- It's like I've died and gone to Heaven. When I did 'Police Woman,' we worked 12- and 14-hour days. Sometimes I would get up at 3:30 a.m. to go to San Pedro and by the end of the day we'd end up in Chatsworth! With a sitcom, we have banker's hours. One day a week you work late in front of an audience. It's a whole different process and incorporates what it's like to be on the stage.
- The adrenaline was really going. Sometimes, when they had a close-up on your face, your wardrobe was being changed. You'd be talking to someone who had long gone for their own costume change. I think all the actors who did that live television really miss that stuff.
- I think Angie came up with that. I think her character's real name was Lee Ann.
- Of course I would, if they asked. I had a good time doing that show. We had a wonderful relationship, a marvelous producer, and the four of us got along great.
- Charlie Dierkop and I, who share the same birthday, September 11, stay in touch from time to time.
- [on his work in the short-lived series "Delta"] At the end of the first act, I was up to my neck in quicksand. As I'm being rescued, I have 90 seconds to have the folks backstage strip me down to a jockstrap, rinse me off, change my clothes, and I have to get on the other side of the stage for the next act, which has me cracking open a coconut.
- Everybody, including you and me, would like to get everything we can for free, but people who can afford to pay their pet's expenses don't realize that if they call up and expect all that money, then we may not be able to help the people who really need it. If you do call us for financial help, the first question you'll be asked is what can you afford? We try to help those people in the direst need.
- Animal people can be a difficult lot. When I first joined Actors and Others, I thought, I'm going to get all these people together. Let's get the heads of all the organizations and let's all work together and form a big group. Well my God, it was like asking the Muslims and the Baptists and the Catholics and the Methodists to work together! I feel like we're all trying to get to Heaven and we're all doing it in a different, holier than thou way.
- We all have a big laugh about that. The tabloids write about the tension on the set, and there isn't any. They look like lovebirds to me. I've never worked with anyone easier to get along with than her. She's not temperamental at all. I have no tolerance for the tabloids.
- No, though there should have been. It was a natural and I don't know why it didn't happen. For years, we all looked good. Apparently, it's past its moment. So many generations coming up now haven't even heard of Police Woman. That's the way it is in this business. There's something permanent about movies but not with television. Let's face it, it was a long time ago.
- [on Fossey's War] When she went by she took her knuckles and gave me a big thump right on top of the head! It was like 'so there, too!' They were so humanistic, I fell in love with them.
- I've learned that you can always count on animals. You can't always depend on people.
- [on Angie Dickinson]That's the kind of friend she is. She really knows the right thing to give, the right thing to do.
- I'm a lucky guy. I've made a great living doing what I've always dreamed about doing and what I love doing.
- After my dad died, I got a job working as an usher at the Strand [movie theater] in Shreveport [Louisiana] making 25 cents an hour. I saved a few bucks and hitchhiked to Hollywood. I had my 15th birthday on the highway. I brought along a pair of dark sunglasses, which I associated with Hollywood, and, on my first day in Hollywood, I went to Grauman's Chinese Theater and I remember walking up and down the forecourt of Grauman's [where movie stars put their handprints and footprints] in my dark glasses hoping everyone would wonder who I was. I didn't last long. I thought I'd be able to get a job but I couldn't get one. This nice lady talked me into going home, which I did. I went back to high school, played tackle on the football team, was president of the senior class and then joined the Navy-I was unhappy at home because my mother had remarried and I didn't like him-and the Navy sent me up to radio [communications] school in Los Angeles at a big armory. Whenever I'd get liberty, I'd hightail it over to the Hollywood Canteen and I met people I'd later work with like Roddy McDowall. Later, I applied for and was accepted at the Pasadena Playhouse.
- That gave me a lot of visibility which was very helpful, since it IS called Actors and Others.
- The only movie I remember my father [who died when he was 13] liking was a picture called The Biscuit Eater, made by Warner Bros, I think. It was a beautiful story about a dog, and my dad kept telling me about this movie. I did see it in my hometown. Ironically, I ended up doing a remake at Disney [a two-part episode for Disney's television series in 1976]. My dad would have been pleased.
