Nominations are now open for The Most Dedicated Actor in Hollywood. The candidates who come instantly to mind are not, alas, available to complete for the title. They seem to be out politicking, or stonewalled in the Utah mountains, or beachcombing in Tahiti, or busy cuing singing baggage-handlers in airline commercials.
No matter. My prime nominee is as available as he is qualified. He is a 53-year-old slumping, galumphing, scowling, sideways-talking, no-expletives-deleted ex-Marine and ex-boozehound with a degree in mechanical engineering who has the odd notion that success is something to be shared, not flaunted. His name is Gerald S. O’ Loughlin Ryker, one-fifth of the star billing on ABC’s The Rookies.
When last seen off-screen he was bucketing over the Sepulvede Pass in his patched-up little red Datsun wagon, en route home to the San Fernando Valley from the 20th Century–Fox studios, where The Rookies is filmed. This had been a day off, in the show’s shooting schedule. But not for O’ Loughlin. He had just put in a full eight hours – not on the stage, which was dark, but in his dressing-room apartment, analyzing and annotating his part in the next episode.
O’ Loughlin is rarely stopped for autographs. Heads do not turn when he enters a public place. In fact, when he shambles into a restaurant, gray cap pulled down to his eyebrows, you expect his first words to be: “So who’s the party called for a cab?”
The only entourage O’ Loughlin ha is his family – wife Meryl and children Christopher, 7 , and Laura , 5. When the kids are in school and Meryl is on the job (she’s casting director for The Manhunter), he travels alone.
That is not to say that Jerry O., as he’s known on the set, has no following. Among people who’ve known him at first hand professionally – cast and crew members, directors, producers, students – there is a hard-core admiration society bordering on an O’ Loughlin cult. Hal Sitowitz, a writer on The Rookies last season and now one of the show’s two producers, comes on like an unabashed fan: “Jerry is one of the truly remarkable performers in the business. He is our rock, a producer’s dream. It’s axiomatic around here: ‘If a scene’s in trouble, give it to Jerry O.’ He’ll bail you out every time.”
If there were indeed a Jerry O. Fan Club, its self-appointed president would be Kate Jackson, the young beauty who plays nurse Jill Danko. “I was just a dumb kid when the show started two years ago, “ she says, “and I used to peek at Jerry’s scripts, marked up with all those magical dots and symbols, then watch open-mouthed when the squiggles came to life in his scenes. I’d never seen anybody so prepared, so ready, so right. I’ve learned from Jerry how to analyze a scene, and now I mark up my scripts just like he does. What a terrific learning experience!”
O’ Loughlin gets two days off between shooting segments. “That’s my preparation time for the upcoming script – if it’s a story where the kids have all the action and I just give a few orders. When Lieutenant Ryker has important scenes, I spend the weekend at it as well.” That adds up to four days’ hard homework for perhaps 16 minutes on camera, breaking down each line, each move, according to “action, attitude, character and the sensory element.” It’s the kind of attention one would expect an actor to lavish on King Lear or Cyrano de Bergerac. But The Rookies? Hardly an orthodox approach to a series role undertaken – as O’ Loughlin readily admits - “strictly for the dough.”
No is Jerry O.’s story in any other way an orthodox TV star’s biography. His father, a “crackerjack corporation lawyer,” whom he adored, died when Jerry was 6. He has only recently fully recovered from that trauma. Until then he suffered through years of anger, anxiety and delusion, compounded by the creeping of alcoholism.
When he was 12 he moved with his mother and his sister from Manhattan, where he was born, up and across the Hudson River to Spring Valley, N.Y., where he grew up. “I enjoyed a typical country, small-town boyhood. Raised and sold chickens, built myself a darkroom and a coffee-can enlarger, was crazy about guns. No doubt about my going to college. But law school was out of the question. My grades were terrible. So I would be an engineer, like my grandfather.”
The first seeds of deviation were planted when Jerry was given a part in a high-school play. “I played this Franklin Pangborn type. The audience thought I was funny. Their response gave me a gut-level satisfaction I’d never felt before. I never got over it.”
For the time being he lived it down, however, and entered Lafayette College, in Easton, Pa. World War II interrupted his studies and in the summer of ’42 he was accepted by the Marines, in the Corps’ “instant officers” assembly line. “It was a crash program and everybody got his commission. Even me, after I flunked the course in Rifle Platoon and Attack. You can imagine what a blow that was to a gun freak! I went out and got drunk.”
He spent most of the war in Hawaii, courtesy of the replacement draft, waiting for assignment to an active unit. When it finally came, the only action left was the Occupation of Japan. “Boredom and booze – that was my war,” he recalls. “In Hawaii I had my first blackouts from drinking. Scary. But I guess not scary enough.”
After the war he went dutifully back to school, but his heard wasn’t in it. He decided that acting was his profession. With two years remaining on the Gl Bill, he went to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, where he worked under the famous drama coach Sanford Meisner; and to Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, the spawning ground of Method acting.
In 1950 he was Marine Lieutenant O’ Loughlin again: the Korean War. This action he sat out in Camp Lejeune, N.C. More boredom. More booze. “After that I quit the Corps for good. I couldn’t wait to get back to the theater.”
He got back with a vengeance, shot to the top rank of promising young actors. But 15 years later what he had become was a promising middle-aged actor. He had appeared with John Garfield, Jack Klugman and Jack Warden in a revival of “Golden Boy.” He had appeared on many live TV dramas. But the successes were offset by the drinking bouts, by all the parts he didn’t get because he was too hung over to audition.
“With all the thoroughness of an engineer,” he says today, now that he can look back with a certain clinical detachment, “I was systematically and progressively destroying myself.”
Eight years ago, as a long romance with a Broadway actress came to a sudden end, he knew he had to do something drastic. What he did was – in the alcoholic’s lexicon – “take a geographic.” He moved to the West Coast. “It didn’t do any good. Nobody knew me out here. The phone didn’t ring. All the more reason to hit bottle and wallow in self-pity.”
Then at a party, he met a lively, forthright young lady named Meryl Abeles who had given up acting aspirations to be a television casting director. Three months later they were married.
Being in love, and married, and getting a rash of small TV parts was not enough. The disease was eating him alive. “I wanted to have a family, to do the things my father didn’t live to enjoy with his kids. But there was only one way I could do that. It boiled down to one simple decision.
“It was seven years ago that I made the decision, and surrendered to the truth about myself and my drinking. Today I’m still working at being a recovering alcoholic. Sobriety is something I can never take for granted.”
It’s been a whole new life for the late-blooming O’Loughlin. The TV parts got bigger, as Jerry’s new reputation for reliability spread, culminating with the summons to The Rookies. He’s gotten involved, with Meryl, in the children’s schools, and he’s returned to his boyhood hobby of photography.
Otherwise his consuming passion is teaching. As soon as the season’s filming ends on the series, he will resume teaching at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, a Hollywood spin-off of the famous Actors Studio. “My acting class,” says Jerry, “is my second family. I could never divorce myself from it, any more than Eddie Ryker could from his second family, the young cops. Remember the George C. Scott character in ‘The New Centurions’? he couldn’t survive when it was taken away from him. I know that feeling.
O’ Loughlin will direct an episode of The Rookies next year. “If I don’t pan out as a director, “ he says, “that’s all right. I have an ace in the hole. I’ve kept all these years a letter I got when I graduated. Offer of a trainee job at Bethlehem Steel.”
Jerry O., as everybody will tell you, is always prepared.

By Rowland Barber