Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

Apparently — I didn’t know him then — there was about a ten year transition period, when Robinson still found the occasional role (ultimately in television commercials) as the same old stuffy retainer, but in the increasingly long intervals of being, in actors’ euphemism, “at liberty,” he paid his rent by taking frequent work as an actual butler or valet for some of the stars he’d appeared with in movies. First he and William Powell, say (it wasn’t William Powell, I don’t think, but people like that), would appear in some film as master and man, and then for the next six months or year they’d recreate their roles in real life, which must have been strange for both of them.

By the end of this transitional decade, acting work had dried up entirely for Robinson, and he had become totally a servant, but with none of the subservience the word suggests. He brought his characterization along from the world of celluloid, and still plays the same old cantankerous pest as ever. Six years ago he was passed on to me by his then employer, a man I’d met as a guest star on PACKARD, and Robinson has been staring down his long nose at me ever since.

And here, on DSI’s Lear, was a William Robinson fan. “I know you!” said the man, a portly sixtyish fellow named Kendall, who had the right look to have played those Robinson parts himself, though a bit more warmheartedly, less accerbically. “You were in the movies!”

“Several,” Robinson murmured. A good servant — that is, a good portrayer of servants — he always manages to simulate a subtle and long-suffering unease when required to sit with the gentry and be served by someone else; in this case, the very pretty stewardess.

“You were great !” Kendall told him. Our plush chairs swiveled, so we could turn toward each other for conversation, and now Kendall demanded one of the other execs switch seats so he could swivel closer to Robinson and tell him all about it. “You were with Joel McCrea,” Kendall announced, tapping Robinson on the knee.

“Occasionally,” Robinson admitted demurely.

Kendall mentioned a title. Robinson nodded, beginning to smile. Kendall quoted a Robinson line from that picture, and Robinson did his best, the old fraud, to look modest. Kendall mentioned other titles, other stars, quoted other lines, recounted bits of business with telephones and breakfast trays, and Robinson did everything but roll over on his back to have his belly scratched. While the rest of us conducted a grown-up discussion about worldwide computer sales, Kendall and Robinson ransacked every nook and cranny of Robinson’s long and middling career. I sensed with foreboding — the kind of foreboding Robinson himself used to manifest when the various Bertie Woosters playing opposite him would describe their latest stratagem — that sooner or later Kendall would, in all innocence, ask Robinson why he wasn’t acting any more, and I knew what then came next.

And he did, and it did, and Robinson raised his voice to be absolutely certain I heard his version of events; just in case I wanted to argue with him. Which I did not.

Here’s the story. In LA I have a good friend named Bly Quinn, who writes for television sitcoms, and last spring she had a pilot being shot for a new series called Akers’ Acres . An irascible old servant named Leemy was to be a regular in the series, and Bly asked Robinson to play the part. After some hesitation, he said yes.

There are two versions of what happened next. Bly’s is that Robinson tried to lord it over everybody in sight; that he rewrote all his own lines and most of everybody else’s; that he argued with the director; that his time away from the profession had left him rigid and authoritarian and utterly incapable of following the simplest instructions. Robinson’s version, delivered in the minutest detail to the enthralled Kendall, was that he was a professional with many years of experience to offer in this particular story milieu, and that his co-workers’ refusal to be guided by his hardwon expertise had convinced him the show would be a disaster. In any event, he quit.

My only quibble, which I was much too cautious to mention, was with Robinson’s assumption that, because Bly’s my girlfriend, I was on her side. In fact, I’ve grown very used to having him around, prickly old fart though he may be, and if he’d stayed with the series he would have left my employ, so I’m just as happy things didn’t work out, and I don’t care who was right or wrong.

Anyway, the one-man William Robinson Fan Club took us most of the way through the second half of the journey, after our refueling stop at Grand Island, Nebraska, a dot on the map that isn’t grand, is a thousand miles from a body of water large enough to have islands, but is certainly in Nebraska, possibly the flattest place on Earth. We had twenty minutes to stand there and look around and know exactly how an ant feels on a kitchen table, and then we were airborne again, and the Robinson retrospective took us all the way to New York.

Where Kendall insisted on driving us home. Usually I have a car pick me up, but since we were coming in non-scheduled and couldn’t be sure of our arrival time I’d intended to call for the car from Butler Aviation, where we landed at Kennedy. But no; Kendall wouldn’t hear of it. His own car and driver were there, Kendall had no pressing engagements, and this was probably his last opportunity to repay all the hours of pleasure Robinson had afforded him over the years. So we accepted the offer, and that’s how it happened we had two outside witnesses — Kendall and his driver — when we got to 10th Street.

We’d landed at just after seven in the evening, having left LA at nine this morning West Coast time, so traffic to Manhattan wasn’t too bad. We made good time, and pulled up in front of my place at quarter to eight. Thanks and appreciation were expressed on all sides, the driver and Robinson unloaded our luggage — not much of it; we keep duplicates of most things in our two houses — and Kendall and I shook hands, he belatedly and laughingly assuring me he’d always enjoyed my acting work as well; meaning Packard.

We were all four of us on the sidewalk in front of my house, then, when this big fellow came forward out of the semi-dark. I’m six foot six myself, a onetime basketball player, and this guy was at least the same height. I didn’t notice much else about him, build or hair coloring or any of that, but I did see that his face was twisted and distorted by some strong emotion. He came striding forward out of nowhere, as though he’d been waiting years for this moment, and reached out to push his right hand against the upper left side of my chest, just below the shoulder, and shove . “You!” he said; he snarled, I mean. He shoved me again. “You!”

What was this? I pushed his hand away, while Robinson and Kendall and the driver stared in astonishment. “Watch it!” I said.

He glared at me. “You fucking think you’re some-thing, don’t you?”

My doppelganger.

At that moment, I had no idea who he was or why he thought he had a complaint. I only knew he was being physically violent, he was grimacing with rage or some other desperate emotion, he was large and strong and probably capable of doing some damage if that’s what he had in mind, and I’d never seen him before in my life.

I used to be a cop a long time ago, for a year and a half on the force out in Mineola, Long Island, and an MP during my army tour in Germany before that. In both jobs, the unarmed neutralizing of the potentially violent is one of the things they teach you before they give you the gun and the shield. So when the hand I’d pushed away came reaching again, I reacted: My own left hand went out, closed around his right thumb, held the thumb folded in on itself, cupped between my bent fingers and the heel of my hand. It’s known as the come-along hold, because it doesn’t take much of a squeeze to give that bent thumb excruciating pain and make the subject of the exercise more than willing to come along.