"If Troy Donahue can be a movie star I can be a movie star." - from "A Chorus Line."
"Contrary to popular belief," says Troy Donahue, "I was not washed up on the shores of Santa Monica."Now 61, still with short blond hair, a lanky 6-foot-3 and a deep tan, the movie heartthrob of the '50s and '60s looks back on a career that, so far, has spanned 70 movies and more than 40 TV shows in 40 years.
And that does not count two TV series, including "Hawaiian Eye."
But it has not been an easy 40 years.
Donahue is a faithful member of Alcoholics Anonymous, a group he says "saved my life."
After a knee injury ruled out uniformed service, the U.S. military decided he should go to Vietnam as a morale booster for wounded troops. Donahue thought this would be a great idea - in part because he would have easy and virtually unlimited access to drugs.
He was right. He quickly discovered that many in the military, including doctors and nurses, were fellow users. He ran into one of the nurses, much later, at an AA meeting.
Donahue, who was given the equivalent rank of lieutenant colonel along with a helicopter and a crew of his own, says Vietnam was just like the movie "Apocalypse Now." (The director of that movie, Francis Ford Coppola, is an old friend of Donahue's. Both were at New York Military Academy, where Donahue was sent after his father died.)
He was a wild youngster, Donahue says, and, as a way of imposing discipline on him, his mother sent him to the academy at Peekskill. Coppola played the tuba there, and other students made fun of him until Donahue brought him into the group that put on school theatricals.
They did not meet again until years later, when the gesture of friendship was rewarded as Coppola gave Donahue a small part in "The Godfather, Part II." In fact it was after Coppola introduced Donahue around the set by his real name, Merl Johnson, that that became the name of the character in the movie.
Californian or not, Donahue is a bona fide New Yorker, brought up on Long Island. His father worked for Paramount Pictures in public relations, and his mother was the lone non-Jewish member of the Yiddish Theater. Donahue took courses at Columbia College in both journalism and drama, but it was drama that intrigued him - that and the swimming pools and glamorous life of Hollywood.
Earlier, however, he had begun seriously considering acting as a career when he was caught in a snowstorm while driving in a rural area and went into a theater, where James Dean's "Rebel Without a Cause" and "East of Eden" were playing. He sat through both until the theater closed.
At that point he knew he really wanted to be an actor and had to go to California. Once there, he got some screen tests with several Miss Americas after boasting that he could coach theatrical talent, but the agent to whom he was recommended took one look at him and said he already had a tall, blond, handsome leading man under contract - Tab Hunter.
Nonetheless, Donahue soon began landing some roles in movies and struck it big with "A Summer Place," with Sandra Dee. Since then he has acted with a long list of headline stars, including Claudette Colbert.
In one picture he had a scene in which he was supposed to be drunk. Though an alcoholic, when the action started he found himself cold sober. It took him a day before he could get the mood and action appropriate to the scene.
Over a period of eight years, during all of which he was on alcohol and drugs, he says, he married four times, the first time to actress Suzanne Pleshette. The last marriage ended 18 years ago.
Donahue ran into one of his ex-wives at an AA meeting, and the two greeted each other warmly. Donahue asked whether she had a family, and she pointed to a young man in a corner of the room and said, "That's your son." It was the first time Donahue knew he was a father.
His girlfriend, with whom he often travels, is Shanghai-born opera singer Zheng Cao, who recently sang in Washington in Puccini's "Madame Butterfly."
How did Merl Johnson become Troy Donahue? He was sitting in on a meeting of Warner Brothers corporate moguls, and they bounced around one name after another. Donahue came first, then, after considerable discussion, Troy. He approved.
Following Donahue's early movies Troy became one of the most popular names for a boy. Now, he says, with a wry smile, it is the favored first name of huge defensive football players. Not to mention the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.
Donahue is fascinated with politics, and he favors the Democrats. He met President Lyndon B. Johnson when he was asked to substitute for an ill George Hamilton as escort for Johnson's daughter Lynda Bird at the wedding of the other Johnson daughter, Luci Baines. Hamilton at the time was Lynda Bird's regular boyfriend.
Johnson gave Donahue a personal tour of his sprawling ranch on the Pedernales River in Texas.
Donahue kicked the smoking habit, he says, when he went to a doctor who told him he was in "remarkable shape," considering his age, then added: "But you're dying" because the actor was a heavy smoker. Donahue was stunned and quit cold turkey.
Donahue hopes to accept an offer for a five-month national tour with the stage musical "Bye, Bye, Birdie." But he is caught in the middle of an argument between two organizations of which he is an active member - Actors Equity, which is pushing the show, and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which opposes his appearance in the musical spoof of Elvis Presley.
If SAG gives him a green light, Donahue says, he'll do the tour.
But as the father of the girl, not in the leading male role of Conrad Birdie.