Telly Loves Ya!

Aristotle "Telly" Savalas is sitting on a sofa in Western Airlines' VIP lounge at Los Angeles International Airport, a glass of wine clasped in one hand and, in the other, the pink-sheathed thigh of his companion, Pam, a coolly stunning brunette approximately one third his age. He is dressed in Southern California regimentals: double-breasted, cream-colored blazer and open-collar shirt of royal blue set off by the traditional Malibu medallion. Inscribed on the medal's face is Telly's Pop, Savalas' race horse, which, running injured [he was finally put to sleep not long ago], had finished 26 and a half lengths off the pace in his last outing and will not be featured this sunny afternoon at Tijuana's Agua Caliente Race Track, where it has been officially proclaimed Telly Savalas Day.

Telly introduces me around: his brother Gus (Constantine Socrates), recently retired from the State Department Information Service (Athens embassy); Larry Newberg, personal photographer, promoter of "Telly--Apparel for the Man" and Savalas' self-described "right-hand man," who is "at his side 24 hours a day"; and Pam, origins unknown, who will be at Telly's side all of this day. He turns back to her and begins talking sotto voce, his hand all the while stroking her lovely thigh. While we await the arrival of Telly's public-relations man, Mike Mamakos, with the tickets for San Diego, Gus begins to tell Pam a story of sibling love.

"Telly saved my life, you know," he informs her. "I had been told by doctors here that I needed a double arterial bypass, even though I had no pain and no symptoms----"

Telly interrupts, "I called DeBakey and Cooley in Texas--figured I might as well get the best. But a guy who knows told me, 'Forget Cooley, he's just a glamor boy.'"

Gus resumes, "Anyway, get this: These doctors here went ahead and sent me to somebody in Norfolk, Virginia, for open-heart surgery."

"When that happened," says Telly, "I asked this cardiologist I know at NYU, 'Do you really think this is necessary?' He said to me, 'Put it this way. Have you ever heard of anyone being sent to Norfolk for open-heart surgery?'"

"Telly got me out of there pronto, before they operated," Gus concludes. "He sent me to Santa Barbara for a month. I ate carrots and lima beans and walked fifteen miles a day. I've been fine ever since."

Telly sips his wine and grins. "I may have to have open-head surgery before my brain goes soft," he says.

Gus winks at Pam. "Telly wrote a book, you know. Brain Surgery Self-Taught."

Pam smiles appreciatively.

It is inevitable, even in the VIP lounge, that the autograph hounds will sniff out their quarry. As always, Savalas is careful to be gracious, to make sure a fan, insofar as it is possible, walks away with a remembrance of personal contact with a warm and generous human being. After each signing, Telly returns his attention to Pam and her thigh.

Soon Mamakos enters with the tickets. We are scheduled to fly to San Diego, there to be whisked by helicopter to Agua Caliente. As we head toward the gate, Telly and Pam hand in hand, the entourage trailing, whispers rise from the crowd, "Kojak ... Kojak...."

That's right, Kojak, TV's blessed menace and the most extraordinary sex symbol ever fashioned. You see him on the tube every week, strutting the sidewalks of New York in his own brand of threads with a lollipop in his mouth or swinging through a number in a special such as Telly ... Who Loves Ya, Baby? with a leer on his face, and you just have to wonder about the Seventies. Forty years ago, Telly Savalas would have gone head to grotesque head with Charles Laughton for the role of Quasimodo. Indeed, just a few years ago, he was playing ex-Pfc. Quasimodo and Sergeant Quasimodo in all those hip/revisionist World War Two shoot-outs (The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes); he has played Pontius Pilate, Al Capone and assorted swine. Such roles fell naturally to an actor with a reptilian skull, accipitrine eyes, edematous nose and a mouth that lady columnists love to call "cruelly sensual," but looks just plain big to me. Now, after five smash seasons on CBS with Kojak, he is Telly, baby, with the booze and the broads and the ponies and money pouring over him like ouzo. Who can explain it? Who can tell me why? Here's Telly: "Look at this classic nose! There are times when I think I am absolutely beautiful. There's a definite pleasantness about me. My mother used to say to me, 'Aristotle, you're the most attractive man in the world. And you've been attractive for over 2500 years. You are the image of the Hermes statue done by Praxiteles. Go look at the Parthenon and see your face.'

"Listen, do you know that even before Kojak, I was once voted the third sexiest man on the screen? True. Women like me--they feel they can tell me things. The day of the blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon is gone. That's not where life is at. Those so-called handsome leading men were pretty dull, anyhow. I compensate for not being one of those guys by the way I think, feel, act and articulate. They add up to make me extremely good-looking."

He laughs. "See, ain't nuthin' wrong with me. It's just the freaky times."

These freaky times have made Savalas a big-league celebrity and a big-time sport, and one of the consequences of this is that he is about to be feted at Agua Caliente and have a plaza in Tijuana named after him.

As we settle into our seats in the first-class cabin, Telly suddenly cries, "All a-board! Mine-ola... Massa-pe-qua ... Gar-den City.... 'Board!"

