The Hollywood Reporter - 31.07.2019

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 64 JULY 31, 2019

Hear Hamilton share his secret to longevity in Hollywood at THR.COM/VIDEO

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Hills, where Douglas Fairbanks once lived.
He purchased the storied mansion with
money earned off movies co-starring Olivia
de Havilland, Brigitte Bardot and Lana
Turner, films that not only were success-
ful but had given Hamilton a real shot at
critical approval — one he never appears to
have been interested in. (The lauded French
director Louis Malle, who cast him for
1965’s Viva Maria!, once sighed, “He’s more
interested in being in the social columns —
I don’t understand — when he should be one
of the greatest of his generation.”)
Hamilton enjoyed the “huge pleasure” of
lording over his estate, yet in time it became
a burden. “A property like that brings you
friends you don’t want and relatives who
come to stay and don’t go,” he says. “You
become a custodian, arriving home at
night and seeing 15 people for dinner and
thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Later, when
Hamilton married model-actress Alana
Stewart and sold the place, Teeny and Bill
sued him for financial support, arguing
that his subsidizing of their lifestyle had, in
effect, saved his life by precluding him from
serving in Vietnam.
Hamilton’s draft deferment had in
fact been granted on the grounds that
he was the sole financial provider for
Teeny — which prompted an outcry when
the public learned he was dating Lynda
Bird Johnson in 1966. He brought the

then-22-year-old presidential daughter to

the Academy Awards that year. (“When I

took out Woodrow Wilson’s daughter, they

didn’t make such a fuss,” presenter Milton

Berle joked.)

While the actor insists his relationship

with Lyndon Johnson was warm, recall-

ing intimate family gatherings as well as

a watch the commander in chief gifted

him, behind the scenes there was trouble.

The president — apparently skeptical of

this movieland slickster — had his long-

time fixer turned Supreme Court Justice

Abe Fortas spearhead an off-the-books FBI

probe into Hamilton’s personal life. The

inquiry, whose machinations became

public only five years ago, turned up noth-

ing that could potentially be weaponized

except that Bill was gay. Still, in that era,

the budding romance was reckoned unten-

able because of the potential for scandal.

“It was a bad time,” Hamilton says of the

saga, his voice soft. He broke up with the

first daughter not long afterward. They’ve

remained friends.

O

n another day, reclining on

the cream sofa in the Wilshire

Corridor high-rise condo

where he’s lived since 2008, his

untucked dress shirt unbut-

toned halfway to his navel, Hamilton is

expansive. On how a career in Hollywood

is like gambling: “You’ve got to be a little

bit foolish about the way you play.” On his

empathetic nature: “I don’t believe I’m cere-

bral about my heart.” And on how he’s been

grateful to be dismissed as a talking man-

nequin: “If I’d been overestimated, I may not

have made it in the first place.”

He’s a vivid storehouse of alert detail. Yet

when inquiry turns to pricklier matters,

memory blurs.

A decade ago, he talked in swashbuck ling

terms about an affair with his stepmother,

June Howard, a onetime singer in his

father’s big band. She’d initiated it when

George was living in Manhattan for a

stretch as a preteen with his father, by then

working as a high-ranking executive at

Elizabeth Arden. When they were together,

“Her pelvis would arrive across the room

before the rest of her,” Hamilton once vol-

unteered. In his 2008 memoir, Don’t Mind

If I Do, he called the experience “my own

sexual bar mitzvah.” But now, post-#MeToo

reckoning, there’s no romance to molesta-

tion, and he’ll speak of the perpetrator only

elliptically, if still sympathetically, as a

discontented housewife, “slightly off, quite

beautiful too.”

(Though Hamilton is all for gender parity

in the industry, he doesn’t retreat from his

past description of himself as “an enlight-

ened male chauvinist,” the kind who once

issued such wisdom in a self-help book as

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G

eorge Hamilton still acts —

for the past few seasons as

Spencer Blitz on ABC’s American

Housewife. He’s a utility player in

the reality sphere, from Dancing

With the Stars (eliminated in the

sixth week of the second season)

BR A ND H A MILTON

From bronzer to fried chicken,

the actor has proved that skin really does sell

and Wife Swap to I’m a Celebrity

Get Me Out of Here. He’s an active

producer. He’s an author, every so

often, of fizzy ghostwritten books.

And, perennially, Hamilton is

a pitchman. Early on, he cashed

in on his nickname, The Tanned

One, with the George Hamilton

Sun Care System during the late

1980s that at one point was sold

exclusively at Neiman Marcus.

Marketed as a “secret formula,” it

included a self-tanning exfoliating

scrub and bronzer. More recently,

as a spokesman, he has hawked the

vitamin supplement Youth Infusion

as well as another anti-aging

formula, Renuva.

Yet as a peddler, his most

prominent pop culture moment has

been his big-budget commercial

turns as the KFC Colonel, appear-

ing on a branded yacht cruising

through crystal-clear skies, talking

up a double-breaded chicken

sandwich that’s “extra-crispy, like

me.” (Hamilton says he dug deep

on the role, recalling meeting

Colonel Harland Sanders when

the two crossed paths while both

were handling respective press

duties at an Ohio radio station four

decades ago.) — G.B.