ALL THE WAY UP: THOUGHTS ON A LIFE LIVED COMPLETE

Cohn: I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.
Jake: Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.
– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

William Smith died the other day. His passing got a little ink, literal and figurative, but largely went unnoticed and uncommented upon. This is the way of celebrity, especially in Hollywood, where fame burns down to quickly-forgetten ashes; but it is even more harshly true of those in the business who are not famous, merely familiar.

You know who I'm talking about – sort of, anyway: Those actors whose names you don't know, but who seem to turn up everywhere: television shows, commercials, classic films and others not-so-classic. Except perhaps in some long-forgotten youth, they are never the stars, but move around them in either friendly or antagonistic orbits. They play bad guys, crusty homicide detectives, curmudgeonly or doting dads, stern judges, old friends, kindly uncles, buffonish politicians, shrewd reporters, irascible neighbors, mediocre generals, long-suffering bosses. There is seldom glory in their roles: if they aren't being shot dead or beaten up, they are quite frequently the butt of insults and ridicule, and when they play a good guy (or gal), they are always to the left or the right of the hero, never in the center of the frame. They carry his coat, reload his gun, jump in front of the bullet meant for his body. They wash out his mouthpiece or sign his check or light his cigar and tell him he (or she) done good.

The catch-all term for this sort of thespian is “character actor.” The term doesn't make any sense, since every actor is playing a character...but never mind that. My point is merely that character actors may make a living, even a very good living, and end up with their name in hundreds of credits and even some legendary moments in cinematic and television history; but somehow no one ever seems to know, or even care, much less recall, what their names are when they walk off the stage for the last time. I suppose there is an implication in the shortness of our memory and the disrespect that underlies it: that somehow these folks, despite all of their success, aren't really worthy of serious attention. They aren't sexy, glamorous, charismatic, or even terribly interesting – not compared to the stars, anyway. They're just there, reliably, like an old pair of boots.

I myself have always had a fascination with character actors. Even as a small child I loved the way they kept turning up in the re-runs of my youth, so familiar and yet so unknown. I noted that some tended to play a type of character while others were more diverse in their appearances. I noted as well that some were better actors or had more presence than others. But I liked and respected them all. There was one, however, who caused me more fear and awe than he did affection, and his name, I eventually learned, was William B. Smith.

Smith was perfectly engineered by nature to play bad guys. He was huge and heavily muscled, with a savage-looking face and a hoarse, growling, rusty voice; and his eyes looked as black as the devil's. There were times when he would smile at the protagonist of a movie or a TV show and it was like the smile of death, if death also happened to be a sadistic psychopath. When I was growing up, William Smith turned up everywhere, and sometimes I wondered what he was like in real life: an arrogant thug, like the characters he usually played? A tough, tactiturn professional, like Charles Bronson? A slow-witted trouper, not villainous but not so terribly bright, either?

When I took it upon myself to learn more about the life of William Smith, at first I could not actually believe what I was reading. It sounded so much like a badly-drawn hero in a badly-written movie that I had to double and triple-check my sources before I came to believe what I was reading. No human, or at any rate very few humans, could crowd so many accomplishments into the 88 years they spent turning oxygen into carbon dioxide as did this man: off the top of my head (among actors anyway) only the late Sir Christopher Lee comes to mind as a life as fully realized as Smith's was. He was not a bull-fighter, but he was damned near everything else you can think of, and contrary to what poor pathetic Jake says in THE SUN ALSO RISES, he did live life all the way up. And then some.

Most of the following information comes directly from Smith's website, but I have taken some pains to verify it, at least as much as time has permitted. Even with the occasional possible error, however, it is a staggering record of achievement, something to both humble and inspire. I do not think Smith would be offended by my plagiaristic reworking of his biography here:

Smith was born in 1933 on a ranch in Missouri. He learned to ride “almost before he could walk” and his knowledge of horseflesh was to come very much in handy in later life. When his family moved to Southern California, he ended up as a studio extra in movies like “The Ghost of Frankenstein” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” He was too young to serve in WW2, but enlisted in the Air Force in 1951. It is unknown if his affinity for languages was discovered there or earlier in his schooling, but he achieved fluency in five languages, including Russian, German, French and Serbo-Croatian. He was recruited by the fledging National Security Agency (NSA), and during the Korean War, he flew secret surveillance-gathering missions over Communist-bloc nations.

After military life, Smith “continued the education he began while in the service, studying at Syracuse University, the University of Munich, the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally at UCLA where he graduated Cum Laude with a Master’s degree and worked toward a Doctorate. Bill would also later teach at UCLA.” He was not, however, merely a bloodless, ivory-tower intellectual. He was Air Force Light-Heavyweight Boxing Champion, a champion discus thrower at UCLA, and a two-time 200-lb. World Arm Wrestling Champion. He was also an outstanding bodybuilder (more about that later). While living in California he volunteered as a firefighter, specializing in battling SoCal's notoriously dangerous and violent wildfires.

