"My Name's Friday. I'm a cop."
(7 of 8)
Dragnet's sets exactly simulate the offices at Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. The very calendars are the same. The telephones bear the same extension numbers. Even the old-fashioned doorknobs are perfect duplicates—although it was necessary to make castings of the knobs at City Hall and have the copies struck off from them. Webb has striven for the same feel of realism in casting. He forbids makeup, shuns rehearsal, and from the beginning has relied largely on radio actors, "because they've all learned to act with their voices." The most notable exception is pink-faced, chunky Ben Alexander, 42, who plays Webb's partner, Detective Frank Smith. Alexander, a former child movie actor (All Quiet on the Western Front) who wisely invested his money and now owns a motel and several service stations, plays on Dragnet mostly as a diversion, has come to be one of Webb's few intimate friends.
The Breakage. Since Dragnet began, Webb has produced the equivalent of 35 full-length motion pictures—more than the output of many a major studio. For months, recently driving for extra time, he turned out two films and two taped radio shows a week. But he has not accomplished these prodigies of production without breakage. His marriage to former Actress Julie London—whom he courted during his San Francisco radio days—went on the rocks last year. Once Dragnet began, Webb had seen less and less of her and their two daughters, Stacey, 4, and Liza, 16 months. "All of a sudden Jack and I couldn't even sit down at the kitchen table and eat a sandwich together," Julie says. "We were lost."
There has been attrition too, in the ranks of colleagues who have not matched Webb's blazing pace, or satisfied his demand for creative contribution. Radio Director Rousseau was one of the first of the bodies to fall along the trail. He gave part of his time to other shows. Once Dragnet forged ahead, he was discarded.
Webb's agent, George Rosenberg, originally held title to Dragnet. Webb grew to regard him as a veritable kidnaper, but Webb did more than fume. An ex-furrier named Mike Meshekoff handled the Dragnet account for Rosenberg. Meshekoff talked his boss into putting the NBC contracts in Webb's name, and in return Webb gave Meshekoff a quarter interest in the show. "I got a letter from Webb," says Rosenberg, "and what the hell do you think it said? Webb was discharging me!" Last January, in turn, Webb and his new business manager, Stanley Meyer (a man who appears among the sports coats of Hollywood in black suits, black ties, black socks, black shoes and, at times, with a furled black umbrella), ousted Meshekoff. Recently they put such restrictions on Jim Moser, longtime Dragnet writer and old pal, "who was just getting played out," that he left the program too.