'Just slightly rhomboid'
By Dwight Whitney
Under John Forsythe's gray-flannel exterior is a man who's really not a square.
John Forsythe is everybody's ideal man. Ask anybody. Ask his friends, his co-workers, his producer, his wife, his children, his press agent. He never makes waves. He is what his devoted wife of 26 years, Julie, describes as "a controlled man." His manners are exemplary. He has charm, cares about people, has read books, can talk intelligently on what makes the world go around, and never allows temperament to interfere with an honest day's work.
He is so "controlled" he has developed a mild ulcer. His everyday life is riddled with paradoxes. At the Actors Studio in 1947 he was known as "The Brooks Bros. Bohemian." He admires the way-out "Summerhill idea" of education but he sent his two daughters to conservative Westlake. He is a dove and a professed Adlai Stevenson-JFK-RFK liberal. On Vietnam he agrees with "my good friend Gore Vidal. Why don't we declare ourselves the winner and depart?" (Senator Aiken of Vermont is also credited with this statement.—Ed.)
Yet he can find nice things to say about California's arch - conservative governor, Ronald Reagan. He thinks Tennessee Williams is our greatest contemporary playwright but experiences extreme discomfort at the thought of appearing in a Williams play. He applauds the New Filmmaking but finds much of "Easy Rider" and "The Graduate" offensive. The supernude "Oh! Calcutta!" was "witless and styleless"—but he went nevertheless.
"I'm a member of the Establishment inescapably," he says. "But beneath this gray-flannel exterior beats a peculiar kind of a heart. It wants a better life for all, less hypocrisy and more social justice."
"No, I don't think you're square, John," Vidal told him once. "Just slightly rhomboid."
"In TV I am the sweet, avuncular, charming Establishment man," he will tell you, with the air of a man trying to be good-natured about a 10-year prison sentence. "Uncle Bentley (in Bachelor Father) or Mike Endicott (in To Rome with Love, his current series), it makes no difference. It's not going to shake the rafters, but there is gentle humor there, especially when you consider other stuff on the air today. I don't see anything wrong and I'm proud to be a part of it." He pauses. "For God's sake don't make me sound condescending! I don't feel I labor in tawdry vineyards."
Biting the hand that feeds him is not Forsythe's style. Only once during the five long years he made Bachelor Father did he ever complain in print. He actually admitted, "I'm just a straight man for a dog, a Chinese houseman and a teen-age niece." He is likely to take it out on himself. "I am a made-up actor," he will say cheerfully, "not a born actor. I don't live to get up and act. But I have made of myself a good actor. I'm salable. I'm commercial I wear well."
This would be more convincing coming from a less sensitive, less intelligent and less fiercely competitive man. Forsythe, a sports nut, is currently hipped on paddle tennis. "When he plays anything, he needs to win," explains his close friend Digby Wolfe, the British comedy writer. "Two months ago I beat him badly at paddle tennis. I won't hear from him for a while; he's too busy practicing up. Then he'll casually invite me over and beat the hell out of me."
Wolfe smiles. "I love the guy. We all love him. He still has his innocence. There is no guile. None. It is difficult for a highly motivated man to function in TV. The best he can do is finding something which does not offend his moral sense. You know who he really is? Ask the average man to describe his ideal Presidential candidate and he will probably describe a man who looks just like John Forsythe."
The day we talked, he was in excellent form. We started with Beefeater martinis at the Bel-Air Hotel. Outside, the swans craned their necks to get a better look. By the time the sole Marguery rolled around, he had stopped apologizing for television and got down to cases.
He recalled how, when he first started out to be an actor, his father, a conservative New York stockbroker, had opposed it. "His idea of an actor was John Barrymore," Forsythe says. "He could never understand why I wanted to act. 'You're a good boy, a fine boy,' he told me. 'But I don't see anything about you that could make an actor. No flamboyance'." He loved sports, he says—could tell you the line-up of the 1930 Philadelphia Athletics— and was good enough at them to win a partial athletic scholarship to the University of North Carolina.
He never did finish college. "Unmotivated and searching," he became an announcer at Ebbets Field, presiding over such things as Babe Didrikson hitting golf balls 100 yards into a net, and Jesse Owens racing a horse around the bases. When the Air Force put him in "Winged Victory," he leapt at the theater, and after the war the theater leapt at him: he replaced Arthur Kennedy in the emotion-charged Arthur Miller play "All My Sons."
"It got to me, that play," he is saying. "Night after night. Hitting your father on stage. I'd rather be what I am, a reasonably simple, happy kind of fellow."
