Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club is Nathan Rabin’s ongoing exploration of books involving show business, with a special emphasis on the very bad and the very sleazy.
Bob Crane is best known for starring in the inexplicably popular Nazi-themed sitcom Hogan’s Heroes and for dying in an unsolved murder related to his secret life as a sex addict and homemade pornographer. He may have been murdered by his partner in swinging and voyeurism John Carpenter. No, not that John Carpenter: an entirely different weird dude from the 1970s obsessed with film, or at least amateur, early video.
As far as distinctions go, those are pretty memorable ones. Paul Schrader, a man who knows a thing or two about sex, guilt, and self-destruction, made a fairly engaging biopic about Crane called Auto Focus, starring a perfectly cast Greg Kinnear, who captured both Crane’s glib charm and his stormy depths.
When I saw that Crane’s son Robert Crane had written (along with writing partner Christopher Fryer) a book entitled Crane: Sex, Celebrity, And My Father’s Unsolved Murder, I understandably assumed that it would be a book about the elder Bob Crane’s brief, alternately charmed and cursed life and career and awful death. I was wrong. A more accurate title would have been Crane: Some Stuff About Sex, Celebrity, And My Dad’s Unsolved Murder But Mainly My Life As John Candy’s Publicist And My Undistinguished Career As A Freelance Writer.
I did not realize until too late that the Crane in the book’s title was really the author and not his father. The book is a giant bait and switch. I came for an intimate portrayal of a tortured soul who was the picture of wholesome, clean-cut, chipper American masculinity to the public but consumed by his libido in private, as told by someone who knew him like none other. Instead I got a book that dispatches with the Bob Crane stuff relatively early on, then goes on for hundreds of pages about subject matters far less interesting and way more self-indulgent.
That’s a shame, because the stuff related to Bob Crane’s life is genuinely compelling. Crane loved being a big kid. He was his son’s playmate, pal, and hero, an energetic goof who was forever fiddling around with primitive technology, making home movies with his family as the cast and diligently, painstakingly editing the interviews with celebrities who were a major component of his popular Bob Crane Show radio show on KNX-CBS. Bob Crane was a radio personality in the truest sense, a man whose energy and curiosity never flagged, who intuitively liked people and had a snappy line of patter for everyone.
He also loved gizmos: recording equipment, video equipment, film equipment, it didn’t matter. At the beginning, Crane’s almost Nixon-like obsession with recording things was relatively innocent. It was the stuff of home movies and radio shows. But as Crane’s life darkened and he moved away from the security of his life as a family man and further into a shadowy nightmare world of sexual compulsion, his use of technology grew more disturbing. As an enthusiastic homemade pornographer, his life focused more on providing a never-ending stream of casual encounters to document for posterity over his family and career.
If Crane was legitimately a book about the author’s father and was about half as long, it might be worth reading. Bob Crane comes alive in his son’s affectionate prose. The younger Crane creates a vivid portrait of life as a celebrity’s child in an exciting and tumultuous era. The portions involving the aftermath of Crane’s murder are chilling.
The subtitle suggests that the book will be a journalistic investigation into his father’s murder, like James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, which was partially about his life, and partially about his mother’s long-unsolved murder. That does not turn out to be the case here. I went into the book assuming, like most did, that Crane’s murderer was John Carpenter. If Carpenter were innocent, would someone as creepy as Willem Dafoe have played him a movie? Carpenter was tried for the murder but was acquitted, largely due to the incompetence of the law enforcement folks handling the case.