Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,625
By This is the grave of Darren McGavin.
Born in 1922 in Spokane, Washington, William Richardson did not have an easy raising. His parents divorced when he was young and his father got custody. But the father was a traveling salesman. He just dropped the kid off with a farm family he knew on Puget Sound while he traveled around. Eventually, Richardson ran away from this farm. An indigenous family (not sure precisely which tribe and there are a bunch in the area) took him in for awhile. Eventually the police found the runaway and his dad sent him to a boarding school. He ran away from that too and was living under a bridge before finally contacting his mother, who had remarried. She and her new husband welcomed him to their ranch in southern California. He then got back into school, graduated, and enrolled at the College of the Pacific in Stockton. He went to study architecture, but got into acting and that changed everything for him.
Richardson moved to New York for a little bit to study theater. He couldn’t pass the physical to fight in World War II. So he continued acting where he could and doing whatever work he could find to help make ends meet. That ended up being a painter at Columbia Pictures. While he was there, he heard about a possible opening for a role in A Song to Remember, a biopic of Chopin. He auditioned and won it. It was a small part but it made him believe. He moved back to New York to seriously study acting. He spent the next decade in New York, eventually using Darren McGavin as a stage name.
By the mid 50s, McGavin was a major player on Broadway. That was his bread and butter, but it was hard to pass up on TV when it was such easy money for not that much work. He also started getting interested in film work and moved back to the Hollywood in the 50s to engage this more. That led to two pretty big roles. First was a supporting role in David Lean’s Summertime, from 1955 and starring Katharine Hepburn. The second, and more memorable today, was another key supporting role in Otto Preminger’s classic The Man with the Golden Arm, with Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak.
McGavin never would be a big movie star on his own, but he was on TV everywhere and movies sometimes for the rest of his career. To go through his credits is a big introduction to the television of the era. He was in a couple episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He got the second banana role in Riverboat with Burt Reynolds, but the two of them couldn’t stand each other and Reynolds was definitely the first banana so McGavin got tossed. Interestingly, McGavin openly stated that he hated television, calling it “purgatory” for actors. But purgatory gets you paid, evidently.
McGavin kept plugging away in purgatory. He was the lead in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer from 1957 to 1959. He was in the miniseries adaptation of The Martian Chronicles. He was in an episode of The Virginian. He had his own show–The Outsider–but it bombed and was cancelled. In 1970, he starred in made for TV movie about tensions between generations in the military over the Vietnam War. This was Tribes and was considered so successful that it actually got a cinematic release in England under the title of The Soldier Who Declared Peace. McGavin naturally plays the old drill sergeant trying to break the hippie draftee played by Jan-Michael Vincent.
The 70s were the real peak of McGavin being the Serious TV Actor in the TV movie universe that was robust in that decade. That started with Tribes and then he got the lead in The Night Stalker, a 1972 ABC Movie of the Week, where he plays an investigative reporter in Las Vegas who comes to believe that a serial killer is actually a vampire. Hmmmm……In it, he played a character named Kolchak (the 70s loved names like this for its fictional leads). It did well, so they made another film. Then they turned it into a series. Kolchak: The Night Stalker combined crime and science fiction. I have never seen it, but it turns out it was quite influential on Chris Carter when he conceptualized The X-Files. It only lasted a half season, as the ratings were terrible, but it probably the second reason McGavin remembered today (first came later), thanks to it being shown on all the old TV channels over the years.
McGavin also got behind the director’s chair for a film named Happy Mother’s Day, Love George, starring Ron Howard, Cloris Leachman, Bobby Darin, and Patricia Neal. It was a sort of gothic horror thing. He stayed active for the rest of his life, though in minor roles. He was the original lead in The Six Million Dollar Man, but was replaced. Then he played the father in A Christmas Story, one of the true classics of the 1980s and one of the very best Christmas films ever made. McGavin is absolutely great in it and if anyone really knows McGavin today, this is why. He was a gambler in The Natural and received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Star in a Comedy for his role in an episode of Murphy Brown. He was the father in the terrible Adam Sandler film Billy Madison. He also got cast in a couple episodes of The X-Files, of course. He also made a bunch of money late in life doing audiobook readings.
Darren McGavin died in 2006. His heart finally gave out. He was 83 years old.
Darren McGavin is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California. For some reason, his wife, who died three years before he did, is in a different cemetery. Maybe he really wanted to be in Hollywood Forever and she didn’t? Who can tell about these things.
If you would like this series to visit other people who appeared in The Man with the Golden Arm, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frank Sinatra is in Cathedral City, California and Eleanor Parker is in Hollywood, but a different cemetery. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.