Yes, There Is Life After Acting

Some years ago, my then-husband, Irv, and I were at a party when he ran into a man who, unbeknownst to him, had been a high-school classmate. The two talked amiably for some time until Irv asked him what he did. The man was visibly displeased.

Irv couldn’t understand why the guy was miffed.

“He didn’t know who I was, why should I know who he was?” wondered Irv, who holds a university chair in cognitive neuroscience.

“You weren’t in “The Godfather,’ ” I explained.

The point is that actors frequently take themselves and their craft very seriously. So does the culture at large. But the fact is that most acting (like most journalism) isn’t brain surgery.

All this came to mind recently when I interviewed James McEachin. McEachin sent me a copy of his new book, “The Heroin Factor,” warning me that it starts out with a murder in Encino. After assuring him that I could deal with this fictional blotch on the Valley’s reputation, I looked at the book and realized that I had seen the author, whose name I hadn’t recognized, in a zillion TV shows and movies.

McEachin is proof that there is life after acting. In the 1960s, McEachin’s was one of the few black faces on such vintage shows as “Dragnet,” “Adam 12,” “It Takes a Thief” and “Hawaii Five-0.”

In the 1970s, he made television history when he became the first, and, as he points out, one of the last, African Americans to star in a dramatic series--NBC’s short-lived “Tenafly.”

His film credits include “Play Misty for Me” and “Fuzz,” based on Ed McBain’s popular police procedurals. He also appeared in some of the best TV series of all time, from “The Rockford Files” and “Columbo” to “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere.” And he has recently returned to acting, “kicking and screaming,” accepting a small recurring role in Steven Bochco’s new series, “City of Angels.”

But, for all of McEachin’s success as an actor, he will tell you that writing is his real passion. If he had known how much pleasure it would bring him, he says, “I would have started writing much, much earlier instead of parading across some TV or movie screen.”

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McEachin makes it clear that he doesn’t dislike acting, “but it’s not curing cancer.” Even when he had his own series, he says, “I didn’t look at it as the end all and be all.”

Certainly, McEachin never planned to become an actor. A firefighter and police officer in New Jersey, he was working out here in the music business when he was approached by a stranger on Melrose Avenue.

“You an actor?” the man asked.

“No,” McEachin answered.

“Want to be?”

“No.”

Nonetheless, he was soon co-starring in his first movie. McEachin has no illusions about the quality of his debut film, titled “I Crossed the Color Line.”

“In the pantheon of bad movies, this would be the standard bearer,” he recalls with a shudder.

His career got a major boost from Jack Webb, whose “Dragnet” was television’s first realistic police show and who once cranked out TV series faster than David Kelley.

“Working with Jack was pretty close to working with Martin Bormann. It was that rough,” McEachin recalls. But once Webb warmed to you, you were all but guaranteed work as part of what was almost a repertory company.

Eventually, McEachin was put under contract by Universal, even though, he says modestly, “I certainly didn’t look like Poitier or people like that, and my acting skills were not as honed as some.”

He singles out as his best film experience working with Clint Eastwood in that actor’s 1971 directorial debut, “Play Misty for Me.” The entire cast made do with a single dressing room, McEachin says, recalling with a fond chuckle, “We were young and we all had hair.”

Like virtually everyone else in Hollywood, McEachin eventually tried his hand at writing screenplays. That was how both “The Heroin Factor” and his second novel, “Farewell to the Mockingbirds,” started out.

McEachin’s first novel, “Tell Me a Tale,” was called “stunning” and “Faulkneresque” by Publishers Weekly. But it is his much lauded second novel that he speaks most fondly of, despite the terrible frustrations that led to its publication in book form in 1997.

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The book began with a true story that McEachin first came across in the 1960s and couldn’t get out of his head. In 1917, 645 soldiers of the 24th U.S. Infantry Regiment (Colored) were posted to racially charged Houston. A clash between the troops and the Houston police left 19 whites dead and resulted in the largest trial in American history. McEachin was so moved by the story of the black soldiers, called “mockingbirds” by the prosecution, that he approached Steve Bochco, then at Universal, about turning the story into a film.

“You’ve got to write it,” Bochco told him. “Simply tell the story.”

“That started me on a long trek,” McEachin says.

McEachin believes Hollywood racism kept the story off the screen. One major Hollywood figure was interested in the project but wanted a rewrite that McEachin could not accept.

“Then the story would be this white defense attorney rushing to the rescue and saving these little colored boys,” he remembers angrily.

A couple of decades later, Hollywood is still overwhelmingly white, he points out.

“Minorities are not in decision-making positions, even now. They can’t greenlight a project.”

Denied the opportunity to make “my ‘Schindler’s List,’ ” as he calls the project, he turned the story into a book.

“I got so emotional I could only write a line at a time,” says McEachin, who describes writing as “both the agony and the ecstasy.”

His latest book is a dark tale of heroin addiction focused on a black police lieutenant who never fails to call his racist colleagues and others on their bigotry. When I observe that McEachin’s protagonist is an angry guy, the author assures me that he was even more so in earlier drafts of the novel.

“I have to be aware that there are certain things that the white reader doesn’t want to hear,” McEachin says candidly.

Like his previous book, “The Heroin Factor” was self-published.

“I don’t think I would go any other route,” says McEachin, who was dismayed by mainstream publishing, including its creative accounting.

“If you think the movie industry is bad, the publishing industry is a holy terror!”

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Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.