I adjusted the tape deck and the digital voice recorder, both excited and nervous on that sunny autumn afternoon. I had at long last arranged for a telephone interview with the widow of darling Christopher Cary and it was time to make the call.
At first I had tried to conduct the interview via email. It is still my favorite choice as an introvert, but in addition, it doesn’t carry the possible hazards of technology failing and resulting in the only copy of the interview being lost. But I could see it wasn’t the convenient option for Mrs. Elen Carysfort, so I caved and asked if we could do it by phone after all. I was hoping desperately it would work.
Unfortunately, I was right in my concerns about technology failing me. The tape deck, which had been reliable in the past, refused to properly record our interview. The recording was very difficult to hear over bizarre clicks and clacks and faded off into nothing within five minutes. The digital voice recorder only works when held at a certain distance, and as I thought the tape deck was the most reliable, I focused my attention on it when the digital recorder seemed to fail. I tried it again as soon as I realized the tape was not working, and to my joy I was able to capture the last portion of the interview on it. I will transcribe that part word for word. For this middle portion, however, I must rely on the notes I immediately wrote after hanging up. Of course, there will hence be gaps in what I remembered and wrote down, but hopefully I recalled all the major points.
Another of my concerns about a telephone interview was the possibility of not being able to hear very well, which is a very real problem depending on whom I am talking with over the phone. Some connections are very bad. Luckily, this fear was unfounded in this case, as I could hear Elen crystal-clear. She was very friendly and happy to talk about Christopher, and I was immediately put at ease.
We had a few preliminary moments of conversation before we got back to the interview questions I had typed up and shown Elen previously. She was quite naturally curious as to how someone like me had become interested in Christopher, and I provided a brief explanation of growing up exposed to classic movies and music and how that set the stage for my interest in classic television later on. My interest in Christopher specifically came from watching him on The Wild Wild West and then becoming intrigued by his character while writing about him.
Elen then shared an interesting anecdote of how Christopher loved the South Pacific islands and wanted to have a get-together along the International Date Line. Since that is in the middle of the ocean, he had to settle for Fiji and ran into some trouble with the Fijian government over the matter. She also spoke of how Christopher was a humanitarian who longed for peace among all nations. She was relieved that he had not seen the beginning of our current stretch of wars before he passed away. (Christopher died in 2000.)
Returning to the previously constructed interview questions, I picked up with the next one on the list and asked whether Christopher had a favorite type of role to play. I was told that he liked playing magical characters. His favorite character of all was Merlin, from an episode of The Time Tunnel. He was very excited by an idea he had come up with of Merlin being born around the 24th Century and then living his life backwards, traveling all over prior time periods.
Christopher was quite involved with Arthurian legend. In the early 1960s, he replaced Roddy McDowell as Mordred in Camelot. In later productions, he graduated to playing King Arthur himself.
Around here I wondered if any recordings existed of him singing in Camelot. Elen wasn’t sure, but she mentioned a PBS production that included a couple of musical numbers by him. I believe she said it was a salute to one of the big songwriters of Broadway. I remember thinking at the time that it was one of the people involved with West Side Story.
I asked if Elen had a favorite character Christopher had played. She said it was Cyrano, from a stage production in Los Angeles. She described Cyrano as a very hard and heavy role and a very complex character. I wish I could have seen it!
Christopher is probably best known for his role among the starring cast of Garrison’s Gorillas. I certainly enjoy watching it to see him. One thing I’ve honestly never known is how he ended up cast in it. I unfortunately do not have detailed notes from that portion of our conversation, but I recalled that Elen said they wanted a British actor for the series.
As an avid writer of fanfiction stories, which are basically non-profit stories about characters from movies or television or books written just for fun and for the love of the characters, I am naturally curious as to what the actors I admire would think of stories being written about their characters. I inquired as to whether Christopher was aware of this happening for Garrison’s Gorillas. I learned more than I dreamed possible when I was informed that there was actually a group of fanfiction writers called The Christopher Cary Connection, which wrote about Garrison’s Gorillas. Christopher was very aware of them and they would send him the stories they wrote. They often asked him questions about World War II to make their stories more accurate. He wanted them to write about the future, in a time of peace. They were active right up to the time Christopher died. They may still be writing. I tried to write down the address of the head writer, Dee Croft, as it was being told to me, but I didn’t quite get it all and then I couldn’t go back to review it due to the malfunctioning tape deck.
Since The Wild Wild West was the show that actually got me interested in Christopher, I definitely wanted to ask if Christopher had ever mentioned anything about working on it. Elen mentioned that during season 4, Christopher was asked to be one of the temporary replacements for Ross Martin when he was recovering from a heart attack! Of course, season 4 is what brought us the series’ only two-part venture, The Night of the Winged Terror, in which Christopher was the primary antagonist. It is highly intriguing to think that they also wanted him to be one of the Ross Martin stand-ins. I would have loved to see Christopher playing a major part as a good guy in an episode!
Several years later, Christopher flew to the Hawaiian Islands for a part in what would be aired as the final episode of season 2 for Hawaii Five-O. He loved Hawaii from seeing it on that trip and went back many times.
