Richard Jaeckel

During my first year of marriage I lived in Sherman Oaks, California.  On Saturday mornings I could often be found walking the dog, cutting the grass or washing the car.  (That's probably why I got a divorce.)  I couldn't help but notice a very hunky, short, handsome, blond man in a beautiful blue Woody pull up in front of the house three doors from mine.  He was there most Saturdays during the time I lived there.  One time he walked over to my house and asked if he could use my phone.  When he came back out I said I liked his car.  

I accepted his invitation to look inside, telling him how much I loved those cars but that I'd not seen one up close.  I knew who he was... Richard Jaeckel, the cocky badass of so many westerns I'd seen and more than a few war films.  I really did think he was handsome, boyishly so, and a good actor to boot and I could not understand why he wasn't a bigger star.  And I told him so.  His reply started a fun dialogue we had for months and months.  More when we revisit the old neighborhood shortly...

He was born in Long Beach, New York in 1926.  His father was in the family's fur business and his mother had dabbled in some stage work.  He had no interest in either profession as a kid.  When he was eight the family moved to Los Angeles and he attended Hollywood High.

Never wanting for female attention he was a most popular young fellow but the girls had to compete with body-building, surfing and other sports which left him with little time on his hands.

His mother was friends with the powerful and often vicious gossip columnist, Louella Parsons, and she got him a job in the mail department at 20th Century Fox.  A casting director spotted him and auditioned him for a small role of an inexperienced, teenage soldier in the enormously popular war drama, Guadalcanal Diary (1943).  Before he could open and date-stamp another envelope, he was rushed into a second popular war drama, playing a pilot aboard an aircraft carrier, in Wing and a Prayer (1944), about the battle of Midway.

He then served in the Merchant Marines for five years.   By now, he had no doubt he wanted to be an actor.  He would be in the business for over 50 years.  He never did catch the brass ring but as a character actor, he had one of the most recognizable faces in the business.  He made a career out of playing ebullient, pugnacious youths in one helluva lot of films.  He did play good guys, too, but he was a delicious villain.  Having pal Louella write nice things about him from time to time didn't hurt. 

He would make 66 movies and 126 TV shows/movies.  Many of the movies were Bs and some were very forgettable although Jaeckel played every performance as though the film would become an Oscar winner.  We cannot begin to discuss all of his films, but let's hit some highlights.

While in the military he married Antoinette, a non-pro, and they would be together 50 years and have two sons.  I remember his family was often a part of our Saturday chats.  They appeared to be everything to him.  They never particularly took to the Hollywood party scene.

Fresh out of the service and back in again for two 1949 films that were popular with the public and generally so with critics.  Battleground is one of the best movies about the Battle of the Bulge.  Jaeckel had just a small part as a soldier but he was fortunate to have been a part of it.  The same could be said about Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) where he became friendly with star John Wayne.

There was that memorable role... sometimes a trivia question in movie party games... in 1950's The Gunfighter.  He is a cocky youth (hmmm) who thinks he's fast on the draw but is killed in the opening scene by Gregory Peck's title character.  Jaeckel certainly died in a lot of movies.

Hot-blooded with Terry Moore in Come Back, Little Sheba

Jaeckel got one of his best roles ever in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) as a horny kid who aggressively flirts with the nubile Terry Moore and invokes the jealousy of her landlord, Burt Lancaster.  The film got lots of deserved attention at awards time and fan mail zoomed for the hot young stud.  After this his career should have caught fire but it did not although he remained steadily employed.

Sea of Lost Ships (1953) is a Coast Guard adventure story with foster brothers (Jaeckel and John Derek) at odds over romantic notions involving Wanda Hendrix.  It's fun but is most notable for the start of a friendship and occasional working relationship with Derek.  Seeing these two in the same frame hurt my eyes.  They would later costar in a short-lived TV series and later still Jaeckel would costar in two horrible movies directed by Derek when he thought he was the great auteur. 

He had better luck with Glenn Ford.  They made three movies together and became friendly coworkers.  First up was The Violent Men (1955) about a war among neighbors.  Of course Jaeckel was one of the many villains.  He has a larger role in the superb 3:10 to Yuma (1957) where he is an outlaw determined to rescue a captured gang-leader (Ford, in a rare bad-guy role) before he's whisked out of town on a train by Van Heflin.  In Cowboy (1958) Jaeckel plays a trail hand on a cattle drive with Ford in another offbeat role, although the film belongs to Jack Lemmon.

Attack (1956) is a gritty look at corruption and incompetence in the military,  Jaeckel is a private  under the command of a cowardly captain (Eddie Albert) who runs afoul of his men, especially Jack Palance.  This was Jaeckel's first film with Lee Marvin, who became another work friend.  It was also Jaeckel's second of seven films with director Robert Aldrich who became a champion of the actor.

