Here’s What Happened to ‘Mannix’ Star Mike Connors Before, During and After the Classic Detective Show

Krekor, an Armenian, was born August 15, 1925 in Fresno, California and in high school became a basketball star, which is where the “Touch” nickname came from in the first place. After graduation, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Force. Following World War II, he attended the University of California at Los Angeles, doing so on a combination of the G.I. Bill and a basketball scholarship. He studied law with the intent of becoming a lawyer like his father, but then acting entered the picture as his coach introduced him to director William A. Wellman. This would result in Mike hiring agent Henry Willson and things moved on from there.

He began working with the Laguna Beach Players and the Hollywood Circle Theater Group. Noted The Fresno Bee, “He was tested for the role of Tarzan, but he was two inches too short and slightly underweight for the role. Casting had begun for Sudden Fear, a picture starring Joan Crawford, when he applied. After Miss Crawford and David Miller, the director, had heard him read some lines, he was signed for one of the six leading roles without any further test.” Ironically, the part he played was that of a lawyer.

In the aftermath of Sudden Fear, he starred in a number of films in the 1950s and 1960s, though none of them elevated him to the star status he was hoping for. Among the two dozen movies between 1953 and 1966 were Island in the Sky (starring John Wayne), The Day the World Ended, The Ten Commandments, Suicide Battalion, The Dalton That Got Away, Harlow, Stagecoach and his crack at riding the James Bond bandwagon, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die.

Beginning in 1954 he appeared on different television shows, ranging from anthology like The Ford Television Theatre and Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, to such episodics as City Detective, The Millionaire, The Loretta Young Show, Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel; The Gale Storm Show, Maverick, two episodes of Whirlybirds, Wagon Train, Cimarron City, Lawman and a pair of episodes of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. Then, from 1959 to 1960, he got to star in a show of his own, Tightrope!.

“I was fighting for a crack at a show and the battle I was fighting seemed to be a losing one,” Mike told the New York Daily News in 1960. “I wanted a part that had guts and action and sophistication. I’d played villains, but never hero and that’s one thing about this business: if you have never done a thing, people say you can’t do it. And once you’ve done it, then they offer you nothing else but. Luckily for me they decided in my favor. I feel the decision opened up a whole new career for me.”

Tightrope! saw Mike playing undercover agent Nick Stone for a total of 37 episodes. Using the approach established by film noir, Nick would narrate the episodes. Due to the fact that only his immediate supervisor in the police department knew what he was doing, Nick was often in the middle of danger from both sides of the law, the cops and the criminal he was attempting to take down.  In many ways, the show seems like a predecessor to the Ken Wahl ‘80s undercover cop series Wiseguy.

In the aftermath of the cancelation of Tightrope!, there were rumblings of a new series that would see Mike playing a “smooth operator” with a variety of hidden talents living on the French Riviera, which would be shot on location. “Sounds like it will be a lot of fun,” Mike related to The Times Record of Troy, New York. “The idea is nebulous at this moment. At first I was supposed to be a guy who will recover stolen jewels or locate a missing wife or relative. Now we’re not sure what the plot will be. It probably will have ‘Riviera’ in the title. The character may be the same type, generally speaking, that Cary Grant was in the movie To Catch a Thief.” The show would never happen.

Despite the fact it was no longer in production, he noted that Tightrope! was not quite over as the show would get a second run in syndication. What he didn’t expect was its popularity in Central and South America. “For some reason I don’t understand myself,” he admitted to the Independent Press-Telegram of Long Beach, California in 1962, “Tightrope! Has completely captured the public fancy down there. To capitalize on the situation, I agreed to appear in a Mexican nightclub for six weeks. I was such a hit they kept me for eight weeks. I played to 5,000 people a night, doing four shows. After that I flew to Caracas for four weeks and found the same wonderful reception.”

