It was hard to believe this was Pete Malloy, the perennial cop-behind-the wheel of Adam-12, now entering its sixth season on NBC. Martin Milner, as Malloy, is a law-and-order Peter Pan who never seems to age beyond 26 or so. But on his home grounds--his 24-acre avocado ranch near Fallbrook, Cal., 130 miles southeast of Hollywood--the real Marty Milner stands up. Or sits down. Because, as usual, he can't get out from behind the wheel (he also drove a Corvette for four years in Route 66). This time, it's a jeep he's driving--through row after row of the 2500 venerable-looking trees from which hang the lush purplish green avocados he grows--for considerable profit.
The real Marty Milner is venerable-looking, too; and away from the makeup men and the cameras, he doesn't seem to care. His 40 years show; a small potbelly pushes out against his yellow shirt and jeans. There are vague pouches under the green eyes. Milner's freckles and red hair now make him look more like a rejuvenated Arthur Godfrey than Huckleberry Finn with a badge.
He is as serious about the avocados as El Exigente is about coffee. As he talks with his Mexican-American ranch foreman, the black-and-white Universal TV police-patrol car in which he makes $10,000-or-so a week is simply a toy, pushed aside for the more serious business at hand.
"The Chicago market is opening up to us," Milner says to the foreman. "We might be ready to break the Florida monopoly on avocados in the Midwest." Then, scanning the thousands of blossoms festooning the gnarled tropical trees: "If the neighbor's bees don't fly over here to pollinate the blossoms soon, we'll have to hire a beekeeper to set up three or four hives on the ranch. Not only do they charge $150 for that, they keep all the damn honey."
In avocado-growing, as in television, Milner is a tight man with a buck. He does not maintain a pad in Hollywood. During the three days a week that Adam-12 is filmed, he sleeps in his dressing room on the Universal lot. When he does a charity benefit, he figures out how many professional fund-raisers are living off the charity. "If I find out there are 30 guys making a nice salary out of it," he says, "I charge them a full personal-appearance fee. If it's for a pure charity, like the hospital ship Esperanca down on the Amazon, where American doctors and dentists work for nothing, I help them raise money by working for nothing, too."
Milner is as full of angles as a Swedish-modern furniture store. One day recently, as he rode with young Kent McCord in pursuit of some car thieves in an episode of Adam-12, he was quiet and thoughtful--not taxed much by the usual there-they-are-let's-go-get-'em quality of the dialogue in the script. Suddenly Milner said, "I just got it figured out."
"Just got what figured out?" asked the puzzled McCord?
The Marines. If I make a personal appearance for a Marine Corps dance at Camp Pendleton, I can ask them for a pass to cross the base in my car. Then I can cut 15 miles out of the trip from here to the ranch in Fallbrook."
When he does a talk show like Dina Shore's, Milner always insists on plugging his avocados. Then he phones all the avocado wholesalers in a crucial market, say Chicago, to let them know the day the show will air there, so that--hopefully--they will buy Fallbrook area avocados rather than Florida avocados.
On the other hand, when he is asked to do guest-shots on shows such as the now-cancelled Laugh-In or the still-viable Mike Douglas Show, he demands that McCord appear with him, thus cutting his fee in half. He likes McCord, unlike his previous bellicose relationship with George Maharis in Route 66. "When Kent and I started in Adam-12," Milner says, "he seemed stuffy, and all his conversation was about his days at Mount San Antonio Junior College. I said to myself, 'Oh brother, what am I going to talk to this kid about?' Then Universal sent us on a promotion tour and I had to sit next to the kid on the plane. He began to tell me very funny stories about auto racing. He's an Indianapolis Speedway freak. I not only found out he had a sense of humor under that uptight exterior, but he converted me into a racing buff as well."
Milner also has a loyally reverential attitude toward his boss, Jack Webb, who owns Adam-12>, along with Emergency!, Chase and Hec Ramsey. Says Milner: "Even if Jack asked me for half of my avocados, I'd give them to him. I owe everything to him."
Milner's debt to Webb goes back nearly 25 years. Milner (born in Detroit, the son of a construction worker who graduated to magazine ad salesman and eventually into movie distributing) started his show business career as if he were going to be the next Van Johnson, whom he resembles. At the age of 14 Marty played the redheaded John Day in the 1947 film "Life with Father," starring William Powell and Irene Dunne.
Then he was bedded with polio, from which he recovered completely with the help of the Sister Kenny method. But the Milner career had lost its impetus. When he worked at all, he was reduced to playing, simultaneously, the hobble-dehoy boyfriend of both Stuart Erwin's daughter in The Trouble with Father and William Bendix's daughter in The Life of Riley--in those unregulated, ill-paying days of live TV series.
In 1951, when he was only 18 (and close to starvation), Milner got a part in the film "The Halls of Montezuma." Jack Webb acted in the picture, along with Richard Widmark, Richard Boone, Jack Palance and Robert Wagner. Milner did not particularly distinguish himself in competition with such a brilliant cast, but off stage he managed to win $150 from Webb at gin rummy.
