The hour was late, and the television set was replaying an old episode of Perry Mason. The series was based on the fiction of Erle Stanley Gardner, who created the character portrayed by actor Raymond Burr. Mason was a Los Angeles defense lawyer known for his clever tactics and the certainty that whomever he represented could not be the murderer, no matter how incriminating the evidence.
The episode that particularly caught my attention first aired on 14 May 1960, during a time when the Cold War with the Soviet Union was trending toward warm and hot. This story was titled “The Case of the Slandered Submarine.” There wasn’t really any slander about the boat, but the series was known for its offbeat alliterative titles. Usually the first half of each program was the exposition of the crime, while the latter half took place in a courtroom where Mason often elicited dramatic confessions from the real killers.
One of the appeals of this episode was seeing film clips of the former Long Beach Naval Station complex and the ships of the era. Present in shots were an admiral’s barge, destroyer tender Prairie (AD-25), an Essex-class carrier in mothballs, all-gun destroyers, minesweepers, an oiler, and fleet submarines little modified from their World War II appearance. Film of the station, studded with palm trees, brought back enjoyable memories from my active-duty days there in the late 1960s. Alas, the ships and station are now gone. In the 1990s the station fell victim to the Base Realignment and Closure process, and the area has since been redeveloped as a commercial port.
The Perry Mason submarine episode came about through the efforts of a proactive Navy public information officer (PIO), as the specialty was then known. In 1959–60 Lieutenant Herb Hetu was stationed at the Armed Services Public Information Office in Los Angeles. As I learned in interviewing him for his Naval Institute oral history, Hetu’s mission was to be liaison to Hollywood. He went to various studios and pitched ideas that would bring attention to the Navy. The studios liked the arrangement, because they didn’t have to pay for the ideas and because location shooting at the port was not far away.
Hetu presented his idea to Paisano Productions, which created Perry Mason episodes for CBS. As Hetu remembered, he came up with a scenario that included a submarine skipper being murdered. He said the Navy “sort of hiccupped” at the idea, but that was essentially how the plot played out. A former commanding officer of the USS Moray (not played by the real Moray) was on board to evaluate tests of a new electronic device. While the commander was napping in the skipper’s bunk, an unseen murderer jabbed him in the chest with a screwdriver.
The case then moved to a court-martial, with Mason defending a machinist’s mate who was charged with the crime. As I scanned the officers that comprised the court, I spotted the moon-faced Lieutenant Hetu at one end of the table. At the other end was Lieutenant Clark Gammell, a fellow PIO. In Hetu’s oral history, he said that the episode’s director was Art Marks, a former Navy man. The impish Hetu told Marks he was going to sneak a nose pick into the filming. He added, “I’m going to get one in one scene, and you’ll never catch me until you’re ready to put it on the air.”
I found the episode online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN-xhauS8bU. Sure enough, at one point Hetu’s furtive nose pick showed up in the background. Mason managed to trap the real killer into giving himself away with blatantly false testimony. Then the camera zoomed in for a close-up of Hetu’s angry consternation. It was fun to see the non-verbal acting by the non-actor.
Hetu clearly had a lot of fun during that tour of duty, including hatching a Navy episode for a popular sitcom called The Real McCoys, which starred Walter Brennan. It was about a West Virginia mountain family that moved to California to become farmers. It was hard to concoct a Navy format for that, but Hetu was involved in one in which an old destroyer named the McCoy was going to be scrapped. The family went to Long Beach to prevent the scrapping and was finally mollified when one of the clan christened a new McCoy.
Still another program Hetu worked with was Hennesey, which was about a Navy doctor and an attractive blonde nurse. Jackie Cooper played the doctor, and Abby Dalton was the nurse. The show boosted Navy recruiting, with the result that Cooper received a reserve commission and continued to support the service for years afterward. Cooper and another reserve officer, actor Glenn Ford, were involved in a program in San Diego to raise money for Navy Relief. The junket also included some starlets to build up attendance.
Part of Hetu’s duty that year was to escort the beautiful actress Angie Dickinson. Also along was a Hollywood stuntman dressed as a naval officer. His purpose was to provide a bit of unexpected slapstick for those who greeted the Hollywood plane. When the stuntman emerged from the aircraft, he waved to the crowd and then took a deliberate pratfall down the steps and landed in front of the local admiral. Hetu remembered that it “really was hilarious and probably gave everybody a heart attack.”
Clearly, being a professional Navy public information officer wasn’t all work.