I was 13 when this Glass Menagerie was first shown on TV, and it seemed like it was the most real thing I had ever seen on TV or in a movie. I remember Hal Holbrook's soliloquies, and I remember thinking Pat Hingle's Gentleman Caller was the nicest man in the world. All the Gentleman Callers that I have seen since were trying to be nice, but Hingle seemed to be absolutely genuine and completely effortless. (I learned that he had gone to UT-Austin, about 30 miles from where I was growing up.)
I noticed Hingle after that--saw him on stage in New York a few years later, with Fritz Weaver and Ken Howard (who had just left 1776) in Child's Play (no relation to Chucky!); and then many years later as Benjamin Franklin in the Bway revival of 1776--he was the best thing in the show--I didn't once wish he was Howard Da Silva.
