MALLINation

Film and TV actor Robert Culp died today in Los Angeles at the age of 79. For a baby boomers he will always be best known for his role opposite Bill Cosby as a spy in I Spy, a show that broke down televisions race barriers. But to Generation Xies like myself it was his role as cynical FBI agent Bill Maxwell on The Greatest American Hero that made him an indelible part of our childhood. Then there were the film roles – Paul Mazursky’s brilliant first film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in which Culp played Natalie Wood’s husband – a man getting in touch with the swinging sixties sexual liberation in spite of his contradictory instincts, or as the venal mayor of New York in the silly Tim Hutton graffiti drama Turk 182, and in countless other parts large and small. He wasn’t an actor who disappeared into his roles, but the mannerisms that conveyed easy mastery in I Spy somehow were made to signal vulnerably swaggering libertinism in Bob & Carol, ill-at-ease conservatism in Hero, and waspy tweediness in his recurring role on Everybody Loves Raymond.

Most of all for me though, Culp reminds me of a childhood growing up in Reagen era America. Seeing this actor who had played and lived so many groundbreaking roles in the sixties play Bill Maxwell, a fascinating amalgam of conservative law & order types, must have induced vertigo in those who remembered. All I saw as a 10 year-old was a close cousin to folks like Garry Trudeau’s Uncle Duke character from Doonesbury, former semi-counterculture types who had surfed the conservative wave into strange places. I read a lot of Doonesbury as a kid, and probably 70% of it was way over my head, but I did learn a lot.

Culp invested Maxwell with enough sensitivity and awkwardness to make him likable, but also enough abrasiveness to function as a parody of Reagen-era figures like Caspar Weinburger or good old Don Rumsfield, a guy who could have been played by Culp in a biopic. Yet there was something ineffably cool in his swagger and his fast talk.

“What’s the scenario?” he would say before encountering a hostile situation, a phrase borrowed later by hip-hoppers Tribe Called Quest. I loved these lovable rogues as a kid, these cynics who had seen it all, the friends of my father who had lived life and scoffed at the idea that there was anything left to learn. I was a premature 40-year old curmudgeon in a 10 year-old’s body and Bill Maxwell was my hero.

The rest of Greatest American Hero (not including Joey Scarbury’s cheese classic theme) could all be cut out as far as I was concerned. William Katt, who played the teacher in an alien superhero suit? Meh. I shared Maxwell’s contempt for his inability to control it’s powers. The only thing I found interesting about that character was when they changed his name from Ralph Hinckley to Ralph Handley because John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagen halfway through the show’s brief run in a bid to impress Jodie Foster.

As an adult I watched Culp’s terrific performance in Bob & Carol and it reminded me of my parents and the crazy ways they tested the boundaries of marriage in the late 60s and 70s. In their case the seams burst – inevitably really given that it’s hard to fathom their ever having been married now. In Culp’s character, from his modish outfits which echoed my father’s own au courant threads in the era to the easy appeal he had to women, there was the hint of the familiar for me. So too was his initial jealousy as his wife, played by Natalie Wood decides to take him at his word and try some experimenting of her own – as is the hilarious scene in which he forces himself to go with the flow of the philosophy of openness he has embraced.

In a strange way the reality of the reactions that these fictional characters went through helped me to understand how bewildering, exciting, and disappointing the sexual revolution was for my parent’s generation. One of the other touches in Bob & Carol that rang true was that all of the characters are in their 30s, as my parents were then – not the teens and twenty-somethings who were rolling around in the mud at Woodstock. These were adults on the cusp of a rapidly changing world.

I Spy and Culp’s role on and off screen also reminds me of my parents, specifically their strong belief in Civil Rights. It may be hard to fathom now in the Obama era but a show prominently featuring a black man and his white partner in espionage was in danger of not being carried by southern affiliates in 1965. When the network had second thoughts about casting Cosby because of his skin color Culp made it clear that he would walk too. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Culp and Cosby traveled to Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers there.

The two actors would remain lifelong friends, with Cosby saying this about Culp tonight:

“The first born in every family is always dreaming of the older brother or sister he or she doesn’t have, to protect, to be the buffer, provide the wisdom, shoulder the blows and make things right,” he said. “Bob was the answer to my dreams.”

Culp talks about Cos and I Spy: