Steam Player, or, Oh, the Hugh M’iddity

Apropos of nothing, the trivia geek in me turned to a typically unbidden inquiry, “Whatever happened to _____?”

So there I was, wondering after the fate of, of all people, Hugh O’Brian , whose trail, I assumed, had seen him gallop from Wyatt Earp to Wyatt AARP long since. His name resides in an occasionally-dusted wing of my halls of memory whose other members, willy-nilly, crowd the screen on the same back channel: Robert Culp, Doug McClure, Fess Parker, James Franciscus, Lee Majors, George Maharis…I think back to the sort of tanned, open-shirted hairy-chests-with-sideburns one used to see among the celebrity couples on the late Bert Convy’s marginally less tacky answer to The Newlywed Game, Tattletales. Vague memories of seeing O’Brian as a regular guest, decades ago, at the Playboy Mansion had me wondering how long the playboy in O’Brian held out.

Quite a while, as I see, providing moral support for all those bachelors determined to hold out until they have themselves put in enough years of “research” to ghost a shelf of dissertations; return with us now to those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, June 26, 2006, as -

TV’s ‘Wyatt Earp’ marries for first time

The Associated Press

Eighty-one-year-old actor Hugh O’Brian married for the first time at a cemetery in what the couple described as “a wedding to die for.”

“This is my first, and most definitely, my last trip down the aisle,” O’Brian said in a statement announcing his marriage Sunday afternoon to his girlfriend of 18 years, teacher Virginia Barber, 54, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

It was the bride’s second marriage.

Some 300 guests — including John Wayne and Pope John Paul lookalikes — witnessed the ceremony at the graveyard’s Hall of Crucifixion-Resurrection, publicist Monique Moss said Monday.

The Rev. Robert Schuller of Orange County’s Crystal Cathedral officiated and the couple was serenaded by close friend Debbie Reynolds. Dubbed A Wedding to Die For, the ceremony concluded with a cocktail reception…

What gave O’Brian the strength to hold fast to the mast of the married-last, I wondered, steeling the fortitude of the single dude?

Now I know what Paul Harvey has called, since Larry King was but a unicell in media’s primordial soup, the Rest of the Story.

Thanks to a link from Bathhouse Addict (”NSFW”, as the kids say, which I assume means, Not So Fast, Willie!; Googlery will take you everywhere; say, who dropped the soap?), to a spread from 1950 in Modern Screen, “Stag Night at the Steam Room“, I learn with no small ration of ethnic pride that Hugh O’Brian was, within a full cohort of rising Truman-era beefcake, an early adopter of the ancient and noble tradition of the Finnish sauna, my people’s answer to the tribal sweat lodge of the AmerIndigenes, and hellfiring forge of all-round hardihood.

Time to splash some more water on the hot Rocks, eh, Mr. Hudson?

Hugh O’Brien, Scott Brady, John Bromfield, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis sit on hot shelves of various tempertures at the Finlandia Baths.

“You should be in the gambling racket, son,” Scott tells Tony, who is beating him soundly at gin rummy. Hugh kibitzes while Rock gets a salt rubdown in the next room so he can go back to the steam room and sweat some more.