Kojak Revisited

(Originally published 6/6/17)

When Kojak starring Telly Savalas debuted in October 24, 1973, I was in the sixth grade at St. John’s grammar school in the Bronx. Pleading nolo contendere to charges of having accepted bribes while governor of Maryland, Vice President Spiro Agnew had resigned exactly two weeks earlier. President Richard Nixon’s infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” had occurred several days before. And a whole lot was happening in New York City, too, with Mayor John Lindsay in the final two months of his second term as mayor of the city Theofilides “Theo” Kojak valiantly endeavored to keep safe.

In the broader historical picture, the 1970s were not good years for the Big Apple. A fiscal crisis and layoffs of city employees, including cops, left the metropolis dirtier and less safe than it had ever been. My favorite decade is nonetheless the groovy 1970s. And it isn’t because of the increases in crime and grime. Where I grew up, Kingsbridge, there was a fair share of both, but it was notwithstanding a great neighborhood to be a kid. The old-fashioned urban childhood still existed then, but its days were definitely numbered. Simply understood, we spent an awful lot of time in the great outdoors back then—winter, spring, summer, and fall—and weren’t preoccupied with technological devices that had yet to be invented.

Along with The Rockford Files, Kojak is my favorite TV detective show of all-time. On the boxes of the recently-released Kojak DVD sets I just purchased, the character is referred to as “Bald, bold, and badass.” That’s a contemporary hipster’s description of Lieutenant Kojak, who was wont to say to a bad guy, “Cootchie-cootchie-coo,” while not-so-gently pulling on his cheek. He was the epitome of cool in his Bailey Gentry fedora, spiffy three-piece suits, and stylish sunglasses.

I liked Kojak for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was its New York ambiance. McCloud just didn’t do it for me! It didn’t matter to me that the episodes were largely filmed in Los Angeles and at Universal Studios. Kojak and company visited The Twilight Zone street, as I call it, too many times to count. You know the street: the bars are named just bars and the jewelry stores, just jewelry stores. I wasn’t even bothered that the stock shots of Kojak driving around Manhattan frequently didn’t jibe with where he was actually going in the scripts. I remember him heading north on the West Side Highway to go to Brooklyn.

So, does Kojak hold up for me more than forty years later? In my opinion, Telly Savalas punctuating his sentences with his Tootsie Roll Pop is timeless. Flipping an organized crime boss out of his chair never gets old. The Hollywood streets and edifices can be a bit off putting, I know. Floodlights in the windows of building exteriors don’t exactly enhance nighttime realism. And location shots filmed in Los Angeles that attempt to pass for Manhattan never work. Fortunately, the middle seasons of Kojak—which represent the best of the show—filmed a little more in New York itself.

In fact, season three’s two-hour debut episode, “A Question of Answers,” is filmed entirely in New York and features guest stars Eli Wallach, F. Murray Abraham, Jerry Orbach, Jennifer Warren, and Michael V. Gazzo, who plays a hooligan loan shark. The year prior, Gazzo won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Frankie Pentangeli in The Godfather: Part II. In the Kojak episode, there is a scene of Savalas and Gazzo in a parking lot just north of the Twin Towers along the Hudson River. That’s what that area was like in 1975. Run down and atmospheric with parking lots—in some instances—on property now gentrified beyond recognition. A footnote on the season three opener is that Telly Savalas’s brother, George Savalas, who played Detective Stavros, is finally credited with his full name, instead of “Demosthenes,” his middle name, which was used in the first two seasons’ credits.

Theo Kojak could do no wrong then and now, with one exception that I’ve gleaned in watching the old shows. So far, I’ve seen him toss his lollipop wrapper off a building rooftop, throw its stick on the sidewalk, and fling an unlit cigarette of Eli Wallach’s into the Hudson River. He has also placed his empty coffee up atop a fire hydrant upon exiting his car. It was the dirty 1970s after all.

One final word on Kojak’s legacy: The coolest cop is part of the Urban Dictionary. “To drive straight into a parking space, improbably available right outside the place you were headed,” which Kojak consistently did at crime scenes, midtown hotels, busy courthouses and apartment buildings, is thusly named. You have “kojaked” if you are so fortunate in your travels to find such an ideal parking spot.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro) 

The 1916 Project

Count me as a fan of Judy Norton’s “Behind the Scenes of The Waltons” YouTube channel. She played Mary Ellen in the award-winning series that lives on in syndication perpetuity. Her myriad videos supply unique insight into the inner workings of a weekly television show from that very colorful snapshot in time, the 1970s. A recent installment revisited “A Walton Easter,” a 1997 reunion movie—the fifth and mercifully the last of them—that found the Walton family in 1969 and assembling for Ma and Pa’s “fortieth wedding anniversary.” 

