Robert Vaughn (1) (1932–2016)

A Fortunate Life

In his entertaining, gossipy, and eminently readable memoir, Robert Vaughn admits at the outset that he 19ll drop names, and he does. Names of people he got drunk with, had sex with, and even acted with. His stories are well-told and frequently ribald. When he does wax abstractly philosophical in the middle of the book, he mercifully ends the offending chapter by assuring the reader that he won 19t do it again, and he doesn 19t.

Reading a memoir always makes me wonder whether and to what extent the author is being self-serving. What if only half of it were true? Would it still be a good story? If so, maybe it IS worthy of my guarded credulity. (One of my favorite memoirs is 1CExploding Star 1D by Fritz Molden; if you can get passed the slightly disorienting first chapter and suspend disbelief at the amazing adventures of its author 14all before he was 23 years old, it is a great, great read.) Vaughn, of course, leaves us guessing about some aspects of his character. He certainly protests his heterosexuality, but he has had some interesting male bonding experiences. My favorite is an evening spent in New York with Christopher Plummer. The two men hired a prostitute, took her to a hotel room and, aside from feeding her, ignored her in favor of discussing 1CHamlet 1D all night, standing on the balcony and reciting lines from the play (Who took what parts, or did they take turns playing the melancholy Dane?) while the hooker was paid merely to sit inside and enjoy room service. Was she the beard for each man 19s tryst with the Danish Prince? Perhaps this incident really bespeaks Vaughn 19s first love: the theater in general and 1CHamlet 1D in particular. (Each chapter of this book begins with an epigrammatical quotation from 1CHamlet. 1D) Vaughn certainly has had relationships with many, many women, including his wife of almost forty years, Linda. To be sure, he admits to knowing many bisexual men, including Judy Garland 19s fourth husband, who sat by at a Hollywood party and watched as a drunken Judy groped Vaughn on the dance floor. (This same man advised Vaughn that he should do the play 1CStreet Car Named Desire, 1D and when Vaughn demurred that trying to fill Marlon Brando 19s shoes would be too daunting, the fellow said, no, he meant Vaughn should play the heroine, Blanche DuBois.) From a story Vaughn tells about Bette Davis, we might wonder if she had designs on him as a potential boy-toy. Vaughn 19s assessment was rather that Davis just wanted him to go on a bar crawl with her, and he told her he was not up for that. This may have cost him a regular role in a TV series several years before 1CThe Man From U.N.C.L.E. 1D At the time, Bette Davis was considering doing a TV series, and Vaughn would have had second billing, playing her son. Perhaps that never happened because Vaughn excused himself and didn 19t spend the evening with her. He never saw her again.

Vaughn provides some insights into his career and its trajectory, which might be considered disappointing if you only go by how many movies he is in that are worth seeing. It seems telling that he refers to a stage play he did in the 1950s as the best work he ever did on stage. That leaves out the following two-thirds of his life, although he did specify 1Cstage. 1D Even so, most of his screen appearances seem less intriguing than the things he got to do in the theater where he starred in and sometimes directed such vehicles as 1CMr. Roberts 1D and 1CHamlet. 1D It was his 1Cbest stage work 1D in a play called 1CEnd As a Man 1D that brought Vaughn to the attention of then popular starlet Natalie Wood, who sought him out immediately after seeing the play. (They dated for perhaps less than a year before Wood met and married Robert Wagner.) Vaughn himself, especially when discussing his post- 1CMan From U.N.C.L.E. 1D career, keeps saying that he has never even bothered to watch some of the bad movies he has been in. In one instance, he does not even know the name of a movie that he made in Yugoslavia, and he cares too little to Google it for this book. (Vaughn, who speaks some German, recalls the director saying he was going to have to learn his dialog in Serbo-Croatian 14which is similar to Russian 14to which Vaughn replied that they had better write it out phonetically on big cue cards.) It says something about his later career that Vaughn seemingly had to be in these bad movies, that these were almost the only parts he was being offered. That he concludes he has led 1Ca fortunate life 1D is at least partly a case of 1Cprotesting too much, 1D but, in fairness, he makes a good case for his life being fortunate. He had his success, or as he says with characteristic self-deprecation, he has successfully stretched his allotted fifteen minutes of fame into a fifty year career. At seventy-seven, he is not only still alive and reasonably well but has an intact family, works when he wants, and is presumably comfortable in his semi-retirement. (I could be wrong: For all I know, the work he does, making commercials for various law firms, as well as publishing his memoirs, could be things he has done 14along with his earlier string of bad movies 14from financial necessity.)

Vaughn is extremely likable. If you are going to read someone 19s memoirs, that helps greatly. Even his being a Democrat (I too was one, once) does not rub me the wrong way. There is something charming about Vaughn 19s old school Democratic politics. He remains more of a Robert Kennedy Democrat rather than a Ted Kennedy Democrat. Also, having visited and even worked in Communist countries, Vaughn is aware of the essential illiberalism of that system. He was in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 when the Russians invaded. The whole film company was put under house arrest, and their interpreter 14with the unforgettable name, Pepsi Watson 14was disappeared. Shortly thereafter, he worked in Yugoslavia where, he observes, the communist way is to treat everyone the same 14badly. Nevertheless, a good deal of his time in the late 1960s was spent in political activism, opposing the Vietnam War. He was among the first Hollywood figures to speak out against it. Unlike Jane Fonda, however, Vaughn did not embarrass himself by going to Hanoi and sitting on an enemy anti-aircraft gun. He mainly kept his activism within the Democratic party where he sided with senators Robert Kennedy and Gene McCarthy against President Lyndon Johnson. He even debated the godfather of contemporary American conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr., on television. (Evidently, he acquitted himself well.) The time this activity took away from his acting career seems at least partly to explain why his post- 1CU.N.C.L.E. 1D oeuvre involved so many potboilers. Meanwhile, friends like Steve McQueen and James Coburn eclipsed Vaughn. For example, Vaughn helped Coburn get his big break in 1CThe Magnificent Seven, 1D only to see Coburn become a bigger star. However, one does not detect any bitterness about this.