"The end of the picture came," Milner told me, "and Jack didn't pay up. I could have used that hundred-and-a-half but my father said to forget it--that Jack would never settle the debt. But a couple of months later I got a phone call. It was Jack. He said, 'Come down to NBC Radio and pick up your check.' So I took the bus and went down to the studio where he was then doing 'Dragnet' on Radio."
Webb gave young Milner the check and said, "Hey did you ever do radio?" Milner told him he hadn't, but Webb said, "What difference does it make? We've got a lot of parts for you here."
Continues Milner: "So I went to work in the 'Dragnet' radio series. Because I couldn't be seen, I played old guys and middle-aged guys. One whole summer I was even Jack's police partner in the series. Then I was drafted into the Army during the Korean War and got stationed at Fort Ord in northern California.
"Jack really saved my sanity then. The Army drove me crazy and Jack knew it. Every weekend he'd have me come down to work on Dragnet, which by now was on television as well as radio. On Saturday, because I looked so young, I was the house male juvenile delinquent for the TV series. Carolyn Jones was the house female juvenile delinquent. On Sundays, I played old guys again in the radio version. Not only did the work keep me from flipping out, but I needed the money. The Army was paying me a fast $104 a month."
Webb continued to help Milner get parts after the Army, including three which pushed him along as a medium-magnitude star. One was in the John Ford film "The Long Gray Line." The others were "Sweet Smell of Success" and "Marjorie Morningstar'." These, in turn, led to his starring role with George Maharis in TV's Route 66 in 1960. Maharis left in a huff in 1963 and the show folded after the following season. A couple of movies later, Jack Webb was waiting for Milner again. "Kid," he said, "your gonna be a cop again in a little something I and a feller name of Bob Cinader dreamed up. We're gonna call it Adam-12."
Today, nearly six seasons later, Milner is still plugging away behind the wheel of that black-and-white Adam-12 patrol car. The show's executive producer, Herman Saunders (who has know Webb even longer, having served with him in the Army Air Corps in World War II) gives Milner much of the credit for the unexpected longevity of the series.
"We keep getting good scripts, of course," Saunders said, "but, will all his griping about how tired and lazy he is, Marty's the cement that holds it all together. He's got an even temperament; he thinks; like Bill Conrad, he just can't misread a line. Also, surprisingly, he's got a very wry comedic sense and will break everyone up with a Don Rickles-type insult line just when tedium and frayed nerves are setting in. Most important, he and Kent really like each other. That's a necessary ingredient in all successful shows. It comes through on the screen and it makes the audience like them. I think that's the main reason we got as high as No. 2 in the Nielson ratings and why this crazy little show might go on as long as Dragnet did."
Kent McCord concurs. He says, "There isn't a day I don't learn something from Marty and he doesn't make me laugh. Like when I came in and told him we got an award as the best half-hour dramatic show in TV and he said, 'Congratulations. That's like winning at solitaire. We're the only half-hour dramatic show on TV, nut.' This summer, we get a two-week vacation and we're taking it together with our families. A sailing trip. On other shows, guys can't wait to put 3000 miles between them during hiatus."
Milner absorbs all this praise with grumbling good humor. "The reason I like the show," he told me, "is because it's ideal for a guy who doesn't want to work very hard. Three days a week and I'm home at the ranch in Fallbrook with my avocados. The only thing better would be if I got promoted to sergeant and they put another guy in the patrol car with McCord. Then it would only be one day's work a week and I'd be at home at the ranch in Fallbrook with my avocados."
When you see Milner's home, you can understand why he wants to spend so much time there. It's a rarity for southern California--an authentic reproduction of a New England colonial--with high beamed ceilings, fieldstone fireplaces, antique hutches, wide-plank pegged floors, framed Gilbert Stuart-type "ancestor" paintings on the walls and copper pots hanging all over the vast kitchen. It looks like 18th-centuy Williamsburg, but Milner says, "We built it only three years ago. It's been aged by four kids, three dogs and three cats running through it all the time. We also have 2 horses, but they're not allowed in the house."
Recently I had lunch with Milner in the kitchen of this extraordinary abode. Lunch was avocado pizzas, prepared by Milner's slim, pretty wife Judy (a band singer when he married her 16 years ago). Throughout lunch, the house was being aged by four superactive Milner children--Amy, 14; Molly, 12; Stuart, 11, and Andrew, 9. Milner kept making wily deals with local avocado packers on the phone. There was only one phone call relating to show business. It was a request for him to star as a guest-fisherman on a TV show called Championship Fishing. He was to go after catfish and trout on Table Rock Lake in southwest Missouri. Milner was just as wily as he was in his dealings with the avocado packers. "Only if my wife and four kids can go along," he said. "We can use a free vacation." And the Milners got it.