A fine actor named George Kennedy has died at the age of 91. I never had what I'm sure would have been the pleasure of meeting Mr. Kennedy but I came close. When I was working on Welcome Back, Kotter, its star Gabe Kaplan met him at some Hollywood function and Kennedy told him he always watched the show because his kids loved it. Gabe, figuring our show could do worse than secure an Oscar-winning actor as a guest star, invited Kennedy to appear in an episode. Kennedy agreed.
The staff quickly whipped up a script for him. Earlier in the season, a story had been developed about a gym teacher who engages in corporal punishment, hitting and slapping students in violation of the rules. The script was worked and reworked but no one was happy with it and it was abandoned. Then someone suggested that George Kennedy sure looked like a gym teacher so why not take just that premise — a gym coach into striking his students — and see what the newer writers on the show could do with it?
Everyone pitched in and the script was totally rewritten. In the new version, Coach Caruso (that was his name because that was the name of a gym coach Gabe had had in high school) slaps John Travolta's character in front of other students. He screams, "This is what you deserve for that performance you're going to give in a mini-series about O.J. Simpson forty years from now!" Okay, that's not true. I forget the real reason.
Anyway, the script came out pretty good. It was scheduled and sent over to George Kennedy who immediately decided he wouldn't do it. His stated reason was that his children would never forgive him he played a guy who slapped Vinnie Barbarino…but when our producer suggested we could write something else for another week, Kennedy said he was kinda busy or something that indicated he just plain didn't want to do the show. So someone else — an old-time western actor named Scott Brady — played Caruso.
We were all disappointed. I always thought George Kennedy was a superb actor — and for comedy as well as drama. I forget if it was before or after the Kotter near-booking but I saw him once in a production of Plaza Suite directed by Danny "Neil's Brother" Simon and co-starring Carol Burnett. I don't think it's humanly possible for a play to be funnier than that one was that night.
There was a time in his life when all George Kennedy wanted to be was a senior officer in the military. Some of the obits allude to him having made the shift from that to acting when he got some work as a stand-in on the Phil Silvers show, You'll Never Get Rich, more commonly known as Sgt. Bilko. Mr. Silvers once told me his version of it, which was that the Army had assigned Kennedy to their program as a kind of technical adviser on Army procedures. When the crew heard how little Kennedy's pay was in the Army, they decided to throw him some extra bucks by giving him extra work, usually as an M.P. Eventually, he got a few lines and then came the acting bug. He sure did well for himself.