Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1963)

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Beautifully engraved with lucky Zodiacal signs. Expands like magic to fit any finger. WEAR IT WHEN SEEKING WEALTH! Buyers galore report MOUNTAINS OF MONEY from miraculous CHANGE OF LUCK. Now YOU FORTUNE 7/n i\ ASK FOR GIPSY GOOD LUCK PACK POST FREE BY AIRMAIL. TAKES TWO DAYS ONLT. NOC.O.D s. SEND DOLLAR BILL. $1 can make a FLASH AT Reveal birthday for EVEN MORE LUCK. Lucky Romany Horoscope included FREE! TAJANA ( B4 ) FORTUNE LODGE, NORTH FIELD AVE., LONDON, W.S, ENG. (Airmail Postage to England 15c) Of course, it’s also the oldest story in Hollywood. For the brash, the brassy, the thick-skinned, it can be an exciting game. But the sensitive suffer. Dick had never flailed helplessly at thin air before. Always some good things had come his way, whether he really enjoyed them or not. Now nothing, and nobody seemed to care. “I almost went out of my mind,” Dick admits. He was only twenty-four but already he lived in a neighborhood of defeat. His apartment house was filled with old people who had long since had it. The hall was chronically posted with funeral notices. It was dismal cooking and eating his skimpy meals alone, standing in line to pick up an unemployment check, doing nothing most nights except study and read. Even the job he finally found attending the paralyzed woman, was not what you’d call cheerful. “Still, I was lucky,” Dick Chamberlain believes today. “All that time I had very wise people keeping tab on me and cracking down.” Two were Carolyn Trojanowski and Jeff Corey. Low or not. Dick never stopped taking lessons. And they weren’t always encouraging. Jeff Corey is a drama expert who has helped straighten out such stars as Tony Perkins. Gardner McKay, Diane Varsi and Tony Quinn. “The thing I liked about Chambo,” he says, “was his sensitivity and charm. He had a lot of good stuff. But he had done mostly classical things in college and was inclined to be too lyrical. It was hard to bring him down to earth. I used to tell him. 'Dick, for Heavens sake, go out in the back yard and rub some dirt on your face!’” Corey put Dick in a class where the “climate was stressful.” Students there were trying to strip themselves down to their own raw juices. “It was painful for Dick,” recalls Corey. “His face turned red and he broke out in sweats. He wasn’t ready for that.” That was when Dick Chamberlain came close to quitting. Wisely, Corey put him in another class that was milder and he carried on. “But he was always shy,” concludes Corey, “and it’s too bad. There are a lot of wonderful things about Chambo that most people don’t get to see.” For a long time few around Hollywood saw more than a handsome, mannerly, young man who’d like a job acting. Only the ones who got to know him became boosters. One was Lilie Messinger, former personnel assistant to Louis B. Mayer, late boss of MGM. A friend of Dick’s family sent him to Lilie, who’d “retired” and turned agent. In her day she’d helped hundreds of newcomers get started but now the last client she wanted was a raw unknown. “Things were too difficult in the industry,” she explains, “And I’d promised myself I’d never go through that again.” But when she met Dick. “He was so charming and attractive,” she says, “I couldn’t refuse.” Wherever Lilie Messinger took Dick, however, others found refusals comparatively easy. Everybody liked him; nobody gave him a job. He was always, “Not quite right.” Dick, however, takes some of the blame. “I think it was largely my own fault,” says Dick today. “I froze up on interviews. When they asked me to read I got a block that reached clear back to third grade. I couldn't sell myself. They could see I was no professional, not yet anyway.” “No, Dick wasn’t,” agrees A1 Tresconi, MGM’s casting chief, who looked him over then, as he had even before at a Pomona College play. “But if you have it in the eyes — you have it. They tell the story. Put it this way: The first time I saw Dick Chamberlain I thought, If nothing else I’d like this boy to be a friend of mine,” Tresconi had nothing cooking then to put Dick Chamberlain in but he made a mental note; Good bet for a long term MGM contract. That’s exactly what Dick finally got, of course, but not until his wide eyes had opened 'considerably wider by the hotfoots of show business. His very first “break” in a TV pilot for “You’re Only Young Once,” turned into exactly one line which he delivered with three other people yelling “Goodbye” to a wedding party. There was a movie, too, “The Secret of the Purple Reef,” and again Dick’s hopes rocketed up only to descend with a thud when they scissored his part to nothing. Then Lilie Messinger went to work for a network — and now Dick had no agent. Now and then he managed to pick up some small TV spots on his own. in “Gunsmoke,” “Mister Lucky,” an Alfred Hitchcock, “Bourbon Street Beat.” “I got by,” he sums it up, “with an occasional loan from home, my chauffeur job and a work check now and then.” Was he discouraged? “It was scary at times, sure,” Dick allows calmly. “But I didn’t expect too much too soon. I knew what I was up against. It all depends on what you want and how badly you want it. I wanted it pretty badly. That’s why I never stopped those lessons. I realized I wouldn’t get steady work until I rated it. When I did rate it . . . well, the break came along.” Family friend The break Dick means was when powerful MCA took him on as a client. A friend of his family’s, Jack Bailey (Mister “Queen For A Day”), aced him in there. As agents, MCA thought big and acted the same way. All through 1960. as MGM waded carefully into television. Dick Chamberlain knocked steadily at MGM’s door. He went there first to make a western pilot, “The Paradise Kid,” but in those days you couldn’t flip dials fast enough then to get away from new TV cowboys. It didn’t sell. Next Dick tried out for a tentative half hour version of “Dr. Kildare.” Nobody wanted it at first so that effort was dropped. He showed up again for another pilot, “Father of the Bride.” He wasn’t the type. Then “Dr. Kildare” came up again — a big hour show now with the works behind it. MCA shot Dick right out again. This time MGM invited him in to stay. That was December, 1960. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. It never is. For a time both “Dr. Kildare” and Dick Chamberlain were on trial. Launching a major TV series is something like a blast off at Canaveral. If it goes into orbit, everybody’s a hero; if it fizzles, they come up hums. Dick knew that thirty-five other actors with far bigger “names” than his, which was minuscule, had tested for Jim Kildare. He also knew that one big reason he got it was because he came cheaper than most. The money wasn’t too important. hut the opportunity was. It could be 88