David Janssen — David’s Drooping… (1965) 🇺🇸

David Janssen (David Harold Meyer) (1931–1980) | www.vintoz.com

September 27, 2025

Success has left Fugitive Janssen tired, tense and physically ailing

by Arnold Hano

Some weeks ago, David Janssen interrupted a rehearsal with Angie Dickinson on the set of “The Fugitive,” because he had developed a tightness in his shoulder that had to be massaged away. By Miss Dickinson. This is no tragedy.

But it is symptomatic of present-day David Janssen, perhaps the hottest dramatic actor on television. Less than three years ago he accepted the starring role of The Fugitive, a part aptly described by another actor, who wanted the job and didn’t get it, as “60 minutes of looking over your shoulder — for the audience.”

This season the audience has caught up. Today The Fugitive is one of the most-watched hours on the air. And Janssen, after a spotty 27-year career that had run the gamut from indifferent to innocuous, is suddenly one of the industry’s most-admired actors. He is also paying the price.

Success is rarely an unmixed blessing. Especially in Hollywood, where new billings and luscious pay checks are seldom as swollen as egos, and where a successful actor is termed “a sweet guy” because he hasn’t pushed his aging mother downstairs recently.

Not so David Janssen.

“Success moves people lots of ways,” says Quinn Martin, partner with Janssen on The Fugitive and the show’s executive producer, Hollywood’s euphemism for boss. “Some actors get paranoid. They turn on people. They become selfish. David has become more secure, easier to work with. He’s the first guy in town who got nicer as the result of big success.”

Alan Armer, producer of the show, says: “Janssen has flowered with success.”

Unfortunately, the flowers have dark petals.

Janssen, who will be 35 this March 27, admits he is tired, tense and physically ailing. He is walking on a left knee whose socket would be no more painful if it were filled with razor blades. He snapped a ligament while pole-vaulting in high school, and has carefully postponed surgery because knee surgeons don’t guarantee success. Now his time has about run out. He walks with a bouncy limp; and because of the melodramatic nature of The Fugitive — with its dashes down black alleys, plunges into icy rivers and savage brawls — the knee has taken a battering until it is today a pulp of torn tendons, bone chips and calcium deposits. When The Fugitive winds up shooting at the end of March, Janssen will be forced to undergo an operation to try to clear it up.

But it is the nerves that are most strained. David Janssen puts in an average 14-hour workday. He rises at 5:30 A.M., showers and dresses, and leaves his fashionable Trousdale Estates home in Beverly Hills before the sun is up. Or even before his wife, Ellie, is up. He doesn’t get home until 8 or 9 at night. “Then I fall asleep in my mashed potatoes,’ he says dryly. When he doesn’t doze off at supper, he staggers to the television set. “TV is my sleeping pill,” he says.

This wry, almost apologetic manner keys David Janssen. For all the tension and physical exhaustion that have become part of his success, Janssen takes neither himself nor the success very seriously. During the episode with Miss Dickinson, the two embrace on Miss Dickinson’s bed. It is a moment of small, nibbling kisses, reminiscent of the old Ingrid Bergman–Cary Grant scene in Notorious; and as they parted, director Abner Biberman suggested to Miss Dickinson: “You could take a bite of his ear on the way out.” Miss Dickinson purred: “I’d rather he do it to me,” and David Janssen excused himself hastily and fled to his dressing room, where he telephoned his wife.

Ellie Janssen, married to David since 1958, is most aware of what the pressures of 14-hour days mean. And she is concerned.

“He is physically tired. He pushes himself beyond his endurance. In a way he has to. He doesn’t want to lead an existence that is solely eat-work-sleep. He must have a social life. He is smoking more these days — two to three packs a day — and he is drinking more. He feels it gives him zing, it peps him up. Fortunately, I have a clue that tells me when he is really exhausted. Tiny white spots form on his cheeks. He’ll come home from the studio, and I’ll say, ‘There they are,’ and David will say, ‘You can see them through the makeup?’ and we both know he has to take it easy.”

All is not bleak. A year ago Janssen found he was constantly clearing his throat. Assuming it came from too much smoking, he cut out cigarettes for a month. Not only did he put on weight and become even more tense, but the throat-clearing persisted. Delighted to discover it was not from smoking, but simply a nervous habit, Janssen began to light up again.

He had himself an ulcer

Or take his ulcer. Three years ago Janssen was sitting around after having completed My Six Loves, a film so bad even Janssen’s press agent Frank Liberman winces at the memory. Farther behind were three-plus years of a television series: “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” a show begat in 1957 and buried in 1960 when doctors replaced private eyes as the big time-slot operators of the living room. In the words of Hollywood, Janssen was between jobs. In his words, “I was unemployed.” So he had himself an ulcer.