Elaborating on how that situation came about, he told The San Bernardino County Sun in 1964 that he had more or less laid low for the previous three years: “I evaporated on purpose. It was well planned and it looks like it will pay off. When Tightrope! went off the air, my agent asked me how long I could hold out without working. I told him I might make it for two years, but that’s a long time without income. He convinced me it would take that long for the over-exposure on television to wear off. To keep the wolf from the door, I appeared in South American night clubs, capitalizing on the popularity of Tightrope! down there. It was a gamble. They might have forgotten about me altogether and that would have been the end of my career. Hollywood has a short memory.”

In 1963, he decided it was time to resume his career, turning down TV offers and concentrating on movies. A role in Panic Button triggered others. “Someday I may do another series,” he mused, “but movies give an actor more to do. There is more prestige in pictures, more money and a longer career. TV burns you out too quickly. It looks good for me at the moment, but in this business it could change overnight. No matter how it turns out, I won’t pull my invisible act again. It’s a frustrating way to prove your point.”

Columbia Pictures considered him to play the character of Matt Helm in 1966’s The Silencers, but, instead, the role went to Dean Martin who made that film, and its three sequels, campy/spoofy James Bond-lite adventures. Based on his his audition, though, they cast him in Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die. And then, after that, came his return to television in Mannix.

JoAnn M. Paul, author of And Now, Back to Mannix, explains, “As a society, and as individuals, we are only as good as our foundational stories. Joe Mannix personified the heroic, highly individualistic, tough everyman who put himself completely on the line to do the right thing. He was not a superhero – he was not out to save the world. He was more of the ilk of a modern-day knight in shining armor, someone who stands beside civilization, the type of individual that is required in order for societies to remain good, the kind of person you hope against hope is there for you when you need him, when you venture out into the world.”

“Joe Mannix,” she continues, “helped one person at a time. He considered one case at a time. He stood up to one injustice at a time – when that injustice presented itself to him. Without being able to count on that type of person being there, often behind the scenes, even on a very personal level that few ever realize, the thin veneer of civilization is threatened. When that type of person is more prevalent in societies, those societies become better.”

“Mannix is different,” Mike told The San Francisco Examiner in 1967, “because we deal with what is fast becoming a problem today. That is a problem of mechanization. A process that is dehumanizing our society. We’ve become a people of zip codes and bank number who often fail to communicate as human beings. And this is the cause for all the current peace, love and anti-war movements. Now Joe Mannix works for Intertect, a highly computerized detective agency. IBM machines do most of the legwork, but Joe is a rebel who doesn’t like machines. He believes you have to know people and deal with them on a human basis. Joe Mannix is a man who believes in looking a man squarely in the eyes.”

He added to the Star-Gazette of Elmira, New York, “The basic premise of the show was that I would fight the establishment and the computerized procedures. That’s what intrigued me originally, but you can’t do that every week. Somebody’s going to say, ‘Why doesn’t he quit?’ Which was the next step and in the second year, Mannix was on his own.”

Explains JoAnn, “When Lucille Ball said she didn’t understand the computers, the series was completely retooled to have a premise so basic it would have never sold as a series. But Lucille Ball, a tough individual in her own right, liked Mike Connors’ presence on the screen. In addition to the computers, Joe Mannix was originally presumed to be built around Mike Connors’ alter ego — its opening credits from the very first season said, ‘Mike Connors is Mannix,’ as if telling the viewer this portrayal was more personal than your typical series. So they stripped away all of the gimmicks and put Joe Mannix in an office with a secretary out front (Peggy, played by Gail Fisher, the first black actress to win an Emmy). Some thought, ‘Would people tune in to watch such a series?’ But the series not only survived, it lasted seven additional seasons.”

She emphasizes that Mannix was vulnerable, both emotionally and physically, and that he got hurt a lot. “He put himself out there for a high cause,” she says, “but the higher cause was simply — or perhaps not so simply — doing the right thing in whatever situation he encountered. Joe Mannix gave us a model of what it meant to want to be a part of something bigger than oneself, something noble, but on his own terms, as a tough individual, dealing with one situation at a time. He was the embodiment of a spiritual figure, even by the admission of the writers of the series.  Joe Mannix emerged as a classical, heroic figure by serendipity.”