That would mean, of course, that the couple tied the knot in 1929, but when The Waltons debuted in 1972, the family was “in the middle of the Depression,” 1933, and John-Boy was sixteen. In The Homecoming, the TV movie that inspired The Waltons, Olivia—Mama—revealed that her blossoming Christmas cactus took root "before the world war"—World War I—the year of her marriage to John. “1916, I recollect,” replied Grandpa. So, got it, Olivia and John Walton should have been celebrating their fifty-third anniversary in 1969, which, by the way, was when the latter passed away. That is, if we accept creator Earl Hamner Jr.’s closing narration in The Homecoming, where he intones, “For we lost my father in 1969.”

What’s the point of all this? It’s a television show after all. Still, we do appreciate a certain consistency and continuity on the small screen and in life in general. Fans remember details. In The Walton’s reunion movies, key people were no shows—like husbands, wives, and children—and went unmentioned. Budgetary savings, I guess. John-Boy was a New York City TV news anchor in 1969, covering the moon landing, which did occur that year, but in July, not at Eastertime. Why couldn’t the reunion movie take place on Olivia and John’s fiftieth anniversary in 1966. John-Boy could have been covering some important news event from that year—and there were many to report. Nowadays, I believe, series are more faithful to all that came before. But in the good old days, it didn’t seem to matter that much.

There are indeed life lessons to be had from The Waltons. And I’m not talking about the storylines and positive messaging. Rather, I’m looking at the broader picture. For one, the show went on much too long. After “John-Boy” Richard Thomas left the series, and “Grandma” Ellen Corby had a stroke, and “Grandpa” Will Geer died, it was probably time to call it a night and exit on top and still in the depression. Dianne Feinstein would have benefited from this life lesson. The later episodes had a stiff, almost soap opera feel to them. Also, you don’t cast a new actor in the role of a character so identified with another actor. Richard Thomas was John-Boy.

Finally, leave the classics alone. The 2021 remake of The Homecoming, which aired on the Hallmark Channel, was ghastly. The original captured the spirit of the Great Depression and hard times with edgy, unsanitized characters. Earl Hamner, Jr., the film’s director, Fielder Cook, and the older actors lived through the depression years. The movie looked the part in studio and on location. The modern version—well—didn’t from the neatly pressed, L.L Bean wardrobe to the all-too smart furniture to the banal Hollywood outdoor settings. You can’t go home again.  

 

Hare Today, Rabbit Tomorrow

Recently, I overheard a neighborhood eccentric inform his companion that he at long last learned the difference between a hare and a rabbit. This local oddball, a former college professor, has been around since time immemorial, living in an increasingly dilapidated house and, sadly, body as well. Like us all, he is aging and aging fast.

For years that turn into decades, there are countless individuals in our lives—on the periphery—that we know very little about. Men and women who cross our paths too many times to count that we barely acknowledge or don’t acknowledge at all. The nutty professor looks the part, acts the part, and keeps pretty much to himself. That is and always has been his modus operandi. Once upon a time, he was regularly spotted walking a strange looking, hairless little dog and—before that—pushing around his wheelchair-bound wife. The man nodded to me a time or two when our eyes met. But I got the impression that even such minimalist greetings made the professor extremely uncomfortable, so—when sharing the same sidewalk—I thereafter avoided any and all eye contact.

As time marches on and neighbors die and move away, life’s fleeting nature becomes impossible to ignore. Suddenly, these obscure folks in my tiny earthly orbit loom larger in my eyes. There’s this peculiar, misshapen fellow about my age who is frequently seen chiding his pooch to behave or—heaven forbid—suffer the consequences. I know his name and remember him from way back when—as a teen—thumbing through the dirty magazines in the back of—what was colloquially known as—“Optimo” or the "cigar store." This guy is pushing sixty now and looks worse for the wear, but I’ve known of him for more than forty years.

These days when people leave town who have been around forever, I feel on occasion as if I’ve missed something by not getting to know them better. After all, living in an ever-changing neighborhood for—in some instances—a half century or more, we shared much in common. And the clock is ticking. If I so desire, I could—the next time I encounter him—engage the nutty professor in conversation and discover what exactly he taught and where he taught it. I could, too, try to break down the wall of the man who—all those years ago—thumbed through Playboy magazine but never once purchased a copy, much to the disgust of the shop’s proprietor. Oh, truth be told, I can’t say for certain whether he did or didn’t, but I’m pretty confident it was the latter.

On second thought, I’ll leave these two cases in point alone, because that’s how they have long wanted it. And one day in the not-too-distant future they will be only memories. The professor will go to his grave at least knowing how to distinguish a hare from a rabbit, which is something, I suppose.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)