Political Maverick Hopes to Take Act to Wider Audience

Jack Kelly, co-star of the old “Maverick” TV show and voice of beer, bank and cereal commercials, has burned through a pack of Marlboros this autumn morning as he blusters on about the governor, local politicians and other assorted pains in his, er, behind.

A wicked Santa Ana wind sends sand dancing below the Huntington Beach Pier as Kelly, his graying brown hair left wind-skewed, smacks the restaurant table for emphasis and unleashes an articulate discourse on taxes and moron bureaucrats too wimpy to raise them, using colorful profanity in non sequiturs mixed with Western metaphors. Many of the folks he calls swear words he also speaks of fondly; he has a sense of humor and reserves a few cuss words for himself.

“I’m a nonconformist, flamboyant” expletive, he says, “but hey, this isn’t a solemn court with . . . red ermine collars and powdered wigs. It’s only politics!”

And vintage Kelly. The man whom legendary Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper described in 1960 as “an excellent camera subject” has spent the last 8 years performing civic duties as a Huntington Beach city councilman and mayor--cutting ribbons, heaving ceremonial shovels of dirt and mostly loving every minute of it.

Along the way he has become the ally of business and builders, the bane of slow-growthers and one of the top vote-getters in city history. This doesn’t mean he hasn’t raised a little hell--not to mention a local stink, when the state fined him $4,000 this year for failing to disclose ownership on some controversial property. While some citizens object to his rough edges--he has used the word caca at public meetings--still others find his persona engaging.

And after a presidential election that turned into the battle of the dullards, Kelly is anything but boring.

He retires from city government today, but not from politics. He says he will run for the Board of Supervisors in 1990--probably against many of the people he curses and, ironically, gave money to in their campaigns for other offices. Some political observers consider his chance slim at unseating incumbent 2nd District Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder, who has indicated that she will seek re-election.

Kelly, 61, doesn’t fret. He usually says what’s on his mind, whether it be talking about allowing high-rises on the beach or the need for a decent minimum wage for laborers or the kissing technique of a particular “broad” at a social gathering. In the latter case, he asked only that the woman’s name be withheld.

In one of the most conservative enclaves of the country, Kelly is “so pro-business it’s funny,” but he’s also a “social liberal” who fervently cites the need to tax gasoline for road money. He’s also a 4-decade Democrat who only recently reregistered as a Republican.

Kelly, the cowboy councilman in golf sweater and gold medallion, shoves up his sleeves and unleashes a devil-may-care laugh.

“Ah, (expletive) it. I’m too old to worry about rejection and losing. I mean, so what? I guess if you really researched it with a jewel loupe,” he says of his life, “I did it my way.”

You may have recognized the whiskey voice on your TV, the classy-sounding ads for Great Western and American Savings & Loan, several banks and Quaker Oats Squares. But Jack Kelly hasn’t starred in a major TV show since John F. Kennedy was president.

Born John A. Kelly Jr. in Astoria, Queens, he was the product of an entertainment family. His father, Kelly senior, was a theater ticket broker who ventured into real estate when he later moved the family to Hollywood. His mother, the former Ann Walsh, was a model and stage actress.

Two weeks out of the hospital the infant Kelly had his first modeling job, posing for a soap ad. He continued to work as a child actor doing stage and radio drama.

In 1938 the Kellys moved to Southern California. Jack enrolled at St. John’s Military Academy and University High School, both of Los Angeles. After he graduated from high school in 1944, Kelly attended UCLA, then was drafted by the Army and assigned to its Air Corps. Basic training at Camp Roberts was followed by a stint as a weather observer in Alaska. He was honorably discharged in December, 1946.

The next year, Kelly decided to try his hand at TV and drove with a “bunch of pals” to New York. His first job was live TV, “Philco Playhouse,” with a vaudeville format and Big Band music. There was an easel with sheets of paper announcing the billing, and Kelly’s job was to pull off the sheets.

“My hand,” he roars, “got a big, big debut!”

Film With Randolph Scott

The “big break” came in 1950, after his return to Hollywood. That year Kelly made his film debut in “Fighting Man of the Plains” with Western star Randolph Scott. After a starring role in the “King’s Row” TV series, Kelly’s time had arrived.

