In 1966, with The Munsters canceled after two seasons and Munster, Go Home! already in theaters, Herman and Grandpa talked to a New York newspaper about what came next. By then, Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis had already spent years working side by side, and the story of how they got there starts in a squad car in the Bronx, a long way from 1313 Mockingbird Lane.
What they told that reporter, which MeTV recently dug back up, says a lot about the friendship. So does what happened to each of them over the next 40 years.
Where Did Muldoon And Schnauser First Cross Paths?
Before there was a Herman or a Grandpa, there was Officer Francis Muldoon, the gentle 6’5″ patrolman Gwynne played on Nat Hiken’s Car 54, Where Are You? on NBC from 1961 to 1963. Lewis joined partway through the first season as Officer Leo Schnauser, the blustery cop down the hall at the fictional 53rd Precinct, and he always thought it was the better of their two shows. Speaking to the Archive of American Television in 2002, as Remind Magazine later reported, he said Car 54 was “better written than The Munsters, much better.”
When Universal began casting its monster family in 1964, Gwynne may have done his old partner a favor. Pop culture historian Geoffrey Mark told Woman’s World in 2024 that “it was Fred Gwynne who suggested that Al Lewis test for Grandpa.” Lewis got the part, and the old partners from the precinct were about to spend a lot of hours together in the makeup chair.
What Was It Really Like Inside Herman And Grandpa’s Makeup?
The Munsters premiered on CBS in September 1964 and ran for 70 episodes. Gwynne’s Herman came with heavy padding, giant boots and a flat-topped head under hot studio lights, and Lewis spent his own share of time hanging upside down whenever Grandpa decided he was a bat. Gwynne found that oddly comforting. “Al has to play some scenes upside down,” he told the Dayton Daily News in October 1964, “and he’s not happy hanging by his heels, but he makes me feel much better.”
Lewis, meanwhile, had his own complaint about the special effects. “Why, the other day, I had six lines in the lab and it took seven hours to shoot,” he told the same paper. Decades later he called Gwynne a close friend and remembered the show as the place they finally shared most of their scenes. “In The Munsters, I did a great deal of work with Fred Gwynne,” he said in 2002.
That partnership got one last big-screen outing in Munster, Go Home!, released in the summer of 1966 and shot in Technicolor after two seasons of black and white. Grandpa spends much of the film as a wolf being smuggled through British customs. The movie was not a hit, and with the show already gone, the two friends were about to head in very different directions.
How Did Fred Gwynne And Al Lewis Spend The Years Apart?
For Gwynne, Herman was hard to shake. He found himself typecast and went more than two years without new film roles, and as late as 1984 he walked away from a Punky Brewster audition when a director identified him as Herman Munster instead of by his own name. He found his way back through the stage, winning an Obie Award in 1979, and then through character parts a new audience still quotes: Jud Crandall in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary in 1989 and Judge Chamberlain Haller in My Cousin Vinny in 1992, his final film. He also wrote and illustrated children’s books, a second career that surprised a lot of people.
Lewis went the other way and leaned into Grandpa. In 1987 he opened Grampa’s Bella Gente, an Italian restaurant on Bleecker Street. Mark said Lewis himself was the main attraction there, “competing for the ambiance and his being there.” He hosted a weekly political program on New York’s WBAI radio, and in 1998 he ran for governor of New York on the Green Party line. He went to court to be listed as “Grandpa,” and when a judge refused, CBS News reported, Lewis called him a “fool.” He still drew 52,533 votes, enough to win the Greens a permanent spot on the state ballot. Even his age became part of the act. He often claimed he was born in 1910, though his Social Security and draft records say April 30, 1923. Long before any of that, though, Gwynne had told a reporter exactly what he wanted for the two of them.
Did Fred Gwynne And Al Lewis Ever Get Their Wish?
Back in 1966, talking to The Reporter Dispatch, Gwynne had joked that they considered themselves “mentally retired.” He said the series had made them good friends off the set. “Even our wives get along,” he said. “For my wife, that’s a miracle.” Then he admitted what he really hoped for. “In a way I’d love to do another series with Al,” he said, though he wondered whether it would be “the answer to my million-dollar ambition or just another step away from being an actor and toward becoming a performer.” Lewis, for his part, said he wanted to try working “on the other side of the camera.”
The series never came, but the reunion did. On February 27, 1981, NBC aired the TV movie The Munsters’ Revenge, with Gwynne, Lewis and Yvonne De Carlo back as Herman, Grandpa and Lily (here is where the rest of the original cast stands today). It was the last time the two friends played those roles together, and whatever he had felt in the lean years, Gwynne made his peace with the big guy. “I love old Herman Munster,” he once said, as The New York Times recalled. “Much as I try not to, I can’t stop liking that fellow.”
Fred Gwynne died of pancreatic cancer on July 2, 1993, at his home in Taneytown, Maryland. He was 66. Lewis would outlive him by more than 12 years, dying in New York on February 3, 2006, at 82 by his family’s count.
In between came one more small reunion that nobody planned. On January 28, 1994, less than seven months after Gwynne’s death, a Car 54, Where Are You? movie finally reached theaters after years on the shelf. New actors played Muldoon and Toody, and Lewis was one of only two original cast members to return. In the film, Officer Leo Schnauser spends his free time watching reruns of The Munsters, so his old partner was right there with him, still up on the screen.
