King of the Beasties

It was the kind of tedious scene that would strain the nerves of the most seasoned actors. But Ben, star of the forthcoming CBS-TV series, Gentle Ben, fended off the attack of a Bengal tiger with almost playful aplomb, breezed through the retakes without missing a cue. Congratulated by Producer George Sherman, Ben merely grunted and slurped down a can of sardines--just as any 7ft.-long, 650-lb. black bear would do after a hard day on the set. Says Sherman: "You look at the script and say 'a bear can't do those things. It's got to be a guy in a bear suit.' But it is a bear, and it's working!"

Ben is the latest discovery of Producer Ivan Tors, 50, who has besieged TV on land (Daktari), at sea (Flipper) and in the air (Ripcord). He is the king of the "beasties"--outdoor adventure films starring big-name big game. This month, as part of a 14-picture pact with Paramount, Tors released Africa--Texas Style, a semidocumentary with Hugh O'Brian as a cowpoke who hunts big game with a rope instead of a rifle. Also planned or in production at Tors's studios and animal compounds, scattered from North Miami and Saugus, Calif., to Nairobi and the Bahamas' Lyford Cay, are such offbeat features as Hello Down There, a futuristic comedy about a family living in a deep-sea bungalow, and Natural Enemies, the saga of a young couple adopted by a pride of lions. This fall, Tors will have five TV shows in the early-evening time slot, five more in reruns and a strong claim to succeed Walt Disney as the leading producer of family films.

Snarling Lessons. Tors's way with the wild began in Budapest, where he studied zoology as a pre-med student. He came to Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1940, but it was not until the mid-1950s, while filming a sea-horse opera called Sea Hunt, that he became impressed with the good manners of the sharks: he visited them in their underwater sets almost daily, was never once attacked. Convinced that the killer image of the shark, as well as that of other animals, was based on fear and prejudice, Tors became a full-time student of animal nature, plunged into his first feature-length nature film in 1962 with Flipper. "Dolphins," he says, "are superior to human beings in every way."

In Ivan's Eden, the watchword is "affection training," as opposed to the old whip-and-fear method. It begins in the nursery, where attendants spend the day fondling the young animals, in keeping with Tors's dictum that "you cannot love without touching." The more dangerous species are stroked on their "affection zones" with long, sponge-tipped "petting sticks," which are gradually reduced in length until an attendant can, for instance, tickle the thorax of a tarantula with his fingers. In "secondary school," the animals are put through an obstacle course in preparation for such script demands as having monkeys cross a chasm using a python as a bridge. For fight scenes, the critters simply wrestle playfully, and the battle noises are dubbed in later; some of the big cats are so tame that they have to be given snarling lessons.

Whale Talk. Eventually, the most promising trainees graduate to the "Beverly Hills" suite of cages, home of such four-legged thespians as Judy the chimp, who can understand 76 verbal commands; Clarence the cross-eyed lion; Bruce the ocelot, who was a regular on TV's Honey West; Zamba II the lion, who appears on the Dreyfus Fund commercials; and Modac the elephant, a 53-year-old veteran of the Ringling Bros. Circus. Tors's Method menagerie accounts for 90% of all the animal scenes filmed in Hollywood; the going rate for a jungle headliner, who travels with two handlers and a standin: $1,000 per day.

Tors, whose grey spade beard gives him the look of a dietetic Burl Ives, is known as the "witch doctor" among his friends and as a photographic innovator throughout the movie industry. His stunning underwater camera work for Thunderball won an Oscar last year. And in the past four years he has built his own company's gross from $750,000 to $12 million. About the only mishap Tors has suffered occurred after he had filmed Namu, the Killer Whale. He had made friends with the five-ton mammal by spending all-night vigils floating on a log in Namu's pen while squeaking to him in "whale talk" and scratching his back. Shortly after the film was completed, Namu became entangled in a fouling net, and, unable to surface and breath through his spout, he drowned. Tors mournfully postponed release of the film, called Namu "the most intelligent creature I ever met."

The more Tors sees of animals, the less he thinks of man. "There are no natural enemies," he likes to say, "except man and woman." To prove that a peaceable kingdom is a possibility--at least on his 260-acre preserve near Los Angeles--he has combined such unlikely pen-mates as a python and a chimpanzee, a lion and an elephant and, most unlikely combination of all, a tiger and a fawn. "We humans live a phony existence," he insists. "We have fallen out of rhythm with nature."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.