SAME BAT VILLAINS

Many of the greatest comic book characters have a special group of villains that they can claim as their own. More than any other comic book character, none have assembled a better-known rogues gallery than the Caped Crusader, Batman.

In any form, the foils of Batman are able to take on a unique personality. Infamous villains such as the Joker and Catwoman have evolved over the years in the comic books, yet Jack Nicholson's and Michelle Pfeiffer's interpretations of the characters garnered rave reviews. Mark Hamill has also given the Joker a unique personality of his own with his diabolical voice in the animated series, along with Richard Moll's Two Face and Paul Williams' Penguin, to name a few.

While each of these mediums have been immensely successful, none of the featured villains can compare to the Batman series of the '60's, led by the late Caesar Romero's Joker, Burgess Meredith as the Penguin, Frank Gorshin's Riddler and everyone's favorite Catwoman, Julie Newmar.

A decades-old favorite on the re-run circuits for everyone from thumb-sucking toddlers to  beer-swigging collegians, I tracked down the remaining members of the quarrelsome quartet to find out how they felt about being television icons.

Burgess Meredith, who played the Penguin confessed, "I had no premonition that anything extraordinary would happen. I just thought it was amusing, and it was a thing to do back then. Many, many stars played one of the villains. It was a kind of trendy thing to do at the time. We're amazed how it keeps up. Not a day goes by that several pictures don't come in, sometimes as many as a dozen, asking me to sign it. I've played quite a few other characters since then, but that's the most long-living role that I've ever accomplished." The biggest names in Hollywood lined up to be a guest star on the show.  Burgess explains, "It was a very fashionable thing to be the Penguin at the time and to be on that program. Lots of stars played in it...I was just one of the many, and I didn't think [my role] was going to continue, except that they found such a reaction to it that they went ahead and made a couple of feature films about it."

Newmar had no idea who Batman, let alone Catwoman, was when she landed the role. "I grew up in Hollywood, and my mother was in the ZEIGFELD FOLLIES, so I got advanced artistic education in music and dance when I was growing up. Later on, acting sort of evolved. I really started in Los Angeles. SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS was a film that paid me $250 a week, and I was able to take off on my own and go to New York at the age of 18," Newmar recalls. "My brother was going to Harvard, and I had a penthouse in New York City. He was down there with six or seven friends; we were all just hanging out. It was a Saturday morning when the call came through asking me if I wanted to play in Batman. I said, "John, what's Batman?" He just leapt off the couch and said, "Batman! It's the most popular show at Harvard! We all quit between four and five and watch the show! What's up?" I said, "Well, I'm the Catwoman."

"I don't read comic books," she explains. "I wasn't allowed to when I was a kid. I read Brenda Starr on Sunday morning. He said, "Go do it." There was no time to do just research. No time at all. I just got on the plane and went there, showed up, got my fitting and when on stage." With nothing to draw on, Newmar made the character her own. "I think there is an enormous physical aspect to the character. If you'd had as much physical sports training as I had, then you just do it easily," Newmar says, "Sometimes you just play from instinct, and the stuff is there. "Life is luck, a lot. We work very hard and we really turn in a good job. It doesn't doesn't quite jive, always. All of a sudden you've got a project to do, and it just turns out perfectly."

Batman, known as well for its outrageous costumes and psychedelic sets as it is for its kooky characters and plots has become synonymous with the adjective campy. The sultry Catwoman, Julie Newmar explains that by today's standards, the show is far from high-tech, but the sets were not designed to save money. "Television has to have a legitimate budget to go from week to week. You can't have extraordinary numbers and millions and go from week to week. It had severe discipline. In fact, weeks after the show was cancelled by ABC in 1968, NBC offered to pick the show up only if the $800,000 Batcave set was still intact. Itwasn't, and NBC didn't.

Burgess credits the makeup crew with much of the shows lasting success, making time spent in the makeup chair worth every second. "The longer you did it, the quicker those geniuses in the makeup department worked. They got it down so it was done very fast. I was always good to get the damn thing off my nose at the end of the day." Burgess doesn't recall, however, whether the nose removal procedure was as painful as slowly peeling off a band-aid. "I have no memory of it, so it couldn't have been too bad. I didn't get anything crooked about my nose. But I must say that if there are any geniuses at all in this business it's the makeup people. Fastest and the most exact geniuses around. They work with lightning speed."