Smith was working toward a doctorate when he was re-discovered by Hollywood. During this early period of his acting career he was busy on many TV series, including classics like “Perry Mason” and “The Mod Squad” (and camp-classics like “Batman”), but was also very popular in Westerns, appearing in “Daniel Boone,” “Wagon Train,” “The Virginian,” and “Gunsmoke.” In 1965, he secured a starring role on “Laredo.”

During the 1970s, he transitioned from playing cowboys to playing bikers, appearing in a staggering eleven motorcycle movies, generally as a gang leader. Throughout that decade and all through the 80s he was a much-demanded bad guy on TV, appearing on “Kung Fu,” “Columbo,” “Mission Impossible,” “Ironside,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “The Rockford Files,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Kolchak, The Night Stalker,” “Police Story,” “Logan’s Run,” “Vegas,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Dukes of Hazard,” “Simon & Simon,” “Buck Rogers” and “The A Team.” He was also a regular on “Hawaii Five-O” in its final season. In 1982 he had a memorable role in CONAN THE BARBARIAN as Conan's intimidating but thoughtful father, who teaches Conan the “Riddle of Steel.” (For my money, this enigmatic speech is one of my favorite moments in cinematic history.) Other classics/notorious films in which he made his presence felt were “Any Which Way You Can,” “Red Dawn,” “Rumblefish,” “The Outsiders,” and the cult-classic “Maniac Cop.”



Smith's visible toughness was backed up by his physical prowess as an athlete. In addition to his other accomplishments, he was a black belt in Kung Fu and Karate both, and “among his outstanding feats of strength are strict reverse curl of his own body weight and 5,100 continuous sit ups.” He appeared as a cover model for numerous bodybuilding magazines. Among his various accolades:

A Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Bodybuilding and Fitness (1995)
Honorary Member, Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures (2000)
Golden Boot Award in 2003 (for his contributions to the Western genre)
Southern California Motion Picture Council Award in 2005
Silver Spur Award in 2008 (again, for his contributions to Westerns)
Muscle Beach Venice Bodybuilding Hall of Fame in May (2010)

I think this would be enough for any man, but not for William Smith. Because for all the muscles, the martial arts, the growling villain roles, behind even his obviously powerful intellect, lay the soul of a literal poet. Smith composed poetry for much of his life, which he published in a volume rather prosaically entitled THE POETIC WORKS OF WILLIAM SMITH: THE WORDS AND IMAGES OF A HOLLYWOOD LEGEND.

I do not yet own this book (gimme time) but I was able to peruse a sampling of his poetry via his website. Two of them struck me with particular force. The first, “Ode to a Mirror,” for its brilliant point of view: that of the mirror and not the people who gaze into it:

I know a thousand faces that don’t know me
I have seen ’em all, sad and gay, caged and free
Blue, moist eyes crying and yearning for love
Brazen, black ones glaring coldly above
Selfish, evil souls have rehearsed before me
Revealing their greedy plots to me only
So many times I’ve tried to reach out
To aide and soothe those riddled with doubt
There were those who thought they had it all
Sad, puny wretches with hearts so small
And then those poor bastards who were driven
Hoping that their sins would be forgiven
They’d cry and weep ’bout their lonely past
Swearing that their lives were pure and chaste
Yet only to themselves do they lie
And only by themselves will they die
But when out of rage they shatter me
My crumbling pieces shall set me free
Never more will I mirror their sniveling frailty
For my shards mean not seven years, but eternity

The second, “The Reaper,” affected me because I know that Smith, who shot his first movie around 1942, and his last in 2020, had thought a great deal about the decline of his body, the death of old friends, and what it meant to be in the final act of his life. In this poem he examines perhaps his own attitude toward impending doom, at once sad and cynical and jauntily defiant:

I remember when my friends and I
Thought that youth and games would never die
We cherished the girls, grog and laughter
Ribald at night, meek mornings after
But now malt’s too strong and girls too young
All our stories old, our song’s been sung
We mumble in search of long dead wit
Humor now is the daily obit
Our high is sharing a friend’s demise
He was a fine lad, echo our lies
While we gloat that it’s him not me
Knowing that they always fall by three
Wallowing secure ’cause Sam was third
Surely there’s time ’fore my taps are heard
Then there’s news of the death of old Hugh
Well, hell, that clown never paid his due
Nights alone you feel the Reaper’s chill
Then at dawn there’s a fine, undead thrill
Check pulse, poke liver, no pain, no fear
Hit the bars ’cause he’s dead, you’re still here
No canes or taxis for you today
On this fine and smogless first of May
Jauntily out the door to the street
Gaily you greet all those that you meet
Then as you stroll you think of old Hugh
The wind sighs, “He was younger than you”
As a maverick tear rolls from your eye
You know you gotta laugh instead of cry
You’ve done some bad and you’ve done some good
You wouldn’t change things even if you could
’Cause through the years you’ve run a good race
The Reaper chased and couldn’t keep your pace
So toast those that live and those that die
And while you can, spit in the Reaper’s eye.

Smith passed away, fittingly, in the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital on July 5, 2021. I imagine that his body, laid into a casket or committed to flames, was completely exhausted, worn out, used up – not by age, but by the sheer wear and tear of living life all the way up. And never mind the goddamned bullfights.