Up Till Now: The Autobiography

been some walk. Only once was there any kind of problem with Heather. On several shows Heather did not wear a bra. Finally, one of the top executives told Ken Koch, an associate producer who eventually directed several episodes, that he had to go down to the set and tell Heather that she was going to have to start wearing a bra. Koch had been in the army, when he got an order he followed it—although admittedly he’d never been given an order like this in the army. But he went to the set and took her aside to explain, “You know, in your profile shots, you’re not looking like, you know, the Heather Locklear that everybody wants to see and the beautiful woman you really are.”
    I believe Heather was taken aback. And so she asked Ken in a soft voice, “Are you going to speak to Bill and Jimmy and have them stuff socks in their crotch so it makes them look like they’ve got big dicks?”
    Ken admitted he hadn’t thought about that. About a week later we were shooting the tag, the last scene after the bad guys have been caught, at Marina del Rey. When we finished we were all walking toward the camera. It was a good shot. When they cut Heather kept walking, right up to Ken Koch, and she told him with a big smile, “You know, didn’t Bill’s dick look bigger?”
    We had a really good cast and crew. I really bonded with both Adrian Zmed and Jimmy Darren. That was important, because we spent a lot of time locked up together in a cop car. Jimmy Darren, I remember, was afraid of birds. All types of birds. As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, as soon as we found out about that we were all very sympathetic. The writers, for example, immediately started adding action scenes that took place on rooftops. We’d be running across the rooftops of Los Angeles in the middle of the summer. Nothing stopped Jimmy—except a pigeon. A single, unarmed... unwinged pigeon was enough to make him pause. As soon as he saw a pigeon he’d start to cower. He’d been jumping from rooftop to rooftop, tackling bad actors, doing whatever stunts were necessary, until he confronted...a pigeon.
    Birds? Who could be afraid of birds? Now heights, that’s a real fear. Hooker wasn’t afraid of anything, Shatner hated heights. Even building roofs, so between Jimmy Darren and me those writers worked overtime to get us up on roofs.
    Adrian Zmed had a lot of talent. In addition to being a good actor, he could sing and dance. He also had a terrific sense of humor. Many of our shows ended with me chasing the bad guy by myself and bringing him down, then seconds later Adrian would come running up to me. I’d tell him, “Get an ambulance, Junior.”
    So one night we were filming this climactic scene and I chased the perp down an alley and brought him down. Heeerrrrrrrrre comes Adrian. Breathlessly, I told him, “Get an ambulance, Junior.”
    Adrian looked at me and shook his head. “Why don’t you get your own damn ambulance,” he said, then turned around and walked out of the shot.
    Well. That certainly was interesting. I was truly surprised. There was absolute silence on the set—until Ken Koch started laughing and then I realized I’d been set up. And started laughing.
    Each episode adhered to a pretty strict formula: really bad guys, beautiful women, and plenty of action. Our criminals were always total “skels,” or as Hooker described them, maggots, scavengers, vermin, creeps and scum, slimy, unctuous killers and rapists, reallyunpleasant human beings, men so completely lacking any redeeming qualities that in one episode they actually cut off the head of a teddy bear belonging to a teenaged prostitute trying to go straight—so whatever Hooker had to do to get them off the streets was acceptable. Each week Hooker faced some sort of dilemma: Should I inform on a cop who froze at the last minute to save a pregnant woman? Did a female cop I trained get shot and lose her leg because I didn’t train her well enough? There was always some sort of humorous by-play between Adrian and myself that continued through the whole episode; Adrian gets a brand-new computer to pick the winners of horse races, Adrian is going to show me how to use modern sales techniques to sell my daughter’s organization cookies. At some point in many episodes I ended up at Valley Hospital. Usually a colorful informer provided information that led me to the bad guy, anybody from a Rasta conga player to a blind news dealer to a friendly pawnshop owner. On the path to