The Untouchable

I hadn’t seen my father, John Kellogg, since I was 2.

He was an actor. My entire relationship with him flourished within the soft glow of a 19-inch black-and-white Zenith.

I never took my eyes off the Zenith. Not even during the commercials. Because sometimes there would be a double bill, as he perched on the front fender of a car with a big smile on his face, holding up a can of motor oil: the All-American dad with his son in the background hosing down their green lawn. The commercial was such a contrast to his usual characters. As Lucky Quinn on “The Untouchables,” with submachine gun in hand, and sporting a slouched fedora and pinstripe suit, he knocked off rival mobsters and members of Eliot Ness’ Prohibition Bureau. Then there was my father again, hugging a can of Pennzoil.

Lucky was finally foiled by a mob of unruly U.S. Treasury agents who mercilessly chased him through the South Side of Chicago, until from sheer exhaustion he collapsed and stumbled head first in front of an oncoming commuter train. Of the more than 50 television programs and 60 films that John Kellogg appeared in during his 50-year career, it is his episodes of “The Untouchables” that are the most memorable and will stick with me always.

When he wasn’t playing a mobster, he would often show up on “Bonanza” or “Gunsmoke” (or another of the TV westerns so popular in the ‘60s) as an all-around errant gunslinger or outlaw raising havoc on the Ponderosa or among the innocent townsfolk of Dodge City. I watched him with profound curiosity, studying the versatile actor who was my father. With each performance I’d come away feeling that I had gained deeper insight into who my father really was. He was, I decided, a bad guy suitable for all occasions.

John Kellogg met my mother, Helen, at the Actor’s Lab in Hollywood, behind Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. He was quite charming, and a real class cut-up from what I understand. He was reasonably handsome in a craggy sort of way, tall, slender, with light-brown curly hair and blue eyes, and he had already landed a big part in “Twelve O’Clock High.” He also found his way into pivotal bad-guy roles in numerous film-noir classics of the ‘40s and ‘50s: “The Gangster,” “Edge of the City,” “Port of New York.” It seemed to me that in most of his appearances he was either beating someone up or at least slapping them around. In “Kansas Raiders” he wore a brightly colored bandana around his neck while defiantly leading a horde of angry cowboys down a dusty trail. Then there was “Bomba and the Elephant Stampede,” in which he played a poacher who would do just about anything to get his hands on some ivory--my father in a safari jacket, aiming a rifle, sneaking up on those poor elephants. He appeared as Morse in “Gorilla at Large,” a thriller about “the world’s largest gorilla.” And he got a chance to show off his comedic side as Cherry-Nose Gray in “Hold That Baby!”

My parents’ marriage was short-lived, about two years. According to my mother’s complaint for divorce, it was fraught with verbal and physical abuse, alcoholism, child neglect and more or less total irresponsibility on my father’s part. In my estimation, his side of the story was rather flimsy. Although he did admit to fathering me, he stated in court documents that none of the accusations against him really mattered much. He insisted that his divorce from his second wife was never finalized, so therefore the marriage to my mother was a sham. (Of course he had gotten a divorce. In the words of my mother: “What a liar!”)

The acrimony was granted a merciful death by annulment. My mother waived alimony while my father was handed two court orders: relinquish all rights to his prized 1948 MG and pay $25 a week in child support. He disregarded his $25-a-week obligation (modified to $20 a week, which he also ignored) and failed to hand over the MG, and his idea of “the right of reasonable visitation to said child” was to not show up at all. My father abandoned me, a betrayal not so plain and simple, and was a deadbeat in the truest sense. My mother tried repeatedly to get him back into court, but the process became too expensive and wearing for her. He was exceptionally adept at ducking and dodging the California legal system, making it so difficult for my mother that, after years of trying, she gave up.

One of the unfortunate court dates was printed up in the newspaper. The article displayed a comical shot of my father pulling out the lining of his empty pockets.

One evening while I was watching my father and his fellow marauders stampede their way into a quiet western town, he telephoned. My mother answered, and every muscle in her neck bulged out. “It’s your father,” she said. “He wants to speak to you.” I put the phone to my ear and heard his voice for the first time in more than 10 years.

