Parting Shot Should Never Be in Rough

When his great good friend, Hal Lewis, the Honolulu disc jockey known as J. Akuhead Pupuli, died, Danny Arnold was in charge of scattering the announcer’s ashes over Lewis’ beloved Waialae golf course.

A companion got cold feet. “People may feel funny about this,” he wavered. “Maybe, if we just sprinkled them in the bushes alongside the holes.”

Arnold was outraged. “Aku was never in the rough on this hole in his life!” he roared. “I’m not going to put him there now!”

Golfers all over the world can understand how Arnold felt. No hacker should have to spend eternity in the trees. He has spent enough time there already.

When Der Bingle, Bing Crosby, died on a fairway in Spain some years ago, every golfer in the world felt a sense of the fitness of it. “Where else would Bing die?” they asked. “He was never off a fairway in his life.”

The rest of us would probably die in a sand trap. Or behind a tree. And lying 4. But Bing probably got to heaven in his cleats and when St. Peter asked what happened, answered: “I used the wrong club. I should have been on. I hit it good.”

A golfer’s idea of Paradise is a little par-3 you can reach with a wedge and read the break. Golfers belong to a mystic fraternity where, although they don’t have these secret handshakes or coded passwords or hats with tassels on them, they have this happy bond that makes all of them brothers, like survivors of the same shipwreck.

It was what made Danny Arnold and Aku Lewis pals. Although they were both New York kids who grew up in the same era, learned to play the violin and became actors, it was golf that brought them together.

Akuhead was a major celebrity in the islands at the time, but most Americans didn’t know Danny Arnold from Benedict.

Even today, Danny Arnold is a candidate for one of those “Do you know me?” commercials.

Nobody would have any trouble identifying him if you said he was the creator, producer, writer and sometime director of the “Barney Miller” TV show, one of the most popular in history. It ran for eight years and won Emmy Awards, Peabody Awards, Golden Globes and the affection of long-suffering inhabitants of police precincts everywhere.

“I took ‘Detective Story’ and took the guns out of it,” Danny Arnold explains. And put some smiles in. The show was so universally admired that, once when he had a show about the problems of evacuating the city in the event of nuclear attack, the Pentagon phoned the next day to tell him wistfully: “We don’t know how to get eight million people out of New York, either.”

Arnold was one of golf’s fellow sufferers when he met Aku in Honolulu 20 years ago. An ex-Marine turned Hollywood sound effects, lighting and editing technician, Arnold chafed. He didn’t want to sit around, cutting remakes of “Camille.”

“I had this urge to make people laugh,” he says. Since that was hard to do aiming a key light from a catwalk, he became a stand-up comic, touring the roadhouses and resorts with an assortment of routines.

He made a curious discovery: His material was funnier than he was.

That led to his penning a series of scripts for Jerry Lewis’ home movies that were funnier than the theatrical films, and he wound up doing Martin-and-Lewis movies like “The Caddy.”

He became a comedy doctor for TV shows like Tennessee Ernie Ford’s and did other movies and shows like the James Thurber series, “My World and Welcome to It,” which was critically acclaimed but slotted opposite “Gunsmoke.”

A man given to Quixotic gestures on a grand scale--Arnold once chartered a Mediterranean yacht for a six-figure fee and took a whole boatload of pals and their wives on a cruise of the Greek isles--Arnold wanted to do something more for Aku’s memory than scatter his ashes along the greens of Waialae.

He decided on a golf tournament to raise money for cancer research. The island of Maui, a favorite haunt of Aku’s, was chosen.

The celebrities were no problem. Burt Lancaster, Barbara Eden and Hal Linden agreed to be hosts. The players were the Who’s Who of Hollywood and TV. Some of the colleagues of Aku in the islands were harder to convince. They were still trying to consign Aku to the rough.

The First Annual Hal (Aku) Lewis Celebrity Tournament was held at Wailea on Maui last May and was a huge artistic success. Financially, it was more complicated. With 50% of the gross proceeds guaranteed to cancer, most of the $360,000 costs had to come out of Arnold’s pocket.

So, a lot of people figured that would be the last Annual Hal (Aku) Lewis Celebrity Tournament.

Not Arnold. “I’m expanding it!” he says. “It’s going to be the biggest celebrity tournament in America. They’ll be begging to get in it!”

And what if it costs him another $300,000? Arnold shrugs. “So, I’ll go to the Greek islands in a rowboat.”

There’s also the notion that if you pass away and you’re behind a tree, at least it’s a mango tree.