with some unsavory type, but at Disney
studios in Burbank he’s on the set showing
photographs of women that he’s been with
to people on the crew. That hurt him
because the executives found out. People
talk, and it started getting in publications
like the National Enquirer.”
The son maintains his father’s sexual
proclivities never veered into dangerous
territory. “To find out that that the all-
American Hogan has this...some people call
it a dark side, but I don’t think of it as a dark
side,” says Robert. “My dad loved women. I
think he might have been overcompensat-
ing for the lack of a solid career in the final
years, and maybe that fed his ego to meet a
woman in a nightclub and they’d go off and
sleep together. But I never looked at it as
dark because it was consensual. There
weren’t hidden cameras or anything.”
Robert isn’t embarrassed by his
father’s sordid enthusiasms. He still
chuckles remembering the time Crane
took him, as a 21-year-old, to the 1972
premiere of Deep Throat. “He just loved it
because he was meeting all these porn
stars.” But by then Crane’s star was fading
fast—the culture had changed, and Heroes
had ended its run the previous year. Work
dried up for the middle-aged actor, who
was soon getting by with gigs on the
dinner-theater circuit.BY THE TIME CRANE GOT TO PHOENIX, HIS
second marriage was on the rocks and he
was only scoring guest spots on shows
such as The Love Boat. The actor bought
the rights to a play called Beginner’s Luck,
a slight romantic comedy he had per-
formed at venues like the Windmill. Two
days before his death, he called his eldest
son. “He was two weeks shy of 50,” says
Robert. “He says, ‘I am making changes.
I’m divorcing Patti.’ He wanted to lose peo-
ple like John Carpenter, who had becomea pain in the butt. He wanted a clean slate.”
That never happened. Robert believes
that when his dad tried to pull away, Car-
penter, who had followed the star to
Arizona, became enraged. “They had a
breakup, of sorts,” claims Robert. “Car-
penter lost it. He was being rejected, he
was being spurned like a lover. There are
eyewitnesses that night at a club in Scotts-
dale that said they had an argument, John
and my dad.”
A few hours later, Crane was dead.
Scottsdale detective Barry Vassall was in
Phoenix with a colleague on June 29, 1978,
when he was called to unit 132A of the
Winfield Apartments. Several cops were
already present, along with a dinner-the-
ater actress named Victoria Berry, who
had arranged to meet Crane that day. Vas-
sall then went to the airport to pick up
Robert, Crane’s business manager Lloyd
Vaughn, and attorney Bill Goldstein and
brought them to the scene. The son believes
what happened next compromised the
hunt for the killer. “Vaughn, Goldstein, and
I walked through the apartment, examin-
ing, touching, handling items in plain view← Clockwise from leftCrane with his first wife, Anne Terzian,
and their children, Robert, Deborah, and Karen, circa 1965.
“He was being a father the best he could,” says Robert Crane;
Crane with second wife Patricia Olson (stage name: Sigrid
Valdis), who played Hilda on Hogan’s Heroes; pallbearers at
Crane’s funeral in Westwood, Calif., included his costar Robert
Clary and son Robert. “The reason we filmed it for six years
was because we had great people,” Clary says of Heroes.