Read On: Recalling experiences with late actor Marty Ingels

You may have heard that a dude named Marty Ingels died this past Wednesday at age 79 from a massive stroke. I heard it, too. But I still don’t quite believe it.

See, I knew Marty — possibly a little too well. And this whole death thing is just the kind of stunt he might pull to draw our attention. Any minute, I’m expecting the phone to ring and have it be Ingels intoning in his raspy voice, “Pretty good ruse, huh?”

While I’m assuming he’s really gone, I’m leaving open the possibility that Marty just might be punking us. And it wouldn’t even be his greatest fake-out, as his entire life seemed to be a kind of ploy.

But let’s back up. Ingels had a showbiz career of sorts. He starred way back in 1962-63 in the short-lived network sitcom “I’m Dickens — He’s Fenster.” Did a lot of voice-over work after that, primarily for animation. His greatest claim to fame, however, was in being the exasperating husband of the Oscar-winning singer and actress Shirley Jones since 1977.

This is not what Marty was known for to any journalist who crossed his flamboyant orbit, however. He was instead an old-school showman, unapologetic and outrageous, for whom the end justified any means necessary.

A bastion of bluster, Ingels was a human exclamation point, a screeching smoke alarm in loafers, a suffocating tsunami in a tie. This made the man at once colorful, memorable and often incorrigible. He believed in the axiom that all attention was good and it didn’t matter how you got it, whether by emailing, badgering, begging, bribing, bullying or cajoling.

My first time being “Ingles-ed” came in 2006, when he decided his wife should win an Emmy Award for her supporting role in an ABC miniseries called “Hidden Places.” After she was indeed nominated, Marty spent $150,000 taking out trade ads, sending flowers and gifts to influential scribes, and essentially launching a one-man, scorched-earth crusade on behalf of his spouse that embarrassed her no end.

As part of that, I received a phone call from Marty one day, as I was covering the Emmys at the time for the Hollywood Reporter. What I didn’t know was that the call was coming from the security phone at my building’s front door, and Ingels insisted on seeing me that instant.

“Open up!” he demanded.

Against my better judgment, I did. There came a knock on my door. I opened it to find Marty standing there in a tuxedo and a devil-horn cap, holding a 4-foot-long Hershey bar, a long-stem red rose and a card that read, “VOTE FOR SHIRLEY!” in cut-and-pasted lettering that resembled what you’d find on a kidnapping ransom note.

At that year’s Emmy ceremony, with Jones out of town, Marty showed up on the red carpet with a life-size cardboard cutout of his wife that he was forced to abandon before entering — to his great chagrin. (Note: It all went for naught. She lost.)

But this was nothing compared to what came the following year, when the irrepressible Marty decided that what the world needed more than anything was a feature film about Haym Salomon — a prime financier of the American side during the Revolutionary War who died in 1785 and whom history had virtually ignored.

The quest to get Salomon recognition quickly grew for Ingels into an obsession. “This is a man whose gargantuan contribution to humanity has gone unremembered and unheralded, which is a crime,” he declared.

Marty bent my ear enough about Haym Salomon that he convinced me to write a column in the Reporter about his quest to gain the guy some recognition — and, oh yeah, he hoped to raise $80 million to make and produce this movie and was, at the time, approximately $80 million short of his goal.

So, we arranged to meet and discuss this would-be project at Art’s Deli in Studio City. At the appointed time, Ingels breezed in, followed a couple of minutes later by an irate woman from whom he had apparently just stolen a parking space. She screamed all sorts of unprintable words at Marty. He ignored her, as if she literally didn’t exist. He, in fact, did not so much as acknowledge her.

I wrote the column. Marty was pleased with it — so pleased, in fact, that he showed up at my front door that day in a Haym Salomon T-shirt while thrusting 10 $100 bills into my hand.

“This is both a ‘thank you’ and a hope that you’ll write a second column,” he said.

When I assured Marty that I couldn’t accept his money, he said, “No one has to know.”

“Actually, I would,” I replied. “And besides, that’s all the column space I can give you.”

A frown crossed Ingels’ face and he left without another word. He never did get that Haym Salomon project off the ground. But I’ll bet you I could raise $80 million to make “The Marty Ingels Story.”

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