Bourbon Street Beat

As we continue with our “Favorite Crime Solvers of the Past,” we turn to 77 Sunset Strip. Even if you never watched the show, you might be familiar with the theme song where they snapped and kept repeating “77 Sunset Strip.”

Created by Roy Huggins, the show debuted on ABC in 1958 and ran until spring of 1964. This was the third appearance by Detective Stuart Bailey. In 1946, Huggins’ novel, The Double Take, was published. In 1948, Bailey stepped into the big screen, starring in I Love Trouble played by Franchot Tone. A decade later he showed up on television played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

Bailey, a former WWII secret agent and foreign languages professor, works with former government agent Jeff Spencer (Roger Smith). Their office is at 77 Sunset Strip, Suites 101 and 102. Suite 103 is occupied by Suzanne Fabry (Jacqueline Beer), a French switchboard operator who handles phones for several clients including Bailey and Spencer. Occasionally she helps them solve a crime.

Other characters come and go from the offices including Roscoe (Louis Quinn), who gives out horse-racing tips when he’s not at the track; he often is an operative for the duo.

Gerald “Kookie” Kookson (Ed Byrnes) is a bit of a kook. He loves rock and roll, is witty, appreciates looking good, and works as a valet at the club next door. But he wants to be a private detective and makes full partner during the show. Kookie provides some comedy with his slang like “ginchiest” for coolest or “piling up Zs” for sleeping. During season 2, Byrnes asked for more money with his character expanding his role, but the answer was a firm no, so he left the show. Warner Brothers eventually settled with him, and he returned in May of that year.

Other occasional visitors include Lt. Roy Gilmore (Byron Keith) and the Frank Ortega Trio (played by themselves), a jazz band, who perform next door. They recorded for Warner Brothers who was also behind the television show.

The show had a fun, witty edge to it making it interesting to watch the interactions of the characters in addition to the crime solving. Bailey and Spencer were updated versions of forties’ noir detectives. Some of the shows had very different plots, something like the shows Moonlighting would feature a few decades later. “The Silent Caper” had no dialogue and, in another one, Bailey finds himself in a ghost town and he’s the only main character in the episode. During the last season in “The Target,” roles were played by crew members who were usually behind the camera including director William Conrad, associate producer James Lydon, and writer Tony Barrett.

Guest stars were plentiful and included Robert Conrad, Dyan Cannon, Cloris Leachman, Shirley MacLaine, Elizabeth Montgomery, Mary Tyler Moore, Roger Moore, William Shatner, Marlo Thomas, Robert Vaughn, and Adam West.

Mack David and Jerry Livingston wrote the famous theme which became a top 10 hit on the Billboard chart. The duo worked on several other Warner Brothers crime shows including Surfside Six, Bourbon Street Beat, and Hawaiian Eye, all based on the 77 Sunset Strip formula and exotic location.

By 1963, ratings were declining and the show revamped. If you read my blog often, you realize this is one of my pet peeves. If they want to change the casts, I understand that. However, in this one, like so often, Bailey is suddenly working alone and there is no mention made of any of the other characters, just as if they never existed. They did this on Happy Days, The Doris Day Show, and several other popular series.

In addition to booting the cast, Jack Webb was brought in as executive producer and William Conrad as director. And if the name William Conrad sounds familiar, yes, it is the same person as the man who starred on Cannon. During the fifties and sixties, Conrad racked up 32 directing credits.

Bailey is now a solo investigator. The title didn’t change, but the old office is no longer there nor the club nor the theme song. A new one written by Bob Thompson was used, and the show took on a darker, more serious nature. Bailey gets a secretary named Hannah who we rarely see.

The show was on Fridays for its entire run, just switching time slots now and then. By season two it was in the top ten. In seasons three through five, it got its biggest competition from Route 66, which it beat in the ratings. The final season, the show got moved to a later slot, going up against The Alfred Hitchcock Hour but, neither of them were in the top thirty.

Big surprise, viewers weren’t fans of the changes or the more serious tone of the show, and they drifted away. The show was cancelled in February. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. moved over to the FBI. Roy Huggins had a hugely successful career. He would write for and create more top shows including Run for Your Life, Maverick, Alias Smith and Jones, The Rockford Files, and The Fugitive. Viewers at least got the satisfaction of knowing that making such drastic changes to the show caused the end of that story. Stream a few of the early seasons on Philo, Roku, or Pluto TV and let me know what you think.

