the daddy of cool; As a boy in 1960s Beverly Hills, Bruce Wagner knew James Coburn was the Man.

Byline: Bruce Wagner

I grew up in Beverly Hills. I went to one of the poor cousins of the moneyed elementary schools, called Beverly Vista. Fashion was big in B.H., and big in my house as well; my mother wore Balenciaga, and my father was probably one of the few heterosexuals to shop at Ah Men! in West Hollywood. Like Mom, I used to get migraines when I was a boy, and wouldn't be able to stop vomiting (there's an official name for that pediatric syndrome now); that was back in the day, when the family doctor made house calls after work. He'd ring the doorbell and shoot me up with Thorazine, after I had waited all day with the dry heaves, becoming conversant with purgatory. Twenty minutes later, needle in buttocks, I'd at last be at peace, wanting nothing more than to garland the world with roses. What I'm really trying to say is, with such a background, I should have been a fag and should have been a junkie, but somehow managed to be neither. (Though I have friends who swear I'm both.)

On the cusp of adolescence, I was still more into the men featured in Vogue than I was the women. I was a late starter. I was swamped by girls' smells, perspirations, perfumes, obsessing over the hair on their arms. But women were beyond me-especially Vogue women. Anyway, by that time we no longer lived on south Rodeo Drive (a house away from Broderick Crawford). My mother, sister, and I had downsized to an apartment on Reeves, and I'd abandoned any fantasies of trading up to a home closer to Roxbury or, delusion of delusions, north of Santa Monica; my parents had undergone a brutal divorce, and I was on the Yellow Brick Road toward that ultimate northernmost destination: Daddy.1

One form I found Our Father in was James Coburn, whom a close boyhood friend and I had giddily obsessed over in The President's Analyst. He was urbane and an exquisite physical comedian, as all dads should be. After four or five viewings, I convinced my guilt-ridden parents that Jungian psychoanalysis was necessary, and they sprang for the sessions. I became a supersnob, Covert Son of Coburn, sneering at those of my friends who pathetically sought the help of psychologists. For me, the formula was simple: Psychologist = Quack. To add to my President's Analyst panache, I was seeing a man who practiced in the same building Daniel Ellsberg's shrink shrunk (and was burgled) out of. My therapist resembled Billy Wilder, had a Hebrew name, and treated me with avuncular disdain; what I really wanted was to be lying on the couch cathecting to Dr. Coburn. He'd have horse-laughed my neuroses away. It was Coburn who should have been dropping me off at school in his steel-gray Facel Vega; Coburn who should have been dressing me in the black turtlenecks my mother got me at Saks for school; Coburn who might have brought me to DiFabrizio's, on Third Street, and custom fitted me for suede demi-boots; Coburn who should have taken me to the Luau and haw-hawed as Sharon Tate and Yvette Mimieux fussed over my brownish curls.

Remember, Beverly Vista was a place where, during lunch hour, Dino Martin would roar past in his Ferrari; Liz Taylor's boy Christopher Wilding tried sheepishly not to be known as his mother's son; and Darby Hinton routinely showed up in fringey costume from the set of Daniel Boone-it was a sadistic kick for him to come straight to school if the show wrapped early, just so he could watch the student body writhe in envy as teachers unabashedly pumped him for anecdotes about Fess Parker. Now, I wasn't an ugly kid, but I couldn't compete with the legally-long-haired-by-showbiz-exemption Darby, or the kid from Lassie, or whomever.

That's another reason why I dug Coburn. I thought, maybe one day I'll grow into that, the way you'd grow into having a beard or understanding why certain men looked so intently at a woman's bare legs. Coburn wasn't conventionally handsome, and he definitely wasn't queer even though he wore what ...