he did probably know. I don’t recall him ever mentioning such in any interview, tho.
Thr first three seasons were good. Ground breaking, funny, and very popular. But by the third season, they were starting to become a little formulaic (formulaeic?). I liked the later years much better (even disregarding the crush I had on Mike Farrell)
My recollection as a MASH fanatic is that both Larry Linville and Wayne Rogers (and McLean Stevenson as well) asked to be let out of their contracts. None of them were fired.
Wiki backs me up – on Larry:
On Wayne:
Rogers had basically given the producers an ultimatum: Pay me more, or I’ll go back to being a stock broker. Rogers was losing money by being on the show as he made more by being a broker than he did on a top rated TV show (Guess he was pretty good at it.).
That’s the thing about brokers - whether the market is up or down - they make money
Huh. Trapper John, MBA.
I wonder how much Rogers was paid for House Calls.
There was one that Hunnicut didn’t resist.
I wish they did a little more with Frank. By all accounts, Linville was said to be an excellent actor.
I vaguely remember that, but didn’t he feel all guilty afterward?
What a pussy.
Yep. He was going to write Peg all about it, and Hawkeye talked him out of it.
One of the more maudlin episodes. I hated BJ when he was strong but sensitive.
Part of his guilt was he didn’t want to hurt the nurse’s feelings - he was afraid she expected him to continue to be with her - and he was surprised when she said (I’m paraphrasing) “no, it was a one time thing - I just needed someone then and there”
Oh yeah. Because she had just gotten a Dear Jane letter.
It plays like an episode of Smallville - people don’t have sex just for the sake of having sex, it’s because there’s some strong positive (they’re in love, so it’s okay) or negative (their feelings are hurt, so it’s understandable but not okay) emotion.
Lesson for the teens in the audience: sex is heavy-duty stuff.
Wayne Rogers is an interesting guy (and an Alabamian, incidentally). I saw an interview with him once when he discussed how he got into finance. He was in a play with Peter Falk, an actor he knew and admired from many stage and screen appearances (though this was pre-Columbo), and became friends with him. Falk was almost suicidally depressed at the time because even though he’d made a fortune by this time bad business management followed by trying to tend to his own affairs and a margin-call had left him broke and deeply in debt to the IRS and having to consider bankruptcy. Around the same time it became common knowledge that Bill Cosby was in a similar situation- he was making $50,000 per week in Vegas or whatever but almost broke due to the IRS and bad management- and John Wayne was having financial problems in spite of earning a huge amount of money (due to violating Bialystok’s top two rules: NEVER PUT YOUR OWN MONEY IN THE SHOW! [or in Wayne’s case The Alamo). Rogers noticed how generally terrible actors and creative people around him were with money and he was terrified of earning millions and ending up in debt so he read everything he could on business and the stock market and real estate investments so that he could know how good his business manager was. When he told his manager “I want to invest in XYZ” based on his research into the venture, the manager explained why that was stupid and saved him a fortune by not doing it- and later on the XYZ investment Rogers had wanted turned out to be a goldmine as he was right and his manager was wrong. He said one of his governing principals ever since has been “Always remember that nobody else is as concerned with your money as you are”.
Since then he’s run his own investments and started advising other celebrities and show biz folks he knew (including Falk, who was set back aright by Columbo which he took solely for money). Rogers said that before MAS*H he was already richer than most of the actors he knew who were more famous and that he got to where he enjoyed business more than acting and did the latter just for investment capital (which is why he did House Calls). Now he takes parts once in a while (he played Morris Dees in Ghosts of Mississippi and Larry Hagman’s part in I Dream of Jeannie because it was $75,000 for a week’s work) but only when he feels like it. He now runs a firm that manages the business of people in Show Biz (he’s been a business manager for Olsen Twins since they were infants) and is on the board of directors of several companies. He also writes columns for business magazines and is a business analyst on Fox News. His personal worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Some of his advice for actors and others who suddenly start making megabucks, I remember, were:
1- a mansion is the worst possible thing you can purchase or rent (don’t do it til you can afford to keep it indefinitely)
2- NEVER give anyone your power of attorney or the authority to sign your checks
3- NEVER hire an exclusive business management arrangement
4- NEVER let a newbie, no matter how talented, manage your assets- you want an established firm (he said he knew this was hypocritical as he was a newbie once)
5- no entourage, or if you have to have one let the studio pay for it somehow
6- whenever possible have the studio pay your agent’s commission and invest the 10-15%
7- when your investments can support you let them, then invest everything you make from acting/singing/etc. (a sort of flip flop self-support)
Yep, the Wiki article was cleaned up by Otto4711.
By the way, the episode in which Frank jumped into the tub with the General did not have the General with “his chippie.” The female in question was his wife.
Are you remembering that from the episode or did you get it from Wiki? It would be kind of ironic to assume Wiki was correct.
Admittedly, I may be conflating this with another episode in which Potter (as I recall) described an embarrassing anecdote about a general who giving his secretary dictation… in a bathtub.
And, from what I read, a very smart and well liked guy.
I’m remembering it from the episode which I just watched a few days ago.
I met him (Linville) when he came on our college campus once. I was on the student committee that hired him, so I escorted him around campus a little bit. He was affable, laid back, and much nicer than I expected. At one point we met up with my girlfriend, and when I introduced them he turned the charm way up, but managed to stop just short of creepy/sleezy/inappropriate. It was actually quite interesting to watch.
Okay, then.
I seem to recall Hawkeye being married in the pilot episode (as he was in the books…I don’t know about the Robert Altman film), and the ring and any mention of a wife being removed in subsequent episodes. Can anyone verify or deny?
Stranger
I do recall reading, though I don’t have a cite, that Spearchucker was removed because there were no black surgeons in the Korean Theater at the time that the show was set, so he was removed and not referred to in order to keep the show somewhat true to life.
Don’t ask me to explain Chuck Cunningham.
SSG Schwartz