ever had, in that they were playing catch up and everything was rushed, rushed, because they were behind. It wasted a day and they had to keep the budget or else they were in trouble. No one seemed to give a damn that I didn't know what to do and I was trying to please everybody. It was awful. Shatner was not the same guy as when we worked together. He was busy with his own stuff, you know. As I explained earlier, actors are not treated with much care. So, it was a painful experience, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. But, I think we won an award that year and the public was shouting hurray and still are to this day. So, it was a fluke, but none that I take any credit for. I did it, I hated it, and there we are.

If we revisited Seattle 30 years after the point where the series ended (being that it's 30 years this year), what would you like to see Jason have done with his life? (Marriage? Kids? The logging camp? Etc.)
This is a nice question. Well, I guess if I were the producer or still the star of it, I'd want it to keep going. I wouldn't want Jason to marry because I'd like his character to be a naughty character, and yet appreciative of women as I am. I just liked the way it was going, to bring in as much current events as possible. To tell the stories of the dreams of the others. Bobby would get married, probably to Bridget. David would get married to one of the other girls, that would be swell. Their families would grow and I would be the doting brother without his own children, I guess. I'd vicariously live their lives through the joys they had. Kind of the mirror in a way. The logging camp would of course change, industry would be there. I'd be there fighting for the trees to remain healthy and not overly cut or misused. I don't know, I'd not thought about it. People have mentioned it over the years, getting another show going. But, again, I don't think that way.
I do hope that it would be given the respect that people who were doing it tried to give it, and not make it coarse or cliché.

What current TV show would you most like to do a guest appearance on?
Well, I think you know by now, none of them. If I had something to say I would like to be interviewed by Charlie Rose, but, I don't have a theme to think about. If I were, I'd like to talk to him. But other than that, I have no interest in any of it. I'm not against it, it's just not how I live.
Maybe Seinfeld because he's off, so I don't have to worry about it. But even that was a cute show.

Was it very uncomfortable to wear those heavy outfits you wore on HCTB in the California heat? (Leather and suede and all that?)
No, it wasn't. My father explained it to me, that in Africa and India, the English soldiers would follow the instructions of the Arabs that were always covered up. They would have woolens and heavy materials on those hot, hot days on the Sahara Desert. They found that keeping the body temperature the same you would last longer and didn't feel as hot. With the hats on and all of that, your body temperature would remain constant. Whereas, if you're wearing something cool and the wind would blow through it you would cool down a little bit and bingo, you'd be up again and down again. So, I took those thoughts and didn't ever take my leather thing off in-between shots because then I would cool down again and be hotter. It was a great help to me, my father's advice.

Would you ever do a HCTB reunion movie if the script was right?
Yes, I would. That's one thing I would do. I realize that all the answers to the questions were that I'm not interested in working in television and I've been offered many times, a series to do. I haven't agreed, but I think I would if the people doing it were serious. Yes.

Will you do the movie based on Charlotte Fox's book "Spirit of the Northwest "?
Well, that's not ready to even think about. I've read it and I think I've spoken to Charlotte Fox, but, it's not the direction, I don't think, that I would be interested in going. If that were the one that they were talking about, she's not ready. She loves the show and all that, so maybe If changes were made, sure. But, I don't know……….

Have you ever been contacted at all to do a reunion movie?
Yes, various times. It's been talked about but nothing ever came of it.
I've never thought about it one way or the other, really. If it came to it and if it were really, really, really together then they would be more serious. Business is done in much more of a tough way then people who talk about how wonderful the show was. Business is another thing altogether and I've never heard any real business conversations towards that end.

Do you know for sure how many years there were between Jason, Joshua and Jeremy Bolt?
Yeah, I guess so. I guess Jason was about a dozen years or more older than Josh and just a couple of years between Josh and Jeremy. I imagine the parents had died long ago, before the episodes started and Jason had taken on the burden of parent, not just brother. He was a mother and father, the person who was the mature one. He was young enough, but more like a parent. That's how I felt about that anyway.

