CITAZIONE
Mark Harmon Dishes on NCIS, Football and Life as a Family Man
Mark Harmon has scored on the football field and in life, playing QB at UCLA, hanging out with Ozzie and Harriet, starring in a record 17 seasons of NCIS and raising a family in Hollywood.
Football was a star in Mark Harmon’s life from the very beginning. One of his earliest memories is watching a film highlight reel of his dad, Heisman-winner Tom Harmon, scoring 33 touchdowns playing college football for the University of Michigan. “I was literally, like, 8 before I realized my dad ever got tackled, because on the reel, he scores every time he gets the ball!” Harmon says with a laugh. And when his father became a football broadcaster, “to watch from the press box or wherever he was working, and look at that field, that had a certain magic,” says Harmon, 67. That magic carried Harmon himself onto the field years later when he played quarterback for the Bruins at UCLA, leading the team to a 17-5 record over two seasons from 1972 to 1973. “Coming out of that tunnel, being in that locker room, in many ways, it was a dream come true,” he says.
He later found his way onto another, even bigger field, and another dream, as his fans know. As an actor, his path eventually led him to his current longtime role as Leroy Jethro Gibbs on the wildly successful CBS show NCIS, now headed into its record 17th season, securing its status it as one of the longest-running scripted prime-time shows in television history.
Today Harmon lives near the show’s Los Angeles set in California’s Santa Monica Mountains with his wife of 32 years, actress Pam Dawber, 67 (Mork & Mindy and My Sister Sam), and near their two sons, Sean, 31, and Ty, 27. And even with his success as one of TV’s most successful and recognizable stars, he’s doing what he can to foster a family life like the one in which he grew up. He was raised in Burbank by his father, who was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954 when Harmon was 3; and his mother, Elyse, who’d been an actress and a model before retiring to stay home with Harmon and his two older sisters, Kristin and Kelly. As the baby of the family, Harmon says, “I think I was more shy; more quiet, maybe.” And while his sisters were into ballet and horses, Harmon was “outside, preferably with a ball. I was always looking for someone to throw with…anybody. Little bit like a golden retriever.”
He remembers weekends in the garage with his fix-it-guy father. “I usually handled the broom and the sweep-up, but I watched him, and then once in a while, I got to do something,” he says. And of course, he played baseball, football and rugby in high school. He excelled at football, and he was recruited out of junior college to play for the Bruins. While at UCLA, he studied communications and graduated cum laude, and he still keeps in touch with some of his former teammates, “mostly offensive lineman, the big bodies up front,” he says. But when he thinks back on those days on the field, he doesn’t dwell on the glory. “I probably remember more about the losses than the victories. I don’t play it back easy.”
How Ozzie and Harriet Changed His Life
Harmon’s football future was forever changed when his sister married the iconic pop star Ricky Nelson and he began hanging out with her in-laws, TV stars Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. Ricky Nelson, who acted with his parents on the 1950s and ’60s sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, died in a plane crash in 1985. Being an in-law, says Harmon, “gives me a really nice relationship with [Ricky and Kristin’s] kids, and that’s a gift. Ricky was a really good guy.”
While working as a lifeguard, Harmon remembers how, after a swim, Ozzie Nelson would join Harmon on the beach. “We’d sit underneath my tower and we’d talk about big band music, as Ozzie started as a big band leader and Harriet was a vocalist.” One day, while Nelson was filming his early-’70s show Ozzie’s Girls, the spinoff of Ozzie and Harriet, he asked Harmon to fill in for an actor who couldn’t be there. Harmon jumped at the chance, shadowing Nelson around the set and into the editing room. After that, he was hooked, Harmon says. “That changed my course.”
After college, Harmon chose not to pursue the rigors—and the odds—of playing pro ball. Although some guys on his team did go to the pros—“and they all made more money one year than I made in the next 15 combined!” he says with a laugh—Harmon instead took acting classes and began getting work on TV shows and in films, where he recalls intersecting with mentors like Jason Robards, Karl Malden, Michael Caine and José Ferrer. “They were all humble; they all gave me valuable time and camaraderie and advice,” he says. In 1983, he landed the TV role that blew open the doors for him, as a series regular on the hospital drama St. Elsewhere, and a few years later he married Dawber.
Hello, Leroy
For the next two decades, he appeared in films, including Stealing Home, Wyatt Earp, Summer School and Freaky Friday, and starred in other long-running television shows while also taking on producing and directing responsibilities—as well as parenting two boys. “I work hard. [But] it’s where I come from,” he explains, based on the ethic he learned from his father’s family, who toiled in Michigan steel mills. Eventually, he says, “I was directing a lot, I was doing a movie here or there and we had this young family that was growing up, and I was missing a lot of [family time],” which “just was not OK.”
So he scaled back. “And then I read this script called NCIS.” The now-hit show about the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a procedural spinoff of JAG, surprised him with its humor, and he loved the character—and name—of Leroy Jethro Gibbs, a former U.S. Marine sniper turned special agent who commands a special team for NCIS. “For a moment, when I started getting interested in doing it, the name changed to Bob Nelson or something, and I just said, ‘Eh…please, can you put the name back?’”
