When handsome, auburn-haired Bruce Fairbairn was chosen to replace Michael Ontkean on ABC-TV’s “The Rookies” after Michael left the show in a salary dispute, he admits, “It was a little bit scary, because the people on the show had been together so long. I worried about what they’d think of me”. He was soon to find out – when he was injured in an auto accident that nearly cost him his hand. For his co-stars’ friendship and concern helped him get through one of the most trying periods of his life. “It takes time for a relationship to grow and develop”, Bruce notes. “But the others opened up to me almost immediately”. The “others” included Georg Sanford Brown, Sam Melville, Gerald O’Loughlin and Kate Jackson. However, it was his co-stars’ kindness to him after his auto accident that made Bruce feel he was fully accepted. “I had the accident after we’d finished eight shows and had one day of filming left on the ninth”,  Bruce said over lunch at a restaurant near 20th Century Fox Studio, where the series is filmed. “We had a script meeting at 20th that day, and I was on my way home in my Volkswagen when I hit water at the bottom of a hill. The car slid and went into a curb, flipped over and hit a tree. The car had a sunroof and when it flipped over, my right hand went through the sunroof and the car landed on my hand”. An ambulance quickly arrived and Bruce was removed from the auto, his mangled hand bloody and limp. He was rushed to nearby UCLA Medical Center in West Los Angeles. “I was in shock and couldn’t feel the pain, actually. I was to meet my wife, Jeri and my mother-in-law at a friend’s house for dinner. But I couldn’t remember my friend’s name or phone number because of the shock. I couldn’t even remember my own number! I had surgery and was in Emergency from 7.30 pm till about 1 am. When I was in Emergency I heard someone say, ‘A friend of his outside’. I couldn’t imagine who it was. I asked and it was Georg Sanford Brown. He had been about 20 minutes behind me, and recognized my car although I’d been taken to the hospital by then. And he found out from the cops that they had taken me to UCLA Emergency. Thank God he was at the hospital! The minute he came in to see me, he put his hand on my shoulder and I remembered everything again. I said “Call Jeri” and gave him the number. He called my wife and took care of all the paperwork, as far as admitting me into the hospital. And he stayed with me half the night.
            “He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He was just there emotionally. He was with me and I knew it. And he brought me back down to reality and took care of everything for me.
            “The next day, Georg came back with Kate Jackson and her boyfriend and Sam Melville and his wife. They covered my entire bed with balloons, stuffed animals, magazines … the whole number! It was fun. They’re good people, all of them. And it brought me a lot closer to them.
            “I needed it, because the accident did a lot of damage to my hand. It took out the tendons and crushed the joints. The tendons were literally ground out, so I’m going back to the hospital during our next production break and have another operation. They’re doing a tendon transplant – taking a tendon from my index finger, moving it over, and then doing a permanent skin graft”. He nodded toward a clawlike metal contraption on the back of his right hand. “This gadget I’m wearing works as a tendon. It holds my fingers up and I’m able to move them.
            “I didn’t think about actually losing my hand till I was out of the hospital and home. I was worried about losing the show, but I never thought I’d lose my hand. I was worried about losing the use of it, but not about having it amputated.
            “And then, after I was home from the hospital, one night it scared the hell out of me! My hand turned purple and swelled up. It was a Friday night and I couldn’t get in touch with the doctor. I thought, ‘I have to wait the whole weekend’. Somehow I didn’t think of leaving the house in the middle of the night and going to Emergency.
            “I had to change my own dressing, and after I’d rinsed my hand off, part of it turned green. I went to bed and lay there, my hand simply throbbing. I thought, ‘Oh, my God! I’ve got blood poisoning or gangrene’. I could not sleep. For the first time I thought about losing my hand. And it was a frightening thought. But by the next morning the swelling had gone down considerably and the hand wasn’t bothering me as much.
            “When I finally got in touch with the doctor on Monday he said, ‘It’s going to happen. It’s going to go back and forth. You’re going to have swelling; your joints are going to stiffen; your temporary skin graft is tightening and it’s going to tighten your knuckles’. And there were all kinds of changes. One night my hand would be ice cold and numb. The next night it would be hot and inflamed.
            “I first went back to the show three and a half weeks after my accident. The studio and stopped production for a week while I was out. I had a skin colored glove made that looks just like my hand. It has zipper on the palm side. I zip it up, and with makeup and a wristwatch you can’t tell it’s not part of my hand. But I’ve discontinued using it and just use makeup on the hand now. It’s more comfortable because that glove is very tight. They took a mold of my hand to make it”.
            Bruce gladly dropped the subject of his accident to go back to happier memories. “I was born on 96th Street in New York City 27 years ago, and was raised in upstate New York. I moved to Los Angeles when I was ten”, he said. “Not long after that, I decided I wanted to become an actor. You see, my aunt was working for Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds when he had ‘The Eddie Fisher Kraft Music Hall’, and I went to a taping of the show. It was the first time I had ever seen a show being done, and it fascinated me. And at that moment, I said, ‘I want to be up there, I want to be an actor!’
            “I was still only ten at the time, and my mother didn’t really encourage me. So I more or less forgot about it till I was about 14, when a kid I met in junior high school had an agent and said I should meet her. But she was a hustler and wanted $150 photos. So I dropped it again”.
