Dick Kallman and the Murder of Little Louie Groovy

Here’s a historical cul-de-sac! Hank (1965-66) was the first sit-com created by Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson, before Happy Days, before The Odd Couple, and before even Hey Landlord. It was the high water mark of its star, young Dick Kallman (1933-1980), whose story bears telling.

Kallman was second generation show business. His mother had been a stage actress; his father Alvin Kallman had been a barnstorming pilot with flying circuses, later, a hotelier and restaurateur, who owned part of the Feltman’s complex in Coney Island, the Savoy-Plaza Hotel on Central Park, and hotels in Havana and New England.

The multi-talented Dick Kallman was still a teenager when he was cast on television on The Billy Rose Show (1950) and in the 1951 Broadway adaptation of Booth Tarkington’sSeventeen. He was in a handful of movies: Hell’s Canyon Outlaws (1957) with Brian Keith; Sam Fuller’s Verboten! (1959, RKO’s last film); Hugo Haas’sBorn to Be Loved (1959) with Carol Morris; and Back Street (1961) with Susan Hayward and John Gavin. He was also on such TV shows as The Jack Benny Program, Bachelor Father, and The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour.

Then came Hank. The premise of the show was quite literally pathetic, in the technical sense. Kallman played a teenager who is forced to raise his younger sister after the pair of them are orphaned. He works a succession of odd jobs, and audits classes at the local college, disguising himself as different characters in order to crash the gates of the university. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t make any sense — one doesn’t earn money by sneaking into classes. And the idea that a kid in his position would need to steal an education is all-too-real but an outrage nevertheless. The show only lasted one season. But Kallman made the most of the opportunity. He recorded several albums of pop tunes, and sang on such shows as Hullabaloo, Hollywood-a-g-g-, Shivaree,The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and The Woody Woodbury Show. After Hank he was in the movie Doctor, You’ve Got to Be Kidding (1967) with George Hamilton and Sandra Dee, and appeared on Batman as Little Louie Groovy, a spoof of Phil Spector. Ironically, this may be how he is best remembered today, not as Hank, but as Little Louie Groovy:

Kallman’s last screen credits were on episodes of Medical Center in the early ’70s.

Meantime, his life circumstances had altered quite a bit. His father had passed away in 1964. One has to speculate that there was a substantial inheritance, in spite of the fact that the Cuban properties had been lost in the Revolution. With no need to hustle to earn a living, Dick seems to have drifted into work that interested him more, which turns out to have been dealing in antiques, art, and jewelry (while continuing to act in theatre). He and his significant other Stephen Szladek abode in a swanky Manhattan flat.

Sadly in 1980, in a perverse reprise of the events of Kallman’s Batman episode, he and Szladek were murdered during an apartment robbery, after which the thieves made off with many of the high end items the men surrounded themselves with. The good news is that the perps were caught and sent upstate. I’m going to guess that Sgt. O’Hara had a little help from the Bat Man.

There’s actually some timely news on the Dick Kallman front. Earlier this year, Knopf published Up with the Sun, a novel about Kallman’s story by historical writer Thomas Mallon.