DAVID JANSSEN
Details of the Fugitive star’s life on the run.
“I’ve conditioned
myself to hole anger up
inside.”
— David
The night The Fugitive finale aired, David Janssen called into Joey Bishop’s late-night ABC show from the Columbus, Ga., set of The Green Berets, which he was shooting with John Wayne. “We didn’t feel as though we should sing sad songs,” he said of the drama’s denouement. “We thought because of the acceptance of the show everyone had done a good job and we were all going on to something better.”
That kind of understatement (the telecast shattered ratings records, drawing 72 percent of households on Aug. 29, 1967, a feat not surpassed until Dallas’ J.R. got shot in 1980) and kinetic propulsiveness made David the perfect choice to play intensely driven Dr. Richard Kimble, a man falsely accused of murdering his wife and hell-bent on clearing his name. He spent four seasons eluding Inspector Javertesque Lt. Gerard (Barry Morse) and pursuing the one-armed culprit (Bill Raisch). After the perp was killed, another witness exonerated Kimble in the finale. The tale proved so popular, it was remade twice — including as an Oscar-winning 1993 Harrison Ford–Tommy Lee Jones film.
None of this would’ve been possible without the mesmerizing presence of David, who spent his life chasing something that evaded him since childhood: love. His Ziegfeld showgirl mom divorced his
dad when David was 4. She put him in an orphanage while she followed her dreams of stardom. “David told me, ‘When and if my mother picked me up at the orphanage on Saturdays, she always took me back on Sundays,’” widow Dani recalls. This haunting memory drove David to drink. “Every party we went to, a friend would say, ‘OK, David’s in the orphanage.’ He was drunk, in other words, and sinking into melancholy ruminations.”
SENSITIVE & PASSIONATE
Booze wasn’t David’s only unhealthy habit. He was a true workaholic — he made 32 films between 1951 and 1956, despite a two-year break to serve a stateside Army hitch alongside pals Clint Eastwood and Martin Milner. He also starred in four TV series (Richard Diamond, Private Detective, with Mary Tyler Moore as his unseenbut-for-her-legs secretary; The Fugitive; O’Hara, U.S. Treasury; and Harry O). Plus, he was a four-pack-a-day smoker and an inveterate womanizer. His first wife, model Ellie Graham, “was insanely jealous and insecure,” Mike Phelps, co-author of her book David Janssen: My Fugitive, tells Closer. Suspicious David was sleeping with two-time Fugitive guest Suzanne Pleshette, Ellie threatened to come to the set with a gun and kill her. Later, David had a threemonth affair with Suzanne, but she broke it off when he wouldn’t leave Ellie.
Although he loved Ellie’s two daughters from a previous marriage like they were his own, David divorced her after 12 years in 1970. Five years later, he wed party girl Dani Crayne (nicknamed “The Mouth” for her gossipy streak), but they separated when he had a fling with Angie Dickinson, his co-star in 1977’s TV movie A Sensitive, Passionate Man. “He was a man who took charge, which I love,” Angie says. “He had poise and grace.” Still, David and Dani had reconciled when he tragically died of a sudden heart attack at 48 in 1980. He left Dani his $10 million estate (he owned 23 percent of The Fugitive). He willed his mother $1, which she said she never saw. After buying her a house, cars and minks to try to win her love, “in David’s opinion, he did enough for her in his lifetime,” says Phelps. “His debt was paid.” And his brief, brilliant run was sadly, finally over. — Bruce Fretts,
with reporting by Diana Cooper