Above: photo by Beth Perkins

“There’s an artistic spark in everybody,” says Ted Hartley (MMP 4, 1956). “If you can get rid of that left-brain inner critic, you can explore what will open up in the right-brain side in all of us.” Hartley came to painting a little over a decade ago, when he brought an instructor to his home for a Sunday-morning art class. He had organized the gathering to engage his wife, the actress Dina Merrill, as she began showing signs of dementia: “I was afraid of losing contact with her, that I would miss the fading signals. It feels as though you’re walking on the edge of a cliff. I asked myself, What can I do to keep my wife interested and alive? With that objective in mind, I started the watercolor class and invited eight of her friends to join.”

When Merrill died in 2017, Hartley struggled to find a new focus. The couple had been together for nearly 30 years. “After the mourning and confusion, you need to reinvent yourself, find out how you think and who you’re going to be, alone.” He continued the classes, bringing in a new instructor and rebuilding his own interest in painting with watercolor and acrylics. He walled in a breezeway in his home to create a studio with skylights. “I continued to draw and paint but now I had a place to do it—and that changed everything,” Hartley recalls. An art gallery in Sag Harbor, New York, held a one-man show of Hartley’s work in 2019 and 2021, followed by another in November 2022 that included three paintings inspired by the war in Ukraine. Proceeds from the sale of those works totaled just under $150,000 and benefited Ukrainian aid organizations.

A similar sense of kismet runs through the other branches of Hartley’s remarkable career: US Navy carrier fighter pilot, investment banker, actor, and film producer. His acting career began with the role of Reverend Jerry Bedford in the 1960s television series Peyton Place. He says playing a sniveling coward opposite Clint Eastwood in 1973’s High Plains Drifter was a career opener. Many other roles followed, as did his work as a film producer, director, and CEO of the revived RKO Pictures. In that sense, Hartley already had extensive experience with creative expression when he came to his next career move.

Of his painting process, Hartley says, “I start with the colors, which leads to a more powerful, intuitive paint-on-canvas movement. If I use my analytical brain to figure out how something should go, it’s usually wrong.” That effortless, spontaneous, go-with-the-flow approach has taken Hartley in some completely new directions over the decades: “However you start is not how you’re going to end up,” he explains. “If I consider how I began painting and where I am now, I realize I have not figured it out in advance. One way I think about it is that I’m on an unmarked trail—and there will surely be some deluges of rain and other catastrophes—but the trail goes on, and if I follow it, so do I.”

How to: Go in a Completely New Direction

Find your river, flow, and jump in.
“Look for a strong interest that fits who you are, that you can be good at, so you can come out into a more wide-open area to play in your imagination. Then, go for it.”

Remember there’s room at the top in anything you do.
“Whatever your thing is, notice who else is trying to do it and their approach. Try that and do it a bit better. Trust your instinct to beat back doubts and discouragement and get on the path again.”

Stay focused.
“There’ll be times when you lose the way, but don’t let that distract you. Just stay open and move ahead—and when you do find the trail again, relax. Follow it trustingly with the right side of your brain, not the smart side.”

A Man of the Cloth

It was 1965 and Ted Hartley had just been fired from his job as EVP at First Western Financial when he bumped into the actor Rip Torn in front of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. When Hartley said he might want to try acting, Torn told him to buy a Mercedes convertible, drive it around town with the top down, and go to as many parties as possible. Oh, and take some acting classes.

Hartley cleared the room at his first audition. (“Doing Laurence Olivier for a fairly small part was more than the casting director wanted.”) But he was cast in his second outing to play Reverend Jerry Bedford on the popular television soap opera Peyton Place. Hartley (shown here in 1965 opposite actress Kasey Rogers) went on to other roles and other careers, most recently as a successful painter: “There’s an artistic spark in everybody,” he says.

+ONLINE:

• Rip Torn’s Three Steps to Becoming an Actor: Things were a little different in 1965, when Ted Hartley bumped into actor Rip Torn on Hollywood Boulevard. Hartley was freshly fired from a job in finance, liked Torn’s “casual, blue-jean air,” and told Torn he might want to try acting as well. Torn tried to dissuade him—Hartley was an engineer, he’d gone to business school, acting wasn’t for him. Okay, Hartley said. But what if I decide to try anyway? What would you tell me? Torn, who went on to win Obies for directing and acting and an Emmy for The Larry Sanders Show, had this to say.
• Hear Hartley's talk on the Moth Radio Hour about overcoming fear as a fighter pilot.

Photo by Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

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