Robert Crane - Crane: Sex, Celebrity, and My Fathers Unsolved Murder

CRANE

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Copyright 2015 by Robert David Crane and Christopher Fryer

The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crane, Robert David.

Crane : sex, celebrity, and my fathers unsolved murder / Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-8131-6074-0 (hardcover : alkaline paper)

ISBN 978-0-8131-6076-4 (PDF) ISBN 978-0-8131-6075-7 (ePub)

1. Crane, Bob, 1929-1978. 2. Television actors and actressesUnited StatesBiography. 3. MurderInvestigationArizonaScottsdale. 4. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)-ArizonaScottsdale. 5. Crane, Robert David. 6. Crane, Bob, 1929-1978Family. 7. Fathers and sonsUnited StatesBiography. 8. FameSocial aspectsCaliforniaLos Angeles. 9. SexSocial aspectsCaliforniaLos Angeles. 10. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)Social life and customs. I. Fryer, Christopher.

II. Title.

PN1992.4.C73C736 2015

791.4302'8092dc23 2014043934

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of American University Presses

To Anne, Chuck, Debbie, and Karen

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

Christopher Isherwood,
The Berlin Stories: Goodbye to Berlin

This book is a work of memory, and as such there may be other people who have different recollections of these events. I have written what I remember to be true and accurate. Some names have been changed for reasons that will be obvious. Some quotes from Greg Kinnear, Paul Schrader, and Willem Dafoe regarding Auto Focus were taken from a variety of sources, and not necessarily from one specific evenings conversation. They do, however, convey the essence of what was said.

Robert Crane

On Thursday, June 29, 1978, I was twenty-seven years and two days old. I had just interviewed the hottest star in Hollywood for Playboys new Euro-hip Oui magazine. I was living in Westwood, California, the epicenter of movies, nightlife, and all things cool in Los Angeles. Life was almost perfect for a young man in my positionalmost, because twelve hours earlier, someone had crept into the room where my dad, TV star Bob Crane, was sleeping and bashed in his head with a blunt object. I was about to find that out.

It was 3:00 in the afternoon. I was home alone at the apartment my dad and I shared. Westwood was an eclectic mix of neighborhoods. UCLA student apartments and frat houses mixed genially with the grander estates of L.A.s elites. In fact, Dad owned a large, handsome house that was less than a mile from the two-bedroom apartment he was sharing with me.

At the time Dad was going through very heated divorce proceedings and needed a safe-house. I guess most divorce proceedings are heated, but his marriage had become Chernobyl on the Pacific. The meltdown had begun six months earlier in December 1977 when he stepped off a United Airlines jet at LAX from Cincinnati, where hed been directing and performing in his dinner theater workhorse Beginners Luck over the previous month. Since the cancellation of Hogans Heroes in 1971, live theater had been paying most of my dads bills. At the airport, he wasnt greeted by a driver or a loving family member; a man walked up to him and asked, Are you Bob Crane?

Yes, he answered, pen ready, thinking the guy wanted an autograph.

These are for you, the guy said, and slapped divorce papers against his chest.

Like most boys in distress, he retreated to his mother. A widow, Rose lived in a one-bedroom apartment just down the street from mine. Dad couldnt go back to his own house because Patti, his second wife who was now suing him for divorce, was in residence there with her teenage daughter from her first marriage and with Scotty, my six-year-old half brother. The house is a half-timbered Tudor affair, draped on the hillside like a spiders web, and Patti had taken up her position in its center, guarding her realm.

When my dad and Patti collided, I had been living alone in my own Westwood apartment. Dad asked me to move in with him at his new digs, and I didgoing literally half a block up the street. The 1930s building had nice big windows and hardwood floors. We set up the living room as a little theater for projection TV, which was the newest craze, with those primary-color lights that broadcast the entire television spectrum. We each had a bedroom. The kitchen area was very small, which was fine because we didnt cook. It was all TV dinners and takeout for us. The dining room was the postproduction room. The guests at our dining table were my dads equipment: Sony VHS and Beta video recorders, a monstrous three-quarter-inch cassette video deck, an Akai quarter-inch audiotape recorder, a Sony handheld video camera, hundreds of video and audio cassettes and vinyl records, a turntable, microphones, a Nikon F still camera, camera tripods, RCA and Sony television monitors, a metal bar for cutting video and audio tape. All the new and exciting techno-gear of 1977 and 78 was on that table.

So at 3:00 p.m. on June 29 I was alone at the apartment writing up the interview I had just done with Chevy Chase for Oui. Chevy had emerged as the first star of the mold-shattering, late-night television revue Saturday Night Live, and he was about to become a big-time movie star. Oui, owned by Hugh Hefners Playboy Enterprises, badly wanted him in the magazine, and I was the lucky guy on the assignment. I was sitting there transcribing tapewhich, for the uninitiated, meant turning on a Panasonic portable cassette recorder, listening to a sentence or two, turning it off, typing the words on my Smith-Corona electric typewriter, turning the tape on again, and repeating the process over and over for an endless number of hours. It was important to me to have the interviewees words transcribed perfectly so there could be no mistaking the subjects voice. Not exactly a glamorous life, sitting in a room by yourself rolling tape, but Chevy was making me laugh with his candid observations of his former cast mates.