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An educated, charming Puerto Rican,
Darrow was brought up alternately in New York City (where he was born) and
Puerto Rico. His background was solidly middle-class enough to allow him
two years studying political science at the University of Puerto Rico. It
later brought him to New York as an aspiring actor, found him a wife and set him
off on a career which brought him a lot of bad parts, almost no money and no
fame at all.
One of the reasons may be that off
the screen Darrow looks -- his hair combed forward over his forehead, the back
brushing the top of his dull green jacket -- just nice, like a young English
instructor in a Midwestern college town. Press agents are fond of saying
that Darrow, for unexplainable, animal-magnetism reasons, "commands
attention" whenever he appears off the screen. It's true, but in that
paradoxical, college-professor way. Darrow's eyelashes are long and
languid, lovely, but they cover intelligent eyes. His teeth have not been
capped; they are pale gray and ordinary -- his left eyetooth a little
crooked. That tooth looks fine, faintly humorous, fairly
provocative. What comes through, in Mexican costume or sport jacket, is
not so much that Henry Darrow has an amorphous, package sex appeal as that he is
a bona-fide human being.
At lunch we are flanked by not one
but two public-relations men. To the left, a studio representative, pale,
bespectacled, worried, in a checked jacket. To the right, Darrow's
personal employee in a blue jacket. He hands us a letter from Photoplay
magazine congratulating him on having represented not one but two award winners
in a recent poll; Glenn Ford as greatest something or other, Henry Darrow as
Most Promising Newcomer.
Darrow looks embarrassed but
pleased. HE gazes down at his plate and says something which sounds like
"Zap." According to his official biography he is 35, might be
older, could be younger. At any rate, he is at some symbolic if not
chronological halfway point in his life. After a various, 10-year
patchwork of roles in movies, television and little theater, he is a strong,
provisional success.
A competent actor and talented mimic,
he has played, among his better roles, a rosy-cheeked lago in a two-bit
production of "Othello," a Hungarian on The Wild Wild West, a
Pawnee on Iron Horse, and an Englishman here, a German there. But
his specialty, naturally, has been Latin roles, and for some time he made
bread-and-butter money as a slick lawyer on the daytime serial General
Hospital.
"They told me the nicer I acted
the worse I'd seem to be. So I'd smile like this, Zap!" He grins
ingenuously and really does look wicked. "And like someone would call
me from another room, and I'd say, 'Just a minute ---.'" He pulls
some papers from his vest pocket, looks shifty, leers around, smiles, puts the
papers back. "That's how it was. Zap! I didn't have to do
anything. Just look rotten.
"I've always done dialect
work. I had all these Spanish accents, Northern, Castilian, Basque,
Mexican...I'd ask a producer what kind he wanted, and he's say, 'What are you,
some kind of a wise guy?' Finally, I'd just say, 'You want Continental
Spanish?'" He clears his throat, speaks a little of his all-purpose
accent, tucking his chin down into his shirt. He looks corrupt and Latin,
an official who spends all day signing documents and taking bribes.
"For The High Chaparral I learned some Apache."
Checked Jacket interrupts. He
wants Darrow to tell about his colorful Indian tutor, reputed grandson of
Cochise. Darrow doesn't respond.
"Apache is guttural, aspirate,
it comes from the throat. I had to learn some Pawnee for another show,
both the accent and enough of the language to get along, and it's a different
sound altogether, it comes from the diaphragm mostly, it's kind of a grunt."
I ask him to demonstrate and he complies; "Hungh, ungh, glah."
"Some critics," Blue Jacket
observes, "are inaccurate for their own purposes. They put down
people because it makes them sound good."
Darrow seems about to agree, then
doesn't. He takes a bite of food. "Zap," he says.
Darrow's enthusiasm seems out of
place on The High Chaparral. David Dortort has combined elements of
Bonanza and countless other Westerns, together with stylistic echoes of
I
Spy, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek into yet another plastic
panegyric to group-living in the Old West. Chaparral is economical
in a way; it runs 60 minutes but achieves a ponderous, 90-minute dignity.
Big John, Billy Blue and the rest spend quantities of time going in and out of
doors, getting on and off horses. Sometimes, not always, Manolito
transcends the form.
"The kind of guy Manolito
is," Darrow explains, "is that he likes nothing better than to get in
a two-against-one fight. Especially if he's one of the two. He's
what you might call a devout chicken." Originally Manolito was
conceived as a skulking villain, but Darrow's own undeniable charm has changed
the character into a nice man. "I'm still bad, " he says.
"I killed my best friend the other day. But he drew first, and I
guess I didn't even know he had a gun. Wasn't that it?" He
looks to blue Jacket, who nods.
To
The High Chaparral Darrow
lends his blood, his soul. He is alive, which is more than can be said for
some of those other Western wooden shooters-of-Indians. But he can't do it
all. In a recent episode, in which Manolito falls in love with a Latin
lovely slated for the convent, everything is gratuitous, from the
rattlesnake which disables Manolito so that he can be tended by nuns, right down
to the final renunciation. After the final commercial, Manolito stands
alone in a moon-drenched patio and addresses a Higher Power -- either God or the
Network. "Thank you," he says, looking bemused, his hair combed
into his eyes, "for the little time I had..."
What happens after The High
Chaparral? "He's very big in Sweden right now," Checked Jacket
mentions. "That's right," Darrow says. "I am.
They want me to come over for a series of personal appearances. I have to
do this act. But for Swedes, and in Sweden -- I mean I don't know
how to do an act. I don't know what they want me to do. They
understand English over there but...they're very big for the character of
Manolito. What would the character of Manolito do for an act?"
"You wear your costume,"
Checked Jacket cautiously begins.
"My costume? It's all
dirty and dusty."
"The sharp costume from the
show. The Spanish one, the tight one. That's very becoming to
you. You can wear that with your figure."
"Oh, OK. But what do I do?"
He turns to me. "I can do all those imitations. But how would
Manolito do imitations? They said I could do an imitation of the Swedish
Prime Minister...but I've never even heard him...?
"Do you know how to crack a
whip?" Checked Jacket asks. "You go out in the tight costume,
the sharp costume, and do you know the wrap-around? You take a beautiful
girl, maybe from the audience, you crack that whip, you wrap it around her, draw
her to you, and give her a big kiss. It'd make a great finale."
"I don't know," Darrow
says. "I'd kill her probably."
If the act succeeds in Sweden, it
won't be because of second-rate songs and secondhand gimmicks. Darrow will
carry it. But actors like Darrow, with a little something going for them
beyond the ordinary, maintain a precarious balance. The system chips away
at their talent, all too often turning them into punch-drunk old pros before
their time, the kind who go along with the gimmicks. But the producers
aren't worried. There will always be next year's discoveries, impatiently
awaiting their turns to be featured, spoiled, flattered, cornered in every way
until all they can say is Zap!
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