Ted Crail admits he never has been low on ego, but there's one thing on which he definitely will never sell himself short - his fast fingers.

It was Crail's typing skills, in the days before word processors and computers, that helped him create a diverse journalism resume - from Flathead Arrow editor to Southern small-town reporter to a chronicler of just about every A-list celebrity of the 1960s.

"I could type faster than anyone else," said Crail, who has been back in Kalispell for three years. "Even celebrities I interviewed would write back to me later and say how mystified they were by my typing. I could type their last answer while I was asking them a new question."

No one would know, looking at a new exhibit of Crail's work at Flathead Valley Community College, that typing speed was the secret that propelled him through his colorful careers.

The show is a record of his photography and relationships with celebrities and non-celebrities alike. The famous include Liza Minnelli, Woody Allen, Don Rickles, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Orson Welles and many more.

The photos and text mingle on storyboards in pop-art fashion, the pictures sometimes digitally altered, each panel telling a real story or Crail's fanciful view of reality, such as "What Stars Do in the Afterlife." On that panel, he uses his own shots of Jackie Gleason, Bing Crosby, Liberace and others.

"There are very few advantages to being as old as I am, but when everyone else is dead, you can tell things about them you couldn't tell when they were alive," Crail said.

One thing Crail will never run short of is stories.

He was able to find something interesting in every person he ever interviewed, especially the celebrities. And he had little patience for reporters who couldn't do the same.

"I often sent reporters to interview famous people, and if they came back and said, 'Oh, it was nothing,' then it meant there was something wrong - with the reporter," Crail said.

Crail believes no one becomes famous by coincidence.

"They have something, and it's up to you to uncover why they are so famous, and how they got so far."

Crail's own path to the world of the luminaries of the day was fairly straightforward.

Crail, 79, was born in Wolf Point but grew up in Kalispell. His first foray into journalism was in high school, where as a member of the Class of 1946, he was not only co-editor of the Flathead Arrow but a stringer for United Press International and the editor of the weekly Flathead Monitor, for which he received $4 a week.

He moved on to study creative writing at the University of Washington. During his college time he had a piece published by the Saturday Evening Post, "Progress Hits My Town," about the effects of the Hungry Horse Dam on Kalispell.

"Of the hundreds of magazine articles I've had, I've never had as much reaction to a story," Crail said. "Hundreds of letters came to my home, with people worried about their own towns."

He left college for a newspaper job in Dunn, N.C., an area that provided a wealth of intriguing material for a journalist in the 1950s. A steady string of news - murder, bootlegging and race conflict - provided plenty of fodder for a young man from the North lucky enough to work for Hoover Adams, an editor who believed "everything should go in his newspaper," Crail said.

Because news was plentiful in Dunn, Crail did not tell a "beautiful Jewish girl," Lee Polivan, that her talent show would be on page one as she requested the day she dropped into his office.

Still, 29 days later Crail and Polivan were married. They were together for 42 years before she died of cancer.

His wife was the reason Crail ended up in Miami Beach.

"My wife explained to me we were moving to Florida, and I had no defense, I had to move," he said.

In Miami Beach, Crail held many jobs - city editor, managing editor, columnist and photographer for daily newspapers, including the Miami Beach Herald.

Once again, it was his ability to generate so much copy with his writing skill and fast fingers that secured him his jobs.

He had to develop his photography out of necessity - taking a few pictures was how he wrapped up about every celebrity interview. Soon his camera became a part of him, "always hanging at my midriff."

His photos were always shot with natural light - no flash or studio lights brought in. He said he often would ask the celebrities if they wanted to direct the shot, and usually, he said, they would give him complete control.

Though Crail said celebrities often were loath to do yet another interview, he said they were usually able to disguise their irritation.

His favorite interview was without question Eartha Kitt, though she was hostile at first. She had been misquoted and misrepresented too many times for her to trust a journalist from Miami, Crail said.

"She grilled me and asked question after question after question," he said. "After a lot of that, she decided I was a human being, which was a great discovery for her to find out that a reporter could be human."

The third-degree interrogation was worth it, he said.

"No one in the world could talk like Eartha Kitt, except for maybe Orson Welles," he said. "Everything she said was eloquent, gifted and true."

He has many lifetimes' worth of fascinating celebrity encounters. Though he was told not to take photos of the actress Jennifer Jones, he said she was "the most beautiful creature on planet Earth. She was bursting with intelligence, and she was intelligent enough to know that when you talk to a newsman, you tell them something interesting."

He said few celebrities were as surprisingly intellectual as comedians Buddy Hackett or Rickles.

"People never caught sight of that when they were performing," he said.

And Phyllis Diller cozied up with Crail by sharing the material from two thick books she had compiled - one of everything funny she had ever thought of, and one of one-liners sent to her by women.

The subsequent story on Diller didn't get front-page treatment in his own paper, but he sent another version to TV Guide. It was the first in a string of 24 of Crail's stories printed in TV Guide, one of the best-selling publications in the country at the time.

Crail ended up going into public relations, a field he called "pig slop" at first. The money was just too good to turn down.

He was still part of the celebrity world, and he ended up working as Jackie Gleason's personal press representative and ghostwriter. "The Jackie Gleason Show" had moved from New York to Miami Beach in 1964, and most major entertainers of the day were featured on the show.

Crail had been wary of joining Gleason's camp because few who worked with him had anything nice to say about him.

"His two devotions in life were to being a wonderful TV performer and a drinker," Crail said.

But Gleason treated Crail fairly well, Crail thinks because he had power over what was printed about Gleason.

Crail and his wife eventually moved on to California, where Crail was offered a job as vice president of creative affairs for Sacramento's Animal Protection Institute. Animal welfare had not been on Crail's radar, but he saw an organization that was foundering at the time and needed some help.

That job - during which he developed a more favorable view of the public-relations field - lasted for 16 years.

Even in that position, he still was encountering the famous, asking people such as William Shatner to help with fundraising.

He also had an interesting meeting with gorilla researcher Diane Fossey, of "Gorillas in the Mist" fame, after he secured her to speak at a fundraiser.

"She saw me in the lobby, put her arms around me, picked me up, swung me around and did a gorilla call," he said. "That was as good as being co-editor of the Flathead Arrow."

He also made a movie history of animal-rights campaigns, "The Ninth Crusade," narrated by Beau Bridges, and wrote a book "Apetalk and Whalespeak: The Quest for Interspecies Communication."

Crail moved back to Kalispell with his friend Maria Arnold because he said his family members were returning to the area and he wanted to be among them.

He came up with the idea for his exhibit after seeing the long, open walls in the FVCC Arts and Technology Building during a visit to a recent art exhibit there, and realized he could easily fill them with a lifetime of memorabilia.

"I did over 50 posters, and I could have done 200 or 300," he said.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com