Up Till Now: The Autobiography

truly dangerous stunts that require a stuntman with experience, that’s something I’ve done throughout most of my career. Over the years I’ve done a lot of fighting, tumbling, running, jumping, car stunts, and unique tricks. I’ve always believed that doing the physical work, the stunts, is part of the actor’s job—but it has to be done safely. The safety of the star is always foremost in every-one’s mind. Not because they love you, but if you hurt your left pinky and can’t make the next shot, it’s going to cost the producers a lot of money. So generally they don’t let the star do anything unsafe.
    The reality is that even the most basic stunts can be very dangerous. On Gunsmoke I played a bad guy involved in a shoot-out with a deputy sheriff. According to the script, just before the shooting started one of my fellow bad guys was supposed to grab me around the neck and use me as a shield. In the story I was shot and my life was saved by a Quaker family; I convinced the family that I was the good-guy victim—until their beautiful daughter fell in love with the deputy.
    In this instance no one promised this story was going to make me a star.
    The actor playing the other bad guy was a big man, who looked crazy. That’s why they hired him, because he looked crazy. As it turned out, he looked that way because he was crazy. When we started shooting he grabbed me around the neck and actually started strangling me. I couldn’t breathe. This was truly the serious actor’s nightmare: I was going to die—on Gunsmoke . I grabbed him by the thumb and yanked him around. I was literally fighting for my life.
    A similar thing happened many years later—when I saved Oddjob’s life. Harold Sakata, who had created the memorable James Bond villain Oddjob in Goldfinger , was working with me in a low-budget film entitled Impulse , a title that had been changed from Want a Ride, Little Girl? I played your basic homicidal maniac, who is forced to try to kill a young girl after she sees me killing an old prison buddy. Harold was a huge man with no neck, he was just shoulders and a head. In this particular scene he chased me through a car wash and I managed to escape by climbing up onto a roof; when he walked by below me I threw a lasso over him and yanked him up. As he’s being strangled I jump off the roof, hit him several times, then escape.
    The stunt coordinator rigged Harold with a harness under his shirt which was connected to a steel cable. To the camera it appeared that I was pulling him up by the rope, but in fact he was being lifted by the cable. We practiced it several times, rope, pull, up, looks good. Then we rolled cameras.
    I dropped the loop over his head and yanked him up. I jumped down to the ground and looked at him dangling three feet in the air, struggling to get loose. He was making terrible choking sounds. Boy, I thought, I hadn’t realized he was such a good actor. He sounds like he’s really choking. I punched him rat-tat-tat in the gut a few times and took off. And as I started running a thought struck me: Wait a second, he’s actually choking. In real life one would probably have screamed, “Help!” but as this was on a movie set I yelled, “Cut! Cut!” and ran back to help him. Harold weighed about three hundred pounds but somehow I managed to lift his body enough to reduce thepressure on his trachea, enabling him to breathe, and then held him up until they cut him loose. I don’t know where I got the strength, but I broke my finger holding him. Because we were filming on a tight schedule I didn’t want to stop to see a doctor, so my finger never healed correctly.
    The most serious injury I’ve ever suffered doing a stunt took place when we were filming an episode of my series T.J. Hooker in Hawaii. We were shooting a fight scene on the top of a hill overlooking, I believe, the North Shore and the Pacific Ocean. It was about a thousand-foot drop off the edge straight down into the ocean. Now, I admit it, I’m afraid of heights. It’s a very odd sensation; I can fly an ultralight or pilot an acrobatic airplane or a glider, I’ve parachuted and I’ve been skydiving, I’ve stood alone on a plateau—but if I’m standing on the third floor of a hotel looking down I can lose it. I’m terrified I’m going to fall.
    This scene had been carefully choreographed by the stunt coordinator. We’d rehearsed it several times: the villain and I are fighting on the top of this hill, he