Sunday Lunch with Stacy Keach
Beneath the white beard and the slightly disheveled white hair, Stacy Keach has a familiar face.
His career, he says good-naturedly, has evolved from "'Oh, he used to play Mike Hammer' to 'Oh yeah, that's Titus' dad' to 'Oh, he's the warden on "Prison Break."'"
"That's all OK," Keach says, taking off his black "Prison Break" baseball cap and the Goodman Theater credentials he wears around his neck and settling comfortably into a large, corner booth at Petterino's.
For a child of 1980s television, it's hard to hear Keach's deep, rich voice without expecting to see a mustachioed, fedora-wearing Mike Hammer. Keach says he gets that a lot. Or something close to it, anyway.
"I can't tell you how many times I've heard, 'I loved you as Phillip Marlowe.'" he says.
But Keach, 65, doesn't really mind being identified with the gangster era. He's always been drawn to the kind of "good bad guy -- or is it bad good guy?" characters that populate the noir worlds of Spillane and Chandler and Hammett.
And his own father, Walter Stacy Keach, also called Stacy, had something of a soft spot for that underground world, as well.
"He grew up here," Keach says. "On the North Side, during the Al Capone era. In fact, he worked in a soda fountain and told us he once served Capone and a couple of his guys an ice cream soda."
This story has grown over the years, as it naturally would, into a tale of the young Keach -- who'd been only 11 when his father died, leaving him, an only child, with an obligation to help support his mother through the Depression years -- getting recruited by Capone into running liquor to the Drake Hotel.
"Well," Keach says fondly, "he did deliver a package there once. And he didn't have enough money for cab fare, so he had to ask them for it at the hotel."
Keach's father, who died in 2003 at age 88, "had a great spirit," he says, "and the environment here produced that. ... He came back here a lot, for reunions at Lake View High and Northwestern."
And Keach himself retraced some of his father's steps when he first came to work in Chicago two years ago for the first season of "Prison Break" (7 p.m., Mondays, Fox).
"I went up to Lake View High," he says, "and I had the address of where he'd lived. The brownstone had been converted, but the trees -- I'm sure some of the trees were the same."
Parallel lives
The elder Keach "had a successful career as a character actor [he was probably best known for playing Carlson in 'Get Smart'], but he was also a producer, and he made a number of industrial films," says Keach.
As it happens, he also made the very first educational video for the anti-drug program DARE, a fact that his son, who in 1984 spent six months in a British prison on drug smuggling charges, savors for its "synchronicity." Their lives have paralleled each others' in other ways, as well.
"He didn't want either of his kids to go into the business," Keach says of his father, "but it was hard for him to hide his enthusiasm when we [Keach's brother James is also an actor, director and producer] asked for help with school plays and things. There was this constant thing that he would say, 'I don't want you to be a professional actor. It's a life of misery, constant rejection.' But then we'd go watch them do "Tales of the Texas Rangers "[an RKO radio show Keach Sr. produced], and it was so great, so fun . . . but, 'No, you're not going to be a professional actor.'"
'I love it here'
"With my kids," says Keach, the father of a teenage son and daughter, "I just say, 'Why not try acting?' It's supposed to be reverse psychology."
Happily tucking in to a plate full of chicken hash and fried eggs, Keach, who makes his debut as King Lear at the Goodman on Sept. 19, is clearly relishing his time in Chicago. There's the connection to his father, of course, but also an identification with a certain Midwestern quality that Keach has always seen in himself, but, having been raised in New York and California, never before really identified.
The close-knit cadre of Chicago actors working in Hollywood are, he says, "all friends of mine. Brian Dennehy is a good friend of mine. Gary Sinise is a good friend of mine. George Wendt is a good friend of mine. I love Chicago actors. ... There's a truth. There's a passion for truth. There's no frills surrounding behavioral choices with actors here. Chicago has always produced our best actors. I know New Yorkers would disagree with me, but it's true. Look at the theaters here."
In the weeks that he has been rehearsing for Lear, Keach, a musician himself, has already spent some time taking in performances at the Jazz Showcase. And he says he's looking forward to heading up to the Green Mill, as well.
"I love it here," he says, casting an eye around the busy dining room filled with patrons from the nearby Daley Center and City Hall. "I could see myself settling here; I really could."
