Dick Powell, remembered by Christopher Knopf (Zane Grey Theatre)

Actor Dick Powell - Zane Grey Theatre Press Photo

Dick Powell came in with that characteristic smile and jaunty walk, asking how things were going, just wanting to say hello. Then his arms were around Aaron’s and my shoulders. We were his boys, and anything we said we could do we could do. Ten minutes later when Powell returned to the set, Kaiser and Four Star were partners, the show on the air. The work at Four Star was constant. Not only Trackdown, but soon most of the other shows coming through in the late 1950’s. Zane Grey Theater was my favorite. For good reason.

As an anthology and with Dick Powell’s magnetism, stars were drawn to the show most other studios couldn’t attract. I’d written a script for it, Interrogation, developed specifically for Powell himself. It was a psychological drama, set in the Mexican-American war, the breaking of a heroic figure without either threat or use of torture. I was on to my favorite theme again, courage vs cowardice. I was obsessed with the theme, clearly still trying to work out things for myself. Dick refused the part and said we’d never get a star to play it.

We got Academy Award nominee Robert Ryan. “I know what you’re asking of me,” Ryan told me. “I’ll give it to you.” Powell could have buried the show out of pique. He didn’t. He took full page ads in the trades recommending it for award consideration. It won the Writers Guild Award that year for Best Written Half Hour Anthology Drama. Throughout Powell’s career he’d had unparalleled success.

He was television’s top male star, president of its leading, most productive independent production company, and a millionaire several times over. What he felt he had never had, what he wanted desperately, more than even producing or directing movies, was personal critical acclaim, not for the work of others, but for himself. This show could, and would, get it for him. Returning full time to the lot, he moved virtually all else aside to see that it did so. He was its executive producer, its soul, and nothing happened on it he didn’t know about. “If my aunt in Little Rock doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t go on my show,” he’d say. Except he couldn’t make it stick, and that is what made the two years on The Dick Powell Show among the most rewarding I experienced.

Basically Powell was a simple man, politically conservative, steeped in traditional values. And there he sat, facing impassioned, young, mostly Jewish writers, wanting to deal with confounding themes. I’ve heard that Powell never met a man he couldn’t forgive. The Dick Powell Show was into its second year, and working on it now with Stan Kallis reenergized me. The show got ratings and envy. And then we got wind of something that made none of it worthwhile. We heard Dick was sick. There were a lot of rumors as to what it was, but the one word, cancer, kept coming up. If Powell was sick, you couldn’t prove it by him.

Dick Powell and June Allyson on the cover of Hollywood Studio Magazine (November 1982)

He’d reunited with his estranged wife, June Allyson, had sailed off with her on his yacht during the summer, and now was returned. He looked great, and acted it, and fought you tooth and nail in those meetings, testing your will, yielding to it as usual if he felt your own sincere devotion to your project. He was dying. He knew it and we didn’t and he never told us nor gave us the slightest indication of it, nor a single moment’s sense that he was hiding that hideous truth, that within several months he’d be gone. And then he was. January 2, 1963.

Singer, actor, producer, director, sailor, pilot, born in Mountain View, Arkansas, he was fifty-eight years old. The pall that set over Four Star was palpable. And over me a near disaster. As for Four Star, at the time of Dick Powell’s death it had a dozen shows on the air, give or take one. Two years later it had two. A year after that just one, The Big Valley, which played on ABC for four seasons. -"Will the Real Me Please Stand Up" (2010) by Christopher Knopf