Telly Savalas: A Gentle Man in a Violent World
Aristotelis “TELLY” SAVALAS was an actor who played a long series of intriguing characters — and one great one: police lieutenant Theo Kojak.
Savalas was born in 1922 into a big, loving, volatile Greek-American family, on Long Island. He had four brothers and a sister. His father, Nicholas Savalas, owned a Greek restaurant and was sometimes flush with money and sometimes broke. He conveyed to his children that life was marvelously various and no problem too big to solve, but you must have confidence. Embrace your problems. Telly’s mother was a painter, very warm, convinced that family was everything and her children could do anything. The one trauma Telly had as a young man was as a lifeguard. Someone drowned when he was on duty, and their death stayed on his conscience.
He graduated from Columbia University, served in the Army, got a degree in psychology, thought of medical school, and worked as a writer and administrator for the U.S. Information Service in the State Department. But he wasn’t settled; he hadn’t found the right woman and the writing he was doing felt like propaganda. He was impulsive and often nearly broke. One night in 1958 or ’59, he took a good-looking woman out to a Manhattan restaurant, spent all the money he had on dinner, dropped the lady off, headed for Long Island and home — and ran out of gas at 1 a.m.
Telly walked to a White Castle restaurant and asked, ‘Where’s the nearest gas station?” They directed him to a station — but warned him it was a long walk through a wooded area. Grimly, he set out, feeling awful about himself, about everything.
Suddenly, Telly was aware of a beautiful car slowing down just behind him. He hadn’t heard it coming. A man with an oddly high-pitched voice asked if he could help. The guy looked genuinely caring, so Telly told him he could use a lift to the gas station. As the guy drove him there, they chatted. The man was dressed in a gorgeous white suit. Though they weren’t talking baseball, apropos of nothing, the man mentioned that he’d just met a certain young infielder on the Boston Red Sox.
Telly knew there was something odd about this guy, and about the whole set-up, but the man was very nice and Telly tried to put it out of his mind. At the gas station, Telly realized he was still screwed; he had no money to pay for the gas.
The stranger in the white suit insisted on paying. Telly said ‘Please! Write down your name and address. I’m very embarrassed by this. I’d like to mail you the gas money in a few days.’
The man found a piece of paper, wrote down his address and his name — James Cullen — and gave it to Telly, who thanked him again, got back in the car and made it home. There he picked up the Journal-American newspaper and saw an article about that Red Sox infielder — dead. Telly suddenly realized that James Cullen was dead, too. He looked quickly at the piece of paper James Cullen had written on. The handwriting was distinctive and he noticed there was not only “James Cullen” and an address but also a phone number. Telly dialed the number.
“Jimmy’s Bar,” someone answered. Telly asked to speak to James Cullen. After a moment, a woman picked up the phone and Telly asked to speak to James Cullen. The woman said Cullen wasn’t there. Telly asked when she expected him back. The woman said “Listen, you son of a bitch…” and told him James Cullen was her husband, he’d been dead for two years, and what was this all about?
Telly told her that he’d just met her husband, and described what had happened. The woman seemed wary but said helping a stranger who’d run out of gas was exactly the kind of thing her husband would have done. She invited Telly to her home, eager to see the note ‘James Cullen’ had written. When Mrs. Cullen saw the handwriting, she gasped, and got out love letters that Jimmy Cullen had written her when he was in the army. The handwriting was identical.
She started pumping Telly for information. What was Jimmy wearing? A beautiful white suit, he told her.
That’s the suit he was buried in, she said, and started to cry. What else can you tell me about him, she begged. ‘Anything!’ He seemed happy, Telly said. He had a beautiful car. He had a strange voice, very high-pitched.
No, no, no said Cullen’s wife. ‘Jimmy had a deep voice.’
Then she startled.
“What?” said Telly.
Mrs. Cullen said ‘Jimmy killed himself, with a shot that went through his throat. It must have hit his voice box.’ Telly Savalas kept going over and over that experience, and finally decided that the line between life and death is not as clear as we think it is.
Then Telly left and began doing TV journalism for ABC-TV in New York City. He was, for a time, the executive producer of the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. He gave Howard Cosell his first job in television. Telly did News & Special Events, and because he’d been in the State Department, he guided coverage of foreign dignitaries. He conducted an interview with Eleanor Roosevelt. When Winston Churchill was in New York, Telly interviewed Churchill.
He was in the habit of playing back his interviews afterward, to find flaws in the person’s argument or in their English. Churchill was the only exception to this; when Telly played back the interview, every word of Churchill’s was used precisely, and the arguments were so forceful that, even on close examination, Telly could find no flaws.
One day in 1959, a talent agent phoned Telly. ‘You know a lot of foreigners,’ said the agent. ‘Give me the name of a foreigner who could play a bit part in a TV movie.’ Telly gave the agent a name, called the foreigner, and got it all set up.
The talent agent called back the next day, indignant: ‘Your foreign guy stood us up. Never showed. Made me look like an idiot.’ Telly heard himself say: “He’ll be there today!”
