Here Come The Brides Extras
Magazine Pictures...
This one isn't really a magazine picture...it's a screen capture.
But it's so good, it should be a magazine picture and I
wanted
to put it SOMEWHERE!
TV Guide January 4-10, 1969...
The article inside reads:
Making Sin Palatable
'Here Come the Brides' seems to have found a successful method
By Dwight Whitney
Jackie Cooper is a pacer. On this particular morning the dapper ex-Skippy turned TV tycoon paces his splendid mahogany-paneled offices at Screen Gems in undisguised joy. Here Come the Brides, a simple-minded costume piece (circa 1870) about a hundred man-hungry, marriage-minded ladies and the hundred women-hungry Seattle lumberjacks who aspire to their favors, is one of ABC's few bright spots in the early-season ratings and appears to be headed for a long run on the air.
Cooper wears this information as jauntily as he wears his navy-blue blazer and red turtle-neck. Like other studio heads with an unexpected windfall on their hands, he likes to give the impression he knew it all along.
"Surprised? Well, no. I believed in it from the beginning," he says lightly. "We didn't make the same mistake we made with Iron Horse. ABC said we couldn't have frilly shirts at 7:30. Avoid fist fights. No playing around with women. We agreed and the show failed. Petticoats and bosoms work fine at 7:30."
This "petticoats and bosoms" show which "works fine at 7:30" operates on a premise that sorely strains even TV's credibility gap. It asks us to believe that if a single one of the hundred "brides" behaves promiscuously with a lumberjack not her husband, the three heroes blow the whole ball of wax, forfeiting their logging empire to the heavy (Mark Lenard). This places the chief hero, played by the dashing Robert Brown, in the position of the housemother in a girls' school, making sure the ladies make it through the vestibule without any undue hanky-panky.
"The show is the opposite of hip, and in this day of the protester that's unique," says Cooper. "What the heroes are so lustily protecting is the old-fashioned morality the Bible Belt holds so dear - the Golden Rule, chastity of women, self-reliance, that sort of thing."
He and his executive producer, Robert Claver, based the series on an old movie script by playwright N. Richard ("The Rainmaker") Nash, who also wrote the first episode. Claver and Cooper simply borrowed a page from the late C. B. deMille, who believed that the perfect way to make sin palatable was to oppose it. As their principal hero they cast, Cooper insists, "an old-fashioned sex symbol in the Gable tradition," a shaggy-maned young swashbuckler who has been swashbuckling around Broadway and Hollywood for 20 years without going anywhere in particular.
"Robert Brown's no Steve McQueen," Cooper is saying. "Doesn't smack 'em before he makes love to 'em. Robert dates back to Flynn and Gable. But apparently there are people out there who still are looking for another Gable."
Another Gable, huh? Well, that's not all there is to it, either. Not if we are to believe the bearded Bob Claver. Claver wears a peace medal over his two-toned gray dickey collar, and his office sports a groovy recruiting poster showing an irate Donald Duck pointing a finger at prospective recruits and yelling, "QUACK." Esprit de corps is what counts, Claver says. He praises the delicacy of the ensemble work, the vigor of the writers, his story editor, his costume designer (an indefatigable lady named Betsy Cox who for one episode may have to dress as many as 67 ladies). He fails to see any satire implicit in Brides. "What we are really saying is, wouldn't it be great to live in a small house, be able to walk to the store, and know everyone in a small town? This show represents that simplistic belief. I think people are ready for that."
To Claver, Brown constitutes a formidable apostle of that credo. "I have an open-door policy," Claver explains. "Anyone with a complaint, all they have to do is knock. Robert is the spokesman for all the actors. He is the Big Daddy of Here Come the Brides."
At the moment "Big Daddy" is playing a tender love scene with guest star Kathryn Hays on the Columbia ranch some five miles away. Miss Hays, a one-time model, is dressed as an Amish woman, one of a group of Amish immigrants on their way to settle in the Yakima Valley. The scriptwriters have contrived to have Jason fall in love with her en route. In between set-ups, Brown is all over the place like a bumptious Saint Bernard puppy. He confers with director Jerry Bernstein, peers into the camera finder, keeps a sharp paternal eye on his young colleagues and co-heroes, Bobby Sherman (Jeremy) and David Soul (Joshua), and gives the big hello to visitors.
"Ah, lad," he booms. "You're just in time. I want to marry this beautiful girl, but it means I have to adopt the Amish faith. But, as it turns out, I can't do it. Very dramatic."
We lunch in the heavily shuttered star dressing room, one of two on the ranch that are not trailers (the other belongs to The Outcasts' Don Murray). It is protocol; Big Daddy expects it. Entering this place is to travel backward in time to another era, another set of values. Robert (he is always called Robert or Robbie) has had it done up to resemble a Victorian parlor. There is nothing particularly camp about it; this scene is for real - the dark wood paneling, Tiffany and tassel lamps, cut-crystal goblets and heavy wood furniture. On the wall, dark portraiture from the French, Flemish and Hudson River schools in heavy gilt frames. On a side table an arms-around photograph of his 17-year-old daughter, whom he can now afford to send to a Swiss school. On a green felt table a pile of papers, a copy of Ramparts, and a huge New York-cut steak.
