From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Edward Crane (July 13, 1928 – June 29, 1978) was an American disc jockey and actor, best known for his performance as Colonel Robert E. Hogan in the television sitcom Hogan's Heroes from 1965 to 1971.

Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. He graduated from high school in 1946 and became a drummer, performing with dance bands and a symphony orchestra. In 1949, he married high school sweetheart Anne Terzian; they eventually had three children, Deborah Ann, Karen Leslie, and Robert David (known as "Bob, Jr.").

Contents 1 Early career 2 Hogan's Heroes 3 Decline and fall 4 Filmography 5 See Also 6 References 7 External links

In 1950, Crane started his broadcasting career at WLEA in Hornell, New York, from which he quickly moved to WBIS in Bristol, Connecticut, followed by WICC in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a 500-watt operation where he remained until 1956, when the CBS radio network plucked Crane out to help stop his huge popularity from affecting their own station's ratings, and then Crane moved his family to California to host the morning show at KNX in Hollywood. He filled the broadcast with sly wit, drumming, and guests including Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, and it quickly became the number-one rated morning show in the LA area, with Crane known as "The King of the Los Angeles Airwaves."

Crane's acting ambitions led to his subbing for Johnny Carson on the daytime game show Who Do You Trust? and appearances on The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and General Electric Theater. When Carl Reiner appeared on his show, Crane persuaded him to book him for a guest shot on The Dick Van Dyke Show, where he was noticed by Donna Reed, who suggested him for the role of neighbor Dr. Dave Kelsey in her eponymous sitcom from 1963 through 1965.

In 1965, Crane was offered the starring role in a television comedy pilot about a German P.O.W. camp. Hogan's Heroes, with a spirit resembling that of the films Stalag 17 and The Great Escape, became a hit and finished in the Top Ten in its first year on the air. The series lasted six seasons, and Crane was nominated for an Emmy Award twice, in 1966 and 1967. During its run, he met Patricia Olsen who played Hilda under the stage name Sigrid Valdis. He divorced his wife of twenty years and married Olsen on the set of the show in 1970. They had a son, Scotty (Robert Scott), and adopted a daughter named Ana Marie.

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.

Following the cancellation of Hogan's Heroes in 1971, Crane continued to act, appearing in two Disney films and a number of TV shows, including Police Woman, Quincy, M.E., and The Love Boat. A second series of his own, 1975's The Bob Crane Show, was cancelled by NBC after three months.

During the run of Hogan's Heroes, Crane met John Henry Carpenter, an electronics expert who sold VCRs. Carpenter is alleged by some to have lured Crane into a life of sexual decadence. Although Crane's family contests this version of the story, it is a fact that Crane made home videotapes of numerous sexual orgies, using video technology supplied by Carpenter, with Carpenter also usually participating in the orgies. Crane is known to have made pornographic films as early as 1956, so Carpenter was an enabler of Crane's addiction rather than an original corrupter.^{[citation needed]}

For several years Crane led an increasingly dissolute life which affected his public image and his ability to get steady work. Finally, one late night in 1978, Crane allegedly called Carpenter to tell him that their friendship was over. The following day, Crane was discovered violently bludgeoned to death with a weapon that was never found but believed to be a camera tripod at the Winfield Place Apartments in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he had been appearing in a dinner theatre production of a play entitled Beginner's Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theatre.

According to an A&E program on the subject, initial police investigation turned up few clues but a large number of suspects, due to the dozens of homemade pornographic videos found at the murder scene. Countless female participants and their spouses were questioned. Although Carpenter was the prime suspect, he wasn't arrested until 1992 - fourteen years after the murder. During Carpenter's trial in 1994, the prosecution showed videotape of Crane and Carpenter engaging in sex with the same woman to demonstrate their close relationship and hopefully shock the jury into convicting Carpenter. But the strategy backfired, and Carpenter was acquitted. Both the murder and the motive remain unsolved. Carpenter maintained his innocence and continued to hope for a solution to Crane's murder until his death on September 4 1998.

Crane's life and murder were the subject of the 2002 film Auto Focus, written and directed by Paul Schrader. The film portrays Crane as a happily married, churchgoing family man and popular L.A. disc jockey who suddenly becomes a Hollywood celebrity, and just as rapidly becomes a sex addict, hanging out at strip clubs and participating in orgies. He documents his exploits on video tape, and is compelled by his addiction into ever more salacious excesses, which eventually crowd everything else out of his life: marriage, family, non-sexual friends, career.

Crane's second wife and their son Scotty (a.k.a. Bob Jr.) objected to the way Crane was portrayed in the film, and took to the media to present their side of the story. Shortly before the film's release, Scotty also started the website www.bobcrane.com to provide documents and testimony that would contest the movie's version of his father's story. The website notably featured clips from a pornographic home video Bob Crane had made in 1956, before his meeting with Carpenter. (Scotty later removed the pornographic clips from the site.)

In an interview posted to the site, Scotty stated, "My father had been having extramarital affairs and photographing hundreds of nude women engaged in sexual activity since the 1940s. He did not suddenly become a 'sex addict' when he met my mother. We have amateur home erotic movies of his that date back to 1956, and I can assure you that the women in those movies were not his wife at the time. [...]

"My father did attend church -- when people died. He wasn't religious and he didn't raise me to be religious. The whole mythology about him being this church-going saint that was brought down and corrupted by the evils of Hollywood -- is really just a dramatic way to dress up a story. But it's totally untrue. He was an overly sexual person from an early age. In the twelve years that my mom knew him, he went to church three times: my baptism, his father's funeral and his own funeral. He never had a family priest for a ‘buddy’ as Auto Focus depicts".^[1]

His last televised appearance was in the Canadian cooking show Celebrity Cooks.

• Man-Trap (1961)
• Return to Peyton Place (1961)
• The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz (1968)
• Superdad (1973)
• Gus (1976)

• Colonel Hogan
• Hogan's Heroes

• Bob Crane at the Internet Movie Database
• Bob Crane tribute site, operated by son Scotty
• Find a Grave Memorial