Batman actor caught in superhero’s shadow
Adam West, actor: b Walla Walla, Washington, September 19, 1928; m (1) Billie Lou Yeagerd, (2) Nga Frisbie Dawson, (3) Marcelle Lear, 4d, 2s; d Los Angeles, June 2, 2017, aged 94.
Adam West played Batman in the television series that sparked a Bat-craze across America, became a minor landmark in popular culture, cult viewing for all ages and a perennial favourite around the world.
Dispensing with the morally ambiguous notion of the ‘‘Dark Knight’’, Batman, which ran for 120 episodes between 1966 and 1968, was a zany, villain-driven, Pop Art-influenced explosion of action and humour that rejoiced in its own absurdity.
Using a bright colour palette, psychedelic sets, tilting cameras to emphasise the crookedness of the baddies and screen-filling bursts of ‘‘Pow!’’, ‘‘Sock!’’ and ‘‘Wham!’’ during the fights, Batman recreated a comic-book world in which the crime-fighter and young sidekick Robin triumphed, but only after overcoming the most extreme peril.
Typically each story consisted of two parts and, like pantomime, adhered to a strict formula. Gotham City would be threatened by a dastardly schemer; Batman and Robin would be summoned, dispensing with their ‘‘real life’’ alter egos, the square-jawed millionaire Bruce Wayne and his ward, Dick Grayson; they would slide down the Batpoles into the Batcave before tracking the villain to his or her lair; a fight would ensue; they would be overpowered, strapped to a baroque contraption and left to their doom.
At this point the narrator, trembling with portentousness, would invite viewers to ‘‘Tune in tomorrow – same Bat-time, same Bat-channel’’. In the next instalment, the pair would extricate themselves and foil the plan.
Each week they found themselves tied to giant catapults, mousetraps or roasting spits, left dangling over tigers, trapped in quick-setting plaster or lowered into boiling wax, while the show introduced some of TV’s most memorable crooks in the Penguin (Burgess Meredith), the Joker (Cesar Romero), the Riddler (Frank Gorshin) and Catwoman (Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, Lee Meriwether).
Opposite this grinning array of devilry, West, aided by Burt Ward as the more excitable Robin, portrayed the crime-fighter with a deadpan earnestness – however ludicrous the scenarios – that contributed much to the show’s success. The official forces of law and order, meanwhile, were characterised as humourless and stolid.
Such sentiments chimed perfectly with the burgeoning teenage culture, while the producers’ decision to excise the ‘‘Dark Knight’’ and create a colourful action-comedy proved inspired in a country deflated by the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam and the civil rights struggle.
The show was an instant success, with so many celebrities clamouring for cameo roles that the producers turned down stars of the magnitude of Elizabeth Taylor. But it fell victim to changing fashions, a fall in the quality of its scripts and the sheer repetitiveness of its format.
The sheer success of Batman left West hopelessly typecast, however. In 2005 he said in an interview: ‘‘I could have played a naked Jack the Ripper, and someone would have said, ‘I hear that Batman’s back in a cape.’ ’’
Adam West was born Billy (William) West Anderson in Walla Walla, Washington State, in 1928. His father was a farmer, his mother harboured frustrated theatrical ambitions. At 12 West found her in bed with a preacher.
Three years later his parents divorced and he moved with his mother to Seattle, where she descended into alcoholism.
He was educated at Lakeside School in Seattle and Whitman College, where he read Literature and Psychology and acquired a reputation for carousing. He enrolled at Stanford for a postgraduate course in media studies but left after six weeks to become a disc jockey.
After two years in the US Army, West travelled around Europe before settling in Hawaii, where he presented a variety programme called The Kini Popo Show, opposite Peaches the Chimp. In his 1994 autobiography, Back to the Batcave, West described an evening spent vainly trying to seduce Natalie Wood, who was filming in Hawaii; he recalled hoping ‘‘she didn’t turn on the TV the next morning and see Peaches and me in hula skirts, strumming ukuleles and singing Mala Mala Mala to a puppet octopus’’.
In 1959 he was signed by Warner Brothers and changed his name to avoid confusion with ‘‘Bronco’’ Billy Anderson, the first film cowboy. Having appeared in a rash of television series, including 77 Sunset Strip, Maverick and Hawaiian Eye, he made his bigscreen debut in The Young Philadelphians (1959), which starred Paul Newman as an ambitious lawyer.
But West struggled to find a transforming vehicle, although he had a role in The Detectives, playing Robert Taylor’s partner, and in films such as Geronimo, Soldier in the Rain, Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Outlaw is Coming. A trip to Europe produced the spaghetti western The Relentless Four in 1965.
The producers of Batman spotted West playing the suave Agent Q in a commercial for Nestle’s Quik chocolate milk powder. After initial reservations he was swayed by the prospect of playing a hero considered ‘‘part of the cultural heritage’’.
He cited Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes as an inspiration, and certainly a combination of quick thinking and their bat utility belts would enable the pair to escape, after which the application of logic in the Batcave helped bring the villains to justice.
He was also alive to the comedy arising from Batman’s peculiar relationship with Robin, and his complete lack of self-awareness.
His solemn baritone proved ideally suited to his endless strictures to Robin to do up his seat belt or when commanding colourful miscreants to surrender.
The series propelled West and Burt Ward to stardom and, if their pay was modest given the show’s worldwide syndication, their scope for personal appearances was enormous. West was even granted an audience with Pope Paul VI, who told him: ‘‘I love ‘Pipistrello’.’’
However, after the show was axed in 1968 West found Batman
‘‘I could have played a naked Jack the Ripper, and someone would have said, ‘I hear that Batman’s back in a cape.’ ’’ Adam West
was ‘‘a brick wall’’. Having turned down the role of James Bond, he claimed, because it needed a British actor, for two years he was forced to support himself through personal appearances.
It was when he found himself in costume – with no stunt double – being fired out of a cannon at a county fair in Evansville, Indiana, that he realised he would have to take whatever he could get. He appeared in an assortment of roles in such films as The Happy Hooker Goes To Hollywood , Zombie Nightmare and Maxim Xul.
Drinking heavily for a period, and depressed by the disparity between his continuing cult status as Batman and his inability to find rewarding parts, he moved to Ketchum, Idaho – where Hemingway committed suicide – to ride horses, fish and indulge his love of the outdoors.
Nevertheless, in 2003 he accepted a part in Return to the Batcave – The Further Adventures of Adam and Burt, in which he and a distinctly tubby Burt Ward reprised their roles. Meanwhile he provided voice-overs to commercials, TV specials and cartoon versions of Batman. He guyed himself in The Simpsons and played the erratic Mayor West in Family Guy.
– Telegraph Group