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Friday, June 6, 2014

Coronet Who?


The summer of 1967, ah the summer where Haight morphed into love and the time of the season when everyone was en route to San Francisco with the obligatory flowers in their hair, and though they may have been dropping out and tuning in; they certainly wasn't tuning in to anything that was on the television. And so they all blinked and they all missed what was perhaps the finest thirteen weeks that CBS doled out in their network's history. Ritualistically each Monday evening during the 8'oclock hour -from the merry month of May until the September that so few remember, yes it was simply a case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time for poor little Coronet Blue. It is an exceptionally rare occurrence when any show can match the novelty and pace of its opening theme song and this introduction in question was a hooky high-octane number brought to you by contemporaneous R&B sensation Lenny Welch. And though the theme wasn't exactly an unfamiliar one - concerning an amnesiac desperately trying to piece his life together (why there was rarely a film noir that left home without it), there was infinitely more to Coronet Blue than just this tried and true concept, and as this series was criminally unsung, you could surely say the same for the actor who was on protagonist duty as Michael Alden - Frank Converse.





Converse, a Carnegie-Mellon graduate was typically confined to the arena of television, the young actor would jut his charismatic chin for the first time for a bit part in 1966's The Trials of O'Brien. There would be a plethora of presences to follow, Converse would be most remembered, not as Coronet Blue's Alden but as Johnny Corso, one of the house detectives of  police procedural N.Y.P.D., a series that also aired in 1967, albeit one that had the fortune of being screened once Labor Day was scratched off the calendar and the summer of love would come to its kicking and screeching halt. The actor also would have been noticed in the odd daytime soap and other prime-time sundries. Converse as Alden, does precisely what his surname says on the label - communicating that he is the forgotten man who can barely remember a thing himself in Coronet Blue and yet still manages to reach ascension up Maslowe's coveted hierarchy, all the while learning the guest-stars a thing or three about consciousness.


The 'Father' and child reunion. (Frank Converse and Doug Chapin)


Each episode was in its own right a stand-out adventure, there was one particularly impressive and notable entry of Coronet Blue - Saturday, directed by David Greene (Godspell,1973) where Alden encounters a most precocious pre-teen in Walter Cane (Doug Chapin) and these were some mighty memory sustaining scenes, shot true location style via Central Park. There is verisimilitude between Walter and Michael , two souls lost. Kid Cane, seemingly streetwise, yet achingly vulnerable, in denial and disbelief upon hearing the news of his father's demise the boy hurries off  into the Manhattan night in hopes to get as far away from the reality of the situation as possible. Cane in textbook transference subconsciously adopts Alden as his de facto daddy for the evening, and implores Alden to keep him company. The boy simply cannot bear the concept of father's passing.And Alden yes he may have lost his identity, but fret not - the two both manage to reach a modicum of self-realization  or at least some serviceable understanding come the fortieth minute of the episode.




Consequently, this Holy Grail of a series would be canceled not only well before any shark-jumping shenanigans but it was to be eighty-sixed before there was any proper closure to Alden's identity caper. The very month that the show took a one-way trip to kaputville, there was in a sense - a reincarnate in the seventeen-episode cult classic - The Prisoner( now what was number six's line after all)?  And while there were additional series during that summer block that were left washed up on the wide Sargasso televisual shores and as ambitious as some of them may have been, there wasn't one that could hold a candle or let alone matchstick to Coronet Blue  - and oh my oh my oh my how it could it have been a contender.



Shoehorning that other Coronet Blue.


Coronet Blue...Coronet Blue...
Deep down inside my brain I keep hearing that wild refrain

Coronet Blue...No Other Clue...
I know that this must be the key that can set me free

For I was born just yesterday and only have a misty river
Always' a'moving like the river. If I linger I will die...

And so I go my lonely way a vision heads 'him' to danger
Even to myself a stranger. Wonderin' who am I ?