The stewardess asks him what he would like. "Wodka, baby ... I want wodka. 'Board!"

Larry and Gus occasionally echo the cry. It is apparently a popular routine. Soon drinks are served as Mamakos tells me, "This is going to be quite a production today. They're dropping twenty thousand pictures of Telly over Tijuana. They wanted to drop ten thousand lollipops, too, but the police nixed that. Might wipe out a couple of Mexicans. Instead, they're going to pass them out at the track."

The steward greets Telly, then asks, "Can you give us a tip on today's horses?"

Telly (affably): "Won't know 'em till I see 'em, pal. 'Board!"

As we swing low over San Diego's iridescent blue bay, Telly takes Pam's hand and tells her, "Before you were born, Pamela dear, I was a young Serviceman in this town. I fought the war right down there...."

Then he grins at Gus. "Hyde Park ... Lyn-brook.... 'Board!"

The first screw-up of the day occurs at the airport; seems there are eight helicopters scattered about various hangars, none of them operational. But two limousines are gassed and waiting. Telly removes his blazer and climbs into the lead limo. "Lemme drive," he says, and we're off on the road to Mexico.

A motorcycle escort picks us up at the border and we wing toward Agua Caliente, sirens screaming. The reception committee is waiting for us at the track: Mayor Fernando Marquez Arce, in a tan leisure suit, and his retinue; a 12-piece mariachi band, complete with guitars and violins and trumpets; five festive señoritas in peasant blouses bearing a blue banner with white letters:

Telly Savalas Day Agua Caliente

Telly emerges from the limo, waves at the gathering crowd, poses for the camera squadrons with the motorcycle cops. The mayor, in careful English, presents Telly with a huge gold key to the city. "Always we are glad to have you in our town...." It's an agreeable moment even in the fierce Mexican sun, but with a nice shading of absurdity about it: the alcalde in his leisure suit playing the rhinestone Gaucho, Telly in dark, dark glasses looking like the only Occidental operative in the Tonton Macoute.

Telly joins the señoritas holding his banner as Mamakos tells Newberg, "OK, we've got to go dedicate that street now. Get our people into the limos, the press into that truck." Moments later, we arrive at what is about to be rechristened the Plaza de Telly Savalas, with Telly posing with the mayor and the director of public affairs for Tijuana and the local director of tourism and telling the NBC reporter down from San Diego, "Great fun, great trip, great city of Tijuana." After the interview, he turns to Pam, laughs and says, "When do you suppose the races start, for Chrissake?"

Only Pam, in open-toed white shoes with gold spikes and a dress as light as a pink cloud at dusk, looks cool. Everything else is white and hot and confusing, and as the crowd begins to surge and roar, "Tel-ly! Tel-ly! Tel-ly!" I somehow conjure up, with a more sinister sense of recall than is really necessary, the climactic street scene in Suddenly Last Summer.

We pile into the limos and sweep back to the race track. The musicians, in gay caballero drag, are waiting on the steps with a musical tribute to Telly's heritage. All I can say is, if you've never heard a mariachi band playing a medley of Hellenic favorites, you don't know what a lively tune is.

We are seated at luncheon tables at the track's glassed-in Turf Club. While nachos and wine are served, Telly tears the tout sheet out of the Daily Racing Form and begins to scan it, expertly, (concluded on page 233) Telly Loves Ya! (continued from page 120) with Pam. A girl shyly approaches him and says, "Nice to meet you," in halting Greek. "I don't know anything else," she adds unnecessarily.

"You spoke it like a native, baby," Telly assures her.

The stadium is, by Mexican standards, immense. There is a dog track running outside the horse track and the stands seat a good 20,000. Also, Agua Caliente must surely be the only race track in Western civilization that features a kiddies' playground on the infield.

Telly pulls out a sheaf of bills and begins the day's betting, telling Gus to lay a chunk on Dynasty Lane's nose in the second race. Before the horses reach the post, the five señoritas bring Telly his banner. "Ees pleasure," they say.

"I'm way ahead of you, baby," he says.

Mamakos leans over Telly's chair. "Hey, we've got to do the dedication of the room upstairs."

"Can you hang on a couple of minutes?" Telly asks.

Mamakos, noting Pam's momentary absence, twits him: "Waiting for your daughter to get back?"

Telly sighs. "I wish she were my daughter."

Pam returns and we push through the crowd to the dedication ceremony. Outside the room, a photographer yells, as Telly kisses an adoring Mexican girl, "He loves ya, baby!"

"You got that right," Telly cries happily.

The room has been remodeled as an authentic, old-fashioned betting parlor, right down to the chalk tote board. Telly the Greek is enchanted. The track director, Fernando Gonzalez, presents him with a medallion, a money clip and cuff links, all hammered by hand from Taxco silver. Telly, flushed, thanks him, then yells, "Hey, Pam, c'mere." She emerges from the hot press of the crowd like a pink epiphany and demurely clasps the chain about his sweaty neck.

