John Gavin: Good Timing and Bad Timing
(aka ecarle.)
Good timing:
Being pushed by the agents at MCA and "beefcake agent" Harry Willson, Gavin landed "handsome guy" roles in three classics: Imitation of Life(1959), Psycho(1960) and Spartacus(1960)...and in the last of these films, he played a young Julius Caesar in scenes opposite...Laurence Olivier!
Bad timing:
Gavin was rather a "Rock Hudson knock off" -- not starry enough on his own -- and so ended up rather quickly as the star of TV series: "Destry" and "Convoy." (Meanwhile, the real Rock Hudson's career sank too came the seventies -- off to TV series for HIM, too.)
Good Timing:
Almost irrelevant as a movie star, John Gavin landed a role in the expensive 1967 Ross Hunter/George Roy Hill movie musical for Julie Andrews -- Thoroughly Modern Millie. (Hunter had produced Imitation of Life and remembered Gavin; Hill was one movie away from directing Butch Cassidy.) Gavin's square-jawed looks were spoofed well here as the male apple of Andrews' eye(though he ends up with Mary Tyler Moore). In one scene, Gavin is shot by an immobilizing dart and freezes in handsomeness, pipe in hand.
Bad Timing:
After Sean Connery has quit the James Bond series after You Only Live Twice(1967), and Connery's replacement George Lazenby has quit(or been fired from) his one Bond film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service(1969)...John Gavin is signed on as "James Bond for the 70's" -- the first American in the role...in "Diamonds Are Forever" for 1971 release. Alas, Connery is lured back "one more time" for top pay and a deal. There will be no American Bond (to date, 50 plus years later.)
Good Timing:
John Gavin is paid in full NOT to pay Bond. He is paid off.
Good Timing:
When Ronald Reagan is elected President in 1980, John Gavin -- one of the few Republican actors in Hollywood and a former SAG President(just like Reagan) -- ALSO cashes in his Mexican-American roots and fluency in Spanish to become Reagan's Ambassador to Mexico.
Bad Timing:
When Psycho II goes into production in 1982 for 1983, Gavin cannot reprise his role as the small town hero who captured Norman Bates, Sam Loomis. We are told that he married Vera Miles character(Lila Crane, sister of shower victim Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh in 1960) but that Lila Loomis is now a widow. "My husband is dead," is all she says. Stress heart attack from guilt over his girlfriend's shower murder?
Good Timing:
John Gavin , buttressed by his ambassadorship and the good fortune to have been in some classics around 1960 directed by Hitchcock and Kubrick("If I'd known they would become classics, I would have paid more attention), plays out his years in a successful second marriage(to Constance Towers) and success as a businessman, Hollywood acting roles long behind him, but one great big famous classic among all others(Psycho) to keep him famous long after his death.