Yes, Commissioner

We kids were watching a star on Batman and never knew it.

Long after the show went off the air, I learned that Commissioner Gordon had been a big name on the silent screen.

About the only exposure to silents I had in the mid-1960s were from compilations of clips of comedies—Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd’s clock, airborne pies, that kind of thing. And a few names like Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish.

But I never recalled seeing Hamilton in anything. Sound brought new stars. I knew who they were (they were parodied in Warner Bros. cartoons). Hamilton wasn’t among them. He made some B pictures. He went to New York in 1944 for 13 years of stage work. As you may have read on the Old TV History blog, at the dawn of network television, he hosted Hollywood Screen Test on ABC, the network that later brought you the Caped Crusader. He returned to Hollywood in 1957 and found some employment in movies and on TV.

The era of the silent screen was the era of puff pieces on the stars, planted in movie magazines and newspapers by the studios. Facts never got in the way of a good story, an attitude that carried into the sound years (Tab Hunter is the all-American boy, right?).

Whether this story from 1928 is true, I have no idea. But (and this was its purpose) I’d like to believe it. This piece of trivia must have been sent to newspapers by the Universal publicity department, where the movie page editor could insert the name of theatre where Hamilton’s newest feature was showing. I’ve found it in several papers. This is from Halifax Evening Mail of Feb. 16.

NEIL HAMILTON FEATURED LEAD
In ''Shield of Honor," a Police Film, is Out of the Usual Run of Pictures
NEIL HAMILTON, popular film leading man who portrays a feature role in "Shield of Honor", the Universal production which is now showing at the Orpheus Theatre, is just as clever and is as much at home doing tricks of magic on the stage as he is acting before the camera.
Since his childhood school days in Lynn, Massachusetts, Hamilton has been an ardent follower of the mystic art of magic. During his school days he was the "kid of the hour" with his many interesting objects used to promote the magician's handiwork.
It was not until after making his screen debut that he took up the study of magic seriously. His many idle hours in his dressing room were soon put to use with his legerdemain activities and he was the source of entertainment to the entire staff on the sets on which he has worked.
Among his favorite tricks is the disappearing cigarette stub. He will borrow someone's handkerchief, a silk one desired, take a lighted cigarette and after forming a cup of the handkerchief he will drop the cigarette in the cup, rub his thumb on top of it, shake the handkerchief and the cigarette will be gone.
Another one is the balancing of a silver dollar op the beveled edge of a water glass. This sounds easy but suppose you try it. He also has any number of card tricks, disappearing cards, picking them out of the air, calling their denomination as they are selected by others and he can also pick the proverbial rabbit out of a silk hat.

Let us leave the era of silk handkerchiefs and stop in the Mod 1960s. Batman is on the air.

