Sometimes you see small things that don’t seem to register with you as a child. They are cool, but you really don’t see the significance, until you look back from an adult perspective…
Jon Erik Hexum was born in 1957 to a Norwegian father and a mother of Norwegian descent from Minnesota. He lived in a broken home, divorce rearing its ugly head when he was four, mom having to work two jobs to support a single parent family. Theatre, band, sports…these were the things that kept Jon Erik on track and level. His mom always seemed to find the money for dance lessons, theatre tickets…a piano. The Arts were important in her household, Jon and his brother never wanting in that department. Finishing out his senior year as Class President, he was also active in his school’s theatre productions, and to add a quirky facet to his repertoire, Jon was the first male cheerleader at Tenafly High. To top it all off, he performed with his school’s marching band in the 1973 Tournament of Roses Parade in beautiful Pasadena, California…his first, but not last time, in the Golden State.
Jon Erik went to college, obtained his Bachelor’s of Arts, and headed to New York, with the dreams of every young actor…stardom. It came, by chance, doing what every starving actor does, service industry work. While cleaning apartments, he met Bob LeMond. Jon Erik cleaned the right apartment, on the right day. LeMond saw “it” in Jon Erik and persuaded him to move to Los Angeles and pursue “that” career in the entertainment industry. It was 1981, and Hexum was a natural. He didn’t get a part or two, but then, very quickly, he did. 1982 saw him score the lead role in a television series called Voyagers!…and that is where my path crossed with Hexum’s. No…I didn’t know him or meet him, and I had no connection with the television series…but I did see him…
It was the Summer of 1982, I was 12, and my Aunt Debbie took me to Universal Studios in Hollywood. It was a fun diversion in the ‘80s, centering around movie and TV stuff. I was fascinated with a pond that had a miniature destroyer chasing a miniature surfaced submarine…complete with tiny bow wakes making it seem the vessels were moving…the destroyer having little cannons that fired off occasionally. I don’t know if those diminutive warships still prowl the pond, but I certainly remember it clutching my attention. The main attraction at Universal is the tram ride. You get into an open air tram car for the grand tour…everything from the latest movie sets to old favorites like the house from Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. Sometimes you can actually see real productions being filmed from the tram. It was that summer day, in the 1980s, when I saw Benjamin Franklin flying his kite by the studio lake. It was the filming of episode three of the series Voyagers!..Jon Erik starring. I saw Jon, I saw Meeno Peluce, his younger co-star…and I saw Benjamin Franklin, played by Fredd Wayne…who played Franklin many a time as a character actor, both visually and in audio recordings.
The series Voyagers! was cancelled after one season. It was too bad…I remember watching and liking it a lot, along with Tales of the Golden Monkey (but that’s a “tale” for another day). Jon Erik Hexum went on to a minor film role and a pretty spectacular primetime television gig, Cover Up. In between shooting scenes on that show, he decided to mess around with the gun he was issued on set…a real gun, with blanks. It was part of his costume, part of the role, and it would be the part that ended his life.
I remember when it happened. I was 14 years old, going on 15, in October of 1984. Between the long shooting breaks Jon probably got bored and started clowning around with the gun. He was showing off, doing mock Russian roulette by putting in one blank round, then spinning the revolver’s cylinder and putting the gun to his temple, pulling the trigger…they're only blanks, right?…not real bullets…
On October 12, 1984 he caught the wrong end of the pistol, deliberately firing a blank into his temple. There was enough force to blow a piece of his skull into the brain, enough to cause a massive brain hemorrhage…and Jon Erik Hexum passed away, comatose, 6 days later.
Jon Erik Hexum very well would have been destined as a 1980s sex symbol, along the lines of Tom Selleck and Patrick Swayze. It was destined not to be. He, like Franklin, belonged to the ages. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I put it together and realized that I had seen him as a teenager from a distance. I got a glimpse into his life…and, on top of that, I saw B. Franklin in the 1980’s…sort of.