Another of the major questions I was curious about was whether Christopher struck up any friendships with the people he acted with. The single most important thing about his turn as Ginger Townsend on The Rockford Files was, to me, the chemistry I sensed between him and co-star Luke Andreas. They sounded like they were having so much fun playing off of each other. It was that chemistry that inspired me to commence writing a long series of short stories all about their characters, taking place post-episode when they’re trying to reform. Elen didn’t know anything about Luke specifically, but she mentioned that Sam Melville was his friend. Curiously enough, I have been watching Sam in The Rookies this past week.
I told Elen how David Chase described Ginger in great detail in the script for The Queen of Peru episode. She was amazed that I had obtained a script and asked how that had come about, so I mentioned the awesome Jim and Melody and how they collect scripts and will photocopy them for the cost of paper and shipping. I wondered if she knew whether David Chase had actually had Christopher in mind when he wrote the script or if there were any other occasions where Christopher was expressly the person desired for a role. She didn’t know about The Queen of Peru, but she mentioned that someone named Davenport penned something called The King of Spain with Christopher in mind. Sadly, it never came to pass.
Actors, of course, play a wide range of characters, many of who are nothing like them in real-life. I asked if Christopher had played a character more like him than the others. I was told about the character he played in the 1980s movie Missing in Action 2. He was an Australian character; Christopher had lived in Australia for many years and knew the people and the stereotypes. He hammed up the role and had a great deal of fun with it.
I haven’t seen that film yet, as I know his character dies and I’m always sad when that happens, but I am interested in seeing it at some point. Elen described the interesting antics surrounding the filming of the death scene. The character was to be shot in the head, which required the usage of an explosion pack for effect. Christopher quite wisely refused to use it until they demonstrated that it was safe. But it was difficult to coordinate the sound of the gunshot with the pack going off and it took two weeks of take after take to get it right. Christopher greatly enjoyed spending all that time in the Virgin Islands and hanging out on the beach when they weren’t filming.
Somehow this led to the intriguing anecdote that he was a cub reporter for a newspaper in Surrey, England before coming to the United States. Elen mused that maybe that job helped put him at ease with talking to people he didn’t know. In spite of appearing gregarious and outgoing, he was actually a shy person. Sometimes that would come out in his roles by him looking away or down or other, similar actions.
He first got into acting in England and appeared in radio shows over there. He came to New York on a steamship and passed the Statue of Liberty as the ship rolled in. He liked the city and Broadway (and the much better pay here versus the pay for English productions) and decided to stay.
When he got fed up with Hollywood and being considered better than others, there was a point where he went through the Want Ads, closed his eyes, and picked something at random for him to try next. It turned out to be a program to help developmentally challenged children. He started teaching them landscaping and it really helped them in many ways. He did a lot of publicity for the group and they were able to get many important jobs, including landscaping for films.
After all of this fascinating and moving information, I returned to the interview questions and asked whether there was a character he played that was more unlike him than most. The reply was Mordred, and Elen added that any deceptive character was very unlike him because he was such an honest person.
Shortly before our interview, I had watched the Aaahh!!! Real Monsters! episode with Christopher. It was very weird and trippy, but I appreciated some of the smarter jokes and of course, hearing Christopher’s lovely voice. I wondered how he had come to land the part, since it’s about the only cartoon listed on his IMDB page. Elen said that his agent arranged it and that he may have also appeared on The Simpsons; she wasn’t sure about that one. She said that cartoons were a coveted line of work and hard to break into because you needed the ability to do many different voices for characters.
On a defunct GeoCities page for Christopher, I read that he originally studied to be a dancer. I incorporated this talent into my version of Ginger Townsend, albeit he did not study for it and was simply a natural, as I couldn’t imagine Ginger being interested in learning the art. I wondered if Christopher continued to enjoy dancing even after switching his interests to acting and directing. Elen told me that he studied ballet as a child and knew ballroom dances as well. Elen wasn’t able to dance, but she could with Christopher because he led so well and helped her along.
Here we discussed some of Christopher’s directing projects. He did some documentaries in Australia and got into trouble over one about marijuana, as they had to have it on the set to film it and talk about it. He had to go to court and explain what they were doing. He stayed in Australia until 1975, when he moved back to the States with his then-wife and son because he wanted to raise his son in the States.
There was also a particularly eyebrow-raising one that I will not mention the name of here because I don’t want people’s overprotective Internet filters to block this site just because of its name, but it is mentioned on his IMDB page and I am sure the readers will pick out which one I mean. Elen was actually contacted by Australia’s film archive about that one, as they wanted to include it in their archive. She refused, as she felt it was a trashy film and not a good representation of Christopher’s work. She hopes it hasn’t been posted online anywhere.
As Steve Moore was the means whereby I was able to get in touch with Elen, he mentioned during our brief conversations that Elen was able to work with Christopher on Steve’s project The Indescribable Nth (Christopher’s final work). I queried as to whether they had been able to work on other projects together. I learned from Elen that yes, they worked together many times on different projects. They wrote and shared tea together and were buddies.
Finally around this point, I realized that the tape deck was not working. In desperation I tried the digital voice recorder again and thankfully, it worked. The remainder of the conversation I will label as Part 3 and it will be transcribed word for word.