Early in his career as George Maharis' co-starring sidekick in television's most popular road show, "Route 66", Martin Milner, as was his faithful nightly wont, put in a long distance telephone call to his wife in California from the faraway scene of locations. This particular waystop was New Orleans, Louisiana.
"Gee, Judy, it's good to hear your voice," Marty said. "I miss you"
"I miss you too, darling. I'm glad you'll be coming home soon."
Marty thought he sensed a cryptic note of anxiety, but decided it was his loneliness playing tricks.
"How's the baby, honey?" he asked.
"She misses you the most, dear--even more than I do, I'm afraid," Judy said.
"What do you mean by that?"
So Judy told him what had happened that day. Little Amy had been playing up the street with some other children, and they had gotten to talking about their fathers. Amy, a bright girl and precocious talker for her one and a half years, had no stories to match those of her playmates. Martin did not come home every night and see his daughter as the other daddies in Sherman Oaks did. This time out, in the noble cause of the hit CBS show, he had been in New Orleans one month. Children, especially children so young, forget easily.
"Well, I don't have a father," Amy told her little friends.
Marty had been restive enough, as it was, about his enforced separations from Judy and the baby. That was all the additional jolt he needed.
Amy really hadn't figured out yet what life was all about," he explains, "and she couldn't understand why I wasn't around. I had been gone for a month, and she figured that I was gone for keeps."
From then on the Milners traveled en famille. Now, two more children and several years later, the Milners are the travelingest family in show business. There hasn't been a more rollicking or more primitive example of family life on the Amercian road since the days of the covered wagon.
Home, be it ever so humble and makeshift, is where the location is--because in spite of the sleek sports car he shares with George Maharis, his fellow Rover Boy of "Route 66", Martin Milner is at heart and by habit and old-fashioned lad with old-fashioned ideas about family togetherness.
He clings to those solid if fading values even though he criss-crosses the country in space age frenzy, filming his show against a dizzying panorama of the native scene that must have been in the mind of the sloganeer who invented that prideful battle cry, See America First.
In lieu of the canvas backed conveyances of prairie days, Martin carries his tribe with him, almost piggy pack, in a specially outfitted Green Briar sports wagon, a handsome and functional product of his sponsor that bears no resemblance to the way it rolled off the assembly line.
"I had a huge rack built on top to carry our luggage and our other belongings," Martin relates with a bland grin. "We carry a fantastic amount of gear--an ironing board, a coffee pot and an electric frying pan, everything that we need on the road. We have the normal things--an ice chest to keep the formula cold, water bottles and then we have table clothes, knives and forks and all that stuff in case we get to a place that doesn't provide us with that equipment. We're loaded to the gunwales."
Milner's home away from home--not to be confused with anything as elegant as a trailer--is air-conditioned and has puncture-proof tires, a precaution that Marty saw to with great care. He outfitted the car with a bottle warmer he could plug into the cigarette lighter. He built a crib for the youngest baby, seven months old Stuart, on the side of one of the cabins in the rear of the wagon. He also installed a portable bed "which we take out when we light somewhere."
Martin is so determined to achieve as much normalcy as possible under his abnormal working conditions that he even has the family housekeeper, Mrs. Mildred Miller, and the family dog, a shaggy-haired terrier named Cup Cake, come along for the ride--and the chores, in the case of Mrs. Miller.
Cup Cake was sent to a special school to master car behavior and to forestall car sickness. With Molly, who is one and a half, and baby Stuart, Judy and Mrs. Miller have seen almost every laundromat in the country. When the laundromats are closed, Mrs. Miller cheerfully washes the diapers. Judy has become an expert at packing--anticipating different seasons and climates in their travels, getting suitable clothes organized and labeled months in advance.
It is a tipoff to Martin Milner's personality that although he sometimes groans under the hardships of his frantically itinerant way of life, he is also mindful of the advantages.
"How else," he asks, friendly green eyes twinkling," would Judy and I get a chance to shop for antiques in so many different places? How else would we get a chance for so many family picnics? How else would we be able to drop in on so many relatives--like when we were in Chicago we stayed with Judy's folks, in Boston we saw her sister, and in Oregon we visited my aunt.
Nor does Marty worry about his gypsy existence having an adverse effect on his children's security. Although baby Stuart and Molly are still too young to be affected, Milner recognizes that this could be a problem for Amy, who is four and gregarious.
"It's true," he concedes, "that Amy has not had the chance to develop lasting friendships on the road, but that won't hurt her. She'll develop another happy faculty. She'll be able to make friends easily. If a child lives in one place her whole life she doesn't have the capacity to make friends easily with strangers."
This is not just a rationalization. It is a conviction based on Marty's remembrance of his rootless childhood--when his father, the late Sam Milner, a film distributor, packed the family bag and baggage every few years and moved to a different city.
"If you move around a lot, even as I did every few years," Marty reasons, "you just have to leave your old friends and make new friends, so you get in the habit. Gee, I can remember when I was a kid, moving. While the movers would be putting the stuff in the house I'd be wandering up the street saying, "My name is Martin Milner and we're moving in. I'd like to be your friend."
