The Hollywood Reporter 1977

ROBERT GINTY: A LONG, LONG WAY
FROM BROOKLYN TO BROADWAY

          Robert Ginty, currently appearing as fly boy T.J. Wiley in NBC's Baa Baa Black Sheep, almost missed the boat when the producers were casting for the part. "My agent called me at 3:00 in the afternoon one day and told me to get over to Universal for a reading," he related. "I took a shower right away and then went out to my old '56 Plymouth. I had not one but two flat tires' the car was dead in its tire tracks. "I really needed the work, so I decided to run the two miles over to the studio rather than pass up the chance for some steady work. Well, I barged into the office," He continued, "all red in the face, sweaty, and nearly hyperventilating. The producers were sitting there….waiting. I didn't recognize Pappy Boyington at all and Bob Conrad was pacing up and down in a jump suit. "Conrad took one look at me and said, 'You seem pretty upset. Are you ready to read for the part?' I couldn't very well say no, so I glanced over the script they gave mae and found something there that told me T.J. Wiley was no ordinary beer-drinking, gung-ho pilot. I read him as a sensitive guy who was too altruistic to swallow the idea of war whole. Now that I look back on it, I suppose some of the 85 guys who tested for the part took him to be a stupid oaf, but I saw him as a questioning greenhorn who would most likely become a conscientious objector after the war. "They liked that interpretation and I got the job, " he added, "but I can't say that steady work has made me more punctual. It's become a standard joke on the set. No matter how early I get up something always happens to make me late. Hell, I was even born late!"
          Ginty came from a long line of Irish Catholic politicians, so it was fitting that he was almost born at a polling place on Election Day. "Nothing could keep my mother away from the polls - not even an overdue baby. I was born at the hospital, but only because the cab driver had a death wish!" The sandy-haired actor was groomed by his parents for a political career from an early age. The family ate, slept and talked politics a al "Beacon Hill" and Ginty himself never questioned his goal. "I expected to go to Yale and then get a law degree before entering politics, but little did they know that my avocation - playing the drums - would make me the 'black sheep' of the Ginty household one day."
          The Ginty home was a veritable way station for relatives coming from the Old Country and others who were just down on their luck. "There was a tragedy in the family when I was young," he recalled, "and everyone stayed at our place. There were 14 kids there and every Sunday afternoon they put on a recital, because they all played some sort of instrument - except me. "Someone laid some sticks on me and I started pounding away' before long I got to be quite good at the drums and my father encouraged me, because he found that the louder I played, the sooner the relatives moved out!"
          In high school, Ginty got into acting for all the wrong reasons. His penchant for mischief earned a steady stream of demerits that kept him after school nearly every day of the week. "I found out that by participating in the school plays I could avoid detention," he quipped, "so it was really a matter of the lesser of two evils. If I hadn't done that, I would still be working off those demerits.
          "When I was 16, I got fed up with things and left home. By that time, I had had quite a bit of experience playing the drums and though of myself as a pro. In the Village, I played with Jimi James (later known as Jimi Hendrix) and the Blue Flames at Café Wha. I traveled a lot after that - upstate New York, Nashville and Chicago. I followed the action."
          Later, he returned to New York to finish high school, but insisted on maintaining his independence. "Music paid my way and I know that my brothers thought I must have been crazy to live at the Chelsea Hotel when I could have been at home.
          Ginty attended Yale for a time, but switched to City College, where he finally receive his degree. He came West for a time, but Sal Mineo encouraged him to go back East and attend acting school. Ginty remarked, "The music scene was getting very unpleasant by that time, so I studied acting with Herbert Berghof, Robert Lewis and Sanford Meisner in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse." As a result of this training, roles begat roles and in 1972 he made his directorial debut off-Broadway in "Appetites." While appearing in a series of plays at the New Hampshire Shakespeare Festival, moreover, Broadway producer Harold Prince invited him to Broadway for three plays: "The Great God Brown," "Don Juan" and "Government Inspector."
          "Don Juan' was a real baptism by fire," Ginty related with a chuckle. "I played an Errol Flynnish swordsman trying to kill Don Juan. On opening night - in front of my mother and brothers - I made my dramatic entrance brandishing a huge sword above my head, but as the stage hands raised the scrim - a large piece of material stretched across a frame - my sword got caught in it and they pulled it right out of my hand. There I was: Standing on a Broadway stage in front of hundreds of people with nothing to wave but my finger!
"I turned to the stage manager with real terror written all over my face, but he just threw me another sword and I went on with my lines as if nothing had happened. That experience made all the difference to me, because after that I realized that an actor can survive just about anything, and I've been surviving ever since."
          It was a long, long way from Brooklyn to Broadway, but a surprisingly short distance to Hollywood, where Renee Valente found ample work for the actor in television series such as "Police Story," "Police Woman" and "The Rookies." Various TV films have followed, not to mention film roles in "Bound for Glory," "Two Minute Warning" and Peter Bogdanovich's "Nickelodeon".
          A regular series role hasn't changed much in Ginty's life. "I came from a hungry background, so I can appreciate a steady income, but it has also made me a compulsive worker. I couldn't stand a real vacation. During one break we had recently, I thought about going to Hawaii to do some relaxing, but sitting on the beach twiddling my thumbs and saying "What's happening?" honestly frightened me. "A lot of my friends who are working regularly in series have bought large homes or a new Mercedes, but my biggest treat so far was going out and buying a three speed bike at a discount store. After all, you can't trust a '56 Plymouth forever, can you?"