Later he replaced Henry Fonda in "Mr. Roberts," a part he could live with. He found it easy to identify with the noninflammable naval lieutenant. But he had the distressing feeling that he walked in the shadow of Fonda, whom he strikingly resembled. He finally got a hit play he could call his own, "Teahouse of the August Moon" (which he wistfully remembers as "a wonderful, delicate, funny, robust evening in the theater"). But there turned out to be not enough "Teahouses" to go around, and he fell back on movies.
Over the years he did some pretty fair ones. He worked for Hitchcock in "The Trouble with Harry" and, 15 years later, in "Topaz." "Don't take it so seriously," Hitch once admonished him. "It's just a movie. And we're the most grossly overpaid people in the world." For Richard Brooks in "In Cold Blood," he played the detective-solver of the crime, a man dealing in rational fact rather than raw emotion. He has just finished another Brooks film, "The Happy Ending," in which he plays a not-so-happy husband. "There is a lot of internal violence," says Brooks. "He may surprise you."
Forsythe has yet to make a real dent on film. "This is the day of the anti-hero," he explains, "the Steve McQueen's, the Dustin Hoffman's, the fellows who look more like bartenders than movie stars. Hell, Ty Power would have had a rough time."
He still feels the urge to return to Broadway. In 1968 he did Vidal's political comedy "Weekend." It seemed too good to be true—he played a Presidential candidate. Despite his fondness for Vidal, he remained relentlessly in character. "I told Gore I objected to some of the devastating Johnson cracks," he says. The question was academic; the play flopped.
Left to his own devices he is forever finding plays with heavy social comment disguised as comedy. One such was "Circle of Wheels" by Arthur Ross, which Ross describes as "a seriocomic study of mechanized man in a mechanized society." It's anybody's guess how deeply Forsythe identified with Ross's "mechanical man." "All I know is," says Ross, "he was totally involved and extremely upset when it proved impossible to do it."
So last year "of my own free volition" he once again delivered himself into the TV arena. It is a queer marriage. His boss is producer Don Fedderson, a complete pragmatist whose guiding philosophy is that "people's greatest need is love," and who has dished it out for years in the form of cream puffs like My Three Sons and Family Affair which invariably feature a dominant father figure. Fedderson says that if he could choose his ideal father, "he would be a combination of Fred MacMurray, Brian Keith and John Forsythe."
Forsythe says he finds Fedderson "a down-to-earth, decent sort of guy." Besides, Fedderson arranged it so he only had to shoot relatively few weeks out of the year, allowing him time for his real commitment—to family and the Good Life, which he manages to elevate to a kind of art form all by itself.
There is wife Julie, who, as one friend puts it, "protects his back" and keeps their Bel Air "farmhouse" in what can only be described as a state of immaculate clutter. She was once an actress before she became "too involved with kids."
There is son Dall, 27 (by an early marriage to the New York actress Parker McCormick), who was on Robert Kennedy's staff in 1968 and is now working on a doctoral fellowship at Columbia University.
There is daughter Page, 18, the dark, imaginative gypsy who writes well and goes to San Fernando Valley State College; Brooke, 15, the organized one with the vanilla hair who is a mathematical whiz. Both are big on the Beatles and Blood, Sweat & Tears, and think their father would be "groovier" with sideburns.
There is the tennis court, the sauna bath, the pool, the cypress trees in front, the carriage lamp by the door, the 2-plus-2 330 GT Ferrari in the driveway, two active poodle bitches named Eloise and Jelly Bean and a mutt named Zan in the living room.
The cocktail hour is moment-of-truth time around the Forsythe house. It isn't planned that way; that's just how it works out. Julie joins in. The banter begins. "You can see I am a man surrounded by females," John says. "Sometimes a man yearns just for the sound of a male voice."
"I think it's probably true," Julie says. "He is a king around here."
"Girls, girls, girls!"
"On Bachelor Father there were. I don't think there was a pretty one in town that didn't work that show."
We review the day, what Brooke did at school, who's going to win the paddle-tennis tournament. Digby Wolfe is heavily favored. We even discuss TV. Julie says that it was she who encouraged him to go back into a series.
"You can see," puts in John, "that I am an amiable fellow with no mind of my own."
"He felt less pain in Bachelor Father Still, it's a good life."
Suddenly she is off on the Good Life in California, what this man means to her, and how he should have been a teacher. "He would have made a great teacher," she says. "He is wasted as an actor. What he plays best is the gentle thing. He has never played a Brando. He is Mr. Roberts."
In the corner is a TV set, its screen dark. It turns out nobody watches it much—except for news, sports and a few old movies. "Oh, John watches educational Channel 28," Julie says. "Working is something else, and he does like the work. He can finish quickly and have time to do the things he really wants."
There is a pause. "You know what they say," says John Forsythe lightly. "Behind every great man there is a woman who tells him when to take out the garbage."