BY DAVID GROVE

Why do you want to do a book on Jan-Michael Vincent?

This is the most common question I received during the writing of Jan-Michael Vincent: Edge of Greatness, my book on the career and life of Jan-Michael Vincent. Jan’s former Hollywood colleagues, most of whom now refer to him in the past tense, asked me this, and so did Jan’s classmates and friends from Hanford, California, where Jan was born and raised.

I’ve always been fascinated by unfulfilled potential, and the tragedy this represents, and I see Jan as the embodiment of this. Although Jan, as an actor, possessed all of the ingredients, on a purely physical level, for superstardom, there was something missing, something very wrong, and I wanted to explore this.

I called the book Edge of Greatness, which suggests great potential but also the existence of a precipice bordered by the arbitrary forces of fate and circumstance. Obviously, Jan’s story turned out very badly, and although there is no clear explanation for the source of Jan’s lifelong sense of confusion, his eternal torment, I found some disturbing clues.

Jan’s hallmark as an actor, at the height of his career in the early to mid-1970s, was his physical beauty, his incredible well of vitality, which disguised the characteristics and personality of a lifelong misfit, an identity that carried destructive implications for Jan in his career and life. He was cursed with natural ability, in terms of his screen presence, and with surfing, his one true passion. He got by on this, his god-given gifts, for a very long time. When this evaporated, turned inward on him, there was nothing left.

Jan’s alcoholism, which is the bedrock of not only his downfall but his life, was rooted in his family. It was passed down to him through his grandfather, Herbert Vincent, and Jan’s father, Lloyd, a World War II veteran who owned a sign painting business in Hanford, Jan’s hometown. However, it must be pointed out that Jan’s brother and sister both avoided this fate. “Jan was a born alcoholic from an alcoholic family,” says Bonnie Hearn Hill, Jan’s classmate at Hanford High, the high school Jan attended between 1959 and 1963. “He would’ve been an alcoholic had he ended up a sign painter in Hanford. He probably wouldn’t have had access to all of the drugs.”

Jan wanted to be a surfer. After graduating from Hanford High in 1963, at the age of nineteen, he enrolled at Ventura College, far away from Hanford. In early 1965, Jan abruptly dropped out and went to Mexico in pursuit of a surfing odyssey, which was halted due to Jan’s draft status. In 1966, after completing basic training, Jan had few prospects. Acting, as a possible career, was a last resort for Jan, and he really had no choice.

Through his father’s connections, Jan made the acquaintance of legendary talent agent Richard “Dick” Clayton, who immediately saw in Jan, purely visually, the heir apparent to James Dean, Clayton’s friend and former client. Clayton, following the Rock Hudson model, specialized in identifying good-looking boys, hunks, and developing them into stars, whether they had talent or not. Clayton’s stable included Harrison Ford and Nick Nolte, whom Clayton discarded in favor of Jan.

The only acting training Jan received in his career was at Universal Studios, in the training program, which he entered in the summer of 1966. Jan was a natural. The camera loved him, and he had an instinctive sense of the camera, and he understood how to seize the crucial moment within a given scene. “Jan was a “stand and deliver” type of actor,” says Robert Englund, Jan’s friend and co-star in the film Buster and Billie. “He could, in those short bursts, dominate the scene he was in, and he was very effective. Jan was about five ten, which was the perfect height in terms of him relating to the camera. He had everything going for him.”

Following the Rock Hudson model, Jan was marketed, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing well into the 1970s, as a male model. He was a teen idol, a luridly-developed persona that followed him into the early thirties, when he was a husband and father.

Vincent starred with Darren McGavin in the acclaimed TV movie "Tribes".

Jan’s first acting role, which Jan received outside of the Universal bubble, was a supporting part in the western feature The Bandits, which starred Robert Conrad, who urged Jan to abandon his chosen screen name, Jan Vincent, in favor of a more manly-sounding name. He became Michael Vincent, Mike, employing the middle name he’d barely invoked in Hanford, a moniker he kept until he appeared in the TV production Tribes, the first film Jan was proud of.

Conrad was the first in a parade of iconic leading men Jan found himself paired with between the late 1960s and late 1970s. Conrad was followed by John Wayne and Rock Hudson in The Undefeated, Darren McGavin in Tribes, Robert Mitchum in Going Home, Charles Bronson in The Mechanic, Gene Hackman in Bite the Bullet, and Burt Reynolds in Hooper.

As a leading man, Jan found his greatest success, critically and commercially, between 1972 and 1975, with the films Buster and Billie, The Mechanic, The World’s Greatest Athlete, and White Line Fever, a film that was most notable, in spite of its success, because it represented Jan’s introduction to cocaine, which he was turned onto by a stuntman. None of these films were gigantic box office hits, but they were successful and promoted the idea that Jan was going to become a major star. “Jan was at the beginning of the process of being groomed for stardom when I met him,” recalls White Line Fever’s director, Jonathan Kaplan. “He was being groomed by Peter Guber at Columbia Pictures, which distributed White Line Fever, and Peter told me that he was convinced that Jan was going to become a major star.”