            Then Bruce revealed that nearly losing his hand was not his first serious accident. “When I was 15, I was shot in the right eye with a BB gun”, he said. “It was really stupid. A group of us boys had BB guns at the time and used to have fights with them. I was hit right in the iris and my eye was like jelly. There was no form to it at all. I was in the hospital for about four days. There was no question from the minute I went in that my eye would be taken out, because there was so much damage to it.
            “The night before I was to go into surgery and have the eye removed, the doctor came in to examine me. My eye had healed the previous night. Just healed overnight!” How had it happened? Bruce can only explain, “People were praying for me – my mother and friends and people that I knew. Do I think it was a miracle? Yes. I have no other explanation for it”.
            Bruce was not much of a student. “I really hated school. It wasn’t what I wanted to be doing”. So after graduating from University High School, he joined the Marine Cops, rather than start a college right away. “I was in the Marines only two months because my vision was off a little bit as a result of my eye accident. In the Marine Cops, if you can’t shoot a rifle and kill somebody, they discharge you!” he said wryly.
            “I started Santa Monica College as a business major to something practical, but it didn’t work out. Then I tried psychology and then sociology, and finally I decided it was time to do what I wanted to do. So I started in the theater program”. This was a constructive step towards his life work.
            While in college, Bruce had another memorable – and frightening – experience. “I saw a ghost”, he says. “I was living in Westwood with my mother and sister. One morning I was in the bathroom, combing my hair and shaving, getting ready to leave for school. Nobody else was there. My mother had left for work and my sister had gone to her high school.
            “And I had the odd sensation that someone was standing in the hallway door, looking at me. I turned and nobody was there. I kept looking, but finally I left and went to school.
            “The next morning, alone once more, I was shaving again and I had the same sensation. I turned and looked. Nobody was there. I walked into the hallway, and when I got about halfway down the hall, I was immersed in cold air. And it frightened the hell out of me! I bolted and ran into the living room, and I just stood there for a few minutes, until I had calmed down a bit. Then I went back into my bedroom and left.
            “Next morning, same time, everything was the same way. Same feeling. Walked down the hallway. Same spot. Was immersed in cold air, and I bolted again” he said, the words coming out telegraghically this time. “It scared me even more the second time because I had experienced it the morning before. Ran into the living room, got my clothes on and split.
            “Next morning, same thing. When I came back into my bedroom, I had the feeling that something was really there. And it was so strong – what can I tell you? I turned and I looked.
            “This part sounds really absurd”, he declared. “But do you remember that commercial, the white tornado? It’s for a detergent. That’s the only way I can describe it. I turned and I looked into the hallway and into the room on the other side of the hall. I just saw a whirl of – you know, like there was a white tornado in the other room. And that was the last I experienced at that time”.
            Picking up the thread of his theatrical career, Bruce continued, “Shortly at Santa Monica College, just by luck I got the leading role in a touring company of ‘Under The Yum Yum Tree’.
            “I had met the director a couple of years previously”, he explained, “and he phoned me because he needed a replacement. He said, ‘Would you like to go to Shreveport, La ., and do it?’
            “I said ‘Fabulous!’ I went to school that day, dropped out, got my ticket for Shreveport, left and never came back.
            “I met my wife, Jeryl Devale – Jeri – in 1970 or ’71, when I was sharing a studio apartment in the East Village with the stage manager of a play she was in. He was having a cast party after the show, and he called me and said, ‘There’s some people coming over’. And I said ‘Oh no!’ It was the last thing in the world I wanted that night, because I was in a terrible mood. So all these people came over, and they were very theatrical, very into off-off-Broadway, Jeri kept looking at me and I kept looking at her. Then I left and went next door.
            “When I thought everybody had left, I came back. Jeri was still there. And we just sat down and spoke with each other and looked at each other. We exchanged a lot of meaningful glances! And we started seeing quite a bit of each other and we moved in together. And about year after that, we wed.
            “In January, 1974, I came to California and did a small part on ‘Police Story’. Then I returned to New York. Leonard Goldberg [of Spelling-Goldberg, which produces “The Rookies”] happened to see that particular ‘Police Story’ and called my agent in New York and asked if he’d send me out. So I decided just to come out here on spec – on a gamble – and was here for like five days and ‘The Rookies’ came up. I went to a week of auditioning with that, and got it”.
            He admitted, “I had been a bit frightened of coming out to California unless I was coming out for something specific. When I got the ‘Police Story’ I had been out here just for the holidays. And after I finished that, nothing was happening, so I went back to New York. But when Mr. Goldberg wanted me to come out, for some reason I said ‘Well, I might as well do it and see what happens’. I’m glad I did!”
            At the time Bruce got the call to return to Hollywood, he was working as a waiter in Greenwich Village. “When we came here, we thought we had saved up enough money so we could definitely get through three months, and maybe six months”, he smiles. “But if I hadn’t gotten this job, we wouldn’t have lasted six weeks, let alone six months!”
            The gamble paid off. And it doesn’t look as through Bruce Fairbairn will be waiting on tables anymore!

By Robert Wilson

Transcribed by Christos Spirou for use on The Rookies Online: http://www.the-rookies.com
For entertainment purpose only. No profit or copyright infringement intended.