SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY 31 March 2002
Heart & Soul
Vicky Allan
WHEN David Soul was just 20 years old he walked in on his best friend in bed with his wife Mim, the mother of his first son. That, I suspect, is the first thing you needto know about him. It’s the unexpected thing. The thing that stops you in your tracks. That David Soul, the icon, the Hutch in Starsky and Hutch, the man who would sing ‘Don’t Give Up on Us Baby’, the heartthrob who would receive letters from millions of female fans, could have found himself so bluntly cuckolded. Thirty-eight years on, sitting with him in a sunny conservatory in Kennilworth, I can’t help thinking about this story. Are the echoes still there?
Soul looks over my shoulder at some far-off target in the distance,
seemingly immersed in those fevered years of big fame, when he and Paul
Michael Glaser were "married to the studio", working 16-hour days with
photographers in their faces and endless, mindless demands coming from all
corners. He likens the fame to a weapon. "It’s like you’re handed a bow and
arrow, or a gun," he says, making a gesture as if to line up his arrow and
pull back his string. "I’d hate to be the target if I had just been given a
bow and arrow." That was a difficult time. Even now you can still see
flickers of the temper. "It wasn’t angry young man, though," he says. "It
was confused young man. And, you know, if in doubt get angry. Because it
really was hard. All these people. And, oh, it’s very important that you
have this meeting, and that you talk to these people, because they really
are powerful. Well, f*** em."
He is a troubling combination. Married and divorced four times, Soul, you
imagine, has not always been easy to live with. For all his charm, his
generosity, that deep, rasping cackle that rumbles through his conversation,
he has a sharp edge. Two years ago he launched a bitter attack on the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe management, when Scottish International, a major
promoter went into liquidation, leaving 50 companies out of pocket. He does
not, I suspect, suffer fools gladly. There is something reckless about him,
a little belligerent. He gets through three or four cigarettes in the course
of the interview, constantly lighting up, gulping in the smoke, despite the
fact he is recovering from flu and his throat, he has told me, is "caked
with mucus".
Today he has been advised not to talk. So instead he whispers on in a
pained, fractured Mid-West drawl, saving the swollen remnants of his vocal
cords for his performance tonight of Deathtrap, the Ira Levin play. A lot of
the time I can’t quite follow him because he doesn’t so much tell a story,
as relive it. "Wait, wait, wait," he says now caught up in some Seventies
moment, surrounded by a gaggle of photographers. He sticks his hand out, as
if to push them back. "Stop that. Don’t you people know how to behave?
That’s not right. That’s not human. You don’t stick something in somebody’s
face and..." He stops, steps back, laughs. "So, no it wasn’t angry. I think
it was the over-reaction of the young person who doesn’t know what to do
with his tools. Nobody teaches you to be a father. Nobody teaches you to be
a husband. Nobody teaches you how to be a star. You have to learn to work
with the tools."
But the anger did come and when he lashed out it was at those closest to
him. Famously, he beat his third wife, Patti Carmel, when she was seven
months pregnant. Rumours circulated that there was a court case against him,
that he was put in jail. "This has been totally misreported," he says. "I
was never jailed. The fact is that I was arrested, but I went into a
diversion programme and by that time I’d already begun working in what was
called anger management. It was a painful and awful moment." Years of
counselling followed. It’s something, he says, you never really get over.
These days he works with men’s groups: it helps him as much as them. "To
deal with the stark reality of having hit or hurt a woman or child, to deal
with the initial responsibility you have not to do that and the knowledge
you did do it, can be incredibly hard. Then there’s the feelings that
follow. Because, ironically the victims, the long-term victims, are both
people. Because you can’t live with yourself and the shame and the guilt. So
a lot of what I do with the groups has to do with just being able to express
it, you know, to another guy, to talk about it."
That was the end of yet another marriage. It was the mid-Eighties, post
Starsky and Hutch, a time of depression and alcoholism, of waning fortunes,
and, soon, another short marriage. Why, I ask, does he think he’s been
married so many times? He does not strike you as some serial trophy hunter.
"It’s not about notches on the gun handle," he says. "I think I liked the
idea of being married, but I think maybe I didn’t take care of what that
means. Then one day I would wake up and, ‘What happened here? What do you
mean you’re going to go? No!’ Why isn’t the right question. I don’t know
why. I mean the first marriage was it for me. I was so much in love and then
I walked in that one day and found my best friend f***ing her and went
ballistic. I ended up in a bit of care for a time. I tried to put it back
together again, but it just didn’t work."
They were at school when they met, at Augustana College in Sioux Falls. Mim
was his childhood sweetheart, the girl from a nearby town who caught his
eye. Despite his parent’s disapproval, at the weekends he would borrow their
car to drive the 30 miles to see her. Two black sheep, both from rigidly
religious families, it was this perhaps that bound them together. Mim’s
background was firmly fundamentalist. Soul’s own father was a Lutheran
minister, a man dedicated to the idea of service. During the Berlin airlift,
he took his family of seven children to Germany, where he administered to
the refugees who were fleeing out of the east. "He was the kind of man who
kept his feelings deeply inside. Yet, we would go to concerts on a Sunday
afternoon, and the thing that amazed me was I’d look at him out of the
corner of my eye and his eyes would mist up and he’d have this imperceptible
quaking of breath… and that was it. You knew he was deeply moved."
Soul married Mim when he was 19. She was pregnant and that was what you did.
"But you know, I was crazy about her. I was absolutely nuts about her, and
we got married, on December 7, in the middle of a blinding blizzard in South
Western Minnesota. And the main discussion at the time was whether or not
she should be allowed to wear a white dress. We had a meeting at her
parents’ home. Her parents on one side of the table, mine on the other.