If you know, how did the Bolt brother's mother die? How about their father?
I had thought about that but no one ever spoke of it. I had all that planned in my own "working on the role thoughts", the back story. But it was only for me to think about, not for other people to agree with or disagree with. I thought it was an early death and the parents must have treated us well, because we were all kind to one another. It was a tragedy of some sort, I don't remember.

If you had to pick a wife for Jason, who would it have been? From the people on the show or the people who guested on the show.
As I've said, at the time they had spoken of one or two, but I wasn't interested in that. I didn't want that to happen because it was the story of these young girls and maybe getting married to the young boys, Josh and Jeremy. But my role was as the protector, and the one who was doing some naughty things, at least people suspected him of doing whatever it was. But nobody knew for sure what he was doing. I liked the humor of that, and the humor would be taken away, I thought if Jason got married. It was a family show, but I was going to be the outsider trying to help those who were trying to get married.

Please tell us about your growing up years. Where you grew up, your family, friends, schooling, etc.
Well, to sketch it out quickly, I grew up in New York; I was born in New Jersey. My father and mother worked in a huge hundred-room mansion belonging to the Keene family. Some people pronounced it Keene but it was pronounced Kane. They were early American aristocrats, moneyed. The elderly woman was Lucy Keene; the Matriarch of the family, all the men had died. When she died, she gave my mother and my father the Blue house, which is an 18-century structure, on the property, which is on the road to Trenton. The road that was traveled by the Revolutionary Army in 1776 and before. The house I was born in was called the Blue House. It was used as Washington's headquarters for one night or two nights, on that road to the battle of Trenton. The large house now is a girl's school, I think. The Blue House, I don't know, it can't be torn down, it's under some official protection for old buildings.
My mother and father lived there with my brother and I. When my brother got to be of school age, taking the buses off to school upset my father. So he gave up the house, even though it was free. It was given to them for all their life's to use along with a stipend which allowed him to not have to work for anybody. He was to take care of the house and he loved gardening. He went back to work for a famous American family, I think it was Atwater Kent, in New York. He went back to the job. He had worked for Franklin Roosevelt and Sara and Eleanor and several of the other Roosevelt people.
We left for New York because my father wanted both my brother and I to attend a school where the traffic would not be threatening to our life's and he wanted one near a playground. He was thinking of us, even though we could have lived on the estates, because he was the big man there. He was called "First Man" as some of the homes had 20 or 30 people on staff and he ran these big places. So, he would always have the privilege to have a place to live, but he wanted to do it on his own. He was a great man, an Englishmen.
So he got on the Lexington Ave. subway, that's the East Side subway. He headed uptown and got off at
170th street and wandered around and found the Grand Concourse, which was a new building and comfortable people lived there. Comfortable in that they had some money and it was a pleasant wide thoroughfare with trees, and he noticed that it was a family neighborhood.
He saw this new-ish building maybe 3 or 4 years old or so, that was bordering the schoolyard of a public school. He went to the superintendent's place and sure enough rented it that day and we moved in and it was our home.
It wasn't for years that I realized that it was different than my parents and I were, we lived in an entirely Jewish neighborhood. For miles, it seemed to me we were the only one's that were different. It was great! We were Anglo-Saxon and we were special as we were on the outside of things. I suppose that's how many blacks feel or people of another race feel in a new country with a different culture. The people couldn't have been nicer and we got on just wonderfully well and I feel privileged to have had to understand and think of those things so early in life. The similarities between all of us gave me an early maturity, if that's the word for it. An appreciation rather than a maturity I think, for another person's point of view. To listen and to observe the differences and to know what they are without judging them as being not as good as yours.

Many, many thanks to everyone who submitted questions:
Nancy A., Marsha, Susie, Karen H., Mary K., and Nancy S.