Gil Peterson

ACTOR

 Where were you in your life and career when you first heard about the movie version of Jacqueline Susann’s most famous novel?

When I was a college senior at Mississippi State University and a halfback for the school’s very highly-rated football team. I was also a ballad singer and I was always very fond of Jack Jones -- one of the best male singers around.  I was a very big fan of modern jazz vocal harmony and I had a group like that. In college during the summers, we played Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and we followed closely in the footsteps of The Four Freshman, although we did our own charts.  But music was changing at the time, moving more and more away from music into stuff that was not music – three chords and that was it.  You know the difference between a jazz musician and a rock musician, of course.  A rock band plays three chords for 10,000 people and a jazz band plays 1000 chords for 3 people.  I stuck with what I liked. But really the type of singing that I was doing was heading south.  

How did acting figure into your plans?

I was still playing football when Columbia Pictures contacted my agent and asked me to come to New York for a one-camera interview/personality test with Joyce Selznick.  I had to go to my MSU coach to ask to get the OK for a few days off from practice– if I promised him that no matter what happened, I’d return. I flew up and after the personality test went well, I told Joyce Selznick that I was going to finish my senior year and continue to play football.  She told me that when I’d graduated, to please contact her.

And did you?

When I graduated, I had an opportunity to go to California and talk to a producer for Tops Records named Dave Pell and that company was about to branch out in singles. He was the producer for Tops Records and they were about to branch out in singles.  I’d only been there two or three months when Tops folded and so there I was, trapped in California.  I started working with the great pianist and songwriter Bobby Troup (he and his wife Julie London were so good to me), and, with the marvelous guitar player and wonderful man Herb Ellis, I recorded the album “Our Last Goodbye.” That got the ball rolling for me. I did a couple of small things in TV series like Combat!, Run for Your Life, 12 O’Clock High and The F.B.I. Around then, 1967, Warner Bros. was looking at everybody in the world for the leading male role in the musical The Cool Ones. I think they interviewed 600 people for it. 

Suddenly, Warner Bros. and Universal were most interested in doing something with me. Universal wanted to offer me a contract player deal and their idea was to put me in various TV series to build me up. I  thought the Warner Bros. deal was probably the best one because they wanted to put me right away in The Cool Ones and five other pictures. If I was going to be an actor, I wanted to be a film actor. In those days, you were either a film actor or a television actor. I went with Warner Bros. and did The Cool Ones, which the great dancer Gene Nelson directed.  He was such a nice man.  Good director, good person, too.

The William Morris Agency wanted to represent me, which Gene thought was a good idea. In hindsight, taking the WB deal was a very big mistake, though, because Seven Arts bought out Warner Bros. in 1967 shortly after we finished The Cool Ones.  The buyout triggered a clause in all of our contracts that made them null and void.  Bill Conrad produced The Cool Ones and he had something like an 18-picture deal but everybody’s contract got slashed. Gene Nelson suggested I get represented and was really supportive.

Had you studied dance, acting, all of that?

I had taken some modern dance classes but I was no professional.  I didn’t have to do much dancing in The Cool Ones and it didn’t take my talent to do the big dance number “The Tantrum.” (laughing)

How did Valley of the Dolls enter your life?

All I knew about Valley of the Dolls was from my agents at William Morris who’d been contacted and told me there was a lot of interest in me playing the part of the singer Tony Polar. He’s supposed to be this handsome Italian sort of lady-killer kind of singer. I never thought I was very handsome but I did know that I pretty good look on film.  Sometimes people look better on film than they do in real life.  So, I went in and tested but I certainly didn’t look Italian.  I didn’t have dark hair, which is probably why they didn’t pick me. They chose someone else for that role but they hired me to play a smaller part as the co-star of a movie within a movie starring Patty Duke’s character. I played her leading man, the actor opposite her. t was a straight scene, not a musical scene and not terribly long. The idea was that the movie scene we’re in was supposed to be romantic but very stilted. They wanted us to do it in a very stilted way and that’s the way we did it. The scene was just Patty Duke and me. The situation was that her character was already on drugs and all that and she was going to see the movie in a theater later. 

