Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1963)

ball games in the big school gym, or at the country clubs scattered around where proms and class balls were held. But he was never the life of any big party. Bill Chamberlain’s wife, Pat, remembers that Dick, late in his teens, could come into a gathering at their house and be so quiet that you’d never notice he was there. Dick was different around his own close set of pals — Dick Hall. Don Tinsley, Billy Buggies, Vernon Lohr and Travis Reed and their steadies. Naturally Dick had one too. Donna was the kind of girl he always chose — pretty, peppy but femininely sweet. Usually somebody could promote a family car; and if there wasn’t a dance or a movie all wanted to see, they could always drive up into the hills, park and as Dick grins, “neck in the back seat.” But the most fun was roaring off to California’s handy mountains, desert or beach on weekends for picnics and sport. Dick liked the beach best because he’d figured a way to casually stroll off the public strand into the private Del Mar Club and blandly assume the privileges of a member. All it took was a cool head and a bit of acting. That came naturally to Dick Chamberlain, so naturally, that he wonders now how he ever let his movie star dream slumber throughout high school. He did do a couple of school plays but something else seemed more his dish. Among the scores of forget-me-nots which classmates scribbled on Dick’s last copy of the Beverly High’s yearbook, “The Watchtower,” is one which explains: “To a wonderful guy,” it reads, “and a terrific artist.” The same book summed Dick up in ways that hardly blocked out an actor’s essential ego. He was voted, “Most re served . . . Most courteous . . . Most sophisticated.” So, painting, Dick Chamberlain decided, was his major talent and ft would he art he’d go after for his life’s work. In a way it was like track, the sport he always preferred to football. Basically, both were solitary and you won or lost by yourself. He liked that idea. After graduation, he enrolled at Pomona College, in Claremont, to major in art. That summer his mother inherited part of an oil well. “It pumped away faithfully all the time I was in college to put me through,” says Dick. “The minute I graduated it went dry.” Everything else flowed as pleasantly for “Chambo” Chamberlain during his dear old college days. He felt at home there as lie had never felt before or, truthfully, since. “I loved Pomona,” Dick says simply. Other alumni have felt the same way. One loyal grad, Robert Taylor, was called “Pomona” by his first wife, Barbara Stanwyck, all the time they were married. Claremont, which Californians call. "The Oxford of the West,” is only thirtyfive miles from Beverly Hills. But, except for the mountain backdrop and sunshine it could be in another land. Four colleges cluster there — Pomona, Scripps College for Women, Claremont Men’s College and Harvey Mudd. Pomona’s buildings are classic and ivy clad; old trees shade its quad. There’s little rah-rah: the climate is academic, secluded and detached. In Dick’s day only 1100 hand-picked students roamed its halls. All of them soon knew Chambo Chamberlain. From the start and in various ways, he was a marked man. At the big Frosh-Soph mudfight Dick had a heads-on collision with the Soph captain and broke that leader’s nose. “For some reason,” recalls Dick, “that made me a hero.” He went out for track and made the mile relay team. The Phi Delts took him in; so did the Scripps girls and Pomona co-eds, in strictly another way, as he passed with his golden good looks. "Dick’s only problem was holding them off,” remembers Bob Towne. “More girls were after him than he knew what to do with. You couldn’t blame them. He was as good, maybe even better looking then than he is now. And. even in Levis and a T-shirt he always looked as if he had just stepped off Saville Row. I had early morning classes with Chambo and I never saw him with a hair out of place, a whisker or, for that matter, a smudge on his face.” Spotlight In one way or another the spotlight focussed on Dick Chamberlain all his four years at Pomona. If he wasn’t winning a trophy at an art exhibit, he was starred in a theatrical production. And sometimes, of course, the spotlight was there, but mercifully deflected by Dick’s misleading look of innocence. Like that outrageous poster on Carnegie Hall at the Arts Festival. “It was a work of art,” declares Martin Green, who was in on the prank. “Not the painting — but Dick’s whole cool maneuver. It involved a brilliant plotswiped fire ladders, split-second timing with the police, all night work and destroying the evidence. We hung it so high that it was two weeks before they could figure a way to get it down from there.” The three stealthy operators — Dick, Martin and Dave Ossman — were all “DP’s.” That meant “Dramatic Productions,” although jealous outsiders had a less flattering name for the exclusive, elite group — “Displaced Persons.” As a member. strangely, that’s just about what Dick Chamberlain was. His major was not dramatics but art. He loved it and was good. His paintings won prizes and he even sold some to Pomona students. “Dick had real talent, still has,” says Martin Green, who should know. “He could have been a fine painter, especially in ordered abstractions and geometrical subject matter. He was especially good in grays, blacks and whites.” But Dick was a dedicated DP for two reasons: Although truly popular for the first time in his life, he still needed a close circle of kindred souls with whom he could shed his reserve and let himself go. As at Beverly High, Dick took in the school dances and events. But it was with Bob, Dave. Martin, Hal and their girls that he really had fun — up at “Stinky’s” joint in the canyon, on ski junkets to Mount Baldy, or at Stan Kornyn’s big home in Covina, where, after a show, they could keep a party going all night, fueled with gin or cheap champagne. DP was a true fraternity, not just a “social” one. Dick has always needed that. The other reason was longer range and even deeper: As school slipped by, something was happening to Chambo Chamberlain and he knew it. “I was thinking less and less about painting and more and more about acting,” he says. In other words, that crazy kid dream was popping up again out of the past, despite himself. “ The last time my husband tried to fix it we got Perry Mason accusing Ben Casey of not brushing his teeth after every meal.” 86