In addition to starring in the show, Harmon expanded his role to become an executive producer, while also co-developing the show’s spinoff NCIS: New Orleans, which debuted in 2014—all of which still surprises him, considering NCIS was slow to find its groove, he says. “We didn’t find it until year seven or six. And we’ve been there ever since. That’s because of the fans.” And for that, he offers “a big thank-you. I don’t ever take it for granted.”
He feels the same way about his marriage to Dawber, whom he met through a mutual friend and married in 1987. They clicked over their sense of humor, though really, “there’s no quick answer, no key. I just feel fortunate,” he says. “She’s a neat lady.” He laughs remembering the thrilling day he thought he’d found a fellow football fan in Michigan-born Dawber. “Early on when Pam and I were dating, it was Thanksgiving, and I turned on the TV early in the morning,” he says. She asked who was playing. When he said it was Ohio State vs. Michigan, she responded with glee as she sat next to him to watch. “She was probably there for 10 minutes,” says Harmon, before Dawber finally asked, “‘Which one’s Michigan?’” She now knows who Michigan is, he says, laughing, and their favorite thing to do is “just be with each other and…that’s it.”
Most of all, they get together with their sons and their sons’ girlfriends over family dinners. And when Harmon’s not working, he turns to an old passion: his workshop. He just finished building a new shop table, and there typically are a few projects in the works. He’s so content there that while he and Dawber talk about getting a house outside of L.A. in some smaller town, “I think, in the end, I would probably do that better than she would, because she would need to go to the city to a play or to whatever,” he says, “where I could just get in the shop and be just fine. I can always find something to do.”
Harmon As Football Player 1972 to 1973-FTR
Mark Harmon at UCLA
On December 10, Harmon will be awarded the National Football Foundation (NFF) Gold Medal, which will bring his football career full circle. In 1973, he won an NFF award as a player at UCLA, the same night John Wayne received the Gold Medal. He’ll never forget that event, he says: Unaware he was required to dress in formal wear for the event, he rented a tuxedo last-minute out of the window from a shop across the street, which led to wearing a dark gray suit with a frilly shirt, “and John Wayne calling me ‘rebel’ all night.”
As the NCAA season breaks into full swing, Harmon will watch or listen to a Bruins game here and there. “I probably have a little bit better weekend when they do well,” he admits, though he hasn’t been to a game in years. And the truth is, having grown up watching games from the stands and the press box—or his QB position on the field—he gets frustrated watching football on TV, when someone else is determining what he gets to see. “Close-up camera, this point of view,” he says, shaking his head. “I like looking at the whole field.” That’s how he prefers to look at his life too. He recalls running a triple option at UCLA and how one of his position coaches would say, “‘Use all the grass.’ What he meant by that was, you push the ball towards the sideline. You make the defense commit before you do, which gives you yet another option,” says Harmon. “You try to never run out of field.”
He sees the parallels in his own life—wanting to pick up and run with the ball every chance he gets. “Sometimes it’s not a popular position—you know, leadership often isn’t,” he says. “But I don’t find failure in being wrong. I learn from being wrong. Even a backwards step can be a forward step, because that’s where you learn the most.”
Which is why, if he were to play back his own reel of his college football days, there isn’t much he’d do differently. “You know, my dad used to say, ‘I’d sure like another shot at Minnesota,’ because he played ’em twice and lost to ’em twice. And I could say the same thing about USC, because we lost to them twice too. But I’m not real good at looking back,” he says. “I’m better pushing forward.”
Harmon 411
These are a few of his favorite things.
Book
Endurance by Alfred Lansing, about Sir Ernest Shackleton’s doomed attempt to cross the Antarctic in 1914—and his crew’s two-year struggle for survival. “Tell Jamie Lee Curtis—that’s [also] her favorite book.”
Sunday Activity
“Barbecue or something, usually with the kids. They expect that too. It’s not unusual to get a call in the morning, ‘Hey, we doing anything tonight?’”
Movie
“I can’t name just one. My [production] company is named Wings after the 1927 William Wellman movie Wings. That’s the first movie I remember, a silent film, and I just remember sitting there, being drawn into that TV set.”
Harmon411.RealityTV_AmericanPickers-FTR
Reality TV Show
“American Pickers. Mike Wolfe was on NCIS [as himself on an episode in 2018]. When I was rehabbing my knee and I was lying on the floor, doing my exercises, [his show] was on all the time.”
Guilty Pleasure
“Washing my own car.”
Workout
“I’ve turned into a Pilates man the last six years. I have a regime that I do every day, and it works for me.”
Snack for Football Games
“I might have a glass of water. I’m not there to eat, I’m watching.”
TV Series (That He Doesn’t Star In)
“I loved watching Bryan [Cranston] in Breaking Bad. We had done a play together.”
Song
“Some obscure big band thing. Ozzie Nelson had a song called ‘I’m Looking for a Guy Who Plays Alto and Baritone, Doubles on a Clarinet and Wears a Size 37 Suit.’ I always thought that was a pretty cool name for a song.”
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