You know how hard it is to back into a parking place when the light turns green and the cars behind start honking? Then you won't envy the traffic hazards that Martin Milner faces in Adam-12. All he has to do is wheel around in dime-sized spaces, with color cameras rolling at hundreds of dollars per minute, and bring his police car into exactly pinpointed positions--while delivering lines of dialogue and managing to look casually heroic at the same time.
There is, of course, an easier way to film such stuff: the way it's usually done, with "process" shots--actors performing against filmed backgrounds. But Adam-12, dramatizing the duty tours of two uniformed Los Angeles cops, carried Jack Webb's Mark VII trade-mark. Webb is the executive producer and he personally directed the first episode. From the outset it was clear that the new show would reflect the same "dum-de-dum-dum" realism that Webb has always aimed for in Dragnet. Among other things, this meant that the actor starred (sic) as Officer Pete Malloy would do his own driving, in a car with built-in sound recording and in intricate sync with traveling cameras.
Of all the available leading men in Hollywood, as it happened, Marty Milner was uniquely qualified. Normally one of the more modest actors you're likely to come across, Milner himself will tell you, "I'm probably the best in the business at hitting camera marks while driving. With all my experience, I can pull right into a close-up."
His experience goes back to four long seasons behind the wheel on the Route 66 series, which was shot on widely scattered locations around the U.S., likewise without the benefit of process photography.
Valuable as his driving skill has proved in terms of time and money saved during production, it was a negligible factor in Milner's selection for Adam-12. One thing everybody at Mark VII, Universal Television and NBC-TV agreed on in advance was that Adam-12, in order to realize its best possible chance for a successful rating, would need an unusually warm bond of audience identification with the occupants of its black-and-white patrol car. In reverse of the customary order, the junior co-star's role was filled first. Kent McCord already was under contract to Universal and had played a rookie cop in a Dragnet 1968 segment. Both Webb and producer Robert A. Cinader, his Adam-12 co-creator thought that the tall, 26-year-old McCord had just the sort of ingenuous enthusiasm required for Officer Jim Reed. Putting the right man in the driver's seat as the relatively hard-bitten, veteran Officer Malloy was more difficult.
"The guy had to be physically right, and he had to have the range and facility as an actor to project the totally credible illusion of a cop, and do it in an attractive way," Cinader summarizes. "As soon as Milner's name came up, everybody said that's the guy. Along with his experience and maturity, there's this wholesome and still youthful quality about him."
Freckled, sandy-red-haired Marty Milner has been carrying the "boy next door" image for 22 years--since he made his debut before Hollywood cameras at age 14 as the Day family's second son in the movie version of "Life with Father," starring Irene Dunne and William Powell. Later the image was doubly enhanced on television when he played similar "daughter's boy friend" parts on Stu Erwin's The Trouble with Father and Bill Bendix's The Life of Riley program. The shows overlapped and Milner, still as boyishly trim at 6-feet-1 and 175 pounds as he was then, recalls, "Finally it came to the point where I married the daughter on the Erwin show at the same time I was going with Riley's daughter."
With time out for two years of state-side army duty, Milner had important parts in such feature films as "Sweet Smell of Success" and "Marjorie Morningstar" to his credit and already was described as "a veteran TV and movie actor" when the heralded big break of his career came along in 1960. That was Route 66, in which he was teamed with George Maharis. Milner was the clean-cut kid who owned and drove the sporty car. He had top billing in the cast, and the show was an instant hit. Then something unforeseen happened. Maharis, saturnine and a bit raffish as he slouched in the passenger seat, won greater press and public attention. The mail piled up--1800 fan letters month for Milner, 5000 for Maharis.
"It wasn't that George tried to steal the spotlight," Milner remembers with philosophic good humor. "He was just a more colorful guy than I. We had almost nothing in common, but actually we got along pretty well. His basic devotion was to his career. I had other drives and other interests."
In their travels through New England, for example, while bachelor Maharis socialized and made provocative comments on whatever popped into his or his interviewer's head, Milner quietly went shopping for antiques to take home to his wife and growing family.
Early in Route 66's third season, Maharis withdrew from the series with hot words for the producer and all others concerned, including "Mister" Milner. The latter maintained his cool. The two have met only once since, a chance encounter that Milner describes as "cordial, but without any real warmth." The last Milner heard of him, Maharis was making movies in Spain: "I think George has done all right. He hasn't become another Paul Newman--but then neither have I."
Milner drove Route 66 along during the remainder of its third year, then acquired Glenn Corbett (who remains a close personal friend) as his touring companion for a fourth and last season. After the show ended, Screen Gems, its producer, bought all his residual rights. With the payments spread out over several years for tax purposes, this gave Milner financial security to compensate for the top-flight stardom his four years of solid trouping might have brought him but didn't.
Since then he has guest-starred occasionally in other TV shows and appeared in several feature films, including the recent "Sullivan's Empire" and "Valley of the Dolls." "I've had all the work I wanted, though not everything had the quality I might have wished," he admits. In partnership with director-writer Allen H. Miner, he has formed an independent production company that has two movie properties almost ready to roll.
His "other interests" now center around a walnut-shaded Mexican mock-adobe house on an unpretentious dead-end street in Van Nuys, Cal. Two cars stand in the driveway. One is a six-door airport bus that Mrs. Milner, former TV singer and actress Judy Jones, uses to transport their four children (two girls and two boys with ages ranging from 10 to 4) and neighbor kids to and from school. The other, Milner's own, is a rare 1953 Bentley Sedan de Ville that once belonged to Frank Lloyd Wright, now lovingly restored and driven with pride.
In a corner of the furnace room is a small woodworking shop where he painstakingly repairs pieces of "primitive" American furniture for family use. There he recently finished several months of patient labor on a de-luxe, miniature dollhouse, infinitely detailed and electrically wired inside and out, as a gift for his wife. "She says I've got a completely one-track mind, and I guess she's right," he said . "While I was working on it, I was called about doing a Tarzan guest spot. I didn't want to go to Acapulco and the part didn't sound very exciting, but the real reason I turned it down was that I couldn't leave the dollhouse right then."
He brings the same kind of single-minded drive to his work as an actor. Four days of every current week he's totally immersed in Adam-12, even giving up his lunch hours to watch daily screenings of the previous day's shooting, constantly criticizing and trying to improve his performance. His junior partner, Kent McCord, expresses both awe and admiration of such professionalism: "I've got so much to learn, but I'm very lucky. I couldn't have been paired with a better man than Marty, and on top of it all he's such a helluva nice guy."
Win or lose in the 1968-69 ratings race, that's already more kind, appreciative words than affable Marty Milner ever heard from the right-hand seat in more than two years along Route 66--and exactly the impression that Webb and Cinader and company fervently hope the Saturday night Adam-12 audience will get of him, too.