Dr. Kildare: The “Perfect” Doctor

July 10, 2023July 1, 2023 / thewritelife61 / 2 Comments

This month we are checking out a few favorites in a blog series: “Examining Our Favorite Medical Shows.” Last week we learned a bit about Ben Casey. Today we are looking at a similar show to Ben Casey, although in many ways it was very different: Dr. Kildare. Dr. Kildare was also on the air from 1961-66. MGM produced this show created by Max Brand in the 1930s. The show had previously been a movie and a radio series. Unlike Ben Casey who seemed to argue with everyone, Dr. Kildare (Richard Chamberlain) was a respectful intern at Blair General Hospital. He wants to help his patients and listens to his mentor, Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Raymond Massey). In season three, Kildare became a resident, and the episodes focused more on the stories about the patients.

In 1960 a pilot was filmed with Joseph Cronin in the Kildare role and Lew Ayres as Gillespie which did not sell. The role of Kildare was offered to William Shatner and James Franciscus who both turned it down. In 1961, a new pilot was produced with Chamberlin and Massey. One of the reasons Massey accepted the role is because he was certain the show would only last one season, and he wanted to continue with his movie career. The popularity of the show put his film career on hold for five years.

Other cast members who appeared on the show included Dr. John Kapish (Ken Berry), Nurse Fain (Jean Inness), Dr. Agurski (Eddie Ryder), Dr. Gerson (Jud Taylor), Dr. Lowry (Steve Bell) Nurse Conant (Jo Helton), and Nurse Lawton (Lee Kurty).

The guest stars on this show were amazing. I feel like this should be read in auctioneer mode but here goes: Eddie Albert, Jack Albertson, Fred Astaire, Ed Asner, Lauren Bacall, Ed Begley, Joan Blondell, Tom Bosley, Beau Bridges, Charles Bronson, James Caan, Robert Culp, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Angie Dickinson, Olympia Dukakis, Barbara Eden, Linda Evans, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Peter Falk, Beverly Garland, Ron Howard, Kim Hunter, Celeste Holm, Carolyn Jones, James Earl Jones, Brian Keith, Ted Knight, Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, Jack Lord, Walter Matthau, Gavin McLeod, Ricardo Montalban, Harry Morgan, Jack Nicholson, Leonard Nimoy, Carroll O’Connor, Suzanne Pleshette, Basil Rathbone, Robert Redford, Robert Reed, Cesar Romero, Gena Rowlands, William Shatner, Jean Stapleton, Gloria Swanson, Rip Torn, Sam Waterston, Dennis Weaver, and Robert Young. For a show that was only on five years, it was an impressive guest cast.

To add more realism to the show, writer E. Jack Neuman spent several months working with interns in a large hospital. Technical advice was provided by the American Medical Association.

The show was realistic in portraying all the drama that is truly found in a city hospital. The plots involved a lot of medical and social issues including smallpox, physician competency, drug addiction, malpractice, and euthanasia. Neuman definitely captured what life in a large, city hospital was like. Kildare makes about $60 a month, or $500 in today’s terms, works long hours, rotates through the various medical departments and has senior physicians overrule his diagnoses.

Just like Ben Casey, the first seasons produced stand-alone episodes and after the success of Peyton Place, storylines carried over from one show to another to entice the audience to tune in again the next week.

The theme music for the series was composed by Jerry Goldsmith. A CD set was released in 2009 which included the theme, the original music from the 1960 pilot, Richard Chamberlain’s recording of “Three Stars Will Shine Tonight,” and musical scores from the five seasons by Hurr Sukman, Richard Markowitz, Morton Stevens, Lalo Schifrin, John Green, and Burt Bacharach.

Airing on Thursday nights, the show was in the top ten during season one and the top twenty for seasons two and three. The show received about 12000 fan letters weekly, and, in addition, Chamberlain received letters personally asking for medical advice.

The network moved the show to Tuesday nights against Red Skelton and McHale’s Navy for season five and the viewers did not follow. The ratings declined, and the show was canceled.

