The world would be very different if his back door pilot for a spinoff had been picked up, back in the ‘70s. Marcus Aurelius Hayes and Gandolph Fitch, solving crimes together in ‘70s LA? That would’ve been a stone-cold classic. The pair were two of the best guest stars on The Rockford Files, played by two of the surprisingly large number of Oscar winners to have appeared on the show, albeit in most cases—including that of Gossett—well before their wins. Isaac Hayes had had his for years, but while Gossett’s career stretches back to the ‘50s, he was still some five years away from his own.
He was seventeen when he made his Broadway debut. Polio had delayed his high school graduation. Still, he had recovered enough strength that he was offered a basketball scholarship, which he declined in order to pursue acting. Since he’d already gotten raves before the formal study, he had a reasonable expectation of making a career at it. And of course he wasn’t wrong. Strangely, though, he also had something of a promising career as a folk artist. It’s harder to picture the world where we’d be using his name in the same sentence as Pete Seeger, but it appears we could, if we thought about such things.
Honestly, no little of his career is surprising in retrospect. He cowrote the anti-war song “Handsome Johnny.” Which, to my delight, has been covered by the Flaming Lips. From a certain ‘80s perspective, Gossett was sprung fully formed in time to appear in An Officer and a Gentleman and then disappear into a bunch of really unfortunate roles, but of course by the time he’d appeared in that movie, he had already won an Emmy for Roots. He’d done Golden Boy with Sammy Davis, Jr., and I am beyond disappointed to not be able to find out what was in the candy bar Necco made based on the musical, because that’s an amazing detail.
One of the well-known sadder side effects of winning an Oscar is being typecast in the kind of role that got you the Oscar. It seems probable that he hasn’t been allowed to use his deft touch for comedy in the years since then as much as he ought because that’s not what people expect from him. However, one of the reason Hayes is such a delightful character is that he’s funny, in among being pompous and conceited and snobby. He knows he’s screwing over Jim, and it’s a delight to him. He wants to get the best of Jim as much because it’s a game as anything else.
Up until I sat down to write this article, he hadn’t been terribly high on my list of people I just wanted to sit down and talk to. That’s no shame to him, you understand; there are a lot of people out there. However, I’ve found one detail that really does make me want to have a conversation with him about movies. It turns out that, in 2016, he was allowed to be a guest programmer on Turner Classic Movies. The four movies he chose were Blackboard Jungle, Lifeboat, Touch of Evil, and The Night of the Hunter. Those are four solid choice, even if I’m not the biggest Touch of Evil fan, and I’d love to talk to him about why those four movies in particular. Wouldn’t you?
I’m not scamming people to fund my lifestyle the way Hayes does; I’m just asking people to support my Patreon or Ko-fi!