- When you look at it and think of John Wayne who was 65 or so at the time, and Dean Martin and me and Michael Anderson Jr. looked about 16, all playing brothers, you said to yourself, 'What kind of woman was this Katie Elder?".
- No. I remember when my mother was sick in the hospital-she was in the intensive care unit after a heart attack-a nurse said to me: "I wanted so bad for you to take Pepper into your arms and kiss her," and then she thought about it and said, "and yet I'm glad you didn't." Our relationship was like Marshall Dillon and Miss Kitty [on TV's long-running Western Gunsmoke]-you never saw them doing anything and yet there was no question that Marshall made it up those stairs to Miss Kitty's room. I think that's like what Pepper and Bill were about. They adored each other. He loved her, he protected her, he was crazy about her-though he wasn't exclusive about it. He was able to flirt with other ladies on the show and there was an unresolved, sexual tension on screen.
- I was adopted when I was a week old... and fortunate enough to be raised by people who loved animals and taught me to love animals. As a kid I had everything. I always had dogs and cats. And I had a goat named Napoleon. And a pig named Alexander. I raised a little baby named 'Bill' which was a nest egg, but he wandered off and the town sheriff caught him and ate him.
- Here's a page and a half devoted to Poacher, my dog and my visit there. We spent 10 days with Dian up on the Karasoake. It was the most exciting time of my life.
- My real name really is Earl Holliman. I weighed six pounds when I was a week old-I had yellow jaundice-and I was adopted. My natural father died six months before I was born-my birth mother lived until the 1970s-and I went to the orphanage. I was adopted by the Hollimans-and, as far as I'm concerned, the Hollimans are my parents. Henry Holliman, a World War 1 veteran, worked in the oil fields. My [adoptive] mother couldn't have children and they had wanted to adopt a child. When they came to see me, I was sick and they took me right away to the doctor, who apparently said: "you don't have a baby here, you have a funeral expense." They paid the midwife seven dollars and fifty cents for me-this was in the backwoods of Louisiana. I had wonderful parents who gave me all the love in the world. They encouraged me to be whatever I can be. I was their only child.
- [on Angie Dickinson] We didn't work on it at all. When they saw the first day's rushes, which took place in a hospital, they were raving about the chemistry between us. Angie was so beautiful, attractive and sexy and she had a marvelous sense of humor and a great vulnerability. She was very sexy yet at the same time there was something about her you wanted to protect, a little girl quality, that made you want to put your arm around her and say it was going to be OK. We were together 12 or 14 hours a day and Angie's very opinionated-when she thinks she's right that's the way it is-and we had our share of disagreements but you could tell we had a warmth. It looked like two people who adored each other. It was there.
- She was always sexy Pepper. Feminists had a problem with the show in the first season and we got a few letters because she was a cop using her sexuality on the street as a hooker and things like that. Some feminists wrote in that she was [being] exploited but it was not a big deal. We also did a show [during the first season] called "Flowers of Evil," about three lesbians running a nursing home-they were wiping out the old ladies-and we got mail on that. The Variety headline [about that episode's controversy] was: "Gays Finger Police Woman." In that same show, Pepper even admitted [to a lesbian character] that she had known a love like that. But they kept Angie looking as sexy, provocative and beautiful as possible. She was gorgeous.
- That I don't know. Quite possibly there wouldn't be. That takes the kick out of it, doesn't it? It's very precise, when you say, Police Woman, it means: tune in to see this woman as a police officer. Police Officer is kind of generic.
- [on Hotel De Paree] The edict came down that the dog was too cute. I said, if the dog goes I go.
- The importance of spaying and neutering. Too many people think of animals as something disposable - or property. I wish we could all wake up one morning and realize this is another living creature. This isn't my property. This is something I'm going to take care of. It would also be nice if we could get people to stop eating animals.
- I was told that, even though I was a good actor, I wasn't handsome enough to be a leading man and I wasn't offbeat enough to be a character actor. I was just kind of in between. Well, when I sat in the barber's chair [for a bit part in The Girls of Pleasure Island], they cut my hair about a quarter of an inch long and in the front it laid down like bangs-that haircut you see all the time now but then nobody had it except Truman Capote-and, with my big ears, my broken nose, my two front teeth, my little eyes and my funny-looking haircut, I was suddenly a character actor. Just like that.
