Robert Rodan and the Gay Casting Couch of "Dark Shadows"

One day in May 1968, when I was second grade in Racine, Wisconsin, my friend Doug invited me home after school.  We came into the living room to find his older sister watching tv.   Outraged over her co-opting Garfield Goose, we demanded that she change the channel, but she said "Cool it, gremlins!  This is good."

I looked at the screen.

A naked man on an operating table.

Seeing shirtless guys on tv was almost unheard of, and here was a guy almost totally naked. Chest, shoulders,arms, belly, legs....penis....


I had heard of the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows -- the older kids all grooved on tortured vampire Barnabas Collins.  But I didn't watch, so I didn't know that Barnabas was trying to cure his vampirism by by transferring his life force into a young hunk, a man built out of the spare parts of bodybuilders.  I don't think I had even heard of Frankenstein.

But there was a naked man on the operating table!

In the actual episode, he's covered up except for his head and shoulders, but in my memory you get an eyeful.

It was a busy summer, with Vacation Bible School and then three weeks at Aunt Nora's house while Mom and Dad negotiated the move from racine to Rock Island, so I only caught an occasional half-episode of Dark Shadows. 

After a few weeks of Frankenstein-style grunts, the man, dubbed Adam (Robert Rodan), becomes eloquent, super-strong, and vicious.   An altogether formidable foe, but all he really wants is a date.  First he tries for Caroline, the teenage daughter of the super-wealthy Collins family.  Then he forces reformed vampire Barnabas and his doctor-sidekick Julia to build him a mate, Eve.  His storyline ends in December 1968, when he goes off to a clinic to have his scars removed and fade into obscurity.

He never got naked on screen, but he did in my memories.  

Robert Rodan, 30 years old at the time, was born Robert Trimas (he chose his last name after his favorite sculptor).  An art major at the University of Miami, he graduated in 1960, spent five months in the army reserve, and then moved to Los Angeles to seek a job in advertising art.  But he was so goodlooking that people kept mistaking him for a movie star and asking for his autograph, so he figured, why not?

In the mid-1960s, he landed only a few minor roles:  an episode of A Day in Court (1963), a musical called Looking for Love (1964), and the comedy Goodbye, Charlie (1964).  Then he moved to New York and began modeling for magazines and auditioning for the theater.

A soap opera gig sounded like a good steady paycheck.

When he went to the Adam audition wearing regular clothes, Robert was intimidated: the other actors came in full Frankenstein makeup.  Still, he was tall, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, characteristics that, according to Robert himself, producer Dan Curtis found especially sexy.

Wait -- is he implying that there was a gay casting couch going on?

And that Dan Curtis was a member of the fraternity?

That explains why half of the male cast members were gay.

After doing Adam, Robert returned to L.A. and started auditioning for movies.  But he was typecast as a monster. 

He acted in a few commercials and the softcore porn thriller The Minx (1969), which a Swedish producer bought and turned into an X-rated movie.  Then he  hung up his headshots, turned back into Robert Trimas, and went into real estate.

Later in life, Robert returned to acting, voicing some of the Dark Shadows audio dramas.  He died in 2021, at the age of 83, divorced, with children and grandchildren.  No gay rumors.

But, half a century ago, he gave a 7-year old Wisconsin boy one of the iconic moments of his life by lying naked on an operating table. 

See also: Barnabas and Willie