Monte Markham says he’s “always been amazed by the serendipity of life” — the happy accidents and opportunities that have appeared like lucky charms along his path.
How else could a gangly kid from the scrappy side of West Palm Beach manage to star on Broadway opposite Debbie Reynolds?
Or guard the “Baywatch” beach as Capt. Don Thorpe?
Or orbit the galaxy on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” drop by “Melrose Place” or woo Sue Ellen Ewing on “Dallas”?
How else could the president of Palm Beach High School’s Class of 1953 end up becoming “The Seven Million-Dollar Man” — the renegade bionic nemesis of Steve Austin (Lee Majors) in “The Six Million-Dollar Man”?
And how could Markham be the star attraction at 2023’s “Thank You for Being a Fan” convention in Chicago?
That’s what they call the “Golden Con,” the meet-up for diehard fans of “The Golden Girls,” the NBC comedy that originally ran from 1985 to 1992 and is now streaming in perpetuity.
“Golden” diehards know Monte Markham as a golden groundbreaker.
He played Blanche’s younger brother, Clayton Hollingsworth, in two episodes in 1988.
In the first, Clayton has just gotten divorced and visits Blanche (Rue McClanahan) to tell her he is gay. He’s too nervous to confess the truth, so he claims to have slept with Rose (Betty White).
In the second, he introduces Blanche, Rose, Dorothy (Bea Arthur) and Sophia (Estelle Getty) to his boyfriend, Doug, and announces that he and Doug plan to be married.
Back in 1988, gay marriage seemed like a galaxy far, far away. It was such a risky story line that the writers received death threats, and some people told Markham everyone would assume he was gay in real life.
He didn’t care. Did those same people believe he was bionic in real life, too?
“I knew Betty really well, and I was friends with Paul Witt (the producer), and I knew Bea from New York,” Markham recalls. “It never occurred to me, not for one second, that taking that part would mean so much.”
A role that still resonates
Thirty-five years later, 3,500 fans waited in line at the Golden Con to tell him just how much it meant.
One fan said, “Monte, I was a 12-year-old boy in Fort Worth, wondering who the hell I am, when I saw that show, and I knew I was OK.” He introduced Markham to his husband.
Grandmothers came up to him and thanked him and introduced him to their sons and daughters. Some fans cried when they shook his hand.
Markham’s role as Clayton was not just any part, and “The Golden Girls” was not just any show.
“It was very, very moving,” Markham says.
It was serendipity that the handsome and rugged Monte Markham, who starred as “The New Perry Mason” a dozen years before and would play the hunky lifeguard captain on “Baywatch” a few years later, would be cast to play a tender and kind gay man.
But it was not a surprise.
“I am an actor to my bones, to my core,” he says. “It’s the greatest love I have.”
That’s because of serendipity, too.
Monte Markham: From the Everglades to Palm Beach
With his tawny blond hair, blue eyes and confident manner, the young Monte Markham looked the part of the spoiled, rich boy.
No wonder he was cast in the play “Sabrina Fair,” the story of a chauffeur’s daughter enamored with two wealthy brothers.
The play, which became the 1954 film “Sabrina,” starring Audrey Hepburn, William Holden and Humphrey Bogart, is set in ritzy Long Island. Markham played David, the part played by Holden in the film.
He seemed to be such a natural, one of his co-stars asked him: “Do you come from this?”
Not quite — but the young Monte did know something about the upper class.
He and his parents, three brothers and one sister, lived in a four-room house on Lilac Court in West Palm Beach, just six blocks or so north of Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks.
If he walked 1 mile west from his house, he’d be knee-deep in the swamps of Lake Mangonia. If he walked 1 mile east, and could walk on water, he would be in the Kennedys’ pool in Palm Beach.
In the 1940s, his grandparents lived on Okeechobee Road and had no electricity. Forty-fifth Street stopped just west of St. Mary’s Hospital — the rest of the road was sand dunes.
Meanwhile … his mother, Millie, who trained as a nurse, worked in Palm Beach taking care of the mega-rich Eva Stotesbury, who reigned over society from her grand mansion, El Mirasol. The Markham kids swam in her pool.
This dichotomy — straddling the world of the rich while teetering close to poverty — taught Markham a sense of duty, decency and hard work he would never lose.
“There’s a streak of morality as wide as the Indianapolis Speedway running down my back,” he says.
Growing up in Palm Beach County
Monte’s dad, Jesse, owned Jack & Skinny’s drive-through restaurant on the northeast corner of Butler Street and North Dixie Highway. It’s now a vacant lot, but when Monte was growing up in the ‘40s, it was a bustling burger-and-barbecue joint, the north end’s version of downtown’s The Hut. Millie balanced burgers and fries as a carhop.
Monte’s dad saved enough money to buy a few lots next to their house, and he planted avocado trees and raised chickens.
Every weekend the Markham kids plucked those chickens and picked those avocados to sell to their neighbors. Monte made extra money delivering bouquets from Belden’s Florist, and lifeguarding, delivering milk and selling “The Post-Times” — that’s what old-timers call The Palm Beach Post, which then had a combined edition with The Palm Beach Times on Sundays.
Aileen Belden owned the florist shop and helped raise money for Monte to go to the University of Georgia, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts. She once told The Post: “Those Markham kids, they pulled themselves up by their own boot strings. That’s what made them what they are.”
Monte’s mother was a marvel.
He had no idea what he should do as a career, but he knew he’d be drafted if he didn’t have a plan. So Markham enrolled at Palm Beach Junior College.
