With Gig Young, it was boozy sweat: the smell of alcohol seeping through his pores. This was in an episode from the first season of The Twilight Zone that is now regarded as one of the show’s best, “Walking Distance.” Young played a cynical big-city advertising guy named Martin Sloan whose car breaks down just outside of the town where he grew up. To kill time, he strolls through his old stomping grounds, only to discover that he has been transported back to his town at the time of his childhood. Sloan freaks out when he recognizes that he is an adult from the future, witnessing the comings and goings of his younger self and his parents, long dead but suddenly alive again and in their prime. I played Martin Sloan’s little brother, who offers the first tell that things are amiss. When Gig sits down next to me on the curb and identifies himself as Martin Sloan, I get upset, protest “You’re not Marty Sloan!,” and run into the house.
It was mainly a fun day’s work for me. We shot it on the MGM backlot in Culver City, where I happily discovered a full-scale park with a real jungle gym and merry-go-round. I couldn’t define Gig’s smell. I clocked its pungency and noticed that he was perspiring so much that his makeup was dripping down onto his collar, which they kept having to touch up. Young was a good actor who inhabited his role perfectly, but I could sense in some intuitive way that this was a man who had some troubles. His unchecked alcoholism later caused his career to unravel.
Johnny Cash sweated like crazy, too. I worked with him in a low-budget crime potboiler called Five Minutes to Live, in which his character, a hard-bitten criminal, hauls me up like a sack of potatoes and takes me hostage.
Cash’s perspiration was different from Gig Young’s. He was nervous about acting, awkward and confused about what to do. Johnny’s runoff sweat absolutely soaked me as we did take after take. In retrospect, I can diagnose this as a serious case of flop sweat. The producers were trying to capitalize on the fame of Johnny Cash the music star, but Johnny Cash the actor was out of his element. Between takes, he was gentle and soft-spoken, a kind man who made a point of showing me that the gun he was holding had a metal block in its muzzle that prevented it from firing bullets. Again, I loved being in on the magic trick. But it was strange to be in on something else: adult fallibility. I wouldn’t have called it that then, but I recognized, on some level, that I was more comfortable on a soundstage than Johnny Cash was.
The sweatiest picture I ever worked on was The Music Man, which came a little later. I played Winthrop Paroo, the little brother of Shirley Jones’s Marian the librarian. I still have visions of the rivulets of sweat streaking down Shirley’s and Robert Preston’s faces, smearing the heavy makeup they wore.
They shot The Music Man in Technicolor. To get that rich, saturated look in the early ’60s, they had to blast the set with bright light, on average about 250 foot-candles’ worth. A foot-candle is an antique unit of illumination that gets its name from the theater, where, in the days before electricity, actual candles were used as footlights. You don’t even hear about foot-candles anymore in the moviemaking business, but even for the era, 250 was a high number. A decade later, when I shot American Graffiti with George Lucas, which takes place mostly at night, George made waves by shooting at only eight foot-candles, and even four in some shots.
When we did close-ups in The Music Man, the lighting went from 250 to a ridiculous 500 foot-candles. That’s actually how I knew when I was on my mark: when I could feel an abrupt temperature shift from hot to unbearably hot. If you look at any close-up in The Music Man in high definition, you can actually see the sweat beading above the actors’ lips.
YOU KNOW WHO barely broke a sweat? Me. In those early days, performing came pretty easily to me. So much of the work seemed like play. They used me a lot on the sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a show that I enjoyed watching at home, even though its high school plot lines were mostly lost on me. My little-boy character was always returning pop bottles to Dobie’s father’s grocery store for a five-cent deposit, an action that—and man, this blew my mind—you could actually carry out in real life! Thanks to Dobie Gillis, I became serious about collecting and returning bottles for a while. I stashed my booty of nickels in an old cigar box from Aunt Julia’s hotel, which I had covered with stickers from our travels to Venice, Paris, and London after The Journey.