Q&A with Richard "Jaws" Kiel at the Guccione Mansion

I introduce myself to Bob Guccione at a party in his mansion on the Upper East Side, just off Central Park. "It's an honor to meet you," I tell him. "I'm one of your editors at Penthouse." Guccione gives me a firm handshake, makes brief eye contact, smiles, but doesn't say anything. At 68, he looks good?tan, lean, chiseled. His castle consists of two brownstones converted into one gigantic six-story megalith of urban decadence and beauty, filled with famous paintings, a Roman-style indoor pool, marble statues, a walk-in fireplace, archeological antiquities and Guccione-designed architectural accents. It makes me feel good simply knowing that something like it exists. Penthouse is the first nudie mag I discovered in my father's closet when I was a kid. The featured pictorial in that issue was a black-and-white lesbian layout of Miss America Vanessa Williams, which got her ousted from that title. I became a senior editor at Penthouse more than a year ago.

What brings me to the Penthouse mansion on this recent Thursday night is the book-release party for Making It Big in the Movies (from Brit publishers Reynolds & Hearn), the autobiography of actor Richard Kiel, whose niece April Warren is Guccione's fiancee. Kiel is most noted for playing the villain Jaws opposite Roger Moore in the James Bond movies The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). The book's cover photo is a screen shot of Kiel-as-Jaws biting through a thick wire cable with the character's monstrous metal teeth (which are now in a museum somewhere) in Moonraker. I saw that movie in the theater with my mother and brother when I was around nine. Kids love giants. I remember liking Jaws' transformation into a good guy at the end of Moonraker. Kiel says that was written into the script because the director's grandson liked the Jaws character. "Kids like Jaws because there's that sort of antiestablishment thing," he says.

The Monday before the party, I met up with Kiel at the mansion. I was a little nervous and intimidated, but extremely curious, as I walked up and pushed the button that would gain me entrance into a place that had been in the news recently when it was put up for sale for $40 mil. I was led up the imported Italian-marble staircase and to the second floor where Richard Kiel was waiting for me by a hand-carved wooden table that sat atop a mountain-goat-skin rug. Kiel invited me to take a look around at the Picassos, Chagalls, Modiglianis and Judy Garland's old gold-colored grand piano. After poking about, I sat on a couch next to the chair Kiel sat in?a reinforced one brought in especially for his 300-some pounds, he told me, since he routinely breaks chairs he sits in. It was an unusually scorching spring day, and I asked Kiel if there was a bottle of water to be had. He directed me toward the kitchen behind us, and I asked if I could grab him one too. I walked through the main dining concourse and into the enormous polished-steel kitchen, and a woman there took care of me. I came back, gave one of the 16-ounce bottles to Kiel. He took it, and the thing disappeared into his hand. Kiel's hand was as big as my head. I considered how easy it would be for him to squash my head like Popeye would a can of spinach. And that he would gladly do it if I were a threat, and if he weren't such a nice guy.

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Sixty-three-year-old Kiel has an overactive-pituitary condition called acromegaly. It ran in the females on his mother's side; his grandmother and some aunts were more than six feet tall. He didn't hit his growth spurt until he was 12. By the time he was a high school freshman he was 6-8 and 275 pounds. He would top out at 7-2 and the mid-300s.

Kiel grew up in Detroit and moved to California with his family when he was in his teens. He moved to Hollywood in his 20s and did stunt and prop work, was a nightclub bouncer and sold stuff door-to-door before he got his first acting roles in tv. He played the alien leader in "To Serve Man," the famous Twilight Zone episode in which the alien visitors' plan for peace turns out to be a plan for cooking humans ("It's a cookbook!"). He played a gay hairdresser/monster in a Monkees episode, a Russian submarine commander in Gilligan's Island, a giant Indian in Lassie. He had parts in The Wild, Wild West, I Dream of Jeannie, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Rifleman. In the Gilligan role, Kiel's sub commander is dressed as a ghost to scare the castaways off the island. The gang, dressed as ghosts themselves, turns the tables on the Russian, who does a "superhuman backstroke" through the lagoon to get away. "In order to make it look like I was going 100 miles an hour through the water," Kiel writes, "they had me hooked to a cable that pulled me through the water while I moved my arms? I was turning blue by the time we did the last take? The prop man brought out a half-pint of brandy, which I gratefully accepted and chugged down?"

Kiel appeared for a few seconds in a gym scene in Jerry Lewis' The Nutty Professor. He was a carnival strong man in Elvis' Roustabout. "Elvis is dancing down the midway at the carnival and he stops from time to time at an attraction as he dances and sings away. I was carnival dressing that allowed him?to get from Point A to Point B in the movie and give him an excuse to sing while he does it." Throughout the 60s he played the heavy in little-seen gems like The Phantom Planet, Eegah, House of the Damned, The Human Duplicators, Skidoo and Las Vegas Hillbillys. In the 70s he got respectable work in films like The Longest Yard, Silver Streak, Force 10 from Navarone and the 007 movies.

His worst movie experience, he says, was working with director Otto Preminger on the embarrassing flop Skidoo (1968), a prison comedy that features a scene in which star Jackie Gleason and the other inmates accidentally ingest acid. "It was a weird movie," says Kiel. "It had the Green Bay Packers line, bare-ass naked, during the LSD hallucination scene. People were getting up and walking out. By the time the movie was over there was just my wife and I and one other guy, probably a film critic. It opened on a Wednesday, by Friday it was gone."

