A Hollywood dream that ended in darkness

It was January 1968.

A screen test. A handsome, fair-skinned boy with freckles and reddish-blond hair. Small and slight. Youthful, expressive, innocent. He is energetic, pitch-perfect and physically effortless in the dance routine. There is a naivety about him, and a wide-eyed charm.

Gene Kelly, the director, is taken with the boy and casts him as seventeen-year-old Barnaby Tucker in the movie version of Hello, Dolly!

The actor is twenty-four-year-old Danny Lockin, who looks much younger than his age.

That was almost sixty years ago, and Lockin could never have known that he was destined to become the eternal Barnaby Tucker.

Nine years later, in August 1977, Lockin was found dead in a California apartment, stabbed and slashed nearly a hundred times, his body mutilated.

We will never know what went wrong with Danny Lockin. Nor will we ever know exactly what happened on the night he was murdered.

It is a classic Hollywood tale.

Lockin was born in Hawaii in 1943 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After leaving Benson High School and the dance team, the Checkers, he completed his schooling in Anaheim, California. He studied at Eugene Loring’s American School of Dance and later appeared in Carey Leverette’s Dance Arts Studio Festival.

There, he was spotted by Marc Platt, Radio City Music Hall’s choreographer, who recommended him for a San Francisco musical revue. Under Leverette’s management, Lockin studied acting and was cast in the film version of Gypsy in 1962. He had a small part in The Stripper the following year and appeared on television in Father of the Bride, several episodes of Dr Kildare, The Lieutenant and Mr Novak.

Lockin plunged into stage work, appearing in an Off-Broadway production of Morning Sun and, in 1964, a Broadway revival of West Side Story. The following year he auditioned for the role of Rolf in the film version of The Sound of Music.

But it was the role of the energetic store clerk Barnaby Tucker in Hello, Dolly! that made his name.

On either side of the film, Lockin played Barnaby on Broadway and in touring productions, appearing with ten Dollys: Betty Grable, Ginger Rogers, Ethel Merman, Phyllis Diller, Eve Arden, Dorothy Lamour, Annie Russell, Carol Channing and, of course, Barbra Streisand.

That was five years of Hello, Dolly!

Then the show abruptly closed on Broadway, and Lockin’s star faded almost as quickly as it had risen. He disappeared from public view. Drinking problems and possible substance abuse prevented him from working. There was a short run with Tom Sawyer in Kansas City, but at twenty-eight he returned to his mother’s house in Orange County and began teaching dance.

After his murder, a family friend said:

“He looked so young that it was difficult for him to find an adult role. He was frustrated that he couldn’t open new doors for himself. He was up against people who had the power and he told too many people off in the business. He began drinking because of his frustration and became more unruly and opinionated. He didn’t make many friends as a result.”

His temper. His demand for perfection. Perhaps they did him in.

His marriage to Kathryn Haas, a dancer in a stage production of Hello, Dolly!, in 1967 lasted only two years and ended following the birth of their son, Jeremy. Afterwards, Lockin became disillusioned with women and told friends that there had been a change in his sex life.

The engaging jack-in-the-box was bisexual.

In 1977, he appeared on The Gong Show at Burbank, hoping perhaps to be noticed again. Chuck Barris confusingly announced Lockin and his dance partner, Billy Jo Conway, as “Billy Jo and the Danny Trio.” They stormed it with a song-and-dance routine that earned them joint first place.

For a moment, it seemed as though something had returned.

On a high, his mother, Jean Lockin, took him for a meal before dropping him off at the Mug Bar in Garden Grove, where he intended to play pinball.

“He had the old light back in his eyes,” she said.

That was the last time she ever saw him.

On the night of August 21, 1977, Lockin’s killer, thirty-four-year-old Charles Leslie Hopkins, called the police and said that a man had entered his apartment and tried to rob him. When officers arrived at the Kona Palms apartment, they found Danny Lockin’s body.

Lockin had been wearing skin-tight dancing trousers without pockets for identification, and the body was so badly mutilated that the police were initially unable to identify him. Photographs of the lifeless face were circulated around the city, but his identity was eventually established when his fingerprints were matched with those taken following his previous arrests for drunken driving.

Hopkins, a known homosexual, was arrested after it was discovered that he had left the Mug Bar with Lockin and travelled with him to the apartment. Further investigation revealed that Hopkins had moved the body from room to room and attempted to clean up the blood before calling the police.

At his trial, Hopkins was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison.

Four years.

An inexplicable miscarriage of justice.

The irony is that shortly before his death, Lockin had recorded a song in a small studio he had rented.

“Today is grey, and I’m just waiting for some sunshine. But, gee, I wish tomorrow would appear.”

“He was no saint,” his mother reflected.

And now Danny Lockin is almost forgotten.

Except for Barnaby Tucker.

Except for those immortal lines from a song.

“Out there. Full of sunshine and full of sparkle. Close your eyes and see it glisten, Barnaby. Listen, Barnaby.”