His Mission, Should He Choose to Accept It!

Actor Peter Graves to Receive Star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame Tomorrow

There is only a short list of ways to achieve Hollywood immortality: One is to win an Oscar. Another is to sign your name in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. But the most lasting of them all may be to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Tomorrow, October 30, at 11:30 a.m., actor Peter Graves, the longtime Pacific Palisades resident best known for his lead role on TV’s ‘Mission: Impossible’ (1966-73 and a 1988-90 revival) will receive his star on the Walk of Fame for his achievements in television. The ceremony will take place in front of the famed Hollywood restaurant and watering hole Musso & Frank Grill, on 6667 Hollywood Blvd. ‘It’s the perfect spot,’ Graves tells the Palisadian-Post. ‘Just terrific! A landmark itself.’ He adds that he knows the area well. ‘We lived in Hollywood for those first couple of years.’ ‘We,’ being Graves and his wife of 59 years, Joan Graves, a very active member of the Palisades community. The Graveses raised three daughters here in town”Kelly, Claudia and Amanda”and they have six grandchildren. Graves courted the former Joan Endress in 1949, as Graves recalls, ‘while working on a play at the New Horizon Theatre, next to the [Palisadian-Post offices] on Via de la Paz. We were still living in Hollywood. She had an apartment, I had a room in a rooming house. We felt we were on good enough ground to get married. With the approval of her family, we did. We had loved the Palisades from having worked on the play. My brother had a house on Bienveneda. When we went looking for a place to live, we chose the Palisades.’ Graves adds drolly, ‘People would say, ‘Why out there? Don’t you want to be closer to the studios and Hollywood?” You can figure out Graves’ answer to that one. However, to his dismay, Hollywood moved to the Palisades. ‘It took them a few years to figure it out,’ he says. ‘Heads of places like Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal, MGM, Columbia and all of those studios moved to town. Back then, they had long commutes. There was all that land from Bundy west on out with nothing on it. At Bundy and Olympic, they had a drive-in theatre.’ Looking back on a career in movies and television that spans five decades, Graves declined to comment on some of his worst cinematic experiences. ‘Everybody has some films that they’re sorry they made,’ he says. ‘I forgot them and I never talk about them.’ And he wasn’t about to delve into yet another conversation about his greatest hits either, which include the ‘Airplane!’ movies, which, in the early 1980s, repurposed Graves for a whole new context: ZAZ comedies (movies made by the team of Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker). Instead, the seasoned actor shared anecdotes about working on some of his earliest films, which will be among the movies that Hollywood tourists will think of now as they stroll by Musso and Frank’s and peer down at the pavement. ‘STALAG 17’ Directed by Billy Wilder With William Holden Graves played Price, a hot shot German spy placed among allied POWs. The feature inspired the late 1960s sitcom ‘Hogan’s Heroes.’ ‘Billy Wilder,’ Graves muses. ‘What a start in show biz. Billy was a pressure writer. He would never sit down months or even weeks in advance to do a screenplay. The movie was based on a play, and Billy used one of the authors of that play in the movie as one of the guys in the barracks. The screenplay fell to Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. Only 20 pages of script had been written. Somebody would come down and say Billy is working, so we’d play cards and tell jokes and, at 2 p.m., he waved down a couple of pages. We did the rest of the film that way. We were able to start it in chronological order and shoot to the end, when they throw me out to the guards.’ ‘The NAKED STREET’ With Anthony Quinn A year after playing opposite Quinn in ‘East of Sumatra,’ Graves co-starred with him in this film noir, in which a mobster (Quinn) springs a condemned murderer (Farley Granger). Graves played an investigative reporter working on an expos’ of Quinn’s underworld empire. ‘That was just before Tony went to Italy and got really famous,’ Graves says. ‘He was married to Cecil B. DeMille’s daughter, and I don’t know that their marriage was too happy. Tony was always looking for a way to better himself as an actor and get at good parts. He had places he had to go to. It was great playing with him in that one, especially with Anne Bancroft in it. Very shortly after that, he went and did [Fellini’s] ‘La Strada’ that brought him the worldwide stardom that he deserved.’ ‘BLACK TUESDAY’ With Edward G. Robinson This film noir marked the return of Robinson playing the gangsters he made his name on in Warner Bros.’ early years. The plot concerned a killer (Robinson) and a bank robber (Graves) who escape from prison and hold hostages in a warehouse. Graves says he loved playing opposite Robinson: ‘You sort of worship at the altar of a great actor, you soak it up like a sponge. That’s the nice part of it. Actors learning how to act or how to act better.’ ‘The Long Gray Line’ Directed by John Ford. With Tyrone Power and Maureen O’Hara Inspired by the true life story of scrappy Irish immigrant Marty Maher, the West Point drama paired Power with O’Hara, one of Ford’s favorite leading ladies. Graves played Col. Rudolph Heinz. ‘John Ford, he was big as you can get,’ Graves says. ‘I went in to interview with him. We talked for a while. My agent was in there. Finally, Ford said, ‘You’re perfect.’ We smiled and danced out of his room. My agent called Casting, trying to get a big raise for me. He thought he could get the salary doubled or whatever. Casting said, ‘No, no, no.’ They said, ‘Nobody pays for a 3-cent stamp without [Columbia chief] Harry Cohn’s approval. If Peter wants to work in the movie, fine, if not goodbye.’ We all did the project and had a ball doing it.’ ‘Night of the HUNTER’ Directed by Charles Laughton. With Robert Mitchum Graves played the patriarch of the family invaded by Mitchum’s sham man-of-the-cloth interloper in this noir thriller. In their only scene together, inside a jail cell, Graves decks Mitchum clean off of the top of their bunk bed. Mitchum’s solemn, terrifying performance and the ambient art direction, with the filming of nighttime exteriors inside studio hangar sets, made the proceedings surreal and spooky. The only film ever directed by actor Laughton, ‘Night’ bombed at the box office, but it has since garnered a following. ‘Big Bob Mitchum, it was a superb thing for him,’ Graves says. ‘It’s a classic, a cult film now. No one knew what it would be except the people who made the film. I believe [the film’s producer] Paul Gregory found the story and enlisted the partnership of his good friend, Charles Laughton. He had been asked to direct a number of times before that, but it was Paul’s friendship and the piece of material. I understand that many other people asked him to direct but he really didn’t want to do that. He died not too many years after it was made. It was great to work with a master actor because master actors make super directors. They understand actors.’