Continuing the “What a Character” series, today we look at the career of Nita Talbot. Born in 1930 in New York as Anita Sokol, Talbot had an almost fifty-year-long career. She began appearing in films in 1949 with It’s a Great Feeling (and would go on to make another 30), but it was in television that she had her greatest success. It’s a Great Feeling starred Doris Day and Jack Carson in a parody of what goes on behind the scenes of the making of a Hollywood movie.

She was married to Don Gordon from 1954-1958 and to Thomas Geas from 1961 until sometime in the 1970s. I could not narrow it down to any specific year. Both of her husbands were also actors. Her sister Gloria was the wife of Carl Betz who co-starred as Alex Stone on The Donna Reed Show.

Talbot began her television career in 1950 on Repertory Theater. Appearing in 32 different shows throughout the fifties, many of her appearances were in dramas, primarily shows with different plays weekly. Talbot had a recurring role on Man Against Crime starring Ralph Bellamy, appearing in 9 of the 123 episodes. Later in the decade she was cast in Joe and Mabel in 1956. Nita played the role of Mabel, a manicurist who was dating cab driver Joe. The show only lasted four episodes. At the end of the decade, she would have a recurring role on The Thin Man as Beatrice/Blondie Dane a con artist.

Nita would take on roles in 29 different shows in the sixties. This decade was her “western” season. She did appear in Gomer Pyle and The Monkees, but most of her roles were in westerns, including Gunsmoke, Maverick, The Man from Blackhawk, Rawhide, The Virginian, Daniel Boone, and Bonanza.

During this ten-year period, she would be cast in three shows, one drama, and two comedies. In 1960, she could be seen in Bourbon Street Beat about a New Orleans detective agency where she played Lusti Weather. She co-starred in one sitcom this decade with Jim Backus in The Jim Backus Show. Backus plays Mike O’Toole, who struggles to keep his news service business afloat. Talbot played the role of Dora, one of O’Toole’s reporters. The show only lasted for one season.

At the end of the decade, Talbot was offered the role that she would become best known for. Although she only appeared in seven episodes of Hogan’s Heroes, she earned an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 1967-68 season for her role of Marya, a Russian spy.

One of her taglines was “Hogahn darlink.” While Hogan could charm most women, he never was certain when he could or couldn’t trust Marya, but he was often coerced to join forces with her against the Germans.

She continued her thriving television career during the seventies with another 26 shows; four of those would be permanent or recurring roles; however, none of them lasted very long.

In 1971, she was offered the role of Maggie Prescott in Funny Face starring Sandy Duncan. Duncan played a college student who worked part time as an actress and Talbot was her agent. When CBS picked up the pilot, they made several changes which resulted in Talbot’s role being dropped.

1973 found her as part of the cast of Here We Go Again. The show portrayed life after divorce for two couples. It should have been renamed, There We Went because the show only lasted for 13 episodes before being canceled.

In 1977 she joined the cast of Soap, playing Sheila Fine, who has an affair with Burt Campbell’s son Peter.

In 1979, Supertrain debuted. It was supposedly the most expensive show ever made. It was a “Love Boat” on the rails. The supertrain traveled across the country and every week passengers found love and solved life problems on their journeys. The show was derailed after nine episodes.

In between these roles, she tended to appear primarily in crime shows in the 1970s such as Mannix, McCloud, Columbo, Police Story, The Rockford Files, Charlie’s Angels, and Police Woman.

Photo: pinterest.com
The Partridge Family

Her roles diminished a bit in the eighties with 13 appearances and 9 in the 1990s. She would be cast in one additional sitcom in 1988, Starting from Scratch. This show starred Bill Daily and Connie Stevens as a divorced couple. Stevens leaves her second husband to come back to her ex-spouse and two sons. Talbot played Rose. The show seemed to get good ratings and currently people are rating them 4.5-4.8 out of 5.0, so I’m not sure why it was canceled after a year.

Talbot retired in the late 1990s and is hopefully enjoying a less-busy life. She had a long and successful career and certainly was a character!

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How pop culture influences us

77 Sunset Strip: A Bit Kookie

Nita Talbot: What A Character!