Richard Chamberlain died this year at 90. He was the first king of the mini-series, whose television career began in black and white broadcasting when he was 26, in 1959.
I started reading Chamberlain’s autobiography, Shattered Love, about this time last year, several months before he passed away. He wrote it as he was turning 70, over 20 years ago. I picked it up partly because his career and filmography started just before I was old enough to stand up in a crib and watch TV, and the shows he was on for single episodes—Gunsmoke, Mr. Lucky, Twilight Zone—are what I would’ve watched, even though I don’t think at the time I ever saw an episode he was in. He says both he and his friends at the time discussed how inhibited he was as an actor—they say he looked like a “gazelle in a net.”
One suspects he was only hired because he was 6’1” and freakishly beautiful, with such dramatic facial features it almost looks like a deformity. (It’s the other reason I decided to read his book.) Eventually he learned how to act well enough and got a long-term gig, 191 episodes, starring as Dr. Kildare. Which also launched him into a mixed bag of movies and the early mini-series, The Thorn Birds, The Bourne Identity, and Shogun, where romances or adventures were shot against backdrops of exotic lands.
The book is in many ways unrevealing. If you want to know whom he dated, male or female, other than his long-term partner Martin Rabbett, you’ll be disappointed. Who was in the closet in Hollywood? How much did he get paid for any of his big projects? What were the names of producers or directors or actors he found abusive, unpleasant, obstructionist? What warts were there on his relationship with Rabbett, including in their long separation? Infidelities etc.? Chamberlain writes as a gentleman. Books about Cary Grant or Rock Hudson have a lot more gossip.
You also won’t get much politics. It’s interesting that Chamberlain is from a time when old Hollywood was often Republican. And it’s a truism that actors, like Sydney Sweeney, who don’t declare themselves to be of the left are secret conservatives. This needle also ticks slightly to the right because the editor who shepherded this book was Judith Regan, who talked Rush Limbaugh and other politically incorrect celebrities (Howard Stern 1.0) into putting pen to paper.
What you mainly get in this book is a tale of a homosexual boy that would be trite if the person delivering it weren’t successful and beautiful, spiced up with some Shirley MacLaine New Age metaphysics. An (alcoholic) daddy was mean and disapproving, so he was closer to mom, but got out of that heterosexual family scene as soon as he could: “When I grew up, being gay, being a sissy or anything like that was verboten. I disliked myself intensely and feared this part of myself intensely and had to hide it and became ‘Perfect Richard, All-American Boy’ as a place to hide.”
When he could afford it he spent money on New Age therapists and shamans and came to a worldview where only you are responsible for how you feel about what the world dishes out, and so Chamberlain is no longer mad at his father (later sober and a star of the AA lecture circuit, perhaps because he had a famous son).
There’s so much of Chamberlain’s life he doesn’t want to talk about that he doesn’t even have 200 pages for his 70 years. So the last 50 pages of his book goes into his readings in eastern philosophy, the gurus he follows, and on how he uses their insights to understand his life. On the one hand you feel for him in his attempt to lead an examined life; on the other, one feels he’s been suckered into accepting a lot of fuzzy nonsense as a kind of orthodoxy, not as a springboard to ask fresh questions.
It’s more entertaining to take his filmography and go back and watch the early TV shows, where the dialogue frequently has a lot of sexual innuendo, perhaps a prank by the writers. It’s unclear how much of the “gazelle in a net” awkwardness was just a lack of skill as an actor, stage fright, or an attempt to freeze any emotional or physical fluidity so he wouldn’t be outed as gay. In his first appearance on television, on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he’s trying to pass a thoughtless driver to get an injured child to a doctor, and delivers the line, “If he’d just give me 6 more inches I could make it.” In another early foray into television, on Boris Karloff’s Thriller, Chamberlain’s a young man who spends his summer days repairing his aunt’s boats and sunbathing with a girlfriend, until the creepy neighborhood gay pedophile and serial killer tells him in a boat house that he should beware the seductive influences of the female of the species. “An older man can sometimes keep a boy straight.”
All in all, a better life than many in gay Hollywood. He succeeded in not being outed when it would’ve ended his career, in not having sexual, drug, or other scandals, and in eventually learning how to act well enough to carry off the early TV mini-series as well as theater and episodic TV (though I’m not sure you can find a great Chamberlain movie). Two Cheers for Richard Chamberlain!