Edd Byrnes - Screen Career

Screen Career

His enduring and most famous role was as Gerald Lloyd "Kookie" Kookson III, on the ABC television detective series 77 Sunset Strip. He played a continually hair-combing serial killer in the pilot, Girl on the Run, but he was so popular (a national teen sensation) that the producers brought him back the following week as a regular cast member in the role of a chrome-plated hot rod driving, hipster-talking ("Kookie-talk") parking valet and sometime protégé private investigator. Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. explained the situation to the audience:

We previewed this show, and because Edd Byrnes was such a hit we decided that Kookie and his comb had to be in our series. So this week, we'll just forget that in the pilot he went off to prison to be executed.

— From the pre-credit sequence for the episode "Lovely Lady, Pity Me"

Kookie's recurring character—a different, exciting look to which teens of the day related —- the valet parking attendance who constantly combed his piled-high, greasy-styled teen hair, often in a windbreaker jacket, who worked part-time at the so-called Dean Martin's Dino's Lodge restaurant, next door to private investigator agency at 77 Sunset Strip—frequently acted as an unlicensed, protégé detective who helped the private eyes (Zimbalist and Roger Smith) on their cases based upon "the word" heard from Kookie's street informants. Kookie called everybody "Dad" (as in "Sure thing . . . Dad."), and was television's homage to the Jack Kerouac style of cult-hipster of the late 1950s. To the thrill of teen viewers, Kookie talked a jive-talk "code" to everyone, whether you understood him or not, and Kookie knew better than others "the word on the street." Some say the Kookie character borrowed much from James Dean's "Rebel", and was the progenitor to The Fonz of the Happy Days series (switch hot rod for motorcycle; same hair, comb and a leather jacket).

Kookie's constant on screen tending of his ducktail haircut led to many jokes among comedians of the time, and resulted in the 1960 charted 'rap' style recording (8 weeks), "Kookie, Kookie--Lend Me Your Comb", recorded with actress and recording artist Connie Stevens, and which reached #27 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song also appeared on the Edd Byrnes album, entitled (what else) "Kookie". He and Stevens appeared together on ABC's The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom. During the run of the 77 Sunset Strip series, Byrnes, as the "Kookie" character, was an extremely popular celebrity (Elvis Presley-level national attention), and Byrnes received fan mail volume that reached 15,000 letters a week, according to Picture Magazine in 1961, and rivaled most early rock recording stars in the day.

Byrnes walked off the show in the second season demanding a bigger part and bigger pay, to which the producers eventually agreed.

Owing to restrictions in his Warner Brothers television contract, he was forced to turn down film roles in Ocean's Eleven (1960), Rio Bravo (1959), North to Alaska (1960) and The Longest Day (1962). However he appeared in the Warners films Darby's Rangers (1957) (replacing Tab Hunter), Marjorie Morningstar (1958), Up Periscope and Yellowstone Kelly (both in 1959). Byrne tested for the role of John F. Kennedy in PT 109 but the President preferred Cliff Robertson, who was eventually cast for the role.

Though a popular celebrity, and yet not a particularly gifted actor, the years of unfortunate "Kookie" typecasting led Brynes to ultimately buy-out his television contract with Warners to clear his way for films—though it was accomplished too late to allow Byrnes to capitalize on feature-length cinema projects based upon his established television series fame.