“Maverick” hit the air Sunday nights in September, 1957, a rather standard Western series about a frontier card shark. James Garner starred alone as lady’s man Bret Maverick.

But a bored writer on the show began interjecting dry humor in the scripts. Two months after its debut, the show had a new co-star, Bart Maverick, a straighter brother to play off the wisecracking Bret. The combination met with wild success.

“In the days when dozens of staunch TV heroes were chasing lawbreakers in every corner of the old West, this program was indeed a maverick--a Western with a sense of humor,” according to “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows.” The Maverick brothers were antiheros who sneaked out of gunfights and sometimes cheated at poker.

The show made bold fun of other TV shows like “Gunsmoke,” “Dragnet” and “Bonanza.” Like audiences of the popular “Saturday Night Live” TV skits that ridicule network news and pop stars, “Maverick” fans loved the Western parody.

But Garner walked off the show over a contract dispute in 1960, and the Maverick brothers who were substituted, Roger Moore and Robert Colbert, failed to capture the audience. By its final season in 1962, Jack Kelly was appearing as a solo Maverick brother, along with reruns. The series ended that summer.

So, to a large degree, did Kelly’s career. Though he continued acting, Kelly himself says the show was the zenith of his show business experience and the role of which he is most proud. He is rather unsentimental about that today, and refreshingly honest about his talents and weaknesses.

He was never destined to be Laurence Olivier; light comedy as a second-banana suited him nicely, he says.

“Let’s face it, the character was not like playing ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ ” he says with amusement. “I’m a realist. Life goes on.”

Many years passed, as did varied business ventures, several of them successful. Property management was one enterprise; real estate was another.

Kelly “owns all of Orange County,” former co-star Garner told a magazine several years ago. By the time he was elected to the Huntington Beach City Council in 1980, Kelly and his wife had socked most of their earnings into real estate, investments that then required three people to manage.

“That’s the only thing I know a little bit about,” Kelly said of real estate.

His wife, Jo, handles most of the family business and investments. “My wife is an exceptional manager of that stuff, and she’s a broker,” Kelly said. “So I don’t have quite that much to do with the real estate once we buy it. I shag deals.”

Jo Kelly says she runs the household from daily upkeep to finances while her husband “is playing golf and playing mayor.”

Kelly, in turn, does most of the family cooking, and he is said to be exceptional in the kitchen. He has a free-form style in which he throws incongruous ingredients together and cooks up magic. He used to write a cooking column for a local weekly newspaper.

Wife Is Equally Bold

If Kelly is outrageous, his wife is no wilting lily either. Jo Kelly is shrewd, personable, much more guarded initially than her husband but almost as bold later in a conversation.

Both say they have had their stormy times during the marriage. “Jack is 12 years old,” Jo Kelly says. “Everybody takes care of him. In my next life I want to come back as Jack Kelly. . . . The best thing that ever happened to Jack is me, and if he was real honest, he’d admit it.”

Central to their life is daughter Nicole, a senior at Huntington Beach High School and a drama student. The relationship of the three stands out to people--close friends or casual acquaintances.

Nicole is the only actor in the family these days, though Kelly still performs. At most he spends 40 hours a year doing TV and radio voices.

Depending on the format and the areas of broadcast, some ad campaigns carry the potential to earn Kelly upward of $100,000 for 25 or 30 minutes’ work.

“I do great dialect, great Italian, I do a Jew better than a Jew,” he says.

His own voice, he believes, is of the rich quality of Max Von Sydow, particularly the homey commercial for Quaker Oats.

Beyond the work schedule and money, Kelly says, there is a purity to the work not found in other forms of performing: “It’s a niche where age and beauty have no importance.”

Like your uncle who still wears Brylcreem, Kelly has a personal style that often seems frozen in his acting prime--that era of blond furniture and brown liquor, when women were flattered to be called dishes, dames and skirts. His conversations ring of a Frankie-Dino rat-packer (though Kelly quit drinking a few years ago), with a Marlboro twist.

City Council decisions require “biting the bullet” and “shooting from the hip,” he says. Government leaders need to be the “lead riders.” He greets his waiter or caddy with, “Howya doin’, handsome!”, women with “Hiya, baby doll!”

Not all women like that. One woman who does business with the city said Kelly once approached her as a client stood beside her and remarked about the size of her breasts.

