Spot’s Co-Star

If Cal Worthington’s dog Spot ever writes a tell-all biography about his famous master, here are some tidbits he might include:

* During the 1970s energy crunch, Cal sold motorized pogo sticks.

* His children range in age from 18 months to 55 years. And Cal, 81, is hoping to have another with wife No. 3.

* When one of Worthington’s trademark cowboy hats is auctioned for charity, the bids are higher if people think Spot relieved himself on it.

* Cal dislikes the car business, which is why he also operates 10 ranches, including a 1.2-million-acre spread in Nevada.

* If Cal’s wife offers to saute some mushrooms for you, be very afraid.

*

On a rain-drenched Monday, Calvin Coolidge Worthington is wheeling and dealing from a ramshackle old bunkhouse in the middle of an almond farm. “Here’s a dandy Toyota Tercel for $7,950,” he chirps, reading from cue cards. “And, boy, here’s a beautiful Nissan Sentra for $6,950.”

In the old days, Worthington would pilot his Learjet to the various cities in his empire--Houston, Phoenix, Seattle--and tape TV ads on location. Now, he stands in front of a green wall at his Northern California ranch and lets a computer superimpose his 6-foot-4 image into an Alaska snowstorm for his Anchorage dealership or a sunset for his Long Beach or Carlsbad lots. Spot, who was officially retired in the late 1980s, is seen only in vintage clips that are spliced between shots of gleaming Dodges and Fords.

Worthington started scaling back a few years ago, selling off dealerships and taping ads from home. But he hasn’t exactly slowed down.

His 42-year-old wife, Bonnie, insists she can hardly keep up with him. “You have to ride motorcycles, play tennis, travel at the drop of a hat. At the PX Ranch in Nevada [which was once owned by Bing Crosby], Cal still rides with the ranchers all day in blistering heat . . . and when they’re branding cattle, he’s right out there, dragging calves to the fire.”

More recently, Worthington made his first foray into politics as a spokesman against California Assembly Bill 1058, which seeks to curb global warming by limiting carbon-dioxide emissions from cars. Noting that carbon dioxide is the same gas that humans expel while breathing, he jokes that bureaucrats might try to outlaw exhaling next. His appearance in a blitz of ads sponsored by the California Motor Car Dealers Assn. has helped to derail the bill.

Worthington’s previous environmental record consists of selling motorized pogo sticks and pedal-powered cars that “get 10 miles to the hamburger” during the energy crisis. He also offered kits to convert gasoline engines to propane.

Such gimmicks have helped make him a Southern California icon--or nuisance, depending on your tolerance for his 26-stanza “Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal” jingle, which he penned and sang in the early 1970s and still uses.

Other stunts include hanging upside down from an airplane wing (“I will stand upon my head to beat all deals”), riding a hippo through Watts and promising to eat a bug if customers found cheaper prices.

Of course, his signature gimmick is the “dog Spot” ad, which featured practically every varmint except a dog. The original commercial, in 1971, was a spoof of two competitors, Ralph Williams and Fletcher Jones. Williams had taken to the airwaves with a German shepherd named Storm, and Jones appeared on TV cuddling puppies from the pound.

“I decided I’d mimic them,” Worthington recalls. So he borrowed a gorilla, chained it to a car bumper and let the cameras roll. With the ape snarling in the background, Worthington began his folksy spiel: “Howdy, I’m Cal Worthington and this is my dog Spot. I found this little fella down at the pound and he’s so full of love.” Then, in a jab at Williams, he added, “I can outsell that dealer in the Valley. And, what’s more, my dog can whip his dog.”

The commercial was a hit. Worthington followed it with a menagerie of other Spots, including a tiger, camel, elephant, alligator, frog, penguin, anteater, porcupine, bear, lizard (blown up so it appeared to be the size of a dinosaur) and Shamu the killer whale, which Cal rode bareback at Sea World.

“Those animals really made me famous,” he says. Dolly Madison enlisted Worthington to do a TV commercial for its doughnuts. And Johnny Carson had Cal and a goose on “The Tonight Show.” When the bird soiled Worthington’s white Western suit, Carson quipped, “Be glad it wasn’t that elephant sitting on your lap.”

Worthington put car-dealership advertising on the map, says Gary Belis, spokesman for the Television Bureau of Advertising, which tracks spending on TV commercials. “He is probably the best-known car dealer pitchman in television history.”

But he learned by watching the masters. Earl “Madman” Muntz dressed up in a Napoleon hat and red long johns while telling L.A. viewers, “I wanna give ‘em away, but my wife won’t let me. She’s crazy.” And Tony Holzer, a used car dealer who went by the moniker Honest John, wore a white robe and halo in his ads.

When Cal is asked why those names are largely forgotten and he has achieved cult status, he replies, “I guess it’s persistence. I don’t do anything very well. I just stick at it.”

Surprisingly, he doesn’t even like selling cars.

“When I started in 1946, I thought if I could just make $25,000, I could buy a ranch,” he says. “But then you get hooked.”

Today, his six dealerships, three shopping centers and one office tower gross more than $600 million a year, according to his daughter, Courtney, who runs the company’s Folsom car center. Cal also owns 10 ranches in California, Oregon and Nevada on which he raises cattle, potatoes, nuts, alfalfa--and a little boy named Cole.