"Yes," he says as he spears the first bite. "I think you could say I am the old-fashioned hero. I speak of all the virtues. This room is a reflection of me. We rehearse our destinies and become that thing..."
The phone rings. It is a woman from a Memphis paper ready for their pre-arranged interview. "Well, I'm glad I'm the plum at the top of your tree," Robert says, leaning hard on his joviality. "Yes...Yes...I'm the hit of the season? How kind...You're right, it's no fun to be a flop...Yes, I've played every kind - half house, quarter house, no house. Even a poor play is fun to a full house. I hate to play with nobody out front. It's against the nature of the artist..."
Now I know. The man harpooning that steak is one of the last of the old-time romantics. In another time and place he might have been John Barrymore. Even his costume is an anachronism. Who ever heard of an 1870 lumberjack in a Sy Devore turtle-neck? He wears it for one reason. As Betsy Cox, the costumer, explains, "The producers think he looks good in it."
As the house extrovert and sometime put-on artist, Robert tends to override his two male co-stars. It is not that he means to; it simply works out that way. David Soul (nee Solberg), a Lutheran minister's son, is a shy, self-effacing young man with natural tow-hair who shuns the worldly places. Originally he was a folk-rock singer who made it to The Merv Griffin Show and eventually found his way into Screen Gems' new-talent program. He gets his kicks writing poetry, composing songs, clearing brush and rebuilding furniture with his new bride, Karen, atop their Benedict Canyon mountain.
Now that he has "made it," David doesn't quite know what to do with it. Robert's tactics frighten him a little. "There is a lot about me that Robert has seen in himself 20 years ago," he muses. "All those insecurities! That thing where somebody comes on the set and you start asking yourself, 'Why doesn't he want to talk to me?' "
Bobby Sherman is something else again. The worldly things agree with him. A child prodigy, he began studying trumpet at 8, gradually came to play 10 instruments. Ultimately he became a rock 'n' roll singer on Shindig. Somewhere along the way he acquired his own recording studio, which numbers among its clients the Monkees. Outside his dressing room sits his new car, a midnight-blue Silver Cloud Rolls. It sits next to David's car, a battered 1961 Volkswagen. "It's not a status symbol," insists Bobby. "Just something I always wanted. So - why not?"
He, too, didn't quite know what to make of Robert. "When we first met he seemed jolly, happy, boisterous and not too sure of himself. Then one day I happened to mention I didn't feel so good about a certain scene. He said, 'I'll call Claver.' I like that.
"David and Karen are very groovy people. We're friends. I didn't know Joan Blondell for a long time. Then one night we had a long talk in her trailer. An awful lot of colors, that old girl. Open. We could laugh and we could relate. I dig.
"Me? I'm a loner. But I have a bug for this business. I want to get through to people. All we've got are words and pictures. The only rules are don't get up tight. The show? There's no way to explain it. Like Kate Smith. No way to explain her either except to say she's got soul, man, soul..."
Henry Beckman is putting on the pants of Captain Clancey, the old curmudgeon of a sea captain who brought the brides to Seattle from New Bedford and proved so amusing doing it that Claver wrote him into the script permanently. Everything okay, Henry? The smile is broad. "This kind of part a man waits 20 years for. I'm not about to blow it now."
Bridget Hanley, who plays the chief bride, Candy Pruitt, isn't working today. Catching up on household tasks instead. We talk anyway. She says the show is "mentally lovely." That explains everything for her.
She's happy but scared. And so are most of the rest of the cast. Scared because most are relatively inexperienced young people and they are frightened that the venture might become a failure.
The hour is late. They have moved to the saloon set, where Joan Blondell as Lottie, the salty lady saloonkeeper, is giving Jason Bolt what for. Joan, a veteran of going-on-40 years of movies, the premier dumb blonde of the 1930's, has seen it all before. What is she doing among this callow youth?
"I thought it looked like an elegant set-up," she says between takes. "I liked Robert; not everyone is psychedelic these days, thank God. I liked Bobby; very aware, though for a long time he was too shy to say good morning. I liked David; a nice young man full of innocence who really comes to life with a guitar in his hand. So I thought, damn, I'd like to stick around.
"Funny thing about a series, though. A little girl came up to me the other day. 'I know you,' she said. 'You're Lottie.' You know, she was right? Joan Blondell no longer exists. I'm somebody named Lottie. That's - what do these kids say? - where it's at these days in TV.
"As for Robert, well, sometimes when he talks I don't quite follow. At times he is too gentlemanly, too humble, too sure. I don't know whether he's putting me on or not".
There is Robert smiling over at her. Putting her on he is not. Life is good. It shows on his face. "The show is a kind of joyous spewing forth of old-fashioned things," he says suddenly. "The country says it's a hit. I wouldn't know. All I know is I don't feel any different at all. I'm still me. I didn't have to sell anything to get here and I'm - I'm -"
Having a ball?
"How did you know?" Robert Brown says solemnly.