LOS ANGELES

THE DEMISE OF one-time superstar Lab Teak is being held out as a cautionary tale of Hollywood in decline, according to commentators.

Teak, whose own disintegration began the same day he became an overnight success playing a defrocked Pope turned private detective in the seminal American TV series, Dick Holiness, is reported to have passed away after a short fall from a dangerous height.

“In his day, Lab Teak got more fan mail than Elvis, earned more money than Steve McQueen, and had an audience of billions for the final episode of Dick Holiness,” says Emmett Hoopla, a Hollywood gossip writer, whose biography of Lab Teak is published next month. “His series was the first show to feature a man and an animal having sex and the first to go a whole episode with just a blank screen. The effect on sixties culture was explosive.

“There are five confirmed cases of people who shook his hand in those crazy years, amputating the hands and selling them at auction. One of the hands fetched a million dollars, no mean sum in those days. At his peak, Lab was said to make women pregnant simply by smiling at them. He seemed to have everything. And then it all fell apart.”

Fifteen marriages during the seven years of his hit television show drained him of just about all his earnings.

“Yeah, the marriages were just part of the catastrophe he became. Two of them only lasted hours, one five minutes. Then there was the substance abuse, the quack medicines and the loony religions. The more popular he became the more unstable his mind became. Crooked agents and managers took what his wives left behind and alcohol led to bad career decisions.”

Teak’s journey to Vietnam in 1971 as an anti-war protester, led to one of the most bizarre moments in his career. He fought with the Viet Cong for four months, ambushing American patrols and lobbing grenades at the embassy in Saigon.

“That made him difficult to employ back in Los Angeles,” insists Hoopla. “A lot of people wanted him hanged for treason. Only Watergate saved him from complete career oblivion. But is star was waning. Some things you cannot survive.”

Failed movie projects and daytime soap opera jobs led to merciless plastic surgery, and even more financial problems.

“With each gap in employment, he kept resurrecting Dick Holiness but each time he did, the audience was smaller and smaller,” says Hoopla. “He spent the eighties playing third-string villains in action hero movies. Then he dove headfirst into low-budget franchises which led him to becoming a body double in early internet porn films . The spiral continued. In the end he actually became a private detective and spent his final years keeping up and coming stars out of trouble by selling alternative gossip to the press. He was last seen living in a trailer on the side of the road in Pacific Palisades. Then the fires came.”

When Lab Teak lost his trailer, he could no longer live in Los Angeles.

“Yeah, he climbed to the top of a billboard that had once advertised Dick Holiness,” Hoopla says, “and threw himself off. The fall didn’t actually kill him. It was the hospital bills. His heart just stopped when he found out how much he owed.”