Drips & Dabbs.

You probably recognize this shot above, as you all just saw it on TV this past Wednesday. It's Phil Stacey being eliminated from American Idol. I believe that's Ryan Seachrest hammering in the stake. Sorry Phil. Some people have to lose, so that Melinda can win. It's just your 'Salem's Lot in life.


Which reminds me, the answers to my quiz last flogging are

A-4
B-5
C-3
D-1
E-2

Is my mayonnaise out-of-sync? Is that even possible? Because my gardener's gorgeous son Eduardo told me this afternoon, while he was putting his clothes back on (My bush needed a lot of attention!), that today is something he called "Sync-o De Mayo," and although he is adorable doing his Chico Marx impression, I nonetheless didn't even know that mayonnaise had a soundtrack at all! And while I will admit that that three-year-old jar of Best Foods Mayo in my spook-haunted refrigerator does taste a wee bit off, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's out-of-sync. And frankly, I've co-starred with people who were a lot more rancid.

Speaking of co-stars who are past their "Sell By" dates, my steady readers must be getting pretty depressed lately, and not just by realizing that they'll never be as rich, beautiful or glamorous as I am, because recently it seems that all I'm writing are obituaries. In the last month I've written post-mortems on Tom Poston, Boris Yeltsin, Stan Daniels, Johnny Hart, AJ Carothers (Don't ask!), Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A relief to all those Kurt Vonnegut Sr. fans.), Calvin Lockhart, Roscoe Lee Browne, Don Ho, Don Imus's career, Freedom of Speech, Barry Nelson, Calvert "Larry 'Bud' Melman" DeForest, John Inman, and Betty Hutton. (She's been dead almost two months, and my ears are still ringing!)

Enough already with the celebrity deaths. This is literally the most unhealthy fad in Hollywood history. Oh, he was 85. She was 90, etc.; puh-lease! In less than four weeks I'll be 110, and you don't see me going around dying do you? No, you do not! I may have had more livers than you've had haircuts, but I'm hanging on! Delores Delgado tried to kill me back in 1960. I didn't let her, and I'm not letting "Natural Causes" take me either. I wouldn't give Delores the satisfaction! You want to know the secret to living a long time? It's simple. Just don't die. Works for me.

But Betty Hutton croaked (I think. Or maybe it was just one of her wacky comedy singing gags), and her Netflix rentals spiked for a month, so now every has-been in show business suddenly wants to jump on the Deathwagon. (I believe it is called a Costa Bower, or at least that's what they called it in Darby O'Gill and the Little People, an early Sir Sean Connery film about Mickey Rooney and Tom Cruise visiting an Irish Scotsman. Were we supposed to think Sir Sean's Scottish accent was Irish?) Well, cut it out! Dying is such a pathetic bid for attention.

All that said, there were two more deaths this week that I must address. And the first is my darling Dabbs Greer.That's Little Dabbs at different stages in his long career, which lasted some 54 years! On the left, that's Old Dabbs, the Dabbs we knew from Picket Fences and The Green Mile. I should give special mention to The Green Mile as not only was it his last movie (Although he did TV for several more years), in a film career that included such classics as House of Wax with Vincent Price, and It, the Terror From Beyond Space (Although It turns out to be merely from Mars, which is in space, but hardly beyond it.), The Giant Claw, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and many others, but also, in The Green Mile, Dabbs played the main character, Paul Edgecomb, although, as they were unable to do a sufficiently convincing youth make-up on him for the flashback scenes, Tom Hanks jumped at the chance to play Young Dabbs, even though they look nothing alike. Clearly this was Hanks's vainglorious attempt to get some of the Greer magic Dabbed off on him, so he could finally achieve stardom.

Dabbs seems an unusual name. Turns out it was his mother's maiden name, as no one would want to go into acting with a freakish, oddball name like his birth name, Bill Greer. Ick.

That middle picture of him is very significant. The people you can't see the faces of behind him are Clark Kent, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson. That is from Superman on Earth, the very first episode of The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves. Dabbs played the very first person ever rescued by Superman, and when Dabbsey described the man who flew through the air and caught him, not as "The Great Sebastian," but rather as "This Superguy", Lois gets an idea, and the name "Superman" is created.

Actually, in an odd way, Dabbs played the first person rescued by Superman twice. You see, in the comic books, back in Action Comics #1, in the very first Superman story ever, Supes must rescue a man wrongly-convicted of murder from dying in the electric chair. This story was adapted for the TV show in the third season, and the man who played the innocent convict who must be saved from riding Old Sparky was none other than Little Dabbs again. Dabbs did a third episode of The Adventures of Superman in the final season when, in The Superman Silver Mine, he gave a tour-de-force performance in a dual role, as a benevolent millionaire, and as a dirty crook who looks and sounds exactly like the millionaire, only without the crepe-hair mustache.

