On Some Notable Passings, and Some Resurrections

We got a triple whammy of death notices yesterday. Typically when we learn of a death and we’ve already written about the subject, rather than penning a new obit I’ll go ahead and share the existing article on social media with an explanation. But the Travalanche articles related to yesterday’s passings were all unsuitable for that purpose in one way or another so it seemed incumbent on me to write fresh pieces. Being so numerous though, I decided to keep them short and bundle them together in this post. We share them in the order in which we got the bad news.

Michael Cole (b. 1940), who played Pete on The Mod Squad died yesterday. My existing post on The Mod Squad is pretty centered on Clarence Williams III, who played Linc, making it an awkward share on the occasion of Cole’s death.

The title of Cole’s BearManor autobiography I Played the White Guy refers to his niche on the show. Williams was the black guy; Peggy Lipton was the chick. Cole had more work to do to make himself interesting, and he actually was. It seems to me in retrospect that with Cole’s character the producers were going for a Bob Dylan type, with those piercing blue/green eyes, his brooding scowl, his grim attitude, and his mumble. Good looking enough to be a leading man type, he only ever achieved that on this show, which ran from 1968 through 1973. Usually actors who get trapped in the over-identification-with-a-tv-role are of a broader type (e.g. the Gilligan’s Island cast). By contrast, whenever you saw Michael Cole, and it wasn’t often, you always went “That’s the guy who played Pete!” in spite of the subdued nature of that role and his style.

Whereas Williams and Lipton managed to get other things going career-wise after this hit program went off the air, by comparison Cole never did escape its shadow. It’s mostly guest shots on the usual circuit (Fantasy Island, Murder She Wrote, and the like) with brighter spots being things The Return of the Mod Squad (1979–oh, well), and a short mini-peak in 1990 and 1991 when he was in Stephen King’sIt and was briefly a regular on General Hospital. At some point he did a road tour of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as Brick — and that strikes me as very good (Newmanesque) casting. Apparently Cole struggled with alcohol for years, which may explain the lack of progress in his career. His last screen credit as an actor is in 2010.

Not long after recieving the Cole Memorandum, we learned that the mindreader The Amazing Kreskin (George Joseph Kresge, Jr, b. 1935) too has left this mortal plane. My 2012 post on Kreskin is somewhat fact-impoverished and deals mostly with the fictionalized movie about him The Great Buck Howard. But there is much more to tell.

Like so many in the magic field, Kreskin was a New Jersey native. Inspired by Mandrake the Magician he developed a second sight act of the sort that was perfect for TV variety and talk shows: that shtick where the performer tells a woman in the audience what’s in her purse — that kind of thing. His debut was on the Steve Allen Show in 1964. He was on The Mike Douglas Show nearly 60 times, and on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson nearly as frequently. (It’s been claimed that Carnac the Magnificent is partially based on Kreskin, but one would have to stress “partially”. Kreskin avoided the spiritual angle and wasn’t the slightest bit exotic.). Anyway, from the late ’60s through the early ’90s, he was a frequent sight on the shows of Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, David Frost, Dinah Shore, Sammy Davis Jr, Alan Thicke, David Letterman, and others. He had his own regular series on CTV (Canada) in the early ’70s. Naturally he had a live stage act, and he wrote over a dozen books.

Our next item concerns not a person but a place. As we reported in early 2020, the death of The Friar’s Club, the legendary social organization for comedians, seemed imminent for a variety of reasons. Yesterday we learned that the clubhouse, which has been shuttered for nearly five years, has been sold. The end of an era. We certainly hope that the organization can and will do like The Lambs, and find a new home. But times are changing. Some days I wonder if the future world will have a place for comedians, let alone clubs for them.

We do have some good news to report though about two places that we earlier reported as close to death. The Laurie Beechman Theatre and Q.E.D. both seem to have rebounded for the time being. I regard both of these venues as important outlets in the contemporary variety scene, so their perseverance comes as very heartening news indeed. We’ll need them in the coming days!