This show really changed Chamberlain’s career. He had always been a small-role guy before this show, but he suddenly became a teen idol. He received more than 35,000 fan letters a month. Onscreen the idealistic Kildare and the wise, sometimes cantankerous, Gillespie don’t always agree but they had great chemistry on the set and apparently off the set as well. Unlike Ben Casey, the cast on this show did get along and Chamberlain mentioned that he always enjoyed working with Massey.

Richard said he grew up in a family where they all pretended to be perfect. So, he went through life trying to be perfect too. He said that philosophy did not work well for his life, but it did work well for Dr. Kildare.

Following the show he would take a turn on Broadway, in big-screen movies, and back on television where he specialized in mini-series like Shogun and The Thorn Birds, both in the 1980s.

One fact I found interesting was that the DVD release of the show included a never-aired pilot from a different medical show, The Eleventh Hour in 1962. The episode originally was written for Dr. Kildare. Drs. Kildare and Gillespie assist Dr. Bassett (Wendell Corey), a psychiatrist diagnosing one of his patients Ann (Vera Miles). Instead of airing on Dr. Kildare, Chamberlain and Massey were cut out of the film and it was submitted as a pilot for the show, with the title “Ann Costigan: a Duel on a Field of White.”

Even Mad Magazine got on the Kildare bandwagon. The 1962, #74 issue, featured “Dr. Killjoy,” a parody of the show.

Everyone seemed to like this show. Then again, what is not to like? You have a handsome doctor, exhilarating drama, a fun guest star every week, and realistic stories. The show would go on to inspire the talents behind a variety of medical series including Marcus Welby MD, ER, House, and Grey’s Anatomy.

Add Some Color to Your Life with Reading Rainbow

March 21, 2022March 21, 2022 / thewritelife61 / 2 Comments

Reading Rainbow was an American 30-minute children’s series that was broadcast on PBS. The show began in 1983. Producing 155 episodes, the series aired new episodes until 2006 and then showed reruns until 2009.

How Reading Rainbow Inspired Me — Photo: bookriot.com

The show was developed to encourage children to read. Twila Liggett created the show with Cecily Truett Lancit and Larry Lancit of Lancit Media Productions. Lynne Ganek, Tony Buttino, and host LeVar Burton were also part of the creative team. The group met with Fred Rogers, Joan Ganz Cooney, and The Electric Company crew to explore ways to make television more engaging to fans. During an interview in 2003, Burton said “I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being. It’s just such an integral part of the human experience—that connection with the written word.”

Many educators found that during the summer, children lost a lot of their reading abilities because they were watching “uneducational” television and not reading. The producers of the show wanted to air a new program during the summer months that would keep kids excited about reading even when they weren’t in school. It was a great goal, but the show was often threatened with cancellation due to a lack of funding.

The show received more than 200 awards including a Peabody Award. Ten of its twenty-six Emmys were for Outstanding Children’s Series. It was the third-longest children’s show on the air right after, you guessed it, Mister Rogers and Sesame St.

LeVar Burton Asks Fans to Help Bring Back 'Reading Rainbow' | The Takeaway | WNYC Studios — Photo: WNYC Studio.com

A topic was introduced in each episode and then a featured children’s book was read, often narrated by a celebrity. After the story, Burton visited places relating to the theme of the day. The show ended with book suggestions for kids to read. In an Esquire interview in 2019, Burton discussed why listening to books is so important: “It gives you the opportunity to, without the mechanism of reading, engage immediately in your imagination. When you’re reading, you’re multitasking. You’re reading and making the movie in your head. When you’re listening to storytelling, there’s no activity, there’s no multitasking—you’re indeed in your imagination as you’re engaged with the content of the story. It’s a shortcut for visualization.”

Steve Horelick was the composer of the theme song with Dennis Neil Kleinman and Janet Weir writing lyrics. The show had three versions of the song with the third version sung by Chaka Khan.

There are a lot of great stars who showed up to read to kids, including Ruth Buzzy, Julia Child, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Kermit the Frog, Peter Falk, Jane Goodall, and Run D-M-C.

Margret Aldrich in wrote an article in 2014, and she chose the top ten books from the series. It’s a great place to start if you want to find a couple of books to read to your child.

