“Timmy’s in the Well” begins with a revelation that changes pop culture as we know it.
When Jon Provost played young Timmy Martin on “Lassie” — from 1957-1964 — his character never, ever got stuck in a well and needed his beloved collie to go get help. That’s despite the fact that virtually everyone who remembers “Lassie,” perhaps television’s most famous family adventure series, remembers an episode where Lassie’s urgent barking prompted this question from a concerned adult: “What is it, Lassie? Timmy’s in the well?”
“In my seven years on ‘Lassie’ and in more than 260 half-hour episodes, I fell off cliffs, into abandoned mines and storm drains, culverts and caves, rivers and creeks, but never a well. And yet, ‘Timmy’s in the well’ became a catchphrase,” Provost writes in this remembrance co-authored by his wife, Laurie Jacobson. (According to , Lassie once fell in a well, as did Timmy’s uncle, Petrie Martin.)
Were “Timmy’s in the Well” solely about Provost’s recollections of being a child actor working with a beloved collie, followed with some insights about the challenges of having to then grow up in fame’s (and Lassie’s) shadow, it’d most likely be pretty good. After all, that topic, while familiar, is irresistible. And Provost’s Timmy is an iconic character — his checked shirt and jeans are in the Smithsonian.
But, unfortunately, he has far greater ambitions. And he can’t deliver on them. Provost sees this book as being a collaborative oral history both about his life and the lives of child actors in general. As a result, his narrative is constantly interrupted by short, bite-size commentary — set off by type — from his family, friends and “Lassie” cast members, as well as from such other former child actors as “Dennis the Menace’s” Jay North and “The Donna Reed Show’s” Paul Petersen. (The latter runs an organization, A Minor Consideration, about problems facing child actors.) Much of it is mundane and disruptive.
When Provost was 2-year-old living in Pasadena, Calif., his mom took him to an audition for a movie based on Edna Ferber’s “So Big.” He got the gig, playing a widow’s young son. More work followed, including playing Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby’s son in “The Country Girl.”
He was a recognized name within child-actor circles when he replaced the “aging” 15-year-old Tommy Rettig as the boy in an overall “Lassie” revamp that brought in Cloris Leachman and Jon Shepodd as his adoptive parents and transitioned out the original cast after one of them, “Gramps,” had died.
Before Provost got the job, he had to pass a key test. Lassie — and his trainer, Rudd Weatherwax, had to like him.
“The first time I saw Lassie, I ran and threw my arms around him. Rudd Weatherwax watched carefully. ‘Go ahead, kiss his face, Lassie. Give him a kiss.’ Lassie obeyed and I laughed, delighted.”
But Leachman — a former beauty queen and Marlon Brando friend who would go on to win an Oscar for her work in “The Last Picture Show” — didn’t fit in and was replaced by June Lockhart. Because the producers were afraid it would raise questions if Shepodd suddenly had a new wife, he had to go, too. Hugh Reilly was cast in his place.
“They had to find reasons for us to be morons so the dog could outsmart us,” Provost quotes Leachman as telling the press at the time. “I can’t say I miss the dog. We were never that close.”
But enough of this. Really, the most interesting part of this book comes much later, when the teenage Provost is footloose and fancy-free in the sexually liberated, countercultural Sunset Strip section of Los Angeles in the late 1960s.
He shared an older hippie lover, Genie the Tailor, with folk-rocker Richard Thompson. And he developed a very strange friendship with the restlessly rebellious actor Sal Mineo (“Rebel Without a Cause”).
Steven Rosen is a Cincinnati-based freelance writer.
Nonfiction
Timmy’s in the Well: The Jon Provost Story, by Jon Provost and Laurie Jacobson, $26.95