Today Janssen views the ulcer and its departure with some small smug pride. “Thinking causes ulcers,’ he says, sitting back in his splendidly dark dressing suite at the Samuel Goldwyn set, situated in the same building as Goldwyn’s. “Thinking gets rid of ulcers. I thought mine away.”

Not quite. According to Ellie Janssen, he also takes gelatin compounds and other ulcer antidotes, and toys with the usual bland diet. With Janssen, the diet is enriched by quantities of black coffee, Scotch and brandy. His must be a very confused ulcer.

And success has its material manifestations. As the star of Richard Diamond, Janssen earned $750 a week. As the star and partner of The Fugitive, $750 a week becomes pocket money. Janssen has taken to buying up pieces of the desert in the Palm Springs area. When it was suggested his land holdings are worth something like half a million to a million dollars, he apologetically suggested they were worth a hell of a lot more. In September of 1964, the Janssens bought a swanky weekend home in Palm Springs, which Ellie Janssen calls “the best idea we’ve had in some time. The minute we take off for the Springs, David begins to unwind.”

Success has also brought recognition. Last year Janssen won himself an Emmy nomination, and walked off with TV Guide’s poll of its readers as the year’s favorite male performer. This is a big change from the old days. Janssen, the Nebraska-born son of a Ziegfeld Follies girl, was thrust into bit parts in the movies when he was 8, and after graduation from Fairfax (Hollywood) High in 1949 began filling minor roles in minor films. He made 32 movies for Universal, playing what Janssen calls “an agreer. The star would approach me and ask, ‘Don’t you think so, Harry?’ and I’d agree, and disappear.”

His pay check went quickly

Of those old film days Janssen says: “Most of my pay check went to my tailor, barber and masseur.” He could have added his bartender. “I was less than responsible,” says Janssen. “I had no obligations except to my own pleasure.”

But along came Ellie Graham, in 1958, to give his life more meaning; and a few years later, Quinn Martin, to give his career more meaning.

Martin says: “David had never believed he was really a good actor. He had a bag of tricks to get by with. He’d blink his eyes or tug at his ears or stroke his chin. He was a glib, good-looking, well-dressed guy who refused to probe his own talent.”

The first year on The Fugitive was a tough one for Martin. “David would argue with everybody about faults he’d found in the scripts. He baited directors. It wasn’t nasty, but he wanted to make sure people paid attention to him. He bugged me.”

Success has changed that. “Today,” says Martin, “David comes in and plays the role and leaves the production to me.” The mannerisms have “gradually disappeared. “He used them only when he was tired. I’d watch the dailies — the unedited film of each day’s shooting — and I’d say to David: ‘I counted two bug-eyes, one ear fug, “and one chin pull. Tired?’ And he’d say, ‘You rat, you caught me.’ The next day, there’d be no gimmicks. Just talent.”

To David Janssen, the real big change is that he’s working regularly at a job he likes, despite the unrelenting ‘pressures. “I’m from Nebraska,” he once said, “and I feel guilty when I’m not working. If I’d stayed in the picture business, making two a year, sitting around the rest of the time, I’d go crazy, and become a boozed-up actor at 35.”

He is now approaching 35, and though he is far from a teetotaler, he is even farther from being boozed-up. He says he is happier these days than those days, that he leads a fuller life, and that he enjoys working on The Fugitive more than he has ever enjoyed work before. But he also says it is harder this second year than it was the first. “It’s difficult keeping the character fresh and reaching deeper into his character to find more things he can do.” He says he’d prefer putting in just one or two more years on the show, but executive producer Quinn Martin speaks grandly of five more years. “Five more years?” Janssen says dully. “Contractually, I suppose I would have to put in five more years, but —” And his voice trails off.

This, then, is David Janssen. He has to work increasingly hard to remain reasonably happy in his career, but the pressures of work create tensions which find no outlet other than more work. It is a vicious cycle, and Janssen may be beginning to show it. There are the tight muscles in shoulder and back; there is the interjected phrase “you know” thrust into every sentence, giving Janssen’s speech a spastic quality.

Novelist Bernard Wolfe, a close friend of the Janssens for the past two years, suggests an explanation. “David is a man of considerable inner tension who, more than most of us, keeps it all to himself. What makes it worse is that David is not a fanatically dedicated person. If he were, all this grueling work would have more meaning for him. But he is not dedicated. He has great doubts as to the ultimate aim of it all, as to where it is leading him.”

David Janssen is a decent human being who refuses to take himself, his work, or his success seriously. Meanwhile, his work and his success may be tearing him apart.

David Janssen — David’s Drooping… (1965) | www.vintoz.com