A pleased paternal smile ripples across Marty's good natured face as he reflects on the adaptability of his happy, lively youngsters.
"We enroll Amy in a nursery school wherever we go,"he says, "and she thinks nothing of it. She just grabs one of her favorite toys and her coat, runs out and gets in the bus, and feels right at home with all the strange kids. She's developed that capacity to adjust to new circumstances quickly."
"Molly, the middle child, she'll go to sleep anywhere. She'll sleep in a car. She'll sleep in a strange room. She'll sleep in a strange bed. Those things are good for children. This experience is an asset for them at this age."
Marty's pretty chestnut blonde, freckle-faced wife, Judy Jones Milner, feels exactly the same way about it. But then Judy approves of just about anything her husband thinks or wants to do. Marty, more appreciative than complacent, ascribes that idyllic state of affairs not to subservience but to a shared philosophy of life.
When they were introduced at a Hollywood dinner party given by Larry Lear, a mutual friend from Chicago, Marty was sufficiently taken with Judy to wangle her phone number. A week later he asked for a date.
"I don't know how I proposed", Marty says, "but it seemed to me that after three or four weeks we just knew we were going to get married. I knew that I was in love with Judy, and I didn't figure I could get along very well without her."
From the very beginning Martin divined in Judy qualities which have held her, and their marriage, in good stead as they go vagabonding about the country while he plays Tod Stiles, good Samaritan of "Route 66."
"She's kind of an old-fashioned girl, I guess," Martin muses, a world of approval in that appraisal. "You know, she wasn't too interested in a lot of frills, a lot of fancy things. Her tastes were a lot like mine, simple. And she was interested in real things.
"I think a specific illustration is the fact that she's traveling with me on the road with the children, getting along in all sorts of circumstances. She'd be a great deal more comfortable at home where she has everything she needs. We move every couple of weeks and we move from funny little houses, apartments, motels, hotels--whatever we can find that's best for our purposes. None of them have the comforts and conveniences of home, but she seems to get along with what she has."
Judy's turning out to be such a trouper has been a source of satisfaction, but not surprise. Marty had her figured out for just that kind of girl during the nine months he courted the vivacious one-time actress and singer.
"You know about a person when you’re spending a lot of time with her," Martin nods agreeably. "You know--if she'd rather see a good movie and spend a quiet evening than go out drinking or something like that. Compared with the average Hollywood girl, Judy was quite a contrast, quite a breath of fresh air. I should say so."
"She comes from the Midwest, from a family that has a great deal of respect for her father," Marty observes. "The respect for her father is from the children and the mother. When he came home from work, somebody was watching out the window. When he came in, they started putting dinner on the table. It was that kind of family."
It was not the kind of family Milner himself had known as the only child of itinerant film distributor Sam Milner and Jerry Martin, once a dancer on the Paramount Theatre circuit. But, without in any way amounting to a disavowal of his own parents, Judy's was the kind of family Martin had come to idealize when he thought of marriage.
"Judy's used to the kind of home where the man had a great deal to say, due to the way the home and the marriage was run," remarks the soft-spoken, down-to-earth six-foot-one redhead who recalls that it was his mother, not his father, who was the disciplinarian during his childhood.
To Martin Milner, his wife's uncomplaining abdication of power is not an act of helpless dependency but a demonstration of trust and love--a quaint concept that has precious few disciples in American households these days.
"Judy's not a modern woman in that she expects to make lot of the decisions herself," he says. "She leaves a great many things to me. She has a great deal to say about our personal entertainment and as far as the children are concerned, but with the rest of our lives, as far as business is concerned, where we live, she leaves that pretty much up to me."
Significantly, Marty does not smirk-or even say nicely--that this ipso facto makes him boss of the clan Milner, which manifestly it does. He puts it in an entirely different, and rather surprising, light.
"I guess," he grins, "maybe I'm the last of the breed of man that doesn't mind taking responsibilities. You know, in many cases woman have taken over a lot of the male responsibilities, but I think the males surrendered it willingly, to get out of the bother of it.
"You know--'Don't bother me with the household problems. You pay the bills. Don't bother me with the children.' I never felt that way. I want to have my say-so."
If there is a competitive bone in Judy's body, there apparently is nothing about Marty that is apt to make it rankle. Judy had what is usually--and in her case accurately--described as a promising career when she willingly surrendered her sovereignty and her professional future to marry Marty.
At the time Judy had become the sweetheart of Los Angeles as the telephone girl for a controversial TV personality named Tom Duggan. Her uncontrived innocence and her naive charm in the face of Duggan's gruff taunts came as a pleasant bracer to nocturnal audiences who didn't think they turned out that brand of girl anymore.
Marty, not being a heavy-handed sort, told Judy that it was perfectly all right with him if she felt like taking some of the film offers dangled at her and continuing with her career.
"Oh, I don't want to work," Judy quickly replied. "When I get married I'm through working."
"She hasn't worked since," Marty affirms, "and apparently she doesn't miss it. She was working at being an actress or performer or a singer the way another girl would work at being a secretary--until she got married. She has no desire for a career of her own. Her only interest is my career.
