The movie Gentle Giant, which kicked off this phase of my life, came on the heels of my Star Trek job. I auditioned for the part, which led to me taking a screen test at Africa U.S.A., a safari park north of Los Angeles that was run by an animal trainer named Ralph Helfer. That’s where I first met Bruno. I was one of six kids invited there to do a screen test in which our acting partner was the bear—not an easy assignment.
I was the last boy to audition. By that point, late in the day, the bear was tired and hot from working under the lights. As I later learned from working with them, bears, when they are hot, sway back and forth in place, paws on the ground. That’s how they cool themselves off. But I did not know that then. I was just a kid actor persevering through the dialogue that I had rehearsed with my dad. There was no way for us to anticipate or replicate the experience of working with a six-hundred-pound animal who stood over seven feet tall on his hind legs, and whose head was now swinging back and forth like a pendulum. The cameras were rolling and I had a problem.
I finally broke from the script, but I guess not from the character. I grabbed the bear’s steel chain close to his neck and gave it a yank. “Ben,” I said, “you knock it off and listen to me when I’m talking to you!”
At that, the bear held still and I finished the audition. A few days later, Dad got a call from Ivan Tors Productions, saying I had won the part of Mark Wedloe, a boy who befriends an orphaned bear cub against the wishes of his father. Ivan Tors was a Hungarian immigrant who had started out in Hollywood producing sci-fi B pictures but had made his name and fortune with family-friendly movies and TV shows starring animals. He created Flipper, the TV and movie juggernaut that featured a trained dolphin, and Daktari, the TV series about a veterinarian who looked after lions and chimps in East Africa. Apparently, Tors had watched my screen test and was impressed by my handling of Bruno.
This was big news for little me. Also big: The actor cast as Tom Wedloe, my character’s father, was—and this seemed too good to be true—Dennis Weaver. The same Dennis Weaver who had introduced Dad to Mom at the University of Oklahoma twenty years earlier! He had since become an Emmy-winning actor beloved for playing the funny sidekick, Chester, to James Arness’s Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke. This was his moment of transition into leading-man roles. In a few years, he would star in the TV series McCloud and the TV movie Duel, the directorial debut of Steven Spielberg.
The actress Vera Miles, a favorite of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, was cast as my mother, Ellen. And, as with Bonanza, the producers gave Dad a little part as a villain so that he could be doubly useful to the production.
The filming was to take place in Florida. Thanks to the success of Flipper, Tors had built a four-stage studio complex in Miami for his ever-expanding roster of animal-themed productions. For this reason, Gentle Giant, the movie, had a different setting than its source material, Walt Morey’s novel Gentle Ben. The action was relocated from Alaska to the Florida Everglades, and Ben was changed from a grizzly—which is native to the upper latitudes of the United States and Canada—to a black bear. Which is just as well. Grizzlies are bigger and meaner.
Dad and I flew first class to Miami from Los Angeles on National Airlines, a routine I would come to cherish over the next few years. In those more elegant days of travel, the flight attendants conducted trivia quizzes and raffles for which the prize was a bottle of champagne. I won it an inordinate number of times. Never drank the bubbly, but it was momentous to be sitting in first class with a bottle of champagne.
Once we arrived in Florida, the trainers reintroduced me to the bear, Bruno. We had met fleetingly at the screen test but now we had to get to know each other as peers. Bruno was in a large chain-link cage with a cement floor at the Ivan Tors complex. The first thing the trainers did was toss a steak to Bruno. He sniffed it and turned away from it. Lesson: I am meat, and the steak is meat, but the bear doesn’t like steak, ergo the bear will not try to eat me. I am not a meal.
Next, the trainers threw a box of doughnuts into the cage. Bruno tore the box apart as if in a diabetic frenzy, consuming its contents as fast as he could. Lesson: Bears love things that are sweet. Sweets will be used to incentivize the bear to do stuff.