October 19, 2007
By Jan Lucas

Saturday of the High Chaparral reunion, spellbound fans packed the hospitality room as Kent McCray described behind-the-scenes and on-camera action. McCray was emphasizing Mark Slade’s scheduled fifth season return when a trim, silver-haired gentleman opened the back door and stepped inside. Flashing a dimpled grin, the newcomer declared, “When Mark left, that meant more lines for me!” Henry Darrow’s surprise entrance won enthusiastic applause.

“It was fantastic! The whole thing just sparked me up,” he said. “I was thinking my God! This is what it was about years and years ago.” A born performer, Darrow thrives on interaction with live audiences.

He was a bold, confident stage-actor in his twenties. “I wasn’t intimidated by anything,” he stated. That included Bill Whitney, who directed Darrow in the theater years before they met again on The High Chaparral. “He said I was moving my head too much,” the actor recalled. But arm around an actress and prop gun in his hand, he ignored Whitney. Playing the scene his way, he was thrilled when Whitney said, “Well, it looks like we have a Spanish Barrymore.”

“I went home that evening and wrote my mother. ‘He said I was a Spanish Barrymore.’ She wrote back, ‘Sweetheart, John Barrymore was known for being a hambone, an over-actor.’” Laughing, he added, “At that time, young actors from the Pasadena Playhouse were considered to be over-actors and indeed we were. In fact, I screen tested several times and proved it over and over.”

But irrepressible Henry Darrow also proved talent, versatility, good looks, drive and practicality gets parts. He recalled, “I’d take anything. Paul Regina, the kid who played my son in Zorro and Son, didn’t want Zorro to be a big thing, because he didn’t want to be typecast. And it’s like oh, God! Paul, what you want to do is work! You want to establish yourself.”

While some consider close association with a character detrimental, Darrow views it as triumph. “You have succeeded in embedding your character into the heart of your audience.” Delighted to be entrenched in the hearts of long-time fans, he was recently amazed when girls in their twenties recognized him as Manolito Montoya. “And I thought, my God, they saw High Chaparral reruns in Guatemala or Honduras! There I am in the middle of the hallway, signing autographs, posing for pictures. I’m kneeling on the ground and they’re saying, okay, goodbye, thank you and I’m saying no, no, no. My knees are bad. You have to help me get up!” he said. Confirming that bad knees aren’t all bad if coupled with a certain loveable charm, he added with a smile in his voice, “That worked out nice.” It would have been an unlikely interlude had Darrow been successful in his own youthful attempt to avoid typecasting.

Born in Manhattan, teenaged Enrique Tomás Delgado spoke only fluent “New Yorkican” when his family returned to Puerto Rico. The transition was difficult, but he fell in love with the island and stayed until an acting scholarship took him to California’s Pasadena Playhouse. There, he deftly tackled drama, romance and comedy. Easily mimicking voices and accents, he portrayed diverse characters with dead-on accuracy. He also danced and sang well. After graduation, with skills honed at the Playhouse and Las Palmas Theater plus can-do attitude, he pursued film and television roles. The future looked golden. “Back then,” he explained, “you got your little degree in movie and television acting, got married and went to live in the Hollywood Hills. I thought, hey, man I’m ready!”

But in Hollywood during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sicilian-American Guy Williams was television’s Zorro and Hungarian-Jewish funnyman Bill Dana rose to stardom as a bumbling Mexican bellhop. Except for a few plum roles, real Hispanic actors had bit-parts as Indians, servants, border guards, gigolos or other riff-raff. His agent kept him working, but said Darrow, “I played Martinez, Lopez, José, Pepé and Carlos for a number of years.” And whereas theater casting usually hinged on an actor’s skill instead of ethnicity, film and television judged differently. A gifted baritone of Russian descent played Daniel Boone’s Indian friend Mingo, but “Delgado would not be up for the part of Corporal Leutz from Germany.”

During ten years of tiny parts, voice-overs, dubbing movies and eventually a few solid secondary guest-roles, pragmatic Enrique Delgado became Henry Delgado then finally, Henry Darrow. “Hector Elizando knew I had changed my name and he said hey, you do what you can to work, that’s the whole idea,” he said, stressing one of life’s twists. “Now that was the irony of it, because after changing my name to Darrow and working a season at the Pasadena Playhouse, I got a part in a series playing a wonderful Mexican character.”