To Be A Drum read by James Earl Jones - YouTube — James Earl Jones Photo: youtube.com

All the Colors of the Race by Arnold Adoff, read by Maya Angelou.
Sunken Treasure by Gail Gibbons, read by Robert Morse
On the Day You Were Born by Debra Frasier, read by Patrick Stewart.
Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman, read by Tyne Daly.
Animal Café by John Stadler, read by Martin Short.
The Magic Schoolbus Inside the Earth by Joanna Cole, read by Keshia Knight Pulliam.
Paul Bunyan by Steven Kellogg, read by Buddy Ebsen
Arthur’s Eyes by Marc Brown, read by Bill Cosby.
Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain by Verna Aardema, read by James Earl Jones.
Abiyoyo by Pete Seeger and Michael Hays, read by Pete Seeger.

So, why was the show canceled? According to John Grant, who is in charge of content at WNED Buffalo, the show’s home station, “The show’s run is ending because no one—not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights.” And, just like that, the last chapter was closed for good.

Burton Calls On 'Star Trek' Fans To Bring 'Reading Rainbow' To The Next Generation | KRWG — Photo: npr.org

Reading Rainbow was an essential motivation for kids to read. However, adults have to realize that they also have to make time for reading. Let’s allow Levar to have the last word. In that Esquire interview, he also talked about why all of us need to read:

“You need to make the time. You have time to eat; you have time to sleep; you have time to love. I think reading for pleasure is an act of self-care, genuinely. I really do, especially in today’s world. You’ve gotta turn off the news; you’ve got to create some escape time in your imagination. You have to feed yourself, people! Otherwise, we have a tendency to get locked into the circumstances of life, and less engaged in the solution aspect of ourselves. It’s really critical for us to read for pleasure. One of the miracles of the modern era is that on my iPad, and consequently, because of the Cloud, on my phone, I carry a library of reading material. I mean, literally a library. It’s so available. We just have to shift our awareness a degree in that direction.”

Tom Bosley Scores a Home Run on Any Team

August 2, 2021August 2, 2021 / thewritelife61 / 2 Comments

Since January was all about female sitcom actresses, this month we give the men their fair due. We begin this series, “The Men of August,” with Tom Bosley. Anyone who was a Happy Days fan knows why Bosley is part of this line-up.

Image result for images of tom bosley — Photo: quotetab.com

Bosley was born in Chicago in 1927. His father was in real estate and his mother was a concert pianist. After graduating from high school, he served in the Navy during WWII. His father was in WWI and then served again in WWII, building army bases on the coast.

Following the war, he attended DePaul University in Chicago, declaring his major as Pre-Law. He had to take night classes because the day classes were full, and after getting tired of teachers not showing up, he switched to a radio school, hoping to be an announcer because he loved baseball, but acting eventually tugged at his heart.” In 1949 and 1950 he performed at the Woodstock Opera House in Woodstock, Illinois with Paul Newman. He was in the first live television show ever done in Chicago which was a production of Macbeth, about 1948 (on WBKB).

In the early fifties, he moved to New York and held a variety of jobs, including coat checker at Lindy’s restaurant, doorman at Tavern on the Green, and Wall Street bookkeeper. He continued to audition for his big break. During the fifties while he was looking for work, he shared rent with another Chicago actor trying to make it in the entertainment business: Harvey Korman.

With one foot in Broadway and one in television, Bosley took on a variety of roles in his early career. In 1955 he appeared in a television production of “Alice in Wonderland” as the Knave of Hearts. In 1959, he won a lot of acclaim as New York mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia in the Broadway musical “Fiorello!” and won a Tony award. Bosley would later return to Broadway in the 1990s taking on the roles of Maurice in “Beauty and the Beast” and as Cap’n Andy in “Show Boat.”

In the 1960s he explored motion pictures and landed his first role as a suitor of Natalie Wood in Love with the Proper Stranger.

Although he continued to appear in the big screen, the little screen took up most of his time in the sixties and early seventies. In 1962 he played opposite Tony Randall and Boris Karloff in “Arsenic & Old Lace.” His face became a familiar one showing up in Car 54, Where Are You?, Bonanza, Get Smart, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, The Mod Squad, The Streets of San Francisco, Bewitched, McMillan and Wife, and Marcus Welby, among others.