Mannix ended its run in 1975 and there are numerous reasons sited for it. One is that it was considered too violent (though there were other shows even more violent at the time), the other was politics in that ABC started airing late-night reruns of the show while there were new episodes being produced, which CBS didn’t appreciate; and that it had simply run its course — despite the fact its ratings were still extremely strong. “I’d say absolutely we’re going to see a thinning of the ranks of cop shows,” Mike predicted to the Star-Gazette in 1973. “It’s like everything else. The airwaves are saturated with cops until people are fed up. All the shows are hurt when you have too many. I don’t care what the framework of the show is — black detective, old, young, wheelchair … it’s all basically law and order. I’m sure what’s going to happen is that we’ll have The Waltons and Apple’s Way and seven more of that kind of low-key, life-happening show. Then people will get fed up with that and an action show will come along and be a smash hit.”

“Mannix was a two-fisted private eye,” he continued, “a return to the old tradition. And it caught on. It came, too, at a time when the Western was fading and the public was looking for a more contemporary hero.” He added to The San Francisco Examiner,  “When we started, we were the only private eye show on television. Now look at them; they’re all over the dial. Imitation is a sincere form of flattery, but this is too much.”

JoAnn points out, “The appeal of the PI/cop shows, some felt, were waning, the way the Western did before it. Ironically, this would make Mannix a victim of the very genre it is so often credited with creating.”

Amusingly, Mike did play the role of Joe Mannix in three other instances. First, in the 1971 episode of Here’s Lucy, “Lucy and Mannix Are Held Hostage;” then in the 1973 Bob Hope Special and, finally, in the 1997 episode of Dick Van Dyke’s Diagnosis: Murder, “Hard-Boiled Murder.” In the pages of The Lucy Book, Mike told author Geoffrey Mark, “It was such a great experience working with Lucille on her series. The thing that shocked me was how she knew every facet of show business, from the lighting to the camera to the directing to what was funny about a line. She knew just by using the wrong emphasis that it was going to kill a joke. I’ll never forget the first day we walked on the set. In a moment, she realized that there was something wrong with the lighting and the camera angles. In 15 minutes, she had totally redirected the setup to how it should be. She was sensational with how she worked with the director, making things better.”

“After the first reading,” he added, “I thought the script was all right, but not a wow, until we began to actually work on our feet. After she saw it, my wife thought it was one of the best comedy things I had done. Lucille told me, ‘You play this thing straight now. Don’t think of these lines as humorous and we will get a lot of laughs on the thing.’ And she was right. I held the script the whole time we were blocking, so I could learn my lines and the moves at the same time … I enjoyed the live audience. In those days I had more guts than good sense. We had very few pickups, much less than the other comedy shows I did.”

“Mike was beloved as a human being,” says Geoffrey. “He was a wonderful father, a wonderful husband and a good friend. He had a wonderful sense of humor. When you sat and spent time with him, he laughed with you, you laughed with him. Miss Ball appreciated that in him. I think she always appreciated a really good looking man who could play broad comedy when called upon.”

When the end of Mannix came, Mike noted to the Democrat and Chronicle, “I knew it had to come eventually. What the hell, we had a good ride. Now it’s time for me to get off my dead butt and get my career rolling after eight years in one job. I want to do pictures and then get ready to do another series. But not for another year.”

He elaborated to the Independent Press-Telegram, “There were a couple of weeks after the show was over where I’d get up and feel lost. It’s been like a whole life, like a family. I sort of felt, ‘Well, it’s the end of the life.’ But then I began to enjoy the time off and really started to unwind. Then, after about four, five months, I began again to get very restless. There wasn’t enough action going on.”

