“Let’s eat with the working folks,” said Charles Napier between drags on a cigarette. “We’re not going to that hoity-toity fish joint Robards goes to. S—t, he can afford it.”
We were in Philadelphia’s dark and dank City Hall sometime in 1992, while the movie Philadelphia was being shot. Napier, who played the judge in Jonathan Demme’s AIDS drama, was discussing dinner, and the hoity-toity eatery he referred to is Philly’s legendary, now-closed Bookbinder’s. And Robards, of course, was Jason, Jr., who played the law firm mentor of Oscar winning Tom Hanks’ Andrew Beckett, the man stricken with the HIV virus.
The food buffet was set up in Wanamaker’s Crystal Tea Room, which was attached to the department store John Wanamaker’s on Market Street. The place was buzzing with activity. Napier got a kick out of pointing out some of the people in the film as they walked by with their prime rib, roasted potatoes and veggie medley on their plate.
“There’s Robert Ridgely,” Charles noted. “He’s been at it for a long time—worked with a lot of the greats.”
Other familiar faces floated by. Charles appeared to be getting fidgety halfway through his meat and potatoes. Time for another smoke.
As we headed back over to City Hall in the pouring rain, I asked him about Russ Meyer. Napier appeared in four of the sexploitation filmmaker’s efforts.
“Russ ran his set like it was the Army, but I was used to it because I was in the Army,” said Napier. “He’d put the women through some rough stuff while making those shows, and he told me to do what he did: Make pretend the actresses were your ex-wife. Ya know what—it worked.”
It was in a Russ Meyer movie, in fact, that I took note of Charles Napier to begin with. A friend and I decided to ditch Yom Kippur services to catch SuperVixens on the big single screen at the Orleans Theater in 1975. It was an experience that changed my life. A lunatic film with naked, huge-chested women gallivanting around the desert, and a square-jawed, super-nasty redneck cop named Harry Sledge, played by the square-jawed, ruggedly handsome Mr. Napier.
Years later, at a video convention, Russ Meyer himself made sure a scene in which Harry places dynamite between the legs of the bound Supervixen (Shari Eubank) in the desert exhibited continuously. “You are evil, Harry!” Supervixen exclaimed—and Russ played it all day for four days!—exclaimed and exclaimed, ad infinitum.
Flash forward to Secaucus, New Jersey, the Chiller Theater Convention, circa 2003. In the corner of a tent populated by such celebrity guests as Adam West, Robert Vaughn and David Carradine shilling for autograph lucre sits Charles Napier, smoking still, with a few stacks of his photos in front of him. He’s getting much less than the other “personalities” mentioned, a reasonable $15. The photos are: Charles as Adam the blond haired space hippie in the Star Trek episode The Way To Eden, Charles as Marshal Murdock, the dude who send Sylvester Stallone’s ex-POW on a mission in Rambo: First Blood II, Charles as Good Ol’ Boys frontman/Winnebago driver Tucker McElroy in The Blues Brothers, and Charles as Lt. Bill Boyle, one of Hannibal Lecter’s victims, in The Silence of the Lambs.
A steady flow of people found their way to the back of the tent to meet Charles and get his autograph. Most are female.
“It’s amazing how many people love this film [Lambs] and especially how many women dig it,” he observed. “I don’t understand why women love it so much. You’d think they would be afraid. I guess they just like to be scared.”
Charles laughed and took another puff of his cigarette.
I now remember what Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme said of Charles a few years earlier, when I asked about him and why he’s used him in almost all of his films.
“He’s just a good luck charm,” said Demme. “I just love the guy. If he is good enough for Russ Meyer, he’s good enough for me.”
2009: I kept Charles’ home number in my rolodex since that day in Philadelphia on the Philadelphia set in 1992. I recalled Russ Meyer telling me he’s living somewhere around Bakersfield in the Sierra Mountains with his wife.
A friend was making a low-budget movie here, and he wanted Charles to star in it. He wanted him to plays a police commissioner. I called him and, amazingly, he remembered me. We talked for a good hour. He was interested in the part, and wanted the director’s phone number to follow up.
I mentioned Meyer, a mutual friend; he spoke fondly of him. He also spoke warmly of Demme after I brought him up. At that point, I remembered Russ telling me that Charles always thought he could be a star, an action hero in the mold of Charles Bronson or Steve McQueen, two actors he idolized. While there was nothing to sneeze at in regard to his range of credits over the years, I sense it was a sense of disappointment that brought him to The Dr. Phil Show in 2003 to talk openly about what he considered a stalled career with his wife. He also shed tears on that show.
Regarding the part in the film I called him about, Charles told me he’s not great at memorizing lines, that they might have to write the lines on paper for him in order to read while shooting.
“Brando used to do the same thing,” he told me.
I looked on the IMDB. Charles seemed to have been working a lot. Lots of indie films and voice assignments and occasional TV commercials. “I make a lot of movies, but they can’t seem to get distribution,” he said. “A shame, because there some talented people out there.”
He had just finished a movie with Jeremy Piven (The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard) in which he played an elderly car salesman and which he couldn’t stop talking about. And he kept mentioning possibly working with David Chappelle, whose writing partner, Neal Brennan, wrote and directed The Goods.
Keeping company with such folks, it finally hit me. Other people were on to Charles Napier. The square-jawed, old-fashioned tough guy was now cooler than ever. How else to explain stints on Curb your Enthusiasm and Monk and voice jobs on Archer and The Simpsons? How about the steady stream of parts in those indie films?
The movie I called Charles about eventually did get made, but because of a reduction in budget, they were unable to hire him. Too bad.
As I write this, that film is about to be screened at a prestigious film festival on the West Coast. It is just about Yom Kippur again. And Charles Napier, now divorced and a resident of Bakersfield, California, died a few days ago at the age of 75. Something to do with blood clots.
Good man, that Charles Napier. Damn good.
Harry may have been evil. Charles was not.