Making Trax

In the fall of 1960, 20th Century Fox began filming a picture based on the 1896 Olympic Games, held in Greece. Jayne Mansfield, perhaps as compensation for having been loaned out to cheapie European studios for her last three, fairly horrid films (Too Hot to Handle; The Challenge; and The Loves of Hercules), was given star billing in what was intended to be a rather lavish costume drama. Fox president Spyro Skouras personally visited the location filming in his native Greece, and declared that the film would make Jayne Mansfield a bigger star than Marilyn Monroe. Dorothy Kilgallen predicted in her newspaper column that It Happened in Athens would be the biggest Fox hit of the year.


Good old Dottie may have been a shark at guessing the occupations on What's My Line?, but she was way off the mark with her estimation on this one. It Happened in Athens wound up sitting on the shelf for nearly two years; and then it was only released as a double-bill offering and marketed as a farce. No one escaped the wreckage unscathed: Fox unceremoniously dropped Jayne's contract, and newcomer Trax Colton, whose star-making vehicle this was to have been, and who was our latest Mystery Guest, never made another film. To be fair, as illustrated in the clip below, Colton may have been pretty to look at; but anyone who makes Jayne Mansfield's acting seem nearly as accomplished as Katharine Cornell's probably would have had a relatively short shelf life under any circumstances.

The handsome actor was born Louis Morelli; "Trax Colton" was the invention of Henry Willson, the notorious Hollywood agent who renamed, groomed, and created (and most likely fellated) such SSUWAT favorites as Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Guy Madison, Rory Calhoun, and scores of other would-be heartthrobs. By the time Morelli/Colton arrived at Fox in 1960, however, Willson's golden touch had tarnished to the point where the agent's own homosexuality was such an open secret in Hollywood, that his handsome male clients were almost immediately assumed to be gay, bisexual, or at least "cooperative" with Willson -- and in the aftermath of Confidential magazine scandals involving Hudson and Hunter, this didn't always set Willson's novice clients' careers up for success.

Presumably disillusioned with Hollywood, Morelli/Colton disappeared after filming Athens; his one other, previous credit was a small role in another 1960 Fox production, The Marriage-Go-Round, which more successfully introduced another newcomer, Julie Newmar. We haven't been able to dig up any more information about him before or after his brief Hollywood sojourn, other than the fact that he had been a used car salesman at the time of his discovery. We can only hope that Louis Morelli has lived a contented and happy life since 1960, and that he would be pleased that Trax Colton still is of interest to a discerning few today. Thanks for playing, darlings!