Michael Cole, who portrayed Pete Cochran, one of the three young undercover cops that made up The Mod Squad on the 1968-73 ABC series, died Tuesday. He was 84.
Cole died at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center, publicist Rachel Harris announced. No cause of death was revealed.
Produced by Aaron Spelling and Danny Thomas, The Mod Squad also starred Peggy Lipton as flower girl Julie Barnes (a vagrant who had fled her prostitute mother) and Clarence Williams III as Lincoln Hayes (arrested during the Watts riots). Pete, meanwhile, was a rich kid who had been booted from his parents’ home after being caught stealing and racing a car.
To avoid jail time, the three agreed to become cops under the guidance of Captain Adam Greer (Tige Andrews). The tagline for the hit series was “One white, one black, one blonde.” (Cole titled his 2018 memoir I Played the White Guy.)
The Mod Squad tapped into the ethos of the era, taking on issues like racism, drug addiction and anti-war activism as Linc, Julie and Pete infiltrated high schools, love-ins, acting classes, etc. — places where regular cops couldn’t go! — to nab the bad guys.
“Being true to the spirit of the counterculture generation, they did not use weapons in the course of their jobs,” Rebeka Knott wrote on the website Groovy History. “They were able to effectively bring criminals to justice with little or no violence. That is what the hippie culture was about … being peaceful.”
Cole was born on July 3, 1940, and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. He never knew his biological father, and he, his older brother, Ted, and his mother, Kathleen, lived in his grandmother’s house in his early years. He said he started drinking when he was about 12 and got into plenty of trouble.
He dropped out of high school and at 16 married his girlfriend, who was pregnant with their first child, Candi. They had a second child, Jeff, before getting divorced before Cole turned 20.
After leaving Wisconsin, he tended a bar in Las Vegas, where got some career advice from singer-actor Bobby Darin, and came to Los Angeles. He was broke and living under freeways when he met acclaimed acting coach Estelle Harman, who saw his potential — “she recognized what was in there before I did,” he said in 2018 — gave him free lessons and let him sleep on a bed on the stage of her workshop.
In 1966, Cole starred with Deborah Walley (Gidget Goes Hawaiian) in the 3D sci-fi film The Bubble and appeared on an episode of Gunsmoke in which his character pretended to be the son of a man killed by Matt Dillon (James Arness).
He caught the attention of a casting director when he read a scene from Picnic at Paramount with another Harman student he had accompanied to an audition, and that led Spelling to pursue him for the job on The Mod Squad.
“I resisted taking the part when Spelling offered it, telling him, ‘[The show] sounds stupid and I hope it never gets on the air,’” Cole wrote in his book. “I didn’t want to play some guy who ratted on some other troubled kids.”
Spelling loved that rebellious attitude, and Cole, of course, would come on board.
The series, created by Bud Ruskin, who had led an undercover narcotics unit for the LAPD, aired for five seasons and 123 episodes, and during its run, the actor survived a car accident that sent him through the windshield and required 130 stitches to repair his face.
Following The Mod Squad, Cole guest-starred on such series as Get Christie Love!, Police Story, Wonder Woman, Beyond Westworld, Fantasy Island, CHiPs, Murder, She Wrote and ER; appeared in the Kevin Costner film Mr. Brooks (2007); and worked in regional theater. He also joined the show’s other principals for a Mod Squad reunion telefilm in 1979.
In a 1999 MGM feature based on the series, Giovanni Ribisi played Pete opposite Omar Epps and Claire Danes.
Survivors include his third wife, Shelley Funes, a former ad-sales rep for Rolling Stone whom he married in 1996. A couple of years earlier, she had convinced him to enter rehab at the Betty Ford Center (Mickey Mantle was there at the time, too), and he lovingly credited her for his years of sobriety.