Nearly being executed in the Electric Chair apparently didn't turn Dabbs off of capital punishment by electrocution, as in I Want to Live, he played the prison guard who straps Susan Hayward into The Chair for her execution. Well, you can't blame him for that. I hear half of the actresses in Hollywood would have lined up to strap Susie into Old Sparky, and when she won an Oscar for letting Dabbs kill her, the rest of Hollywood's actresses wanted to kill her too. And of course, in The Green Mile, he was strapping folks into The Chair as well, so I guess old habits are hard to break.

Another habit he found hard to break was marrying people. He performed the wedding of Rob & Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and on something called The Brady Bunch, he officiated at the Brady wedding as well. Fortunately for him, in real life, he was able to break the habit, as he never married or had children. He never actually executed anyone either.

Now before you go jumping to the conclusion that Dabbs must have been yet another show business closet homo, let me remind you that the fact that he never married proves he's straight! In my extensive experience, gay men marry women left and right, and usually one of their wives is me. Not only was Dabbs never married at all, but he was also never married to me! Therefore, I think we can safely assume he was Dabbs Greer, not Dabbs Queer. Sorry boys. Maybe next time.

That third picture of him is from one of his numerous appearances on Perry Mason, on which he played the victim in one episode, the innocent client of Perry in another, the killer in yet another, and various red herring suspects in several others. I wouldn't be surprised to learn he had played Della Street in one "Very Special" controversial episode, shot while Babs Hale was out sick. That man was in more episodes of Perry Mason than Raymond Burr was, and Ray was in all of them. However, it is not true that Dabbs played Godzilla in the Raymond Burr version of that documentary, though you may have noticed, he did a good bit of science fiction, while Godzilla was a terrible piece of science fiction.

Sometimes a death, however sad, means good news for someone else, and I have good news for hunky young men within driving distance of my fabulous movie star mansion, Morehead Heights: we lost a Tarzan this week, so my weekly Tarzan auditions are back on, and I'm back on my back.

The amazing Gordon Scott, in my expert opinion The Handsomest Tarzan of all-time, passed away this week. Here's a picture of him:

Wait a minute! What is that scribbling in the upper-right hand corner of the picture? "To Douglas, Gordon Scott. 'Tarzan'." Good grief Douglas, have you given me some old signed picture of him? You met him? You? But he was a gorgeous, incredibly handsome, overwhelmingly muscled Adonis, and you're a horny old homo with all the self-control of a rabid dog. Did you ...? Oh. What a relief.

It's all right, everyone. It turns out that when my amanuensis, Little Douglas, met Gordon Scott, Gordy was already over 70, and looked just ghastly, so Little Douglas behaved himself.

Gordy was a lifeguard in Las Vegas, where the ocean riptides and currents are considerably less challenging than they are in California or Florida, when he auditioned for Tarzan. After I passed him on to Sol Lesser with my highest recommendation, Gordy went on to marry Vera Miles, although I understand he was not in Psycho. He was married to other people too, at various times, and the Los Angeles Times obituary for him said he had "at least three children." They don't know how many kids he actually had? Who was he, P. Diddy? Brigham Young? King Ramses II? Anna Nicole Smith Marshall Stern Birkhead Denk Hatten Morehead von Anhalt Gabor? (Well, his tits are about as large as hers. He could certainly have breast-fed in a pinch. But then, come to think of it, we do know how many kids Anna had; we just don't know how many fathers they had. Maybe Gordon Scott fathered one of Anna's kids.)

He made a bunch of Tarzan movies, some in color, some in black & white, and one with Sir Sean Connery, Tarzan's Greatest Adventure, the only Tarzan movie where Tarzan wasn't the hottest man in the picture. After his Tarzan films were over, he went on to give many fine performances in the classics. Who can forget his Hamlet, his Oedipus, or his Algernon Moncrief? Admittedly, these performances were all in his living room, and witnessed, if at all, only by his indeterminate number of spawn, but I'm sure he was hunky and gorgeous.

Dabbs Greer was a great acting talent. Gordon Scott was a great specimen of man. You know, if you put Dabb's talent into Scott's awe-inspiring body, you'd have the perfect man. Works for me. As for the rest of you celebs, stop dying! The next one of you that dies, I'm gonna kill!

Cheers darlings.