When he hung up the phone he knew he might go play the part himself. He did, stayed in character the whole time, pretending to be a foreigner. It went well, and he was offered a bigger part. This was live television, and just before they filmed the program, when Telly heard a director say “Two minutes!” he realized he’d forgotten all of his lines. His mind went blank. Then he thought of how his father would laugh at such a moment. His confidence returned, and with it all of his lines.
He began to see acting as a possible new career. He asked his parents what they thought. His mother admired actors and said, “Telly, do it.” He confessed to his father that acting seemed a racket. Nicholas Savalas said, “Telly, everything’s a racket. Just find something that makes you happy.”
In 1961, Telly played a police detective in the film “The Young Savages” and realized he was more excited about working with Burt Lancaster than he’d been interviewing Eleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. In “Birdman of Alcatraz,” he played a convict lost in his own sadistic fantasies.
He played another sadistic convict in “The Dirty Dozen,” then a private investigator in “Cape Fear.” He had a nice smile and a purring quality to his voice that made you notice him — but he was always a supporting actor, never the lead. Later he summarized those years by saying, “They wouldn’t give me a girl; they gave me a gun.”
In 1965, he called his parents to tell them that George Stevens had hired him to act in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” about the life of Jesus Christ. “You’ll make a very nice Jesus,” said his mother. “Mom, I’m playing Pontius Pilate,” said Telly. Stevens asked Telly if he’d be willing to shave his head to play the part, and Telly found he liked the way it looked. He kept shaving his head after the movie shoot was over. He didn’t have much hair left anyway. Being bald made him distinctive.
From 1973–1978, Telly was a star, as the bald-headed Greek-American New York police lieutenant Theo Kojak in the CBS TV series “Kojak”. Telly had to put in 14-hour days, but for the first time he was very well paid and had a show revolve around him, his strengths, his needs. The show had 118 episodes and in time was broadcast in 75 countries around the world. It smoothed the way for later cops shows, like “Hill Street Blues” and “NYPD Blue.”
He had real money now, and spent it freely. He’d often place bets between takes of the show.
Theo Kojak ran the detective squad in the 11th precinct. You could tell he’d grown up in a tough neighborhood. He knew people who’d gone bad, and even sympathized with them to a degree. But he was still going to nail them. He didn’t break department rules or New York State laws, but he bent them all the time, and without apology. Kojak was dapper, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and walked and talked like a New Yorker. He sucked on lollipops because he was trying to quit smoking and he made famous the line, “Who Loves Ya, Baby?”
Kojak’s car wasn’t flashy — a 1974 Buick — but he drove it fast, and it got the job done. Lieutenant Kojak would rather handle something verbally than with his fists or a gun. But he had that snub-nosed .38 in his overcoat pocket. We always knew he had it, and watched for him to get annoyed enough to take it out and point it at someone.
Telly also made the shaved head popular for men. He didn’t let other bald actors play on “Kojak.” When a young Hector Elizondo got a guest star role on a “Kojak” episode, Telly said firmly that Elizondo would have to wear a toupee: “I’m the only coconut here!” An early scene was shot outside on a windy, blustery day and Elizondo was sure the damn toupee was going to blow right off his head, but they shot it that way because Telly said so.
Elizondo watched Telly and was reminded of Humphrey Bogart, another character actor who became a star, another actor who wasn’t conventionally handsome but had a face the camera loved. Both Bogart and Telly had excellent timing and a distinctive voice, a purring quality that turned grating when they felt threatened. Put all that in a scene with good dialogue and threatening bad guys, and the scenes played very well.
Another young actor, Edward James Olmos, stood up to Telly. There was a scene where Kojak strolls into a bar in Spanish Harlem and brusquely asks the bartender how often a certain patron comes in the place. Olmos was playing the bartender. The script called for him to meekly reply. Olmos argued that this was not realistic; no bartender on his own turf would answer a question like that unless he knew the guy asking was a cop.
Telly walked off the set with a sour remark about prima donna actors. Nothing happened for an hour, and Olmos was afraid his acting career on television had just ended. Then Telly emerged from his trailer, huddled briefly with the director, and they shot the scene with Kojak flipping his badge before asking the question. All agreed it made the scene better.
Telly liked to mix with Kojak fans. He had charisma, and was a master of New York street patter. When fans came up to him with their own bald look, Telly would smile and say with mock menace, “Stay out of my racket; you’re too good-looking.”
If someone asked him if he’d ever taken out a criminal for real, Kojak would purr: ‘You try to avoid the rough stuff, but when you’re dealing with bad guys, you gotta do something. Right?’ And he’d smile like a guy who’s seen it all. When fans told him they wanted another “Kojak” TV movie, Telly would beam and purr, “Talk it up, baby!”
In 1994, at age 70, Telly Savalas died of prostate cancer in his suite at the Sheraton Universal Hotel. The cancer was a closely held secret; Telly didn’t even let his publicist of 25 years know anything about it until three weeks before the end.
“I don’t play that far away from myself,” he once commented. Asked what he liked about the character of Theo Kojak, Telly said, “He’s a gentle man in a violent world.”