Kiel says that Preminger so terrorized Tony winner Austin Pendleton during filming that the actor had a relapse of a childhood stutter. Kiel (in a German accent) says the director screamed, "'You want to be an actor, you must act! You stink!' as loud as he could in front of everybody. Pendleton said, 'I don't understand the motivation.' Gleason, he was so pissed at having to be in this movie, you could tell he just wanted to get it done. He said, 'The motivation is to do the fucking movie and get the hell out of here.' Apparently Pendleton had had a stuttering problem in his youth. He had gone through therapy. Preminger had him stuttering probably like he was when he was eight years old. I hated this guy." To show another actor how he wanted him to slap Kiel's character in a scene, Preminger struck Kiel hard across the face. "I ended up having a confrontation with him, telling him not to mess with me or he would be dead?and I really meant it. From then on he treated me very very nice." Kiel almost left the movie business after making Skidoo.

In the mid-70s Kiel worked on a short-lived tv series called The Barbary Coast, a Wild, Wild West knockoff starring William Shatner and Dennis Cole. "Shatner was idolized by network people," says Kiel. "He could just urinate and people would tune in. He had a really huge ego. He and Dennis Cole clashed. Cole had a making-deals-you-can't-refuse kind of management. Apparently, when there was strife between him and Shatner, somebody must have paid Shatner a visit, because everything got cool."

Kiel was a heavy smoker and drinker until the late 70s. It took a tragedy for him to get his act together. "I was putting vodka into beer and wine, scotch in my coffee in the morning," he says. "I couldn't go to sleep at night if I didn't have my Pall Mall reds on the bedside beside me. I'd get up in the morning, light up the Pall Mall red, have the coffee with the scotch in it, and my body would be saying, 'Oh no, not again.'" A week or two after making Force 10 from Navarone with Robert Shaw, Shaw, also a heavy drinker, collapsed and died while out driving. At the time, Shaw had 10 children, a new wife and a baby. "When you're putting vodka into beer and wine, and scotch in your coffee?your body's not made to run on that stuff," says Kiel. "I kind of got scared. We had three children, number four was on the way. Seeing what happened to this guy made me afraid it could happen to me."

So Kiel, who's always considered himself a Christian, stopped partying and got serious about his religion. In fact, the last few pages of his autobiography read like a Bible tract, complete with contact info should you experience an epiphany while reading them. So I wondered if Kiel sees any conflict between his religion and his association with Penthouse. Kiel says, "There's conflict all over the place, but that doesn't mean you don't have relationships with people or with your niece?I have a son that's living with a woman, they're going to be married in September. That's a conflict, but what are you going to do?"

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In the 80s Kiel appeared in the movies So Fine, Cannonball Run II and Pale Rider. In '91 he produced and starred in the children's movie The Giant of Thunder Mountain, which flopped, Kiel says, because of a misguided distribution deal with a company that normally handled horror and European art movies. Kiel's latest role was alongside Adam Sandler in Happy Gilmore, in which?because of a crippling car accident 10 years ago?they had to make it look like he was running by putting him on a platform with wheels and pushing it.

These days, Kiel is signing 8-by-10s on the James Bond movie-convention circuit. But he's excited about an historical novel he's just finished about Muhammad Ali's original namesake, abolitionist Cassius Clay. He's looking for a publisher and hopes to see the book made into a movie. "We still have racial strife in America, and it's stirred up by people," he says. "Programs like Roots told one side of the story; the side of the story I discovered in my research was that?the Republican Party of the 1860s built 985 new schools for the freed black slaves, they had the foresight to build four [black] universities? It shows how things can change? [Southern Democrat] Andrew Johnson was impeached by the Congress because he vetoed every single one of these forward-looking laws that helped the freed black slaves, which is the opposite of what you think today between the Democrats and the Republicans. It showed that the party of Lincoln was a more liberal party, and I thought it would be important for the Republicans to look back and see that this is a part of their heritage.

"There is so much of our history that is not being told properly. No one knows why Andrew Johnson was impeached, or that 93 percent of [Southern whites] never owned a slave, and that they were adversely affected by slavery. There's all this bitterness and pain and anger and guilt that's been caused by misinformation that causes people to hate the whole South? The end of slavery was really to the benefit of the working people of the South. It changed things drastically, and yet the powers that be, the people who control the press, that have the money to make history, so to speak, they tried to make a different picture of it all? This book could stir up debate and help people understand what really went on back then."

The Thursday after our interview, Kiel is holding court in that same chair. As the night wears on, he looks more and more agitated at being interrupted by photographers as he chats with old friends. I want to get a photo with him myself, but the longer I wait the less I feel comfortable asking. In the meantime, I've met a few famous folks: Alan Dershowitz (who complimented me on the editing we'd been doing recently on his monthly Penthouse column); Tina Louise, who played Ginger on Gilligan's Island; Soupy Sales; George Lazenby, who played James Bond once, in 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service; Megan Mason, our sultry Pet of the Year; and of course my boss, Bob Guccione.

At the end of the night, after several glasses of champagne and a group tour of the mansion, I finally get that photo op with Kiel. "Make it look like you're crushing my head," I tell him, which he gladly does. I hang out to help kill the last bottle of bubbly as Kiel and wife Diane get into an elevator. You can see all of Diane, but not the upper reaches of Kiel, who has to bend over a little to fit inside the lift.

Jaws is gone, the champagne has run dry, and I leave that once mythic place wondering if I'll ever get to see it again.