Lawrence Eisenberg

By Lawrence Eisenberg

Appeared In TV Guide September 29, 1984.

Telly Savalas stands at the rail of the Royal Viking Sky, coolly surveying the merriment around him. It is the "confetti scene" of ABC's Love Boat No. 183. "The Scandinavian Cruise," which, like most of the previous 182 programs, will show the entire guest cast and a group of extras throwing streamers toward an imaginary crowd on the pier, to indicate that yet another adventure is beginning. Susannah York losses her streamers elegantly. Jack Klugman laughs out loud. Priscilla Barnes, Christopher Norris and John Davidson are raucous. Even shy Janet Jackson manages to act as though she's having a marvelous time. Telly lights a cigarette.

One deck below. where the camera records this abandonment, second assistant director Charlie Siegel calls, "Telly, you're not throwing your streamers!"

Savalas gives the smile that kills. "It's not in character," he says, making a cursory wave at the camera.

Telly's very appearance on The Love Boat is not in character ("Have I ever watched the show? Don't ask me embarrassing questions," he says), nor is the person he portrays much like anybody you've met on the series: an arch-criminal who, at the denouement, not only doesn't regret his heinous activities, but has never once fallen in love during the cruise.

Telly is an anomaly for another reason. Though all the guest stars are famous to the skies back home, few people, with the exception of fellow passengers, know who they are in most of the ports on this cruise. But everybody knows Telly. In the Summer Palace outside Stockholm they call to him in myriad tongues. In Helsinki's Market Square they shake his hand. And in Leningrad's Hermitage Museum, Russian women (who, it is rumored, have seen Kojak on a TV signal pirated from Helsinki) toss off their babushkas wantonly and kiss him on the head. Well, yes, people have caught Klugman before and a few have seen Susannah York's films. But…yawn. With Telly around, The Love Boat becomes The Good Ship Lollipop. And while it's true that most stars want privacy, they hadn't bargained on so much of it. The thing is, when you're talking public adulation, everybody wants a piece of the pie. Jokes spring up: "If the Royal Viking Sky sinks, I can see the headlines: TELLY SAVALAS & 1000 OTHERS DROWN."

There would be a record of such a catastrophe thanks to John Davidson, who spends many of his nonworking hours filming everything with his videotape camera. John is bright and genuinely endearing, but he seems not to want to settle for that: he is always trying to sell you on some other John Davidson--an earnest, studious photojournalist--who doesn't have nearly the credibility of the real one. He also has this thing about interviewing people, as though nobody has told him That's Incredible! was canceled. In Leningrad, to the chortles and elbow-jabbing of his co-stars, he asks the Intourist guide, "Can you deduct business expenses from your taxes?...Was Peter the Great considered good for his people?" (Somebody suggests he do a new show--That's Deplorable!, adding that if the ship hit an iceberg, the last sight to be seen would be John and camera slowly sinking into the Baltic Sea, microphone hand barely above water and, gurgling from his lips, "How does it feel to drown?")

Alas, that subject comes up more than once. Since it first hit the waters in 1973, the beautiful Royal Viking Sky has been rated the Tiffany's of cruise ships. The Love Boat company had negotiated with the line for six years before a deal was made. But the Viking gods were riot smiling down on this Norse opera:

On June 8, having just come out of a four-week dry dock, the Sky sails from Southampton, England. The air-conditioning doesn't work until 8:30 the first sweltering evening. Two days later, the running water goes out until past dinner time; but the formal dress code is not relaxed, so many Love Boaters bathe in Perrier. Like something out of Spielberg-Lucas movies, toilets tend to flush by themselves during the night. From start to finish, the ship lists. In the middle of a concert by piano virtuoso Leonard Pennario, a lifeboat inexplicably lowers past the portholes. At midnight one night the lights go out and the engines stop. And, though you can get caviar at dinner every night and most crew members are courteous and charming, there is the occasional jar: at dinner one evening, the bodice of Susannah York's gown snaps off. The smiling waiter signals for a friend to come over and look ("On the QE2," huffs a tablemate, "the waiter would have given her a napkin to cover up"). And one company member, wanting to make a ship-to-shore call, is told by a woman at the information desk that he has to place it from the bridge. "Where is the bridge?" he asks. "Where it's always been," she replies.