Inspired only by Shakespeare, Darrow let creativity fly and made Manolito Montoya shine. Upon seeing the pilot, TV Guide critic Cleveland Amory wrote he hoped Darrow would at some point stop laughing, but viewers fell in love with Manolito. Reflecting on favorite scenes in “Destination Tucson” and “The Arrangement”, Darrow said, “Denne Bart Petticlerc was a wonderful writer. That scene where I saved Leif’s life had everything in it — the serious, threatening kind of demeanor and the humor of the character.” Cleveland Amory kept watching and declared Darrow’s captivating performance worthy of an Emmy. “I brought a kind of freshness to the role because I had no approach. I wasn’t that aware of the camera, anything like that. I had no tricks.” But the older actors had plenty and he was a zealous student.

“It was like I was taking a four-year college course in a year,” he recalled, noting Cameron Mitchell taught Upstaging 101 brilliantly. “When we did the pilot, Mark Slade and I were talking. ‘That scene with the three of us, wow! That’s great, working with Cam Mitchell!’ Then we went to the dailies to see it, and any time you’d see our faces, he’d hug us and turn us around so our backs were to the camera. When he grabbed you, you were going to be a prop of some kind.” A quick study and a diplomat, Darrow learned to fall down or dip off-camera. “They’d yell ‘Cut! Hey Cam, don’t hug Henry so tight, he looses his balance.’”

With temperatures over one hundred, dressed in leather and wool, Darrow remained enthusiastic. “I wanted to be in on everything!” If anyone had dialogue they didn’t like, he asked for it. After a while, he was told to stick with his own lines. “The producer said, ‘Henry, you gotta shut up. It’s somebody else’s turn.’”

He was quieter but restless when Leif Erickson advised him to take it easy. “You’re always up and about… standing… It’s better if you sit down instead of standing all the time and it’s even better to lie down instead of sitting.”

Darrow may have slowed down on the set, but he and The High Chaparral raced to break new ground. The series was the first to feature a Latino family and offer solid roles to minority actors; it cast Apaches as Apaches, employed approximately 150 Hispanics during its run and catapulted Darrow to international fame. One of the few Hispanic stars in Hollywood, he joined Ricardo Montalbán and others to improve the image and opportunities of Latinos in the entertainment industry. Together, they formed Nosotros (www.nosotros.org). Montalbán was the first president, Darrow was vice-president and name recognition opened doors. “Ricardo and I would visit the networks and make our pitch about there should be more Hispanic actors, and they’d say, ‘Yeah, but look at the percentage that so-and-so has of Latins.’ And it was like ‘So? They all work in the kitchen!’ They’d say there’s nobody qualified. And we’d say, ‘Well, what are you going to do to help people qualify?’ We wanted people behind the cameras, but first we wanted people in front.” Darrow said progress initially came with better Latino roles, but “gradually that has broken away and you have Andy Garcia [ Ocean's Eleven] in a story about stealing some diamonds from the hotel. It has nothing to do with being Hispanic. Then you know what you were starting or trying to start is succeeding.”

Recently passed over for a part on the Jimmy Smits series Cane , Darrow said, “On the other hand, now there’s this new series with Jimmy Smits, Rita Moreno, Hector Elizando. I auditioned and they told me I was second choice. I wondered, who was first? And it was Hector.”

Philosophical about disappointment, energetic Darrow focuses on upcoming projects. While awaiting word on another audition, he is busy crafting a one-man play. His movie Primo opens later this year and another film is in post-production. He has seldom been without work, except after The High Chaparral ended. “They felt I was too associated with Manolito still, that people would say, ‘Oh, look! There’s Manolito on Mission: Impossible.’” Determined as usual, he kept plugging and parts came, the memorable as well as the mundane.

Years before winning a Daytime Emmy for Santa Barbara’s Rafael Castillo, portraying Harry O’s acclaimed Manny Quinlan, becoming the beloved first Hispanic Zorro, blasting into outer space or delighting theater audiences as Cervantes, he went after a Native American role in Cancel My Reservation . Auditioning for Bob Hope in Hope’s Toluca Lake home would have intimidated some, but not Darrow. “I wanted Hope to see I had a sense of humor,” he said. When Hope asked what kind of Indian he was, Darrow responded, “Porrican.” Puzzled, Hope asked where he was from. “New York,” he deadpanned.

“Hope said, ‘New York?! Are you Puerto Rican?’ And I said, ‘Yeah!’ And he asks, ‘And Puerto Rican is Indian?’ I just lied and said, ‘Yeah!’ He laughed in my face and said, ‘The kid’s in!’” Describing to Hope a scene in Little Big Man, Darrow quoted Chief Dan George: ‘Well, sometimes the magic works, sometimes it does not.’
And when Henry Darrow’s magic works, the kid’s always in.

photos courtesy of Kat Garcia and www.henrydarrow.com