It was 2018. My 82-year-old brother Bob was in a Los Angeles hospital. Liver cancer. The only thing I knew about liver cancer was that it was fatal. I immediately called Bob after receiving a call from my cousin Joe in L.A., who apprised me of the situation.
Bob could barely hear me, even though I spoke as loud as I could into my cell phone. I didn’t know if it was a poor phone connection or whether my brother was having a hard time hearing. He didn’t sound well. He was giving his all just to hear me and communicate with me as he lay dying in his hospital bed. He seemed to take his impending death with equanimity, like, “I’m not scared, I’m fine with whatever happens.” At the end of our conversation, with tears flowing down my cheeks, I shouted into my cell, “I love you, Bob. God bless you.”
I was an athlete in my day, but Bob was the real, true athlete in our family, going as far as playing football and basketball at Oregon State University. He even played organized basketball into his 60s. I remember one day, when he was 25 and I was 20, we decided to play a one-on-one game of basketball in the backyard of our parents’ house on Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood. I was a pretty good basketball player in my day, but Bob, he beat me to a pulp. He would drive to the basket for layups or shoot medium range shots. I had a decent outside shot, either a one-handed set shot or jump shot, but it didn’t work against my brother that day as it had with almost everyone I ever played against. No one ever beat me in a one-on-one game like Bob did. It was due to his lightning quick reactions that prevented me from scoring one point. He humiliated me.
Of all my five brothers, Bob was the most influential. He won All-City honors in football, basketball, and swimming at Hollywood High in the early 1950s. The many times I went to see him play basketball or football from the ages of 10-12, I didn’t have to pay to get into the games. All I said was, “I’m Bob Sutton’s brother,” and they gladly let me in.
Yes, Bob truly influenced me. He played football in high school; I played football in high school. He went to Oregon State University on a football scholarship; I went to the University of Oregon on a football scholarship. He majored in philosophy at Oregon State; I majored in philosophy at Oregon. After stumbling around in a few jobs in L.A., Bob found his calling in life: acting. I was a teacher in L.A. for a few year until I found my true calling and became a writer. If that’s not following in my brother’s footsteps, I don’t know what is.
In 1966 Bob went to Spain, where the Hollywood studios were producing many movies at the time. In his very first acting role, he got a part playing a young Arab man in the film Lost Command, starring Alain Delon, Anthony Quinn, George Segal and Claudia Cardinale. Bob’s claim to fame is that he kissed Cardinale in the film. At the time, she was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.
Bob studied his craft studiously. He even taught acting for many years, but never made it big. He was mainly typecast as a tough guy or villain because of his distinct smashed-in nose. I saw him perform in several plays around Hollywood, in many movies like Sudden Impact, Hoosiers, and Dogpound Shuffle, on TV shows such as The Rockford Files, NYPD Blue, and Shameless—but the most memorable acting I ever saw Bob perform was when he visited me in San Francisco. We went to a party made up of poets and writers who took turns reading their works. When it came to Bob’s turn, he went, “To be or not to be? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them….” Bob made that soliloquy come alive. He did it better than Laurence Olivier or any of the other British and American actors who I’ve seen play Hamlet.
***
I was speeding down Highway 5 from San Francisco to L.A. to be with my dying brother, when my cell phone rang. I pulled over to the side of the road to answer my brother Albert’s call. He said that Bob had just passed away after being moved from the hospital to his apartment the night before.
My brothers Dave, Albert, and Maurice, and our cousin Vic were at Bob’s and his wife Louise’s apartment when I arrived. Two Jewish men from the cemetery were in the bedroom preparing Bob’s body for burial. I didn’t go into the bedroom to get a last look at my brother. What I saw of him, as they were wheeling him out, were his two bare feet sticking out from under a sheet.
The very next day Bob was buried in a simple wooden coffin in the same Jewish cemetery where our brother Charles was buried. Thirty of us met at the gravesite, mostly family and a few of Bob’s friends. Bob’s coffin was lowered into the ground and everyone either shoveled a large or a small amount of dirt over it. We all stood or sat in chairs around the gravesite and almost everyone offered a memory of Bob. Our cousin Joe, who was the last of us outside of Bob’s wife Louise to see him alive, said that my brother was prepared to die and that to escape the pain he was having, he was looking forward to death in a very calm, courageous manner.
Two days after Bob’s burial, we met at our cousin Vic’s house for a memorial. We spent about an hour and a half in Vic’s living room, 35 of us, talking and reminiscing about Bob. Louise, crying, thanked everyone for pointing out parts of Bob that she never knew. Cousin Joe, Bob’s close friend, told a story of how Bob and another friend of his helped scare away the Mafia from his office one day. Joe was Ricky Nelson’s manager and the Mafia wanted to hold Ricky to an agreement he signed to perform in Italy. But Ricky had changed his mind and vehemently refused to go because he was afraid of flying on planes (sadly, he was to die in an airplane crash years later). Joe called Bob and another friend to meet him outside his office. When Bob and Joe’s friend entered Joe’s office, the two Mafia men saw two snarling, tough-looking “bodyguards” ready to duke it out at any moment. The Mafia men quickly left, never to bother Joe about Ricky again.
My brother Bob Sutton was an accomplished athlete and actor, but most importantly, he was a gentle, sweet, and humble human being.
Bob Sutton