A fight for life

Actor Mike Farrell visits Napa to promote book, meet with local death penalty opponents

By CARLOS VILLATORO, Register Staff Writer

Long before Mike Farrell, star of the hit show “M*A*S*H”, began his career in show business, he was an activist that was devoted to many human rights causes.

On Saturday afternoon, about a dozen curious fans gathered at Riverhouse Books in St. Helena to hear Farrell share stories about his life.

Farrell was in town promoting his autobiography, “Just Call Me Mike,” and meeting with members of Napa’s chapter of Death Penalty Focus, a nonprofit agency that Farrell started that’s opposed to the death penalty and seeks ways to have it abolished.

His life of activism began before he became an actor, while he served in the U.S. Marine Corps. Farrell’s fellow Marines gave him grief over a friendship that he made with a fellow Marine, who was African American, he said.

“Racism in the military was something new to me,” he said.

After he got out of the military, Farrell took a job as a driver and traveled throughout the South and further experienced racism.

“I saw white-only rest rooms, white-only drinking fountains,” he said. “So that started to work me up. Then there was the Vietnam War, rights for women (and) gay people (and other) injustices. Nobody knew about me until I became an actor that became known.”

Farrell became famous playing the role of Dr. B.J. Hunnicutt on “M*A*S*H” and used his fame to shed light on the causes that were important to him. One of those causes was the death penalty.

Farrell had always been against the death penalty. When a pastor visited him on the set of “M*A*S*H” and asked him to help stop an execution scheduled in Virginia the actor obliged. Since then, Farrell has become deeply involved against the death penalty and has become a national voice against it.

“The death penalty is a fundamental violation of human rights,” he said. “Those who dehumanize others, dehumanize themselves in the process.”

Farrell said that the death penalty is a flawed system that unfairly targets minorities and poor people, and is used as tool for politicians to show that they are tough on crime. He also pointed out that it takes more money to kill people than it does to sentence them to life in prison and wiping out the death penalty would save the state millions of dollars a year.

And while proponents of capital punishment say that certain crimes merit capital punishment, Farrell says that it’s not so.

“I don’t claim that any of them (on death row) are saints,” he said. “The question is ‘Do we deserve to kill?’ Nobody is always the worst thing that he or she has done. There is always a reason for human behavior. We should be better than to stoop to the level of a killer.”

Prankster on the set

Although Farrell spoke about causes that were important to him, he also talked about his career as an actor.

Among the “M*A*S*H” cast that also included Alan Alda (Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce), Jamie Farr (Maxwell Klinger), Loretta Swit (Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan), David Ogden Stiers (Charles Winchester III), Harry Morgan (Sherman Potter) and Gary Burghoff (Walter “Radar” O’Reilly), Farrell was known as the “Archangel of practical jokes,” he said.

One day, he and fellow actors Farr, Swit and Morgan sat together for lunch and a waiter brought out an elaborate tray of desserts.

“He said ‘Compliments of Sir Richard Attenborough,’” Farrell told the group.

Attenborough was sitting across from the trio and when they turned around to thank him, he ignored them. They wondered why, Farrell said, until they saw Stiers sitting at another table laughing it up. When the bill came the desserts were on it, Farrell said, and he told the waiter to put it on Stiers’ tab.

Farrell approached Stiers and told him what they had done and Stiers told him that he signed Burghoff’s name on the bill. The next day on the set Burghoff stormed up to Farr “like his rear end was on fire,” Farrell said, and began screaming at him.

When Farrell went to apologize to Burghoff, Burghoff told him, “Mike, David made me do it.”

“I thought ‘(Stiers) is never going to let me off,’” Farrell said, as a wave a laughter erupted among his fans.

The next day, Farrell was in line to get comical revenge on Stiers, and told Burghoff to do the same thing to him that he did to Farr the previous day. Burghoff obliged and the two actors got into it in front of the cast and challenged each other to a fist fight. Once they got out of sight, the two made banging noises and started yelling. A worried Stiers ran to them and found Farrell grabbing Burghoff by the shirt collar and shaking him.

“We started laughing,” Farrell said. “You could see the blood draining from (Stiers). Of course he said ‘Never, never again.’ And of course he lied.”

Farrell’s continues his book tour in Ashland, Ore.

Napa Valley Register Copyright © 2009