What were your experiences doing the scene with Patty Duke, the director and the crew?

I was a very open and friendly person, very sensitive.  Patty Duke knew that I was an inexperienced actor.  She also knew that she could take advantage of me and she didn’t.  In fact, she was very nice to me.  She had so much more experience than I did but she didn’t try to upstage me or throw shadows on my face.  She never tried any of the tricks that some of these people do.  It’s just ridiculous that people do that but that’s one of the trademarks of Hollywood.  She was just a truly pleasant person and was very kind and generous to me.  I really appreciated what she did because I was this fairly new, upcoming guy. I don’t recall anything about Mark Robson, frankly, but everyone I met on that movie was so very nice to me.  It was a good experience – that’s the way it went down.

 Where did you first see the movie and how did you react?

They had a special showing for us at 20th Century Fox as they always do.  It’s the only time I’ve ever seen the movie.  Bobby Troup and I were very good friends, as I said, and he may have had something to do with the film – maybe he played in the orchestra or something, I don’t know – but he was at that screening, too.  My part got slashed.  I think this was a matter of the film running too long and that was one of the scenes that was taken out of it.  I never saw what we had shot.

What did you think of the performance of Tony Scotti who played the Tony Polar role?

It’s a long time ago, of course, but quite frankly, I don’t remember him in the movie or his performance. 

After that, you did lots of television before leaving the business in the mid-‘80s. Do you think your good looks were a help or a hindrance?

To some extent, the way I looked hurt me. I was doing acting workshops and, in those, I really liked doing the character parts.  I went on auditions to play the villain.  I was a very good cold reader.  Some of these directors that I read said you’re gonna hear from us – I never did because I didn’t look the part. I never considered myself a great actor or anything but I was getting more comfortable in front of the camera.  The only reason I wanted to stay in front of the camera was so I could learn filmmaking.  Whenever I was on set, I’d ask if I could look through the viewfinder.  The directors were usually very nice about that.  I was very good at knowing where they were cutting, how far down my chest was it going to be cut.  I wanted to know.  I think they figured out that’s what I wanted to do eventually. In workshops I took with the actor James Best, I liked directing people in the stuff I wrote.

People in the “Me Too” era talk a lot about the ‘casting couch,’ which, of course, they should. But what about the casting couch for men?

That’s another problem that I had.  Drugs and homosexuality were becoming a huge part of the industry at the time and, being a young pretty boy, I had a lot of trouble with that.  It was another thing that I absolutely could not tolerate and would not be a part of. That didn’t help me.  I just didn’t want to be around those people.  Again, I think that just comes from my basic background of being a conservative southern person. I was [propositioned] a number of times.  ‘Not interested, thank you.’  That’s why a lot of the casting people get in those positions, so they can take advantage.  Any time you have a role available in a film, anyone of one hundred people can do that equally as well.  So either you know the right people or cater to the right people and capitulate.  That’s just the way it is.  I have no way of knowing how it is now but I expect it’s a lot worse.

Again the business was changing so dramatically in the late ‘60s.  I grew up in a very small town with very basic concepts of the world and very conservative.  Things were leaning more and more toward, not nudity or pornography, but it was headed in that direction.  I could see it more and more and I didn’t like that.  I was offered some things but they had nude scenes.  I was also offered a couple of things in magazines, too.  Burt Reynolds was a friend of mine.  I didn’t know him extremely well but I was close to Jim Best and he and Burt Reynolds were extremely good friends.  Burt used to come by our workshop a lot. When he did his Cosmopolitan thing, he wasn’t totally nude but it launched his career.  There’s no question about that.

I started a very small film company with Jim Best and a wonderful writer and friend William S. Ballenger. We were selling stocks in the company and were about to launch  our first film but someone I trusted caused serious problems and we dissolved the company and gave everyone their money back. It crushed me that someone could do that. It was heartbreaking. I did a couple of things television wise but I gradually got out of that and joined a friend of mine in a commercial real estate properties all over the United States.