Paul Dooley had been a character actor, a commercial pitchman, a Broadway thespian, and a stand-up comedian by the time writer-director John Hughes cast him as the father of Molly Ringwald in 1984’s “Sixteen Candles.”
After that? He was a dad, says Dooley, 94, as he talked recently about his new memoir, “Movie Dad.” “I got typed being a dad,” he says from his Los Angeles home. “So that’s why the multitude of things are being a dad.”
He’d been a movie dad before. Director Robert Altman, a frequent collaborator, cast him as the father of Mia Farrow in 1978’s “A Wedding.” A year later, he was dad again in the acclaimed coming-of-age film “Breaking Away.” Oddly enough, Dennis Christopher played his son in both those films.
And he’d be a movie dad after that, too. Dooley played Julia Roberts’ dad in 1999’s “Runaway Bride,” walking her down the aisle three times – “Once on a horse,” he notes. Years later he had a recurring role on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as Cheryl Hines’ father, which made him Larry David’s father-in-law.
But the irony in all those paternal roles, and all the other onscreen fathers he played, was that off the screen, Dooley’s own children vanished for most of a decade, a trauma he alludes to in the subtitle of the book: “Finding Myself and My Family On Screen and Off.”
Many of his roles are well known, though the stories behind them are fresh and entertaining in his memoir. But that real-life family drama around his role as a dad is something Dooley says he has almost never shared.
“I don’t think anybody knows about that until they read the book,” Dooley says. “Some of my friends know it. But even with many of my best friends, I didn’t talk about it.
“You couldn’t believe the thing was happening. Yet it happened.”
A boy grows up
For an actor so often typecast as a father, Dooley’s own dad didn’t provide much of a role model.
“It didn’t put me in a bad mood to write about my father,” he says of revisiting his childhood and adolescence growing up in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a factory town on a bend in the Ohio River. “I’d long come to grips that he was the kind of man he was.
“He was unable to share,” Dooley says. “I really think my father was afraid of people. He didn’t have friends. And his dad had left the family, so he had all that to deal with.”
And as a kid growing up in the ’30s, that wasn’t all that unusual among the fathers of his friends, he says.
“The odd thing is I bonded with him to the extent that I wanted to be like him,” Dooley says. “If he didn’t smile, I didn’t smile. If he didn’t laugh, I didn’t laugh.
“I became this kind of character to portray these guys on screen who were kind of withdrawn, stoic, kind of, you know, unfeeling people. Sometimes cranky guys.”
At 12, he discovered radio comedies with stars such as Jimmy Durante and Jack Benny, and become obsessed with the art of jokes. A few years later, a high school friend introduced him to the films of Buster Keaton, and Dooley saw a vision of his future.
“I knew, somehow, I wanted to do what he did,” he writes in the book. “I wanted to try to become a comic actor.”
That dream went on hold as Dooley served in the Navy just after World War II. But on his discharge, after a friend told him he could enroll at West Virginia University for free on the GI Bill, that spark rekindled.
On the WVU campus in Morgantown, Dooley studied acting and theater and made silent movies with his friends. Occasionally, he and his classmate, the future star Don Knotts, drove the 70 miles to Pittsburgh to catch the comics who opened the burlesque shows there.
After graduating in 1952, he and his first wife headed to New York City where Dooley the actor, who dreamed of his name in lights, soon ended up in a different kind of greasepaint, working as Dooley the Clown, doing pratfalls for school kids to pay his rent.
Bright lights, big city
Nine years later, Dooley got his break.
Throughout the ’50s, he’d worked on the edges of show business, gaining experience but rarely landing the kind of gig that might lead to something big.
Still, some moments stood out, such as the time he was cast in the New York City debut of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” in an off-Broadway production, or his steady if low-paying work as a stand-up comic.
Several summers he worked as a comic in the Upstate New York resorts where actors, comedians and musicians from the city would put together revues to entertain the guests.
“It was nine years before I made any money,” Dooley says of his slow path through the ’50s. “But in between, I had some very nice jobs. I worked with Carol Burnett at a place called Green Mountains.
