Don Hastings
was born on April 1, 1934, which seems to be the month for
1950s space travellers, since Jan Merlin was born on April
3, 1924 and Frankie Thomas on April 9, 1921, while Al Hodge
himself was born on April 8, 1912. What might the so-called
astrologers have to say about that?!?
Don's older brother Bob was singing on the radio regularly
in 1940, when Don accompanied him to the studio, came to the
attention of producers, and wound up singing and acting on a
variety of radio programs. This radio exposure earned him a
part with the national touring company of the play
LIFE WITH
FATHER, and
he toured with the players during the seasons of 1941-43.
In the interval from 1944 to 1948, he appeared on Broadway
in four plays, as various as
I Remember Mama, and On
Whitman Avenue (both 1946), A Young Man's Fancy (1947) and Tennessee
Williams's Summer And Smoke (1948), while continuing to
take radio (and later, TV) roles as time permitted.
In the spring of 1949, at the tender age of 15, he was hired
to play Captain Video's juvenile sidekick, the otherwise
nameless Video Ranger. Watching the few kinescopes that
survive from these days, it is impressive to see how
professional, calm and adaptive Hastings is, especially in
comparison to Richard Coogan, the first Captain Video, who
tended to float or blow his lines regularly. [When one
actor "floats" his lines--- does not deliver the lines as
scripted--- it can really shake up the other actors in the
scene, who may even panic when they don't hear their cues.
As the usual recipient of the floated lines, Hastings always
seems to take it in stride.] It is Hastings who seems to be
the veteran, Coogan the relative newcomer.
During the first year or so of Captain Video , the scripts tended to be
"written short," and it was usually necessary to kill some
time during the broadcast with unscripted sequences. One or
two actors were hired who could ad-lib in some presumably
comical dialect, usually Cockney. It was usually Don,
rather than the inflexible Richard Coogan, who had the task
of interacting with the wildly improvising performers for
the time needed to get back on schedule.
In one episode, as related in Jeff Kisseloff in his fine
book The
Box, Coogan
and Hastings were crawling across the desolate landscape of
an alien planet Unknown to them, a circus set complete
with elephant was being set up in an adjoining studio. The
elephant trumpeted loudly, causing Coogan to drop out of
character and gasp, "What the hell was that?!" Hastings,
remaining completely in character, ad libbed, "I don't
know, Captain, but it sounds big and angry. Let's keep away
from it!"
When Al Hodge took over the role of Captain Video, he
brought to the show a long experience in radio and early TV,
and could cope fairly smoothly with nearly any emergency.
As a result, Don Hastings tended to depend upon and to take
his cue from Hodge, rather than having to step in himself to
save the scene. It gave a nice added, unscripted resonance
to the relationship between the two characters.
In a 1994 interview, Hastings was asked if his role as the
Ranger made him into a teenage heart-throb. He replied,
"Well, I don't know about that, but it was great. Well, I
was 15 when it went on and 21 when I went off, and I think
[that show] was probably the reason I'm still in the
business. That's kind of an awkward age. I had been a kid
actor and done some plays and stuff on Broadway... but
growing up from 15 to 21 is usually when kid actors drop
out. [But Captain Video] kept me employed, and I had
really one of the best times in my life, working with an
awful lot of good actors who are all over the place now. It
was just great. It was like my college education."
The purpose of Hastings on the program was of course not to
serve as a teenage heart-throb, but rather to be a stand-in
for the kids watching, who could fantasize that they were
riding along with Captain Video on his adventures, in place
of the Ranger--- this being the main reason the character
was never given a name. If the female teenagers who viewed
the program liked Don's clean-cut good looks, that was fine
too!
After the collapse of DuMont and Captain Video in April 1955, the now adult
Don Hastings was seen mainly in soap operas such as
A Date With
Life ,
Modern
Romances ,
Guiding
Light and
eventually Edge Of Night, as "Jack Lane," where he
stayed from April 1956 to early 1960. In late 1960 he got
the role of "Dr. Bob Hughes" on As The World
Turns, and at
least according to the official ATWT website, viewed in October 2001, he is still
in the role more than 40 years later. [We here at Roaring
Rockets must
confess that we have never seen even a minute of any daytime
TV series, and if life is kind, we hope to maintain that
claim indefinitely.]
Don's singing career was not confined just to his childhood.
He appeared off-Broadway with Kathryn Hays in ALGONQUIN
SAMPLER, and they later toured the US with an evening of
two-person musical theater called HASTINGS AND HAYS ON LOVE.
A number of readers of Roaring Rockets have mentioned seeing
Hastings, and even chatting with him backstage, during one
of these tours.
Like fellow spacemen Frankie Thomas and Jan Merlin, who
wrote for soap operas in the 1960s and 1970s, Don wrote
scripts for As The World Turns during 1971 and 1972, and also
wrote for Guiding Light. He says in an interview
that As The
World Turns
was "the last live dramatic show on television." It
finally switched to "live-on-tape," when the program went
from 30 to 60 minutes, no date given.
As near as we can figure out, from garbled Internet sources,
he has been married twice; Since 1981, he has been happily
wed to actress Leslie Denniston, whom he met on ATWT. [It helps to have a job where you are
surrounded all day long by extremely beautiful women, I
guess!] He has three daughters and one son from his two
marriages... Katharine, Jennifer, Julie and Matthew
Hastings.
Like two other Golden Age TV spacemen, Ed Bryce and Ed
Kemmer, who also chalked-up decades-long careers in the
soaps, Don apparently made an ideal soap-opera hero. As Dr.
Bob Hughes, he is described by the offical ATWT website as having "a perfect
bedside manner" (apparently no pun intended), as well as
being "the man most men want to be like," and "a good
doctor, a good friend and a good man!" By the way, the
character Dr. Bob has been married 5 times, and has two
sons, two daughters, two stepsons, and two stepdaughters,
not to mention two or three grandchildren. He has also had
seven passionate romances that did not lead to marriage. I
mention this because many Internet biographies of Don
Hastings that I have seen are unable to distinguish between
the marriages of Hastings himself, and the marriages of his
character Dr. Bob. If an Internet source mentions that Don
was married to "Lisa Miller, Sandy Wilson, Jennifer Ryan,
Miranda Marlowe and now Kim Hughes" [as many do!], note
that these are in fact the fictious characters that the
character Don plays on TV was married to over the years from
1960 to the present. As mentioned above, his character was
also depicted as having affairs with seven other women,
during or between his various marriages. This seems a lot
of action to us here at Roaring
Rockets, but it is probably
very close to hermit-like behavior for soap opera
characters! We are, in fact, assured by the official site
that "throughout his failed marriages and many women who
didn't measure up, Bob has always been the man of honor,"
in case you were beginning to wonder.
We haven't heard of any other regular cast member from a
pre-1950 TV show who has had continuous and regular
employment in starring TV roles ever since. Apparently when
Don laid aside his Ranger uniform, blue and white plastic
space helmet and Sonic Ray blaster forever, his career as a TV
hero was just beginning. And may it continue for a long
time to come!
