Camaraderie

The cast and crew of Combat! were a congenial bunch. Though not all the actors were close friends who socialized after hours together, they all were friendly and have developed lifelong relationships. That feeling of camaraderie was extended to the guest stars.

At the 1996 Combat! reunion, the actors reminisced about the family feeling on the set. Jack Hogan said, "There was something macho about the show, everyone would love to do it."

Pierre Jalbert recalls, "One of our great pleasures was, on Friday night, we'd say to the Assistant Director, 'Who's coming next week?' meaning, who's the guest star. We were installed, so we didn't have any anxiety. Our game was to make the guest star as comfortable as we could. Invite him in our trailer and put him on — put 'em in a barrel. As Peabody would say, we'd throw a bone on the table to see if they would go with it."

"We'd all have our director's chair," said Jack Hogan. "We'd sit around between shots and role play. One of us would be the psychiatrist and we'd have different roles and discuss world situations, but you couldn't keep a straight face."

"That's how we'd entertain ourselves, while the guests would entertain us," said Pierre. "You must understand we respected these guys, these guys had reputations, they were stars."

"And we were the show to be on," added Rick Jason. "And they were happy to be there."

Part of what made the set so pleasant was a fabulous caterer. "Millie catered the food," says Tom Lowell. "I started the show at 165 pounds. I weighed 187 when I left the show two years later." Conlan gained about thirty pounds. Millie was wife to a grip and started cooking for Gene Autrey's films. Rick met her at ZIV as she catered out of the back of a station wagon for the "Bat Masterson" series. Rick arranged for Millie to cater Combat!

Georg Fenady also enjoyed the cooking. "May and Millie, who were our caterers, were unbelievable. They'd lay out a banquet every day. Ours was the only show that, during the hiatus, they'd lose weight. During the season they'd gain fifteen pounds."

The actors were happy to be associated with the series, and with Vic Morrow. "As we relaxed into our parts and the show took off," says Rick Jason, "I discovered his sense of humor. It was quite dry. Quite often, while shooting a scene, he'd throw an ad lib at me to see if I was listening. The first time he did it, I just stared at him and the director yelled, 'Cut!' After that, realizing what he was doing, I'd throw an ad lib back at him, and we'd do this for six or seven lines (all in character). Sometimes we could hear crew members stifling laughs. Our script supervisor was going crazy, riffling through the script for pages he thought he might be missing. Eventually, he'd whisper to the director that what we were saying wasn't in the script. 'CUT!' he'd shout. 'C'mon fellas, we have a lot of stuff to shoot today,' or something to that effect. I understand a lot of those were printed as out-takes and saved on a special reel by our head editor. I have no idea where they are, or if they still exist.

"You know Vic hated firearms," continued Rick. "Guns of any kind. He could also break me up any time he chose; a very funny man, he was. One rare afternoon we were wrapping early, perhaps about 4:00 pm. I had a couple of shotguns in back of my station wagon, so I said to him, 'Hey, wanna go shoot some skeet?' He said, 'Nah, I can't stand to kill clay.' He made me laugh."

In an issue of TV Collector, Dick Peabody said, "Vic was an extremely generous guy and he shared everything he had. His motor home (was) the best dressing room, so that was our clubhouse. And he got ABC to keep each of us stocked with our favorite brand of liquor for five years . . . Vic was the most misunderstood person in the world, very shy guy, he wasn't good around large groups. He appeared one way to people who knew him only casually, and he was an entirely different person to those who knew him well. He had, probably, the wildest sense of humor of anyone I've ever known."

To break the monotony of filming, Vic came up with the idea of a jazz band. "We were just goofing off," says Pierre Jalbert. "You know, after six years, from six o'clock in the morning until maybe sometimes twelve at night, you get a little tired of reading and playing or goofing off. So we had to find something to do . . . sometimes we had a six o'clock call at the studio, and many times we wouldn't work until four o'clock in the afternoon. But you were paid, so you had to be there." Vic had always wanted to play the saxophone."All of a sudden, Vic said, why don't we get some instruments and try to play. Of course, nobody knows how to play. So we went to a music store very close to the studio. He bought a saxophone. I used to play a little piccolo, a little 25-cent piccolo. And he said that wasn't good enough. So I bought a flute. Somebody else had a trumpet . . . we'd get on the piano and one of us on the drums and then we would tape whatever came out that we used to call music. I still have those tapes on the old quarter-inch. And those sections, there are moments that it sounds pretty damn good. But we used to roll on the floor with all that. We were like a bunch of kids. We used to call that our musicales."

Tom Lowell says, "Nobody ever threw a temper tantrum, as far as the players were concerned, the actors on the set. There were little things that went on regarding dressing rooms and this and that, and little snit fits every once in awhile. It was never one actor against another, it was usually the actors against the front office."

Friendly rivalry developed for screen time. With six actors vying for the attention of the camera, each would develop tricks to be noticed in their scenes. They all tried to personalize their costumes to make them distinctive.

"Bernard McEveety caught me," says Tom Lowell. "He was a wonderful director. He was given those kind of scripts that were always very action-filled and we all had one lines and you know, you pop in there, and come down on one knee and everybody would be sitting around saying 'Where are the Krauts?' 'They're over there' 'Okay, let's go.' And that's it. ... Everyone is looking for camera time, you know, everybody's always doing little schticks to try to get themselves noticed. One day we came into this little clearing, and it was a close shot on all five of us sitting there, and I turn and took my helmet off — all the other guys are doing schtick, looking around, you know — I took my helmet off and turned right toward the camera and Bernie stopped, said, 'Cut! Tom, the Krauts are that way!'"

Dick Peabody used his height to good effect. "I used to bump into things. Any opportunity to bump my head on a low doorway, I would do it — a kind of a schtick that would be useful to gain attention. Though I was probably the most schtick-free actor on the show. Mostly because I didn't know if I could handle the schtick very well. I remember in Support Your Local Sheriff, Walter Brennan and Gene Evans and I are sitting at a table in a bar and all three of us have drinks in front of us. And Brennan and Gene Evans are, from time to time, taking a sip out of their shots. And I didn't touch my glass, because I didn't know if I could remember exactly at what point that I picked up the glass and took a sip of it, you know. So, I decided I'm gonna play it safe and not touch that glass. You know, most actors, give 'em a prop and they'll go crazy with it. But I had this strange kind of ego that nobody — I think Vic was the only person who understood this, I don't think any of the production people at Combat! knew — they thought that I was just too insecure to do anything. Only Vic knew that the reason I didn't feel any compulsion to play with props or move around or scratch my nose, as actors will do, or any of those attention-getting things, because my ego told me that I didn't have to. That my presence there was enough.

"[Littlejohn's] character sort of evolved. Part of it just came out of my natural awkwardness. I think all of our characters evolved. I don't think they were set to begin with. Saunders was not the same Sergeant Saunders he was at the beginning. There was a tremendous evolution. In all of us."