“I worked the door at the Village Vanguard where I saw Mike and Elaine the first time they came to New York,” he says of groundbreaking comedians and writers Mike Nichols and Elaine May. “I saw Lenny Bruce there. I got to watch Miles Davis and Coltrane and all those people.”
At the Timberland resort one summer, he met and fell in love with one of his co-workers. They married and had two children as Dooley’s career took off in 1961 after landing his first big TV commercial role as a spokesman for Fab detergent.
“That was the turning point, when I got my first commercial which became a big contract for me,” Dooley says. “That 40 grand, guaranteed, after living on $3,000 a year in the ’50s.”
Success, then trouble
Things remained good in the ’60s.
Steady commercial work filled the decade interspersed with legitimate theater work. He was cast in “The Odd Couple” on Broadway as one of Oscar and Felix’s poker buddies. When Art Carney left the show, Dooley replaced him as Felix opposite Walter Matthau as Oscar.
When the Second City comedy troupe came to New York City from Chicago, he discovered a love and natural talent for improv, and appeared with them regularly during a long run in Greenwich Village.
But at home things were not good. Around the end of the decade, he and his wife split, sharing custody of their daughter and son.
Dooley stayed busy as his background in comedy and commercials led him to a new gig as a co-creator of Children’s Television Workshop’s new series “The Electric Company,” which debuted in 1971.
“I brought my sense of humor,” Dooley says. “I was an improviser before I was an improviser. I always like satire or wit or parody. I’m a minimalist.”
And that worked perfectly for “The Electric Company,” which was designed to help kids learn to read in an entertaining package. The cast featured Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, Luis Avelos as well as contributions from Mel Brooks, Irene Cara, Carol Burnett and many more.
“One of the things we did in our commercials was to disguise the message of the commercial within the humor,” Dooley says. “It was perfect for a kids’ show because of the attention span of kids. You don’t do a 10-minute sketch, you’re gonna do one-minute scenes or two minutes.”
The kid who loved jokes now got to make jokes for a new generation, though he found the work entertaining himself, too.
“I was doing little private jokes for myself and they became features,” Dooley says of some of the regular characters he created. Like Child Chef Julia Grownup, a play on the name of the real-life chef Julia Child, or the detective character named Fargo North, Decoder, a play on city and state.
Then, one summer day in the early ’70s, while Dooley’s kids were on vacation with his ex-wife, a letter arrived.
“I’m taking the kids,” it read in part. “We’re not coming back.”
Heartache to happy days
“When it happened, I had some odd sense it could have been my fault,” Dooley says. “You think, What could I have said or done that made this happen? Well, you forgot about the fact that my ex-wife had her own problems for her own reasons.”
Dooley hired detectives. He went to court and got an order granting him sole custody. Yet no traces of the children could be found.
“In the first three months, it was almost just like a trauma,” he says. “But I didn’t bring it up to friends. I didn’t want to feel pity or anything. I just was hurt, but I was very passive, and I just ate it.
“The New York (TV news) catchphrase was, ‘It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?” Dooley says. “What could be worse than that? Every night it might be on whatever network I was watching.”
Finally, after a year, he made the difficult choice to halt his active efforts to find them.
“I said to myself, ‘What happens when I find them?’” Dooley says. “By law, I could take them back. I thought that might traumatize them for a second time.”
A decade or so passed. Then, a tip arrived with his daughter’s location. Soon, though hesitantly at first, Dooley and his now-young adult children were reunited.
Today, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife of four decades, Winnie Holzman, a screenwriter and dramatist whose credits include creating the TV series “My So-Called Life” and co-creating the smash Broadway musical “Wicked,” which she’s most recently adapted as a film.
They have a daughter together, and Dooley’s older children remain close to their father, having rebuilt the bonds and made up for lost moments in the decades since their reunion.
“We’re each other’s constant companion,” he says of his wife, and the happiness he finally found in his family. “And there’s not a day goes by that we don’t make each other laugh hundreds of times, in small and large ways.”
