FIXATIONS : To Morrow, a Star : Seal Beach Fan Makes Sure That the ‘Combat’ Actor Has a Place in the Heavens

Vic Morrow may not have a star on Hollywood Boulevard yet, but there is one roughly 600 trillion miles away in the Cupid constellation that bears the late actor’s name.

That’s the work of Diane Elliott of Seal Beach, who last week drove through that rain to hand-deliver a press release she’d carefully crafted on a library typewriter.

Titled “A Tribute to Vic,” it announced that the actor, “famous for his role as Sgt. Chip Saunders on the hit TV series ‘Combat’ ” now had a star named “Morrow” registered forever in the Geneva, Switzerland, vaults of the International Star Registry, the respected proprietors of which likely sent out for a round of schnapps and strudel with the $40 fee Elliott sent them.

There was nothing in the press release about Elliott’s role in securing Morrow’s new place in the heavens. She wasn’t looking for any recognition for herself, just some for Morrow on his birthday, which was Valentine’s Day.

Along with having several store-bought “Combat” episodes on video, Elliot tapes the show nightly off KDOC, and one black and white installment was screening as she answered the door last Wednesday.

“I know his every movement,” Elliott said, motioning toward Sgt. Saunders on the TV. “I think by watching a person you can tell a lot about them. Vic was a very complex man--Ooh, there’s a really cute scene coming up where he cusses out his troops.”

Above her TV is a vase of old flowers, ones she had left at Morrow’s grave site at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City. She picks up the withered ones when she leaves new bunches there every Sunday. One, a pink carnation, was residing over her heart in the left pocket of her blouse. Morrow died July 23, 1982, in the “Twilight Zone--The Movie” helicopter disaster.

In the house she and her husband, Alan, share, Elliott has other Morrow reminders: lobby cards from “The Blackboard Jungle”; a framed photo on the night stand by the bed of a grizzled Morrow in his battle regalia, with a cigarette dangling from those cruel lips. She has 17 Polaroids taken at various times of Morrow’s grave. “I took them because it was so nice to come home and imagine myself back there at times,” she explained.

An abundantly cheerful, outgoing person--the kind who serves guests herb tea with apricot brandy as a matter of course--Elliott may be caught up with this actor she never met, but she’s far from the manic edge of, say, Kathy Bates in “Misery.”

But one has to wonder: With all the names Hollywood’s pantheon has to offer--like Doug McClure, Vince Edwards, Marlon Brando and Sebastian Cabot--why Vic Morrow ?

Elliott, now 44, used to watch “Combat” as a young teen, she said, but only became interested in Morrow last summer, when she was laid up with a broken wrist and began watching reruns of the show.

“As I started to watch I got more and more interested, so I got this book about how he died (“Special Effects” by Ron LaBrecque) from the library. It hurt me and made me angry, how he’d been treated in that film. I got this drive to know more about him.

“I went to Hillside Memorial, and I felt very drawn to him there. And I felt a terrible loneliness: When I got to the grave, it looked like no one had been there in a long time.

“I started bringing flowers and always laid them on the ground beside his grave. I started noticing that at other people’s graves the flowers would be standing up. Then one day I came and they had this little cup with water in it set up there, to put the flowers in to stand upright. And that blew me away, I’m not kidding. It absolutely made my day: Somebody had noticed that somebody cared about Vic.”

Elliot often brings daisies.

“There was a ‘Combat’ episode called ‘The Little Carousel’ that touched my heart so much. In it Saunders was very hurt and downtrodden by war and he fell asleep and this young French girl was very concerned about him. So he wakes up to her there with a little fire there and coffee brewing . . . it’s like a dream sequence. Later he puts her on the little carousel in this village and pushes it, and picks up a daisy and puts it in his teeth--this wasn’t a normal ‘Combat’--and sticks it out there for her to pluck as she goes around. It was such a heartwarming episode.”

She searched everywhere for a biography on Morrow and was appalled to find there wasn’t one. She’s determined to write one herself now and is also starting a campaign to get him a sidewalk star on Hollywood Boulevard.

“I went down to Hollywood and said, ‘Where’s Vic’s star?’ and they said, ‘Um, he doesn’t have one.’ What do they mean he doesn’t have one? Of all the people that should, he should. He was a chief of many hats. He had a long career. But when I talk to people about Vic now all I ever hear is, ‘Oh, wasn’t that the guy that got decapitated?’ ”

Small world that it is, Morrow used to live up the block from my sister’s best friend when we were kids living in the Hollywood Hills. Morrow had a little MG or Triumph that, as he’d forget to set the brakes, would sometimes go rolling down the hill into this family’s car, suggesting that Vic just wasn’t very lucky around machines.

“Combat” had just gone on the air, so for these kids to be able to to tell classmates “Hey, Vic Morrow hit our car again!” imbued them with the kind of status that “I lunched with De Niro” might curry in the adult Hollywood today.

Unfortunately, outside of the playground, Morrow never got much respect. Like many actors associated with a long-running TV role (“Combat” aired from 1962 to 1967), he found it hard to get accepted as anything else. He wound up in made-for-TV movies and playing supporting roles in such films as “Bad News Bears” and “1990: The Bronx Warriors.”

“It’s a shame,” Elliott said. “He was really an in-depth man, really took his work seriously.” She has movie stills of Vic looking quite serious holding a switchblade, looking thoughtful with a machine gun, and then downright grim with a spewing flamethrower in his hands.

His skills did go far beyond that, Elliot claims, citing a body of unheralded film roles, stage work, writing and directing that Morrow did. He also gets points in the “real man” category for having done his own cabinetry work in his Studio City home, something Elliot learned when she and her husband went out there one day to take pictures of his former dwelling. She was delighted when the present owner consented to actually show them around the property.

Husband Alan, Elliott said, is also caught up in her Morrow interest, usually accompanying her to Morrow’s grave. Alan’s a computer circuit technician and musician, while she works now as a “domestic engineer” cleaning houses. For most of her working life, though, she was an exotic dancer.

“That was an OK life, something I fell into because I had a daughter when I was 18, and I had to support her. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do in life, but it was a good living. Life isn’t always as you dream it to be. Sometimes it turns out different,” she said.

Prior to her Vic fixation she had a very normal life, she said.

“It’s normal now, too. I don’t totally devote myself to this. I have my family . . . my husband, my daughter, my six cats. (Surprisingly, the cats don’t have names like Kirby, Littlejohn or Caje).

“I’m doing all this for Vic because I think he was a very misunderstood man. It’s like the song (Elliott began to sing), ‘Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood, dum dum dum do do do . . . ‘ Vic got the rap of being the mad dog, the juvenile delinquent. People should have stuck with the guy. I’m not some kind of freak; I’m just somebody who cares.”

Way out in space, 100 light years away, it will be about another 70 years before the VHF waves from the original 1962 broadcast of “Combat” reach the Cupid constellation. But maybe someday in the unforeseeable future, Morrownian ships will land on this planet, full of sullen, unshaven khaki-clad strangers, looking for C rations, looking for cigs, looking for Elliott’s biography of their ancient namesake.