It was also during this decade he married Jean Eliot. They were married until she passed away in 1978.

In 1974 he accepted the role that would make him a household name. “Love and the Television Set” was one of the four skits appearing on an episode of Love American Style, and I actually remember watching it. Garry Marshall developed it as a pilot, but the network wasn’t interested in turning the pilot into a show when it first came up. However, once George Lucas released American Graffiti in 1973, also starring Ron Howard, ABC took another look at the period show. The first two seasons, the show focused more on Richie Cunningham as he interacted with his friends and family. Jerry Paris (Jerry Helper on The Dick Van Dyke Show) directed 237 of the episodes. Happy Days was described as relentlessly ordinary. The plots revolved around the same types of problems most teens experienced in the fifties: dating, wanting to be popular, peer pressure, and similar issues.

Bosley originally turned down the role but reconsidered after reading the script more thoroughly; he was drawn to a scene between Howard and Richie that moved him. Bosley said he also was looking for some security. His wife was sick at the time, and they thought she might have epilepsy, which was later determined to be a brain tumor; he wanted an easier schedule in order to care for his wife and help raise his daughter.

He captured the sometimes cranky, but lovable, Howard Cunningham perfectly. He might not agree with his children, but he was always there for them, and he was apparently always there for his castmates who all remembered him as a kind, fatherly figure.

For a decade, Bosley developed the role of Howard into a much-loved sitcom father. Bosley said none of the characters were well defined in the early scripts. The cast developed their characters as relationships developed. He described the actors as a baseball team that never made errors; they just clicked and had a wonderful rapport.

During the run of the show, his wife passed away from her tumor, and in 1980 he married actress Patricia Carr whom he stayed married to until his death.

When the show ended, Bosley was immediately offered another role. Although he appeared in a variety of shows in the early eighties, including five episodes of Love Boat, he moved from Milwaukee to Maine to help Jessica Fletcher solve mysteries on Murder, She Wrote. Bosley said the role of Jessica was written for Jean Stapleton, but then she did not want to do it so it was offered to Angela Lansbury. He and Angela had worked together in the past, so he did the pilot. It was supposed to be a one-time role, but they brought him back nineteen times without a contract. As Sheriff Amos Tupper, he spent four years trying to figure out why so many murders took place in peaceful Cabot Cove. He then retired from the police force and moved to live with his sister.

Image result for images of tom bosley father dowling — James Stephens, Tracy Nelson, Bosley, Mary Wickes Photo: pinterest.com

He actually did work with a sister in his next role on Father Dowling Mysteries. As Father Frank Dowling by day, he moonlighted, solving mysteries with his assistant Sister Stephanie Oskowski (played by Tracy Nelson, Rick Nelson’s daughter and granddaughter of Ozzie and Harriet).

Bosley described Father Dowling as being a lot like himself: calm, quiet, and caring. While murders occurred on the show, there was no violence. When they were casting the part for the housekeeper, they described the character as a Mary Wickes type, and Bosley told them to just get Mary Wickes, and he loved working with her. He enjoyed that show more than any of the other shows he worked on. The cast was totally caught off guard when it was cancelled. The network wanted to do a show with James Earl Jones and Richard Crenna. They gave Crenna’s agent a short-time period to agree to the show and he agreed before the limit ended, so the network was forced to delete a show from the current schedule to make room for this new show and they chose Father Dowling; the James Earl Jones show, Pros and Cons, also about several private detectives, and was dropped after 12 episodes.

When the show ended in 1991, his career definitely did not. When asked if he was going to retire, he replied, “Don’t be silly—actors spend half of their careers in retirement.” He continued appearing in a variety of shows (39 in all) until his death in 2010 from a staph infection.

There are several actors I get confused by at times because of their similarities. One is Ray Walston from My Favorite Martian with Jonathan Harris from Lost in Space. The other is Tom Bosley with David Doyle from Charlie’s Angels. At least I felt better about my mental error after doing research on Bosley. Apparently, David Doyle was named “Bosley” on the show because people confused the two actors so often.

I’m sure Tom Bosley would have made an excellent attorney or announcer, but I’m happy that he followed his acting passion, and I’m thankful for the five decades he was willing to entertain us with his special gift.