You know, one of the great challenges of writing a lot of fiction is coming up with new names. Now, Angel comes up with a frankly beautiful spur-of-the-moment riff about how King Sturtevant is an African tribal leader connected with a display at the art museum (he implies there’s only one, but would you expect Angel to know how very many art museums alone there are in LA?), and of course it also turns out that “King” is a nickname and he’s actually Larry. Still, imagine writing enough scripts so that you’d come up with that name, huh?
Jim is refusing to get in on one of Angel’s cons when a couple of goons come in demanding that Jim give them King Sturtevant’s tapes. Jim doesn’t know who King Sturtevant is, and the only tapes he has are some Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald on reel-to-reel. (Oh, the ’70s.) King Sturtevant is, in fact, a football player played by “special guest star” Rob Reiner. Sturtevant himself is not sure what the tapes are, so he told people he’d sent them to Jim. It might come from the mob, though, because his boss might be mobbed up. Then, they find him dead.
Early in the episode, Jim and Angel are being chased by federal agents. Jim goes into a drive through hoping to lose them. The billboard announces that the theatre is playing an adults-only engagement of Once Is Not Enough, starring Kirk Douglas, and The Gambler, starring James Caan. I’ve never seen either of these movies, so I looked them up. The latter seems like a fairly straightforward melodrama about a compulsive gambler. The former is based on a Jacqueline Susann book and turns out to be banned in South Africa.
Ye Gods, Sturtevant’s a piece of work. When Jim first encounters him, he’s wearing a polyester shirt and a denim blazer—in several different amounts of dye—and bell-bottomed pants. Also a tacky turquoise necklace and the largest turquoise bracelet I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been to Arizona. And a couple of rings. And enormous lapels. And he has a walrus moustache, and Rob Reiner’s hair, and he cannot see a woman without hitting on her. Women universally react to him with disgust.
I really hope, for Jim’s sake, that his quarter-page ad gets him a lot of business for things like delivering subpoenas and tracking deadbeat exes and so forth. (California was the first state in the Union to enact no-fault divorce, in 1970, so there was a lot less money in tracking adulterers.) It certainly seems to get him into an awful lot of scrapes from people who pick his name out of the phone book. You’d hope it isn’t more trouble than it’s worth.
Take Care of Rockford Files: Held at gunpoint. The trailer gets ripped up. Fist fight. Is punched by and gets to punch King Sturtevant. Held at gunpoint. Fist fight.
One of my favorite episodes to a large degree because the late and lamented Mr. Reiner was so far outside his usual zone. He was not physically believable as a football player, but he captured very well the ego of Namath-era wannabees. Without saying so, King was apparently a QB not with an actual NFL team but more likely with the equivalent of the short lived World Football League that had come and gone by the time this aired, or maybe a semi-pro league a notch below the WFL.
Dick Butkus was already getting some work as an actor prior to this, and he would play himself quite often.
Directed by Lou Antonio, who played the other half white and half black alien opposite Frank Gorshin on Star Trek, and who directed four other hours of our show and lots and lots more.
I wrote this several years ago, and when I got to posting it earlier this month (I try to get the month’s articles all scheduled at once; you may have noticed I am not reliable at this) I nearly cried.