“Meet Cal’s latest vice president,” says Worthington’s wife, hoisting the 18-month-old boy as she greets a reporter and photographer at the family’s Big W almond ranch, near Chico. “This is Coldren Wilshire Worthington.” (Coldren was the maiden name of Worthington’s mother.)

Later, as the boy stares and smiles at a female visitor, his mother explains that he’s “quite a flirt--it’s definitely something in the DNA.”

Apparently so. During a seven-year stretch in the 1970s, Cal alternately lived with his first wife, Barbara, and model Susan Henning, the original “Every body needs milk” girl, whom he married in 1979 after divorcing spouse No. 1. Seven years and two children later, in 1986, Henning sued for divorce and filed a palimony suit seeking half of everything Worthington earned during the time they lived together before marrying. Her attorney, Marvin Mitchelson, estimated Worthington’s riches at $50 million to $100 million, but Henning lost the case.

Worthington met his third wife, Bonnie Reese, while she was working at KZAP-FM in Sacramento and had recruited him to be a celebrity DJ (along with singer Huey Lewis and former “Leave It to Beaver” star Jerry Mathers). He later told his secretary to “find that Bonnie Reese” so he could ask her out. At the time, she was in her 20s and he was in his 60s.

“She is a little old,” Cal jokes.

In 1995, they married on a bluff top at the Big W ranch. And in 1998, she burned their house to the ground. “Yeah, it was my fault,” says Bonnie, a good-natured Long Beach native who wears a custom-made Big W pendant around her neck. While sauteing mushrooms, she left the kitchen to read something to Cal and a fire started. Unfortunately, the kitchen’s extinguishers hadn’t been juiced up in 15 years and by the time firefighters arrived, everything was lost, including three pets. The family has been living in an old ranch house ever since, but the new home is almost ready. “We used the same foundation,” Worthington says. “We loved that house.”

But some flourishes have been added. The lights in the kitchen will shine through a stained-glass ceiling. The showers and bathtubs are lined with jasper stones collected on the ranch. The basement has a gym for Cal. And the black-walnut kitchen counters will be lacquered with the same coating used on cars.

Hardwood floors and a big stone fireplace give the house a mountain-lodge feel. “We weren’t looking for something flashy,” Cal explains. “We were looking for something comfortable. . . . I used to have a pretty nice house in Baldwin Hills, but I much prefer it here.”

Out back, there’s a two-story treehouse, a tennis court, an airstrip for his planes and a “swimming hole” built with the same jasper stones that fill the bathrooms. “I didn’t want a plastic pool,” Cal drawls. “I wanted something rustic.”

Although Worthington hasn’t worked with Spot since the late 1980s, he still surrounds himself with animals, including three dogs, several chickens and a pair of rickety old horses. Driving his red Chevy Suburban along a narrow, tree-lined lane on the ranch (“Isn’t this a beautiful lane?” he says, “A painter couldn’t do a better lane”), he parks beside a pasture and walks toward a blind horse named Cochise.

About 30 years ago, Cochise arrived at Worthington’s South Gate dealership to play the role of Spot. “He was wearing a derby hat and son of a gun if I didn’t want to buy him for my daughter, Courtney, who was 6 at the time. She rode that horse all over as a girl.”

Cal’s other love is flying. During World War II, he led bombing raids over Berlin and later aspired to be an airline pilot. But “the airlines wouldn’t even talk to me because I didn’t have a college education” (Oklahoma-born Worthington dropped out of school at age 13). So he bought a gas station in Corpus Christi, Texas, and soon discovered a knack for selling cars. He rented a dusty lot for $25, recruited his dad to help him paint signs and paid the phone company to run a line to a locked steel box on the side of a nearby garage. “I had a brass key to the phone,” he recalls. “Every time you answered it, you got an electric shock.”

After selling his first three cars and making $500, “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” he says. “Then I had to hitchhike home because I’d sold my car too.”

By 1950, he had moved to Los Angeles and acquired a Hudson dealership on Slauson Avenue. As his business expanded, he began sponsoring country music shows. “I’d be on the lot till midnight doing live ads because there was no videotape until 1956 or ‘57,” he says.

Later, he moonlighted as a radio traffic reporter, circling the city in one of his planes every morning and afternoon in exchange for advertising time on three local stations. But the long hours at work took a toll on his family, he concedes.

There were some business setbacks too. In 1969, an accountant embezzled $350,000 and nearly broke him. In 1978, the state attorney general charged him with deceptive advertising (Worthington eventually paid $50,000 to settle the case but admitted no wrongdoing). And in 1995, when he briefly owned the struggling Claremont Auto Center, General Motors dealerships, saying he had weak customer-service ratings at other GM lots.

No matter the rough spots, Cal always seems to bounce back. Blessed with buckets of down-home charm and determination, he is as durable as the Energizer Bunny. Alas, so is his jingle, which still tortures insomniacs on 22 stations in Los Angeles and San Diego. “If I had a dollar for every ad I’ve run, I could quit the car business,” he says.

Actually, he could quit anyway. With billions of dollars in car sales under his custom-designed Big W belt, he doesn’t need to work. But he isn’t quite ready to ride off into the sunset astride Spot. “I’ve done everything,” he says. “Traveled the world, eaten at fine restaurants, sipped champagne at the great watering holes of the world. The only thing left is to raise another child.”

And sell a few more cars, of course. “If I retired,” Cal says, “I bet you I wouldn’t live a month.”