Perhaps Vaughn 19s years on 1CThe Man From U.N.C.L.E. 1D became a problem for his later career. After playing Napoleon Solo in a spy spoof, no one could take the actor seriously. Being characteristically good-natured, Vaughn says that despite the headaches caused by network meddling and stalking fans, he loved every minute of it. He claims rumors that he and co-star David McCallum didn 19t get along are completely unfounded. If anything, both men were united in their annoyance with the way that each season of 1CU.N.C.L.E. 1D became sillier and sillier. At one point, they did an episode in which they were made to use a weapon that fired cupcakes.

Vaughn 19s informal style, appropriate as it is to the memoir form, is sometimes odd for the reader. For example, he only calls his mother by her given name about three times. Mostly she is just 1CMother. 1D The first time he refers to 1CMarcella 1D I had to ask myself, Who is Marcella? but 1CMarcella Vaughn 1D was his mother 19s name. (He never calls her by this full name; you must find it in the book 19s index.) Several chapters later, Vaughn uses the name 1CMarcella 1D a second and third time; this is in his account of her death. Vaughn was very devoted to his mother, living with her on and off through much of his youth and early manhood. He was 25 before he had his own bachelor pad. Even then, when his mother later developed cancer, he moved back in with her.

Vaughn, I knew 14though I imagine not everyone does, earned a Ph.D. in Communications from the University of Southern California, taking classes the whole time he was doing TV, movies, and politics during the sixties and early seventies. His dissertation was about the Hollywood Blacklist. For those who are not conversant, what happened was that many Hollywood movies of the thirties and forties took a leftist or progressive stance, occasionally overtly sympathetic to Marxism and the Soviet Union. When the Cold War between the capitalist West and communist East took shape following World War II, socialist sympathizers throughout American society were shunned and persecuted in what came to be called the McCarthy Era, named for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, who led the call to root out communists from under every bed and behind every curtain. (It is not often enough noted that an anti-reactionary witch hunt went on in communist countries at exactly same time, eerily mirroring the McCarthy Era. My favorite depiction of this is in the satirical 1969 Hungarian film, 1CI Tanu. 1D) Hollywood studios, fearful of government pressure, proscribed certain producers, directors, actors and writers suspected of being communist sympathizers and put them on a list of those who could not be allowed to work. This blacklist gradually fell into disuse after more than a decade, by which time many of its victims (Vaughn 19s book about the period is entitled 1COnly Victims 1D) had committed suicide, left the country or, in some cases, particularly among the writers, continued to work under pseudonyms. Vaughn not only researched the politics of the period but interviewed people extensively. He learned the art of interviewing well enough, BTW, that he later was able to work in Los Angeles doing celebrity interviews on the radio.

It comes across in this book that his greatest love has been the theater. While his political detractors imagined that he visited Moscow in the mid-sixties in order to advance his status as a 1Ccommie stooge, 1D Vaughn was evidently more thrilled to be walking in the footsteps of Constantin Stanislavski, the influential Russian actor, director and teacher. Vaughn was an acting teacher himself, starting in his twenties. One of his students was Jack Nicholson. (I told you Vaughn is name-dropper.) He recalls Nicholson vowing to quit the acting business in the mid-sixties, and Vaughn told him he was too young to quit. Two years later, Nicholson got his career-making role in 1CEasy Rider. 1D

Vaughn never seems to have considered quitting, regardless of the fickleness of his fortunes. After reading 1CA Fortunate Life, 1D I am glad that he stayed with it and that he decided to write about his remarkable life and times.… (mais)

Easy to read. RV comes across as a precocious snit in his far younger days - but raised by a theatrical mother who wanted her only child to be an actor, I guess that was inevitable! Enjoyable memoir of his career, taking in the early days of TV, 50s Hollywood, the theatre etc. A nice snapshot of what its like to be a big star with all that goes with it back in the day. Not a heavy read but its a "star's memoir", designed to be picked up and put down! The story does jump back and forth a bit and could have done with a tidier edit, to me, if I'm being fussy. However, its clear RV is a bright, well read guy who's clearly led an interesting and full life outside of Hollywood too. Definitely worth a read.… (mais)

Robert Vaughn has had a long and successful acting career. As well as being The Man from U.N.C.L.E., he was also one of The Magnificent Seven, and in more recent times, was a main cast member on the BBC show Hustle. But in addition to such achievements, he has also starred in countless other films, and appeared on stage many times. In this book, he describes his life, from his childhood with a mother and step-father who were also actors, to his unconventional adolescence, to his ascension to genuine Hollywood star.

However, this book also covers much more ground than just his acting career. With a keen interest in politics (he is a staunch Democrat), Vaughn also describes his friendship with Robert F. Kennedy, and his theories on the truth behind RFK’s assassination. There are fascinating tales of being trapped in Czechoslovakia at the time of the Soviet invasion, and being placed under house arrest while filming in South America. Amongst all of these stories are of course, anecdotes from Vaughn’s lengthy career, in which he talks about many of his friends, famous and otherwise, including Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen.

Vaughn is clearly a highly intelligent and thoughtful man, and he has written an absorbing autobiography. I had only seen him in the aforementioned Hustle, and more recently on stage in a (breathtakingly wonderful) production of Twelve Angry Men, and was large unfamiliar with his earlier work, but the stories from that part of his career made for interesting reading.

I would certainly recommend this book to fans of Robert Vaughn, but also to anyone who enjoys reading autobiographies.… (mais)