Newmar's unforgettable Lurex outfit also added a dimension to the show. "It had a kind of an elasticity to it, so that it...gave where it was suppose to."

Although the cast of villains stole the show, rumors of the big egos for the dynamic duo made their rounds. The villains, however, say the rumors were unfounded. "There wasn't any time for that," Newmar says. "I didn't work with any of the stars other than Batman and Robin, and they were just dreams to work with. They were always on the set laughing and making life very enjoyable."

Meredith agrees, "Things were done with such speed you didn`t hardly have time to be untoward out of politeness. We rushed through, and I don't remember any difficulty with them at all. You were in and out of there as quickly as you could in those days."

Filming two episodes a week, production of Batman occurred at breakneck speed. "I don't remember having to do more than a couple of days each time," Burgess recalls. "It took longer to do the makeup than it did to do the show, almost. It was a good deal of ad-libbing and a good deal of fun. It was the ad-libbing that led to the most famous quack on television.

Meredith explains, "I wasn't smoking at the time, and still, I had to have that cigarette in my mouth all the time. The character of the Penguin had it. It would irritate my throat-we weren't on a big budget in those days, so instead of stopping to clear my throat I just incorporated it into the character when I was coughing. When I didn't think I was funny I'd just cough."

Years before Tim Burton spent millions of dollars revolutionizing the live-action Batman, the original Batman crew (this time with Lee Merriwether as Catwoman) was filming the first full-length Batman film in 1966 at the same pace as the series. "[It was] done in about three weeks," Meredith explains. "They were done very efficiently and very fast. All of it was done with a great deal of fun. It wasn't taken very seriously."

Although he doesn't look back, Frank Gorshin is interested in reprising his role in Batman 4, perhaps as the father of the Riddler, but doesn't expect to since none of the other original villains have been asked back. Meredith still hasn't seen the new DeVito Penguin.

"I saw the first one," Meredith says. "They asked me to come to see it, and I was it. I didn't see the [second one]." "As I remember, I thought it was pretty good," Meredith continues. "I thought you can't spend too much time on that story, but what they spent on it was excellent."

Although the actors had a wonderful time on the show, most would rather look at the future than back at the past. "I hardly think that Batman was my favorite star accomplishment. I did many things. I can sent you a list of things that I did over the years that I certainly think more highly of than Batman," Meredith confesses. "Although [with] Batman, I was surprised by its popularity.

Frank Gorshin, the Riddler, shares Burgess' sentiments. Never one to reminisce, Gorshin shies away from most interviews regarding former roles he's done, although he does say that working on Batman was a wonderful experience that he considers one of the highlights of his career.

Newmar takes a notoriety of her former role in stride. "There's so much gratitude in being so pleasingly regarded, and having such a delicious gift as this character. Very few women get the opportunity. It's a rare gift to an actress to get to flesh out such magnificently funny writing as this one. But you're right, one tries not to repeat oneself, even though in this last film I sort of played a cat, Miss Kitty, and Peter David wrote in kitty cat stuff for me to do, which I took out immediately so that it wasn't like the Catwoman. As a matter of fact, someone gave me a cat and the cat was in the movie. I brought it back from Romania." When asked if she'd like to do a television series today, Newmar answers in a typical cat-like manner. "What a lovely thought. Gee, by midnight I'll have a dandy answer for that. "It's very important for me to play mothers, now, of grown sons, to make me look young. Something brilliant, staggeringly effective and crashingly funny."

Meredith has also been in a couple movies since the Batman days, most notably as Sylvester Stallone's trainer, Micky, in the Rocky movies, and most recently in Grumpy Old Men.

A private man, living in Connecticut with his wife Christina, Gorshin's career also does not end with the Riddler. Recently appearing in Robert Townsend's superhero film, Meteor Man, and about to begin a one-man show on Broadway, Gorshin's latest movie role will be as the boss of a rubber factory in Hail Caesar with Robert Downey, Jr. and Anthony Michael Hall. Frank's fate? His character dies in a vat of rubber.Currently bombarded with calls about being a guest on the Ed Sullivan Show 30 years ago, the same day a little band known as the Beatles made their American television debut, Gorshin has been turning down most interviews.