He played the zany Corporal Max Klinger on the antiwar TV comedy hit M*A*S*H during the 1970s and 1980s. But don't mistake him for the Soldier in the dress. Jamie Farr served with pride in the real Army. Here's how he got there and what he learned.
Fifteen years before I played the fictional Corporal Max Klinger on the long-running TV series M*A*S*H, I was a real Soldier in the U.S. Army. Just like Klinger, I was drafted. But I wore a regulation uniform, not a dress, and I served two years on active duty and six in the Army Reserve without trying to get a Section 8 discharge.
I won't try to tell you that serving in the military changed my life or opened up new career vistas. But it did help mature me. And having actually spent time as a soldier in Japan and Korea gave me some context later on for my roles in M*A*S*H and for a film version of the Broadway comedy No Time for Sergeants.
My first contact with the real Army came in 1957, and it wasn't very welcome. I'd been out of high school for five years and was in California at the Pasadena Playhouse of Theater Arts. A talent scout had seen me and invited me to test for a role in a movie called Blackboard Jungle. I'd just landed the part, and my career seemed finally launched.
Then came the letter from my draft board, and I headed for Fort Ord, California, to begin my basic training. I figured the closest I'd be coming to show business over the next two years would be watching a movie at a local theater wherever I'd be stationed.
So you can imagine my surprise when I was assigned to help make training films at the U.S. Army Pictorial Center. The installation was located at the old Paramount Studios in Astoria, New York. And it was filled with other show business people. I'd just finished reading a book on how to write screenplays, and the author worked across the hall.
I couldn't believe it.
I soon became a script supervisor and was assigned to temporary duty making training films about tanks at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Huachuca, Arizona. A few months later, a group of us got orders for Japan, and I was assigned to the Armed Forces Radio (AFR) Far East Network in a small village outside Tokyo.
I had neither the time nor the inclination to think up crazy tricks. While I was in uniform, I served as a reporter, writer, actor, and producer for AFR, gaining what would prove to be valuable experience. The pace was frenetic.
At one point, the great comedian Red Skelton, for whom I'd worked during my earlier civilian days, asked the Army to let me go with him to South Korea to help entertain the troops. We toured military bases all over the country, including a few mobile army surgical hospitals-MASH units-an acronym that I would encounter again. I did a second stint in Korea the following winter.
When my active-duty time was up in 1959, I returned home to a family tragedy. My father had died and left my mother with nothing to live on. I was needed in Phoenix, Arizona, where my Mom had moved from our family home in Toledo, Ohio. No doubt I'd have to leave show business-at least for a while.
But Red Skelton wouldn't hear of it. He gave me cash to send home to Mother, and put me under a personal contract. I stayed with Red for a year, traveling with him to all his night-club appearances and helping with his TV show. A few weeks after that, I was offered a guest slot on M*A*S*H that was supposed to be a one-shot gig.
The rest is history. After two years of regular appearances, I ended up as a full cast member in a program that became the number-one show on television, with 32 million regular viewers and a life-span of 11 years. I've played dozens of roles in movies, TV shows, and stage plays, but none has had the visibility of M*A*S*H.
Corporal Klinger, as most people know, was a reluctant Soldier who dressed up as a woman in an attempt to obtain a medical discharge. But the character matured as the seasons passed, and Klinger became a more sensitive-and even helpful-figure. Like the rest of the M*A*S*H characters, Klinger was funny, but with a lesson.
To be sure, my stint on active duty (and the six years that I later spent in the Army Reserve) wasn't anything like what was portrayed on M*A*S*H. Yes, we had some light moments, but we were serious in carrying out our assignments. You couldn't have told me from the rest of the guys in our unit.
Yet there's no doubt that my experiences in the Army—particularly in Korea—helped prepare me for my role on M*A*S*H. Although we shot the TV show in the mountains of Malibu Canyon in California, I remembered the real smells of those awful honey-bucket fields and the images of the shell-pocked landscape of South Korea.
I'd seen the real Soldiers who actually had been wounded in combat, and had been healed in the real MASH units. I'd slept in tents, and I'd traveled over bumpy terrain that may still have been minefields. And I'd flown by small helicopter to camps in remote spots. For an added touch, on the set of M*A*S*H I wore my real Army dog-tags.
Although I'd initially resented having to interrupt my budding career in show business when I got drafted, I realized later how important the time I spent in uniform was in my life. I learned discipline, brotherhood, and punctuality, among other things—the stuff of a young man's maturing—and I got valuable experience.
To this day, I keep in touch with former Army buddies. Like many veterans, we laugh about what we thought then were the hard times. And we try to forget about what actually were the hard times.
I often tell young people that if they're searching for heroes, all they have to do is watch a parade on Memorial Day or the 4th of July. Those fat old men you see with the soft caps on their bald heads-those veterans-they are your heroes. I salute them.