The Arrow Collar Man Stars Again
By HAROLD HEFFERNAN
HOLLYWOOD (NANA) — Greta Garbo's former landlord is a great big star—all over again.
Moreover, within the next couple of weeks, Neil Hamilton—the man in the Arrow collar ads a few decades back—will celebrate his 48th anniversary in show business.
He'll be doing it on the set of the feature film treatment of the phenomenally successful "Batman," in which he's repeating his role of the police commissioner of Gotham City. And, of course, 20th Century-Fox Studio is the scene of this new mischief.
"I spend most of my time on the screen calling Batman on the Batphone imploring his aid," he laughs. Still handsome, and looking at least 15 years younger than the 67 he professes, Hamilton finds the assignment fun and a good job.
"And acting to me has always been a job, a means to a living," he says. "I've never been one of those guys who claims he acts to express himself."
Hamilton, married over 40 years to the same lady, co-starred with Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and all the romantic actresses of his era. At the peak of his career, he had a fan mail count of 20.000 a letters a month. In recent years, when acting lobs were hard to come by because he no longer is the young leading man type, he earned a comfortable living lecturing to women's clubs in various parts of the country.
"Several hundred dollars and chicken a la king several times a week are nothing to turn your back on," he said wryly. "And it was better than selling real estate. Heavens, that's a perfectly horrible job—real estate! I worked as a salesman for a while. A nightmare!"
Hamilton says he's still a film fan but doesn't attend pictures much any more because he's tired of those "dreary stories about perversion and dope pushing and all the downbeat celluloid that passes for significant commentary."
"Where are the pretty girls in movies today?" he asked. "Name me three—just three —pretty girls in movies today," he demanded. "Today, they are all concentrating not on how to act appealingly but in displaying what huge bosoms they've developed, or how fetchingly they can twist hips. No sign of subtlety or good manners anymore. They simply hurl the sex stuff out at you with a shovel."
Hamilton, whose chief attributes in his heyday were a flashing smile, clean-cut good looks and dress, and an instinctive graciousness, chose acting as a career after he plodded, as a teen-ager in Massachusetts, from the family farm to a nearby theatre where the actors gave him their leftovers to carry back to feed the Hamilton pigs. Gradually, he got an acting break there between the porcine chores.
He became a star first for D. W. Griffith in movies made in New York and Griffith later brought him to Hollywood, where, teaming with "It" Girl Clara Bow, he quickly won matinee idol status.
He estimates he's made about 300 films.
Hamilton's favorite assignments include the original "Beau Geste"—the fourth has just been completed—in which he teamed with Ronald Colman, and "One Sunday Afternoon," in a pairing with Gary Cooper.
Greta Garbo, during her tenure at MGM, rented a house from him for two years and always paid her rent on time.
"But I never got to meet her," he says. "When she left, I found she had piled carpets as much as a foot deep in the bedroom—I don't know why."
Hamilton has hopes, however, of finally meeting his former tenant. She's reported to be a rabid "Batman" fan.

My grade four class wasn’t the only place where we were talking about Batman on Thursday morning and wondering what would happen on tonight’s part-two episode. Here’s a good-news story as reported by the Hamilton’s home-town newspaper, The Daily Item, on Aug. 20, 1966.

Ex-Lynner Neil Hamilton
Commr. Gordon Wins Hearts of School Kids
Neil Hamilton, the onetime Lynn resident who plays Comm. Gordon an ABC-TV's 'Batman," is a veteran of 48 years of richly varied background on the stage, screen and television.
Recently, however, he indulged himself in a brand new experience—he made an announced visit to a contingent of his young fans in their fifth-grade classroom in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Hamilton had met their teacher socially and she told him that five minutes of each Thursday morning in class was devoted to trying to solve the dilemma the Dynamic Duo had been placed in the night before.
With such interest brought to his attention, Hamilton sent off photographs of Batman (Adam West) for each member of the class—24 in all. Twenty-eight thank-you's followed, along with a brief letter from the class president extending an invitation to the actor to visit them.
Nnoe [sic] of the children expected such a visit, but they didn't know Neil Hamilton. Bearing 28 candy bars, he drove the 44 miles to the Thousand Oaks school. To get directions to the classroom, he stopped by the superintendent’s office where he was greeted with a blank look and the query: "Are you from the welfare?"
Assuring the superintendent that his bag of candy was not a welfare package, he was shown to the classroom, still unrecognized, to meet his fans. What happened next is best expressed in quotes from the letters he received after the visit:
“You are the nicest person I ever met" . . . "I would have rather seen you for 45 minutes than have gone to the movies for the whole day" . . . "I would pay $1 to see you again" . .. "My mom wouldn't believe me" . . . "Thank you for the autograph" . . . "Now I can prove you were here" . . . "You are a very nice move [sic] star" . . ."You seemed to like kids very, very much . . "
An Oscar isn't an actor's only award.

Hamilton wound down his career after Batman went off the air. He was 85 when he died about two weeks after his birthday in 1984. And while, I suspect, just about everyone reading this knows him best from telling Chief O’Hara he was about to use the Batphone, Charles Schulz remembered him from an earlier time in a 1979 cartoon.