Plastics-Adjacent: The Loving, Centrifugal Argosy of John Fink

The actor completes his audition with camera rolling, and even does it “off-book” – no script in hand. He’s come prepared and has done quite well, John has. Inching closer to that coveted role in this new TV series, he may soon join an ensemble that includes the great Celeste Holm! 

There’s just this one other thing standing between John and this gig – a casting ritual called the personality test. By some reckonings a successful TV series is principally a dozen or so egos joined at the contract. The money folk want assurances these acting school hotshots can play well with others and not derail the investment. The young actor will be thrown a few key questions to gauge his malleability, his personal chemistry. The camera still rolling, the director belts out the actor’s name which, it must be said, does lend itself to shouting. 

“John Fink!”the director barks. He sits back and effects an amused expression. “Now that’s a really interesting name. Did you ever think of changing it?”

“Yes,” John says. 

“To what?” the director asks. 

“Irving Fink,” John says.

A pin-drop silence, and the room bursts into sputtering laughter. 

Fink is in.

Thoroughbred Fink

The Corner Green’s airborne hirelings are throwing down serious birdsong today, flitting from tree to tree and (per the norm) taunting the earthbound little mutts below. John and I sit opposite each other at one of the lil’ iron tables there. The guy’s telegenic good looks and amused demeanor lay the groundwork before he’s spoken a word.

“I became an actor because I got away with it,” he says. “I just started going out for plays at school and I loved it. I was ADHD, as they call it now. I was a poster kid for ADHD. And my father was 52 when I was born, and he wasn’t a great force in my life. Had he been younger I think he would’ve directed me towards business or something. As it was, I was left feeling free to do what I wanted. I got a lot of kudos for it, and I ended up after college wanting to pursue it. What else am I going to do? I love this. It’s great!”

Largely retired from the acting now, John Fink’s artistic apogee neatly paralleled the arguable Second Golden Age of film and television acting. Fink was (for instance) in the running for the role of Benjamin Braddock – Mrs. Robinson’s bewildered postgrad paramour and the role that launched Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. It’s all I can do not to start blabbing excitedly. 

When the writer of this piece was a schoolkid sporting a puka shell choker and many-zippered bell bottoms, Fink was cavorting onscreen with Columbo, haunting Roddy McDowall with co-ghost Stefanie Powers in Topper, flirting with Janet and Chrissy on Three’s Company (“…Come and knock on our door!”), and sharing Blake Edwards’ direction with James Coburn in The Carey Treatment. In a less salutary flashback, Fink came this close to corrupting John-Boy Walton. Sometime later he would be frozen solid by a merciless Arnold Schwarzenegger – comeuppance for the John-Boy thing, surely – and would lawyer up for Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It? Fink was on a golden age soap in the ‘60s, and would replace Ken Howard as Thomas Jefferson in the legendary Broadway production of 1776. Fink’s thespian cup ranneth over. 

“Even when I was at Penn I would go up to the city and see My Fair Lady or see West Side Story. I loved theater. It was all about theater. No thoughts of Hollywood, none of that. Yes, I loved film. But it was about pursuing the stage.”

What’s in a Name

“John Fink.” Let’s tear this bandage off. While the name may invoke a cackling, black-gloved fiend from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Fink’s thoroughbred American visage could give a Wheaties box Impostor Syndrome. Combine screen-enhancing good looks with Yale Drama School chops and you’ve got a ubiquitous working actor strolling through your Columbo, your Waltons, your Quincy M.E., McMillan & Wife, your Three’s Company and Laverne & Shirley. This was TV’s second Golden Age; arguably the very last time whole families gathered round appointment television in a unifying bath of prime-time luminescence. As we nuclear families huddled in our cathode ray caves, the omnipresent John Fink was likely onscreen. 

And the movies? Batman & Robin (see Finksicle above), The Client, Falling Down, Flatliners, The Number 23 (as Jim Carrey’s numerically haunted dad) – to name but a very few. John’s very first film, a 1970 zeitgeist jamboree called Loving, saw him working with Eva Marie Saint (!), George Segal, Sterling Hayden, and Roy Scheider. 

Fink hit the ground running and was working from the get-go. When he landed an early role in the classic ‘60s daytime soap opera Secret Storm, the swaggeringly confident thespian threw up his lunch in the hallway walking to set.But during the run of his character,Fink would so convincingly play drug-addled nice guy student Jimmy Dobbs (addiction a groundbreaking soap topic in that day), sympathetic strangers would approach him on the street, lay a hand on his shoulder and somberly wish him well. But in the beginning was The Stage.

“I got a year at Yale Drama School. I’d read that Paul Newman had been there, Julie Harris had been there. I didn’t want to get a diploma, I just wanted to make contacts, and it worked! I did some off-Broadway stuff, and John Guare [award-festooned playwright of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation and many others] was one of those contacts. I was lucky enough to appear in two of his earliest plays, one at Yale and his first in New York, off-off-Broadway at the legendary Caffe Cino. I’ve maintained a friendship with Guare ever since.” 