Back in the Turf Club, Telly becomes reflective as he wins his third race in a row. "Look," he says, "I'm enjoying my money now, but I've always enjoyed it. Now it's just that there's a spotlight on me and more people enjoying it with me. Anyway, celebrity is nonsense. Thank God I came into this butcher business late, with my head on straight."

Among those enjoying his life and his money are three daughters by his first two marriages and a son from his days with actress Sally Adams. Does he feel like marrying again?

"All the time, friend, all the time. But right now, I'm movin' around. I live in Bel Air, New York, London ... I follow the action, and you can interpret that any way you want. Kojak? It's good until ten minutes after I get bored with it. Now, you know, we're shooting it in L.A.--at least in the parts that look like New York. Plus, we've got enough leftover footage from shooting in New York to last us for years. Nobody's sadder about the show leaving New York, but financially, that's the way it's gotta be. But it's tough. I'm a New York guy...."

No number of Giorgio blazers or jangling medallions could possibly disguise that blunt fact. He was born in Garden City, Long Island, of Greek immigrant parents. His father, a tobacco speculator, alternated from rags to riches to rags with disruptive regularity. Telly got himself shot up a bit in the war (he tends to be vague about his background in general and about the war in particular), later entered Columbia and graduated with honors in psychology. True. Love him or don't, Telly Savalas is no fool.

He started med school but became disillusioned with psychiatry (he now calls Freud "an intellectual gangster") and drifted, like Gus, into the State Department Information Service. He claims to have given that up because he rose through the ranks so swiftly that his colleagues determined to knife him. He became a director for ABC television news and special events, won a Peabody Award for developing the series Your Voice of America. Shortly thereafter, an agent asked Savalas to find someone who could play an Eastern European judge on television's Armstrong Circle Theater. He auditioned himself, "out of curiosity," and got the part. Burt Lancaster later spotted him and got him a role as a fellow convict in Birdman of Alcatraz. Telly was nominated for an Oscar and his reputation as the quintessential cinematic creep was established. But even as he played all those wackos and pervs and sados, he dreamed his Quasimodian dreams. "Forget the gorilla exterior," he told a reporter. "Inside is a sixteen-year-old Romeo."

"'Boooard!" cries the 50-odd-year-old Romeo as we leave the Turf Club and make our way down to the paddock. Mamakos, the last word in casual PR, pleasantly observes, "Notice how just about nothing that was predicted has actually happened? The mariachi band was supposed to stick with us throughout the day, but after the first couple of sets, they said it was siesta time and took off; said they'd be back around five or six. Hell, I told them, we'll be gone by then. They just smiled. Mañana."

We endure the final ceremony, complete with the winning jockey and mount from the seventh race and garlands of flowers for Telly. He waves at the crowd with a lollipop in his mouth and they respond accordingly. "¿Olé! Tel-ly! ¿Olé! Ko-yak!"

With that, we're off, sirens screaming again as the police run us smack into the Saturday-afternoon traffic returning to the U.S. But Mexican cops know their way around a log jam of California dreamers; they steer us into the empty incoming lanes and escort us to the head of a line. I get another flash from film memory: John Ireland, impoverished journalist, riding in unaccustomed style with the heavy hitters in All the King's Men. Newberg is saying to me, "Telly, he's really something. It's a bitch keeping up with him. He's on the go so much and runs so hard, and he only needs a couple hours' sleep. I'm always falling asleep in his production meetings."

We have about 45 minutes before our flight back to L.A., so we stop for drinks at a fern-draped Mexican restaurant and lounge overlooking San Diego Bay. The swift sailboats are lovely on the water in the lambent late-afternoon sunlight. A San Diego Chamber of Commerce fellow with us mentions that a prominent local sailor, Lowell North, was skippering one of the boats vying for the right to defend the America's Cup. Since I once covered the competition for Time, I present a brief, incoherent history of the cup.

Telly is fascinated. "We once whipped Sir Thomas Lipton, huh? Five times? Hey, that's something." Telly, you may have noted, is a rabid patriot.

He then asks Mamakos, "Hey, Mike, can I get a boat?"

"I don't see why not."

"Really," Telly insists. "I don't mean let's talk about it next week. I mean I want a boat tomorrow. I'm not a plan-ahead guy, like most people. What's happening is happening now."

"Sure, Telly, sure," says Mamakos.

Savalas chuckles and waves the bay away. "I don't want one of those puny little boats, either. I don't like little things." He lifts his jeroboam of margarita. "I like big houses, big cars, big boats, big broads. I'm that kind of guy. Want an island? I'll take Hawaii--all of it." He turns to me. "Am I right, Mark?"

I think on that. "Truth is, Telly," I reply at last, "I'd settle for Oahu."

Telly Savalas mumbles with delight. "See, dear?" he says as he runs his hand slowly, lovingly up Pam's pink-sheathed thigh. "That's the difference between people. Mark here, he's willing to settle for Oahu. Me, I want Hawaii."

"'Celebrity is nonsense. Thank God I came into this butcher business late, with my head on straight.'"