- There was one they wrote particularly for my character called-I think it was-"Sarah Who?" The star of Bridget Loves Bernie, Meredith Baxter-Birney, played the daughter of one of my best friends who had died-a cop who had been killed long ago-and she was like an adopted daughter. Somebody was killing policewomen and she was killed and I had a breakdown, crying and all that. I got to play a little bit of everything in that-tough guy, soft guy-and I always liked that.
- Actors & Others discovered that sometimes even the best intentions can lead to untenable situations for the very animals we're trying to help. We used to take animals and put them in a shelter in Chatsworth. We had a deal out there. We were paying a gentleman only $1 a day per animal. When I joined, we had 70 dogs. We'd alleviate an emergency - then move on to the next emergency - and the next thing you know these animals had been there a long time. We stopped doing that because we're not good at placements. When somebody calls up and says "I have a dog and she has 6 puppies and what do you people do if you won't (take them)?"... that's not what we do. What we excel in is spay and neuter, the hot lines, the information, and the medicals
- It's a volunteer job but it's always been a hands-on job for me, and I wouldn't want it any other way. When somebody comes up to me and says Actors & Others didn't help him, I take great umbrage because I feel a responsibility for the character of the organization. We get anywhere from 100 to 300 calls a day for help in the office and sometimes they expect more than we can do. We're really out there for the infirmed, the elderly, the low income, fixed income people. The homeless. Aids patients. For many of these people, the only warm body they curl up next to is a dog or cat. And often they can't afford to feed them properly and certainly not pay for vet bills. We even have a food supply for them.
- In the beginning, I was paired with [policeman] Royster [played by Charles Dierkop] while [actor] Ed Bernard [as policeman Styles] would play a pimp to Pepper's undercover hooker, but, after a while, they began to put us together. She'd get into trouble and I'd run in and save her. I would make some smart remark and she would come back at me in some sexy kind of way and a lot of that was ad libbed. We had a tacit kind of permission to do that and it really helped the chemistry.
- At that time, Angie was married to [composer] Burt Bacharach and they had a young daughter, and it was very important for her not to work after six o'clock at night-it was part of her contract-though she got looser about that as time went on, because there were many times when we had to work at night. Sometimes, we'd work 'til midnight on location. We might start in the morning in San Pedro and finish the day on the streets of Burbank. It was tiring.
- The first part Loni Anderson ever had was with me on Police Woman. She played a waitress. She had very dark hair-she looked Oriental-and it was before she had the blonde hair. She came up and took my order and I'm coming on to her and I asked her how she liked Ella Fitzgerald and she said "oh, my husband just loves her, why do you ask?" and my line was "I guess I'm just taking a survey." I'd get away with murder. [In one episode,] I had a stewardess at the little bar in my apartment. She said something about how to solve crime and I said, listen, I'll make a pact with you, you don't ask me how I solve a murder and I won't ask you how that pilot uses that big thing up in the air. Everyone on the set would snicker but we'd get away with it. I remember once when Angie and I had to get into [police] uniform and at the very end of the show we were walking back and, just as we walked past camera, Angie said "I can't wait to get back into my pants" and I said "neither can I."
- We had a very big, hit show. We were always in the top 15, sometimes in the top ten, and I remember one summer when we reached number one in the ratings-and that was before cable. They put on Baretta against us, Get Christie Love, the thing with Darren McGavin [Kolchak: the Night Stalker]-Police Woman was a hit. The entire Friday night lineup was a smash on NBC: Chico and the Man, Sanford and Son, The Rockford Files-and Police Woman. Friday night was NBC night. What happened was they would start taking us off [the regularly scheduled night] and put us on someplace else [on the schedule] for a couple of weeks to get our audience to watch some other show, so people looking for Police Woman couldn't find us. They moved us from Friday night to Tuesday night opposite M*A*S*H, which was a huge, established hit, and we began to slip in the ratings. We could have been on the air for another few years.
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