But The Love Boat is like your mailman: nothing stops it from the completion of its appointed rounds, including some of the coldest, rainiest June weather in the history of the North Atlantic. "The Scandinavian Cruise" features four stories: Telly Savalas has constructed a robot that looks like Isaac (Ted Lange) and, with the help of an actress (Janet Jackson), will get the robot to pull off an ingenious crime. John Davidson is an advertising executive searching for a Scandinavian woman to represent a suntan lotion. To get the job, Christopher Norris pretends to be Swedish. An eccentric Swedish millionairess (Priscilla Barnes) falls for Gopher (Fred Grandy) and convinces him to marry her. And Jack Klugman, unsuccessful with women, decides that a nose job in Stockholm will solve his problems. Susannah York, who falls in love with him, is convinced he's getting a sex-change operation.

The script, which contains the word "love" 29 times in various forms, features an improvement over previous shows in the areas of humor and intrigue, though no reduction in the trademark lame jokes and exposition that seems designed for slow lip readers:

Vicki (Jill Whelan): "I've seen pictures of the fiords--narrow inlets surrounded by mountains. They're the greatest!"

Delia (Janet Jackson), describing a movie she's about to film: "It's kind of a spoof of war pictures. You know ... a little comedy ... a little danger."

But in 87 countries this is what the people crave. Among them is Mrs. George Steinbrenner, a passenger on the Sky. "There's so much sorrow and trouble in the world," she says. "It's a joy to see happy endings." (She mentions that her husband, principal owner of the New York Yankees, never watches anything else on Saturday night; adding that, considering the Yankees' record early in the season, he needs cheering up.)

Later, Fred Grandy, who could be acerbic on the subject of comflakes, adds, "Traveling by ship is buffet style--you get small portions of every country. Cruises seem to be designed for people who are afraid to travel. I take my kids on these trips, though I'm not instilling in them the love for travel that I had, but a love for midnight buffets. Our formula is inviolate: the network insists that whenever we go to a place we go to two places. They said, 'You can't just do a show on London.' Well, it didn't stop Dickens from doing a lot of work. We'll run out of world before we run out of story material."

It is 9 o'clock in the morning and a little girl, perhaps seven-years-old, in a party dress--one of hundreds of passengers who have gleefully volunteered to be extras--interrupts Grandy to say, "Hi, Gopher, where's Isaac?" When she leaves, somebody comments, "She really thinks she's living on the Love Boat." Fred responds, "Aren't we all?" Another passenger is asked by a crew member whether she is an extra. With pride approaching hauteur, she replies, "No, I'm an extra's wife."

Love Boatmania has also caught on in the business, considering the formidable guest-star names in recent seasons ("We're getting a better class of has-been," says a company member). Stars can earn up to $50,000, along with a free cruise (though cast members pay for their guests, on this cruise each of the actors gets a free cabin that's worth $483 per person per day).

There will be two cast changes in the eighth season of The Love Boat. First is the departure of cruise director Julie McCoy (portrayed for seven seasons by Lauren Tewes, who, according to executive producer Douglas S. Cramer, "was unmanageable on the set, rude to guest stars and had trouble keeping her weight down." Her fatal mistake was in the last salary-bargaining session, when she asked for more than $60,000 a show, which would have amounted to a raise of $20,000 per TV hour. Result: She was put permanently ashore to await a starring role in what a company member wryly calls, "The Herve Villechaize Twilight Zone Comedy Hour"). On the season opener, Julie's departure is announced by the Captain (Gavin MacLeod): "This morning she married Marty Chenault...She wanted all of us to be there, but there just wasn't time."

The new cruise director is Judy McCoy, sister of Julie. As played by Patricia Klous, she is the quintessential blonde cutie, with the perkiness stewardesses used to have before they became flight attendants. The second permanent cast addition is Ace, the ship's photographer (Ted McGinley, formerly of Happy Days). Ace is Judy's equivalent in male cuteness, so preppified that alligators could wear shirts with pictures of him on the pocket. Off­-camera, McGinley is surrounded by women; even Scandinavians are overwhelmed by his California blondness.