Supervisor Wieder says: “I have a good working relationship with Jack, yes. The kernel of Jack’s behavior is sexist. . . . If he ever called me Wieder-babe, God, I’d punch him! . . . He has chutzpah, unadulterated gall. He’s flagrant, and people are so shocked that he gets away with it. He’s a good ol’ boy, and he keeps getting the vote.”

But plenty of women find his candor appealing. Westminster City Councilwoman Joy L. Neugebauer, who has served alongside Kelly on the board of directors for the four-city Public Cable Television Authority that serves her city, Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley and Stanton, says: “I find him knowledgeable, well prepared and intelligent. In fact, he’s charming. In conducting meetings he gives credence to what I say, whether he agrees or not.”

Kelly finds rather confounding the suggestion that some women find such expressions as baby doll and sweetie sexist. He looks almost bewildered when asked about it, then he rubs his chin and pauses to think.

“I have no recollection of rejection of it (referring to a woman as sweetie ), but then maybe they just don’t tell me,” he said.

“I would say there’s some merit if someone were to think it was condescending, though it’s not meant to be. I don’t get up in the morning thinking about who I can hurt.”

From the day he took office in 1980, says Richard Barnard, assistant to the Huntington Beach city administrator, Kelly stressed that political infighting bored him; he wanted to see action on street sweeping and trash collection and city services so citizens could see what they were getting out of their government.

In the two elections that he won, Kelly relied on his maverick persona in appealing to voters. But much of the money to get the votes came from Huntington Beach oil, real estate and other business interests.

Time and again, Kelly is the lone vote for or against an issue. “I’m Mr. 6-1,” he says of his voting record. “But I can’t worry about that. I figure every time I push the button (to vote), half the people are going to love me and half are going to hate my (expletive) guts.”

Some political observers question whether that maverick attitude will fly as a county supervisor, where Kelly would have to work with the city councils of Seal Beach, Cypress, La Palma, Stanton, Huntington Beach, Westminster and Garden Grove, plus federal and state agencies.

“I think the power of incumbency would be significant,” one political insider said about the 1990 supervisors race. “It’s unclear what support he would get from his maverick bit. Another question is whether his temperament--he is excitable--is what the voters want.”

Other candidates for the job may include Huntington Beach council member Tom Mays and former council members Don MacAllister and Ruth Bailey.

Kelly tangled earlier this year with the state Fair Political Practices Commission, which fined him $4,000 for failing to disclose his purchase and resale of an apartment building.

“I did it, I’m sorry, it was a mistake, and I paid dearly for it,” Kelly said. He attributed the omission to a bookkeeping error.

Like most other local politicians, Kelly views transportation as the single greatest dilemma facing the county. But he says there will ultimately be a showdown between the north county and the south.

“South county is basically owned by five landowners,” he says. “and all they’ve got is I-5 to get down there. When that clogs, they’re screwed. So they are getting these toll roads.”

Kelly thinks that the older, more populated half of the county should flex its political muscle to snag federal and state transportation money.

Barnard, assistant to the city administrator, said Kelly may have a reputation for favoring development, but when he and Kelly traveled a few years ago to Sacramento to convey Huntington Beach’s concerns about a bill that would have had tremendous impact on the city’s power over the future of the Bolsa Chica wetlands, Kelly represented the City Council’s position, not his own.

“He put his personal feelings aside,” Bernard says.

Even if Kelly loses in his bid for supervisor, he says he has “many irons on the fire.” He abandoned an idea of operating three restaurants downtown, not because of any perceived conflict of interest but because he decided that the cost to provide parking was outrageous.

He has also abandoned an idea to buy vacant land in the city for a quasi-mall for new automobiles and woo from Beach Boulevard as many car dealerships as possible.

Now he’s got an idea to develop a large, classy banquet-capacity place with landscaping and settings where people can be married.

Golfing will also keep him pretty busy. He played regularly in the old days with Bob Hope, Garner and other stars; now his weekly putting pals are more often friends from business and politics. And that suits him fine.

At a farewell bash Thursday night attended by about 200 people, Kelly waxed sentimental and said thanks for the memories. “Listen,” he said Friday. “I made out like a bandit. I got a golf bag. . . . This is one gift I don’t have to report.”