“She was constantly doing and doing,” he says. At one point, his parents owned a liquor store, “and my mother had a sewing machine in there. She made my Cub Scout uniform and Boy Scout uniform, and our clothes — and all the while she’d be working the desk and paying the bills, with a pistol hidden under the desk.”
He didn’t have a store-bought shirt till he was 14, but Monte had natural charisma. His classmates elected him president of Palm Beach High’s Class of ‘53.
On his first day, he walked into his political science class and there was a tall, exuberant man telling his students that Nikita Krushchev was in power in the Soviet Union, and they better know that name.
The professor emphasized every syllable as if he were performing an opera: “Nee-keeeeta Kruuuushchev!”
The next day, that teacher, Watson B. Duncan III, who also taught English literature, told Markham: “I’m doing a play. I’d like you to try out for it.”
First time on stage
The play was a melodrama called “The Man.” Markham played “a psycho who strangles a woman.”
The woman happened to be played by Terry Garrity, who later wrote the sexy bestseller “The Sensuous Woman.”
And Markham happened to be an actor.
A real actor. An actor who came alive onstage,
“It’s funny,” he told The Post in 2002, “when I look at the old pictures, I was a funny-looking guy. But I always felt very powerful inside. I never had any stage fright. Acting felt great. … All my moments of grace have been on a stage.”
Duncan, who died in 1991, also discovered Burt Reynolds, a star football player in Palm Beach High’s Class of 1954. Monte and Burt didn’t know each other well in school, but they saw each other periodically as their careers grew.
Burt’s personality and image — manly and mercurial — could complicate his personal relationships. Sally Field told People magazine in May that Reynolds, who died in 2018, did not want her to take the lead role in “Norma Rae” that won her an Oscar because he thought “Norma Rae was a whore.” He threw the script at her, and his anger and controlling behavior ended their relationship.
Once, Markham was at Reynolds’ home in Jupiter, and considering a gig at Reynolds’ theater, and Reynolds seemed stand-offish.
One of Burt’s entourage came up and tried to smooth things over. “He told me, ‘Monte, you know, Burt loves you.’ ”
Markham cherishes their shared past. These two very different men owed their careers to the same man, Watson B. Duncan III.
“The great fortune of my life was meeting Duncan,” Markham says. “If I had never met him, I sincerely doubt I would have become what I became.
“He taught me how to learn.”
‘Hey, Baywatch! Hey, Capt. Don!’
Klaire Keevil Hester, five years younger than Monte, liked his looks but “fell in love with his confidence.”
Her parents owned Helmly’s Department Store on Clematis Street. A skilled dancer, Klaire would do high dives into the pool at The Biltmore in Palm Beach to see if he’d notice her.
He finally did. They married on June 1, 1961 — and Klaire has been by his side ever since, often on sets and in editing rooms.
When their daughter, Keevil, born in 1962, and son, Jason, born in 1968, were small, Markham’s career soared, and Klaire made that possible.
“From 1967 to 1972, there was nothing I couldn’t do,” he told The Post in 2002, “and I found out there’s nothing Klaire can’t do.”
He played the lead in the ABC series “The Second Hundred Years” — playing both grandfather and grandson — then got the lead in another series, “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.”
His first movie was the 1967 Western “Hour of the Gun,” which was also Jon Voight’s first film. James Garner co-starred — and became a good friend.
In 1968, he filmed “Guns of the Magnificent Seven,” starring alongside George Kennedy, James Whitmore and Joe Don Baker. They filmed in Madrid — a glorious experience, Markham recalls, because Klaire could come visit.
The family moved to Malibu in 1973, the same year Markham starred opposite Debbie Reynolds on Broadway in the musical “Irene.” He then toured in “Same Time Next Year” with Deborah Kerr.
All the while, Klaire held down the fort. She’s as tough and smart and talented as Millie Markham, and that’s saying something.
“She’s a phenomenal person,” Markham says.
In 1991, he directed a post-apocalyptic Western, “Neon City,” that’s become a cult favorite.
In 1992, Monte, Klaire and Jason formed Perpetual Motion Films, a production company that has made hundreds of hours of A&E biographies and documentaries for The History Channel.
Markham has narrated so many A&E biographies, he’s frequently stopped by people who recognize his voice. He also gets stopped by people who shout, “Hey, Baywatch! Hey, Capt. Don!”
Still making movies
The Markhams are now making a film about the pilots of Civil Air Transport, an airline founded in Asia after World War II that was the forerunner to Air America, the covert airline operated by the CIA.
This story is personal for Monte. His older brother, Jesse, was a pilot for Air America. He disappeared in 1982, when the Cessna he was flying took off from Fort Lauderdale, headed east — and was never seen again.
Markham has outlived all four of his siblings. He turned 91 on June 21.
“Every morning, I stand up, and I say, ‘Thank you,’ and I think about all the faces and the coincidences and the luck in my life. All the serendipity.
“It goes back to my family and how I was raised. Take the opportunity! Try it! You don’t know what you can do until it happens.”
Jan Tuckwood is the former associate editor of The Palm Beach Post. She met Monte Markham in 1994 while editing the book “Pioneers in Paradise: West Palm Beach, the First 100 Years.”
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Palm Beach County native, 91, reflects on legendary Hollywood career
Reporting by Jan Tuckwood, Special to the Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Jan Tuckwood, Special to the Palm Beach Post | USA TODAY Network
