James Daly

We here at Attention Must Be Paid do not out the dead. Not in any substantive sense. Your sexuality is not my business, and I’m not going to go digging through archives and innuendo trying to determine the real sexuality of someone who went to their maker silent on the subject. This frankly makes the column a bit of a challenge every June, because finding people to fill it for Pride relies on people who were more or less out before their death. Generally. Every time I go looking for people to fill the schedule, I find other people’s lists full of supposition and rumours.

In James Daly’s case, he was not out before he died. He died in 1978, still closeted. By then, his daughter Tyne, was already herself a working actress. His son Tim took his first professional job that year (and would go on to play my cousin’s dad in Storm of the Century). He had divorced his wife thirteen years earlier and distanced himself from his family almost entirely. Eventually, shortly before he died, he told Tim why he had distanced himself, why he divorced his wife Hope. Tim himself kept it a secret until 2016, at which point he outed his father on Sunday Morning on CBS.

Oh, the divorce made a certain amount of sense. At some point he couldn’t stay married anymore. It happens. Hard on Hope, of course, but it is what it is. Worse, though, is why he distanced himself from the kids. You see, in those days, it was considered a mental illness still. And Daly, poor soul, believed that it might be catching. He didn’t want his kids to become homosexual, so he stayed away from them for their own good. To keep them from catching The Gay. Presumably by 1975, he recognized that he wasn’t sick, just different, and worried less. Which makes it sad that he and his wife had tried to “cure” him and that he quarantined himself for ten years.

Through it all, he kept working. Stage, film, and mostly television. Oh, you might recognize him through the makeup in Planet of the Apes, but you’re more likely to recognize him without it on Star Trek. He did a lot of the early TV playhouse shows, too. More than I recognize, honestly. He did at least a little with Tim and with Tyne. For 177 episodes, he was the star of Medical Center. He appeared in a movie with Keenan Wynn and then-son-in-law Georg Stanford Brown. His final role was in Roots: The Next Generations.

For seven years starting in 1958, he had worked for R.J. Reynolds, serving as a spokesman for Camel. He apparently traveled the country to be photographed in various places smoking Camels. Do I know that this is what killed him? Of course not. I wouldn’t be surprised, though. He officially died of heart failure, interestingly enough while planning to appear in Equus, a production of which would be Tim’s first professional role. I don’t know if it was the same production, but the idea of some father-son bonding does sound nice as a break.