After Mannix, he appeared in less than a dozen movies, including Avalanche Express (1979), Too Scared to Scream (1985, which he also produced), Downtown Heat (1994), and an uncredited role in The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave (2000). On the small screen, he starred in 10 TV movies and guested on a number of shows. From 1981 to 1982, he starred in 18 episodes of the series Today’s F.B.I. So while he kept busy, his career never quite got the same sort of heat behind it as when he was playing Joe Mannix.

Suggests JoAnn, “Mannix was an incredibly demanding series. Mike was in almost every scene, and many of the scenes not only were on location, but also involved stunts. Mixed in with that kind of shooting were the emotional scenes Mike specifically wanted to include. He wound up with a bad back and bad knees as a result of working on the series.  Because the series was built around him — no gimmick, no real co-stars, other than Gail Fisher — and was an hour-long, action-packed, story-driven series that ran for eight seasons, I can think of no other television series in the history of television that was so demanding of an actor as Mannix was of Mike Connors.”

Another part of it was Mike’s personal life. He married college sweetheart Mary Lou Willey on September 10, 1949, when they were both students at UCLA and he was with her for the rest of his life. In a 1978 profile presented by The San Francisco Examiner, it was noted that Mike when they were students, he was studying law on an athletic scholarship while Mary Lou was studying education. Said Mike, “I told her along the way that I was very much in love with her, and wanted to get married. But she kept stalling, saying she didn’t think she was ready. By this time, she had dropped her college courses and was at home in Laguna Beach, where I was installing sprinkler systems and selling brushes and vacuum cleaners door to door so I could be near her. Finally, I told her to make up her mind, that either we got married or we called off the romance. I left Laguna and went back to school.” A couple of weeks later, she said yes.

Observes Geoffrey, “Family was terribly important to him. Their home in Encino was gorgeous and you never felt like you were walking into a fancy house; it was a home. Mike had great admiration for Mary Lou and there was great warmth between them. That’s an important word. I never heard him say a disparaging remark about her when she left the room. What I did hear was, ‘I’m the luckiest guy on the planet. I really married well.’”

But there was another side to things. The couple had two children, Matthew Gunner Ohanian, born in 1958; and daughter Dana Lee Connors, born 1960. Matthew was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 15 and ended up dying of heart failure in 2007. In between the diagnosis and the end of Matthew’s life, Mike became extremely active in mental-disorder charities.

His son, says JoAnn, “ultimately had to be institutionalized. Mike was devoted to his wife and family. His two children even appeared in the pilot episode of Mannix. It had to have hit him very hard. And in terms of his career, my guess is that, in the big scheme of things, his son’s illness probably took precedence.”

Mike Connors died on January 26, 2017 at the age of 91 from leukemia, which he’d only been diagnosed with a week before his passing. Prior to his death, he had certainly been very much aware of the enduring nature of Mannix and was grateful that people remembered it so lovingly, but he never seemed to buy into the idea that he was a TV superstar. “You can’t call anybody in television a superstar,” he related to The San Francisco Examiner matter of factly, “because they can come back in another series and bomb. I’ve always believed you’re nothing if you’re not honest. I know many people standing in unemployment lines and pumping gas who are far more talented actors than most of us who are successful. As Mannix, I’ve tried not to shock people or to be gimmicky, but to make them believe I’m that character. I want them to say, ‘Yeah, that’s the way I would react.’ When I was doing the Tightrope! series, I visited Spencer Tracy on the set of The Devil at Four 0’Clock. ‘Goddamn it, kid,’ he said, ‘there’s not a moment that I don’t believe you in that show and don’t you forget it, because that’s what it’s all about.’”

“I fully intended to become a lawyer,” he told the Daily News-Post of Monrovia, California in 1971. “And I think that’s why Mary Lou married me, but when I switched into theater arts, she stuck with me even though my mother and her friends in Fresno disowned me. They said, ‘He’ll come to his senses.’”