She’s pregnant. We’re shamed teenagers, and she says: ‘Well, I want to wear
a white dress.’ And her parents say: ‘Absolutely not. You’ll wear a cream
dress. It has to be cream.’ Nobody talked about her feelings about her
pregnancy."
The breakdown of that marriage, he says, destroyed him. What pulled him out
of the depression that followed was, partly, his time in care and music. "It
was Charles Aznavour," he says, "who helped me. Because we didn’t talk about
feelings back then but here were these songs that were about no regrets and
about new beginnings. We didn’t have that kind of introspection in American
pop music. He vocalised what I was feeling, but without taking the romance
out of it, or the possibility of love." "The autumn weaves a woollen blanket
for the sun…" he starts to sing. A thousand women would kill for this
moment. David Soul, singing Aznavour, his broken voice stumbling over the
notes with the physical and emotional pain behind it so evident.
Music was already his great passion. Turning his back on America, he went to
study political science at Mexico City university and began playing the
local bars, singing Mexican folk songs. Soon he had worked up a gimmick act,
‘The Covered Man’, playing electric blues in the clubs of New York wearing a
balaclava. Numerous theories went round as to who he was. Was he Mayor
Lindsey? Or perhaps Bob Dylan in disguise? When he finally removed the mask,
the show quickly waned in popularity. Still, he toured as an opening act
with The Byrds and Frank Zappa, got a spot on a TV entertainment show and
before long he was offered the lead role as a tofu-eating, yoga-practising
cop called Hutch in a hip new series. It had never seemed like he was
heading for acting, yet somehow he ended up there.
It is typical of his career, of his whole life. He is an opportunist.
"There’s a wonderful old Northern German story that describes me. Two guys
come down the street and there are two doors, one for guys with blond hair,
one for guys with black hair. Black hair thinks: ‘Oh, that’s where I go.’
Blond hair goes through his door. Then they come to two more doors: one for
brown shoes and one for black shoes. On and on they go and they get to the
end of it, and the one guy looks at the other and says: ‘What does it mean?’
He says: ‘I dunno, but it’s a wonderful system.’ Ha ha ha. I suppose I just
went through doors."
In recent years it seems he must have been through a few new doors, doors
marked ‘social conscience’ and ‘proud father’ and ‘stable partner’. You get
the feeling that perhaps some of that confusion and restlessness has begun
to settle out. Every now and again, he gets out another photo of a family
member. There, he shows me, is Alexa Hamilton, the American actress who has
been his partner for the last nine years "both in business and love". This
is China his beautiful 13-year-old daughter. And has he told me about his
second son, the kayaker and adventurer? "I see my kids more often than ever,
the six of them," he says. "The problems that used to be there, between
myself and the first wives are gone. And what’s happened over these years is
that we’ve become friends. What a concept you know, become friends first,
then get married. They all get on with each other too. Mim gets on really
well with Alexa and came over and stayed when we did the Edinburgh show." Up
until now, Soul has only rented homes in Britain, moving from London
apartment to London apartment, since he arrived in 1995 for a production
that never actually happened, but if all goes well with his residency (he is
waiting to hear back from the Home Office), he is even thinking of buying a
house here.
What is odd about him is the way he appears to combine a self-centred vanity
with an acute social conscience. It is as if, perhaps, his father’s voice is
there. Many of the stories he tells are to do with causes he has supported.
There is the time he campaigned for Martin Bell, his support for the World
Society for the Protection of Animals, the many documentaries he has made.
Even his recent row over the Edinburgh Festival comes out sounding more like
a defence of the smaller companies who got screwed. "I wouldn’t come back to
the Festival with a show," he says, "not until I’m assured that these little
productions are protected."
It is a touchy subject, money. In fact, Soul and Paul Michael Glaser got
very little of the Starsky and Hutch fortune - they made a paltry 100,000
each. "We were so screwed during the making of it that when it came time to
strip it for syndication, we had a choice. We could either take our net
involvement into the show, which was 7.5%, which if you’re in the business
means nothing, or wait and still get screwed." These days, he and Glaser are
still close friends. They have been constants in each other’s lives, seen
each other through the bad times: Glaser’s loss of his wife Elizabeth and
daughter Ariel to Aids, Soul’s many divorces. In recent years, they talked
about reviving Starsky and Hutch. The rights were coming up for option and
they thought they would make a movie. "One of the things that set Starsky
and Hutch apart from other shows was that we grew up with a generation, in a
much simpler time, a time when there were fewer channels and the family
would gather round and watch a particular show together. You realise you’re
part of the family structure in a way. So, we thought, to give closure to
the relationship, it would be interesting to see what happened to these guys
25 years later. They’re at a World Trade Organisation event, one guy is
heading up a big security company, the other is protester and conspiracy
theorist. He’s kind of wandered through Europe, got married a couple of
times whatever. Yeah, he’s like me. That’s the blurring of fact and fiction.
To many people I am Hutch, so some of my story’s in there." They never got
the rights. Seeing an opportunity to make big bucks on a Charlie’s
Angels-style remake, Warner offered the original writer an irresistible
deal. Ben Stiller will star, and perhaps Brad Pitt or Vince Vaughn. The
funny thing is, I was never a Starsky and Hutch fan. - I can barely remember
the leather jackets, the cardies, the tofu, and that seat-drop onto the
tomato-red Ford Gran Torino - but Starsky and Hutch: 25 years on intrigues
me. Partly because even I know David Soul is Hutch and no one else ever
could be. And with all that blurring of fact and fiction, I’ve finally
bought into the Soul-Hutch story. I want to know more.
Deathtrap, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh (0131-529 6000), April 2-6.
David Soul's official website: www.davidsoul.com