The ports are the real excitement for cast members, because they get to witness hitherto unrecorded--and sometimes un­heard of--events:

A vast party scene, originally planned for the garden courtyard of Stockholm's city hall, is rained out. Thanks to the influence of Swedish filmmaker Henrik von Sydow (Max's son), they are permitted to move to the Bib Rummet, the huge reception hall where Nobel Prize winners are honored. One hundred Swedish extras in party dress (who are paid 200 kronor--$25--for the day, unreported, right in their own city hall) mill around with stars for the entrance of Helga's Joy, a racehorse. Clop, clop comes Helga's Joy across the red carpet. Not in the script--nor in the history of the Nobel Prize--is what he next does on the carpet.

Between scenes, cast members headquarter in the anteroom of city hall's ladies room. Says Bernie Kopell ("Doc"): "No matter how far you get in the business, this is where you wind up." They kill time comparing early sex experiences.

Gavin MacLeod says he was told nothing about sex until his late teens, when his uncle took him aside. The vital facts, in their entirety, were: "Those girls from Ossining--stay away from them." Ted Lange then talks of trying to impress girls in high school by joining the track team and taking dance lessons. "But I was the lousiest athlete in school and I couldn't learn how to dance." Priscilla Barnes says, "Are you sure you're black?"

In Helsinki, the only port in this itinerary where The Love Boat is shown, members of the permanent cast are stunned by a mob cheering them at the gangway. The fans don't leave until the ship sails 11 hours later. And Jill Whelan is the star of a real drama--finishing a scene seven minutes before the anchor Iifts so she can fly back to Los Angeles for her graduation from The Buckley School, after which she will rejoin the cast in Copenhagen.

It is in Leningrad where the company has its most exotic moments, unfortunately never to be seen on TV. Doug Cramer tells of meeting with the Soviets in August 1983. After all production details had been torturously mapped out, Korean Air Lines' Flight 007 was shot down by the Soviets and ABC canceled the deal. In March of this year, negotiations were reopened to film in Leningrad. Then the Soviets backed out of the Olympics, and the deal was canceled again.

As the Sky is docking in Leningrad, Fred Grandy wanders around reading aloud from what he claims is a Russian phrasebook: "Where can I sell these explosives? ... How much for that black­market icon? ... I'm feeling depressed. Where do I buy some drugs?"

Once the anchor is dropped, the Love Boat company is not even permitted to take production cameras out on deck. But cast members spend two days in this beautiful, faded city, where you see hardly any cars and hear few sounds from the curiously sedate people, who seem to have stepped out of pods in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Intourist guides tell of the wonderful living conditions, pointing to apartment houses that seem about to fall down. The days are without end (in June it doesn't get dark that far north) and the air is filled with what looks like flying cotton, which turns out to be the hairy­tufted seeds shed by poplar trees. Love Boaters gawk at the treasures in the Hermitage. but are horrified to see, in one gallery, an open window admitting sunlight directly onto a Rembrandt.

Paranoia is fueled by customs guards who take your passport every time you leave the ship and return it only when you get back. It is heightened when Doug Cramer takes a party of 14 to Sadko, Leningrad's leading nightclub. After an evening of caviar and vodka in a private dining room, a friendly Russian points under the table--to a listening device.

The perfect Soviet paranoia story has been told to Christopher Norris: A Sky passenger in a Hermitage gallery has witnessed two police throwing a Russian woman to the floor, searching her purse, and then jabbing a needle into her arm and pulling out her unconscious body. The passenger, a Texan, verifies the story, except for one detail: "There was no needle. They just knocked her down and drugged her outta the room."

Russia becomes a memory as the Sky makes its last port—Copenhagen--where the company moves onto a smaller ship to be joined by the guest stars of the next show. On the first night ashore, The Love Boat's permanent cast goes to Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen's beautiful amusement park, where Yolanda Kopell is giving a 51st birthday party for her husband, Bernie. Arm in arm walk Bernie, Gavin MacLeod, Fred Grandy, Ted Lange, and Jill Whelan--a heart-stopping sight for any American TV watcher.

But there are no Americans in the area--and all the Danes are gathered around Telly Savalas, giving him giant lollipops and shouting, "Who lervs ya. bebi?"
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Copyright Lawrence Eisenberg. 2010. All Rights Reserved