Another war movie followed, The Naked and the Dead (1958), based on a Norman Mailer novel.  Jaeckel is one of the soldiers.  He made a rare trip into film noir with The Lineup, also 1958, which showcases him as the driver for a pair of drug runners in San Francisco.  It features some wonderful sites of the city.

One of Elvis's best films is Flaming Star (1960), the story of a young man raised in a family with a white father and Indian mother who, along with some neighbors, gets involved in a skirmish with Indians.  Jaeckel plays one of the neighbors.

One of his best parts came as one of the three soldiers accused of rape in the gripping Town Without Pity (1961).  Costar Robert Blake said that Jaeckel was the only person he knew who is crazier than I am.  That's quite an endorsement.

He slipped back into virtually unknown films and a great deal of television before getting a key role in the violent and enormously successful The Dirty Dozen (1967).  Jaeckel plays Lee Marvin's able second-in-command, a no-nonsense sergeant who helps convert a ragtag group of criminals into a vital fighting force.  Jaeckel is one of the few left alive to appear in a sequel, The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission (1985).

In 1968-69 when I had my neighborhood chats with him, he wasn't working much and he seemed, at times, unhappy about it.  When I questioned why he wasn't a bigger star, he dramatically looked me up and down (I was over a foot taller). I asked if that was a height reference and he said he'd give anything to have my height, that it would have made all the difference in his life.

I interjected with that's not what I meant about being a bigger star and we moved on but virtually every time we met, he made comments about our statures.  I found him to be funny (he thought I was too), self-effacing, kind and not big-headed.

I have dealt with short men all my life and a number of them have had problems with me over height differences.  I know the signs and I know them well. It's a certain agitation that overcomes them.  The funny thing is I did notice it several times with Jaeckel although he never let it out as some others have.

Did he have an attitude at times in his work world?  Was there an air of hostility and it kept him from becoming an A-lister star?  What did Robert Blake mean that he was crazier than Blake?  (I was not aware of that comment when I met with Jaeckel.)

It's been said he didn't rise to the top of the industry because he was little and had a boyish appearance.  That's why?  Tell that to Alan Ladd (who was also blond and shortER) or even Tom Cruise.

Regardless, this is an actor whose work was always spot on, no matter the film, but he never gave a better performance than he did in Sometimes a Great Notion (1971).  And the real hoot comes out of the fact that it's a good-guy role.  He was horsing around one day on the beach with his family when Paul Newman came by.  After chatting some, director-star Newman offered Jaeckel the role of his cousin in an Oregon logging family.

Of course what is memorable is that scene.  If you've seen the film, you already know what scene.  Jaeckel is pinned in the water by some rotating logs but with his head sticking out.  He is talking to Newman who works to dislodge him by trying various things.  The real issue is the approaching high tide.  It always creeps me out.  In my comfy chair, I find myself lifting my head.  But like an accident, I can't stop looking at it and when it's over, I am sure my heart is in pieces.  

Jaeckel would be nominated for a supporting Oscar and I can well imagine how thrilled he was.  These early 70s were a good time for him professionally.  Again, too bad that it couldn't be parlayed into something more that he wanted.

Aldrich used him effectively as a cavalry soldier in the exciting Ulzana's Raid (1972) with Burt Lancaster and Bruce Davison as a scout and a lieutenant who are at odds on how to capture or kill a murderous Indian.  The following year Jaeckel was third-billed after James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson in Sam Peckinpah's macho Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).  He plays a sheriff who figures prominently in the proceedings.

For the remaining 26 years of his life, Jaeckel did guest roles on countless TV series and made generally unexceptional movies.  He was effective as a government agent tracking alien Jeff Bridges in
Starman (1984).  Rather unceremoniously he ended his 50 years in the acting business with a role on TV's Baywatch from 1991-94.
  
The stocky, hunky, cocky blond was always a most watchable screen presence.  He was durable, dependable and somehow great fun, even as a bad guy.  

He always needed to be near the beach.  He loved surfing, swimming, sunning and beach sports.  He didn't work at that body to keep it covered.  He worshiped the sun and was obviously one of those who thought there was no look quite as exciting as blond and tan.  

As he ended his run with Baywatch, he found out he had melanoma and it became a tense, three-year battle with the disease that eventually spread to his bones.  It got so bad that he took up residence in the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills.  People tried to visit him there but he waved off most of them.  He no longer looked young and vital and he hated that.  I know people are pulling for me to beat this, he said, but let them have a glass at the bar for me and let it go at that.

Richard Jaeckel passed away at age 70 in 1997.


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A guilty pleasure