The Countess

“The Countess”

Click here for the answering machine gag.

This episode is a reversal of “The Dark and Bloody Ground”. In that episode, one of the characters returns to reclaim his past (and gets murdered for it), in this one, the titular Countess (Susan Strasberg), having found happiness in a fortuitously built life, has invested years in burying her past. Unfortunately, her past returns in the form of a blackmailer, played to oily perfection by Dick Gautier, who knows all about the Contessa’s past mob ties, so she hires Rockford to find some way of getting the blackmailer off her back.

Though this episode is a reversal of “The Dark and Bloody Ground”, it shares with that story a fascination with money and class. In a party scene, Rockford finds a particularly inventive way of driving off an obnoxious upper class snob.

“Where did you meet the countess? Europe?”
“No. Marineland. I run the hot dog concession by the killer whale tank. The Countess loves my footlongs. I’ll let you in on my secret. It’s the wrapping. I wrap the hot dogs in cellophane before I put them in the hot water. Keeps them from getting tough.”

At the party, Rockford meets the countess’s husband, Mike Ryder (Art Lund) a likable fellow who, the countess later explains, never got past the eighth grade but struck it rich and loves the idea of having married a countess. He tells Rockford that most of the people at his party are “social climbing creeps” who are there to fill up the place. It’s apparent that Rockford feels a kinship with Ryder, based on shared social origins and an impatience for the idle rich, and it makes it easier for Rockford to sympathize with the Countess’s desire to preserve her image in Ryder’s eyes.

Unfortunately for Rockford, his confrontation with Dick Gautier’s Brago goes poorly. In the middle of their fight on the beach, a sniper shoots Brago from the bluff. Rockford runs past two witnesses to pursue the man, and ends up being pulled over and arrested as a suspect. This leads Rockford to the man who’ll serve as his principal police antagonist for the next couple of seasons, Lt. Alex Diehl (Tom Atkins). Diehl tries to toss Rockford in the Tombs, but Beth Davenport arrives to bail him out by daring Diehl to book Rockford for first degree murder, a charge he doesn’t have enough evidence to make.

Rockford gets out, finds out the videotape he made of Brago is missing, and suspects the Countess of having stolen the tape and Brago shot. At this point, he confronts the Countess at her tennis lesson, watch for James Cromwell as her tennis instructor, and lets her know that unless she convinces him that she’s innocent, he’s going to sell her out to the police. The Countess doesn’t do a very good job, until Rockford tells her that he has a copy of the tape he’d made of her meeting Brago and will show that to the cops unless she pays him. She offers to pay, and Rockford realizes that she couldn’t have made off with the tape. At that moment, he explains just how much she can expect from him:

“You’ll keep your promise. You won’t tell the police.”
“Well, let me put it this way, Debbie: I’m never too sure just how much character I’ve got. In a pinch, I start groping for alternatives. I’ll probably sell you out before I take a rap for murder. If you can help me, you’d better get your coffee can and start bailing, because if I go down, you go down.”
“Chivalry is really dead isn’t it?”
“I know.”

This reminds us that Jim Rockford isn’t the standard issue dime novel gumshoe. He gets rattled, and he doesn’t promise more than he thinks he can realistically deliver. He sometimes likes his clients, but he won’t martyr himself for them.

Shortly after this, the mob kidnaps him, and during the kidnapping he finds out that the mob didn’t kill Brago. They are, in fact, angry about his having been killed. (Brago had relatives in high places.) Before the mob can execute Rockford, the police bust in. They’d be planning to arrest Rockford, but the mob just barely beat them to it.

Rockford escapes from the police and returns to the Countess’s house. He’s just realized who the killer is, only to discover that the killer is in the house with him. It’s Mike Ryder, which functions as a nifty plot reversal because the entire episode operated on the assumption his innocence of the matter at hand. It turns out that Ryder knew Brago was the blackmailer, knew about the Countess’s past, and killed to preserve her reputation. Now he feels a need to kill Rockford. Rockford tries to talk his way out of the situation, but Ryder forces him into the driver’s seat of a car. Ryder takes the passenger seat, and soon they’re off toward the execution site. Rockford continues to beg in the car, but Ryder is unmoved. At that point, Rockford runs a bluff, accelerating to a high speed on a twisty back-hills road. Ryder tries to pull the keys out, but Rockford reminds him that this car has a safety feature that prevents this and nods at the obvious irony. Soon Rockford loses control, the car plunges into a ravine, and though Rockford manages to escape the car, Ryder isn’t so lucky. At the hospital, the police tell Rockford that Ryder won’t last the night.

The last lines of the episode wrap up the themes of falsehood and artifice that flow through the story. The countess has cleared Rockford with the police, and in doing so implicated her dying husband. She calls herself a plastic countess, and hates that Ryder, the only real person she’s known, sacrificed himself for that. Rockford replies: “We’re all scared to death. I guess that’s the price we pay for living in a world where all the price tags end in 99 cents and they sell mortuary plots on billboards next to the freeway. What you do is to keep laughing. They’re going to kiss your hand, honey, because you’re a countess. Stop worrying about it. Just keep laughing.”

“Is that what you do?” the Countess replies.

“You bet.”

I sometimes think that scene is a little overwritten, and that there’s something incongruous about telling someone who’s husband is dying to “keep laughing”, but it also seems like sound advice. Rockford knows, from experience, that everyone, in every situation, sometimes has to be a phony. The only way to manage that without going crazy is to keep laughing. On a few occasions, in future seasons, Rockford has an opportunity to express this same sentiment. I think he does it better then, but scene still functions here, tying up a very satisfying episode.

Next Week: “Exit Prentiss Carr”