“Hello, Cheryl! How’s your health?” He explained that he had been living in New York, but in a short while he and his wife Barbara and their daughter Sharon Lee and dog Pepe were moving out to Malibu and would like to see me.

I didn’t know what to expect, except that I was going to meet someone I’d watched on television for most of my life. It was more reassuring for me to think of it as coming face to face with a TV character, rather than the uncertainty of encountering my father, a total stranger.

My mother and I shared a one-bedroom apartment on Carlton Way in Hollywood. It was in a tacky early-’60s building painted pink and sprinkled with glittering God-knows-what. Apartment buildings in those days just had to have names--ours was called The Starburst. And indeed, it did have a star, a broken tan one, full of holes and splattered with stuff that looked like tar.

The first thing I noticed about my father when I opened the door was his dirty tennis shoes, a Wrigley wrapper stuck to one heel. In truth, there wasn’t much resemblance between him and Lucky Quinn. I hardly recognized him without his slouched fedora and pinstripe suit. He wore a navy blue sweatshirt over faded jeans. Barbara, in her late 20s, I guess, and noticeably younger than my father, was conservatively dressed in black slacks, a gray turtleneck and a pair of sandals. Her mousy brown hair was pulled tightly back and piled into a swooping swirl on top of her head.

My father reached out to shake my hand. His tight grip and overly toothy smile put me immediately on edge. I found it difficult to look him in the eye. He plucked the chewing gum wrapper from the bottom of his sneaker, wadded it up and tossed it before stepping inside.

I recall several minutes of awkward shuffling and throat clearing. I sat on the little stool that normally faced the Zenith. My mother chose the chair with the stained throw pillow, while my father and Barbara scrambled for the couch. Mom cut through the ice with a good old-fashioned question-and-answer session: “Isn’t Cheryl a lovely girl?”

“Why, yes!” my father immediately resounded. Followed by an “I should say so!” from Barbara.

I said something about how much I enjoyed watching him on TV all the time, especially as Lucky Quinn, and how sorry I was to see Lucky’s demise by way of commuter train.

“‘The Untouchables’ won’t be coming back, either,” he said. “It’s rerun time. All those Italians and their whining. When Capone and Luciano started going by names like Fred Jones and Bill Smith . . . well, let’s just say that the audience didn’t buy it. It was goddamned laughable.”

The only really tense moments of the visit were when mom called my father “Giles.” That was his real name: Giles Vernon Kellogg Jr. My mother had told me that he detested his real name. He changed it early on in his career after someone said he bore a striking resemblance to John Garfield. She described how he meticulously groomed and patterned himself as another John Garfield and would become inconsolably morose if studio executives or his fellow actors failed to see the uncanny similarity.

No matter how much I wanted to believe that I was finally going to have a father (and one that came prepackaged with a beach house, dog and half-sister), the dread was undeniable. He had deserted me once. I knew he would do it again.

His rented Malibu house was situated directly on the sand and held up by pilings. It was really more of a cottage than a house, a very small one-bedroom with a compact living room and a tiny bonus room that he and Barbara had converted into Sharon Lee’s bedroom. My accommodation was the left window seat over one of the pilings with an unobstructed ocean view.

The drive out was fairly calm, though there had been a bit of confusion beforehand as to where my father might pick me up. He made it quite clear that he didn’t want to go too far out of his way. He said he would settle for Greenblatt’s delicatessen, across the street from Schwab’s. Mom bickered with him on the phone (I heard her call him Giles several times) until he finally relented and agreed to make the trip to The Starburst. He said to allow him about an hour.

Five hours later he arrived, offering nothing in the way of an apology. He said only something about having to stop off at Sears, which was several miles farther east than The Starburst. After he took the time to poke fun at my mother’s turquoise eye shadow--”What the hell is that crap on your eyes!”--we were off for a fun-filled weekend at the beach.