John is one of those guys. He’s sped around Manhattan on the back of Hoffman’s moped, been old-school canceled by a jealous Dean Martin, and punched in the face by Michael Douglas. His Laverne & Shirley episode is enshrined in the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Life being a cactus flower, John’s has been colored by both heartbreak and joy, the two inextricably linked in ways the most eloquent seer would stammer in trying to articulate. 

Phoebe, Sharkey, and the Next Room

“My wife and I had our first child in 1975, and at two and a half, she suddenly developed this little thing on her back. It was ultimately diagnosed as being a rare form of cancer. They removed the tumor, and she survived that.” Doctors had told him and his then-wife, Charlotte (known more familiarly to friends and fam as “Sharkey”), that the likely recurrence of the condition would oblige an aggressive regimen of radiotherapy and surgery. 

John and Sharkey pondered the grim likelihood of recurrence, and the frankly eviscerating effects in that event the Hail Mary regimen would have on their Phoebe. John’s pre-internet research at the UCLA Medical Library was sobering. “Nobody, adult or kid, had ever survived this cancer using any of the standard techniques,” John says. 

It was around this time John chose to leave acting, first for Phoebe and then for a decade to pursue his new passion – helping get out the word on his newfound health-related discoveries. He would return some 12 years later for more television, smaller parts in movies, and some local theater. Of immediate concern was Phoebe.

John and Sharkey’s Lamaze teacher directed them to an acquaintance whose mother-in-law had sought and found alternative cancer therapies. In the course of this journey they would also seek and find an escape from L.A., moving to the healthier, sea breeze-tossed village of Montecito in 1978. Phoebe would pass at 4 years old. 

“My wife was an amazing woman,” John says of the enviably nicknamed Sharkey Fink. “She was such a leader in all of this. And she was the one who really inspired me; her smarts, her strength and her passion were so great.” 

In the immediate wake of Phoebe’s passing, John experienced something that would prove spiritually metamorphic. “I was sitting alone in the room with Phoebe a few hours after she passed,” he says, then slowly raises his hands, palms downward, to suggest buoyancy. “And I watched a white cloud come up off her body like that and go right up into the ceiling. And what was that? That really took me from being an agnostic into being a believer.” (Anyone inclined to politely scoff at this account is encouraged to revisit their high school Elementary Quantum Physics notes and see where credulity’s red line actually lives – author.)

Phoebe’s passing would also take John from disquisitive investigator of cancer therapies to published author. His initially home-made compendium Third Opinion, a global directory of alternative health centers, is now in its fourth revised edition at Simon & Schuster. The book’s initiating research would find John traveling the world with two physicians, following leads and thoroughly vetting far-flung clinics. John would later travel to D.C., testify before a Senate committee and join a congressional advisory board called the Office of Technology Assessment, which from ‘72 to ‘95 looked at emerging therapies as prospective elements of policy. He would also spend 27 years as president of the Santa Barbara Chapter of Cancer Victors and Friends. 

John’s high-spirited wife Sharkey would herself be taken by cancer in 2014, a scant two months after her own shocking diagnosis. Their next meeting would be in the presence of a Santa Barbara medium, whose unexpected, sudden chortling would be ascribed to a certain diaphanous livewire in the room. John and his visiting grown daughter would glance at each other and grin. 

Spring Reawakening

When some two years after Sharkey’s passing an acquaintance tested John’s interest in meeting someone, his recent comic misadventures in dating gave him pause. His friend’s description of widow Kerin Friden as both deliciously waggish and “drop-dead gorgeous” abridged John’s hesitation. Kerin had lost her husband 13 years before and had in the interim shown little interest in dating, having particularly foresworn politicians, athletes, and – yes – actors. Their mutual friend (or “common friend” as grammarian fussbudgets reminded Dickens in the day) pointed out to Kerin that John had a lovely sense of humor. When her friend also mentioned that John wore no socks, the deal was sealed.

When John and Kerin started hanging out together the curtains were figuratively thrown back, a warming bolt of figurative sunlight poured into the figurative room – well, you know. I can attest that a few minutes with the couple is like a short elevator ride with Nichols and May. For the past decade or so, the two volunteer with the Center for Successful Aging as peer counselors and run a group together. 

Add John’s grown kids Lily and Andy, grandkids and in-laws – the concentric family circles widen to embrace and enliven the whole mess and the show goes on. I’ll note here – apropos of nothing – that “Fink” is phonetically identical to the Dutch word ‘Vink,’ meaning Finch, which Darwin hobbyists will recognize as that curmudgeon’s favorite adaptive superbird. And this energetic and emotionally adaptive Finch’s perspective is about what you’d expect.

“Reframe awful things in your life to find the hidden gifts,” John says. “Phoebe’s short life led Sharkey and me to helping many others, and it made us more grateful for the time we all have together.” Oh, and one other thing this veteran of Ally McBeal, Batman & Robin, and The Bionic Woman would like to add… 

“My motto is have fun and keep having fun. When my kids saw my Advanced Health Directive, my daughter was reading and suddenly said, ‘What the hell is this? You want to be cremated and have your ashes flushed down the toilet? Why?!” And I said, ‘Because there’s no way you could do that without laughing.’ And that’s all. Keep having fun.”