"I consider myself very lucky. It's very pleasant to have someone who is more interested in you than she is in herself. And I really get the feeling that Judy is more interested in me than in herself."
Nor is it lost on Milner that such selflessness is all the more unique in an inherently competitive place like Hollywood, where pretty girls are constantly converging, as Judy herself did, from all points of the compass to scramble for a career.
"It's very difficult for those girls to give up everything after they've fought for 6 or 7 or 10 years to make a career," Marty says understandingly. "They develop a kind of drive that you just can't dismiss. It's still with them after they're married. It's hard for them to work for a career and suddenly give it up."
"Judy was not of the usual Hollywood mold, however, and she had no trouble breaking the emotional momentum of which Marty speaks. The crucial point, as Marty already has indicated, was her accommodation to the erratic life she knew she would have to lead if Marty accepted his co-starring role in "Route 66."
"When I was first offered the show," Martin reveals, "I was offered a couple of others at the same time, but I felt this one had the best chance to be successful, and would do the most for me if it were. So Judy and I discussed it. I knew exactly what the show would entail and I went into with open eyes. And Judy said, 'Well, do whatever you think would be best for you, the only provision being that if you're going to travel a lot I want to come along.'
"As for the discomfitures of our existence, Judy puts it very aptly, I think. Whenever I say to her, 'I'm going to so and so. Do you want to come or do you want to sit this one out?' she says, 'Oh, I'll come.' Her feeling is that she would prefer to be at home, but not without me. She would prefer to come along on the road, get along as best she can with the children rather than stay home alone."Marty has a reputation both in the business and among friends for being singularly sensible, and he admits without an an-shucks that this unspectacular impression of him is warranted.
"I think I’m a pretty sensible type fellow, not too frivolous," he nods thoughtfully. I like to do ordinary things. We don't live an exciting life by Hollywood standards or by New York standards. But it's very pleasant. We enjoy it."
The most cursory consideration of the way Martin functions would seem to bear out that he is sensible--in his approach to acting, to marriage, to money, to children. His feelings about his children are more illustrative. He balks at pushing them into acting or permitting them to be drafted just because he was addicted from the age of ten in grade school dramatics and little theatre in Seattle. Despite the fact that he turned out just fine, Marty is convinced that childhood stardom more often than not proves an emotional crippler.
"My oldest daughter, Amy, is kind of a precocious child," he acknowledges. "She likes to sing and dance and show off, and I guess word got around. Universal-International wanted me to bring her out to see about a picture they were doing. I just turned them down. I'm not even going to let her start.
"On 'Route 66' a couple of times they wanted her to work as an extra, and I wouldn't let her. I know they might want her to work at 10 or 11 in the morning, and they might not be through with her by 1:30. You can't say, 'Well, gee, she's got to take a nap. You'll have to reshoot this tomorrow.' But I'm not going to let her miss a nap because she's working at age four. It's not a natural life for a child."
Marty's own career got going on a professional level when his family moved from Seattle to Los Angeles, and he got an important part in "Life With Father" with William Powell and Irene Dunne. Right after he finished the picture he was felled by an attack of polio. He reacted to this heartbreaking setback and its consequent blow to his acting ambition by saying to his mother through the early fever of his illness, "Don't worry, mom. Everything will be all right. I'll just be a director instead of an actor."
However, in three months he recovered, went back to high school and resumed his acting. There was a two-year respite of Army service followed by a short-lived enrollment at the University of Southern California. At the tail end of his first semester at USC, Marty landed a part in "Halls of Montezuma" with John Wayne. The picture carried into the summer. He went back to school, but not for long, in the fall. He got another picture, "Operation Pacific," at Warners--and promptly quit school to go for broke as an actor.
He went--but not broke.
His clean-cut, All-American, boy-next-door type was very much in demand for the cycle of post-war battle pictures. And in a sense those movies have remained a living monument to his early career.
"Our sound man, Paul Franz, got a letter from his wife on the road one day," Marty smiles. "She said she finally saw a war picture on television that I wasn't in."
Martin made out in mufti, too. He is remembered not only for epics like "The Sands of Iwo Jima," but for a succession of other important pictures like "Sweet Smell of Success," "Marjorie Morningstar", "The Long Gray Line", and "Pete Kelley's (sic) Blues." He racked up some 200 TV appearances before achieving full-fledged stardom in "Route 66."
His only regret is that his father, to whom he was very close, did not live to see him make good. His father had not imposed his will on Marty, but he had made no secret of his acute disappointment when his son quit college.
"I miss my father even more today than when he first died," Marty says. "There are so many changes in my life now, so many things have happened that I wish he could be here to appreciate. I'm sorry he can't be here to enjoy some of the fruits, to see that at least temporarily things have worked out all right.
"Also, I'm sorry that he can't be here to enjoy the children, because he always wanted a little girl, and he and my mother couldn't have any more children. Now I have two little girls, and it would be great for him to see them."
Martin Milner--just an ordinary guy. Only ordinary guys like him are not so ordinary any more.