Up until now, I’d never actually known anybody who lived right on the beach. All one had to do to reach the sand was simply walk down a short flight of stairs attached to the side of the cottage. There were lots of well-to-do families, very handsome people and some famous faces on this stretch of Pacific Coast Highway. But it was the face of Henry Jones that got to me. He was a character actor like my father, but one whom I regarded as more skilled. It quite literally gave me a jolt to see “Leroy.” Leroy, just lazing by himself beachside, looking scrawny in baggy swim trunks. The poor sap handyman Leroy from the movie “The Bad Seed,” whose muffled cries of horror and anguish as he burned to his death on a bed of excelsior were forever chilling. I wanted to join him on the beach that day and chat awhile--to ask Henry Jones his views on cruelty, madness and dying a slow death--but I didn’t. I just stared at him, and then walked on.

Such an abundance and overflow of smiles, get-togethers and frolicking about. Volleyballs and beach balls aloft like balloons. Beach families I wanted to be part of, entertaining beach friends I wished I knew. So many gleeful shouts and hoots. Echoed sounds of privileged people at play--enjoying their day under the sun, over savory grills, on blankets and umbrella-festooned chairs, cool drinks in hand. They had found their very own secluded paradise, each lavishly lulled and cradled and sung to by the Pacific Ocean and the salty-warm Malibu air, all of which was in limited supply and strictly reserved for the favored few. To an outsider, appearances were everything, and it seemed to me that these joyful beachgoers lived lives of unstoppable happiness--and for a solitary moment, I happened upon and was given temporary access to their flawless world. But only as an observer.

It was difficult to engage my father in conversation. His comments were few. He took several minutes, however, to show me how to avoid burning my feet on the sand. He demonstrated how simple it was to bury one’s feet. I watched as with each giant step he dug his big, bony, tanned feet deep into the cool sand beneath the scorching surface.

Observing my father swim in the ocean was an event. He swam with such authority, making deep dents in the water with fisted blows, like Lucky Quinn giving the Pacific Ocean a knuckle sandwich. The occasional feisty swell meant nothing to him. If one got in his way he’d just give it a sharp slap in the kisser, as he did to Robert Mitchum in “Out of the Past,” and move on to the next. He marched out of the water with an air of what could only be described as pure bravado, then, without saying a word, briskly dried himself off with an oversized towel and bounded up the stairs to the house, skipping steps as he went. In the doorway, I saw him whisper something to Barbara, who then proceeded down the stairs. She informed me that my father intended to spend the rest of the afternoon watching a golf tournament on TV.

That night we sat on wooden barstools at a narrow kitchen counter and ate a dinner of linguine and clam sauce with garlic overkill. My father talked about “The Untouchables” and how he had been the only sane actor in a cast of neurotics. But that was all behind him now. He had just landed the role of a lunatic uncle named Jack Chandler on the popular nighttime soap opera “Peyton Place.”

After dinner, he gave one long, satisfied stretch. “Cheryl, I have something for you,” he said. He got up, walked over to an unsteady bookcase and fumbled with several dusty paperbacks. He hid the mystery item behind his back and proudly announced: “I was in a golf tournament two weeks ago, and though I didn’t win, I did earn Honorable Mention. The prize was this, and I’d like you to have it.” I looked down into the palm of his garlicky hand to see a blue striped envelope with the word COMPLIMENTARY printed in bold black letters across the front. “Two free tickets to a Dodgers game! You can take Helen or somebody.”

A powerful sadness caused me to loosen my grip. The prize fell to the floor. Pepe ran over and sniffed it, then walked away.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” my father screamed, sounding very much like he had in “Kansas Raiders.”

“Where have you been all this time?” I asked.

I wanted him to assure me that despite all his failures as a father so far, he would come up with at least one great excuse. And I would forgive him his betrayal.

He stared at me with an expression that I hadn’t seen since he knocked Kirk Douglas senseless in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.”

“I’m giving you free tickets to a Dodgers game, aren’t I? There are a lot of people who’d like to have these tickets!”

“But you never loved me. Did you?”

I waited for his reply. None came. Instead, he did something Lucky Quinn would never have done. He looked down at his feet and rubbed one dirty tennis shoe on top of the other.