Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment Page 11

  My performance aside, Nichols was right that Rattigan’s play was particularly good when Sir John sees through Michael’s high-minded posturing. A number of times Michael would spout off quotations from the writings of the contemporary British socialist, Harold Laski, and Sir John would scoff at his pretentions. But, Olivia, being his mother, was blind to her son’s conceit. Much of this dialogue was part of the rewriting that Rattigan had done at Alfred’s insistence, expanding Lunt’s character and, in the process, improving the play.

  The review I enjoyed most came from Robert Garland, the renowned critic of the New York Journal American, who wrote that “Dick Van Patten…brings a boyish likability to a priggish, puritanical part.” I liked that because it’s always a challenge for an actor to make a villain appealing. And while Michael Brown was not quite a villain, he was, at least for most of the play, pompous and insufferable. Yet, the Lunts had stressed to me that the audience must find something to like in his character, or they will find it hard to join in the laugh. I had made a conscious effort to strike that balance and was delighted to see that Garland had noticed.

  This was, by far, the high point of my stage career. In a little over ten years, and with the relentless support of my mother, I was now playing on the biggest stage with the greatest stars. Looking back I don’t think anything can compare with the electricity of that first night and then the enormous satisfaction—and no small relief—in reading the wonderful reviews the next day. Montgomery Clift had called me after I first won the part and assured me there was nothing like working with the Lunts. He was right. And this was no ordinary part. One columnist noted that it was the longest juvenile role up to that time on Broadway. Michael Brown’s part took up ninety side sheets—meaning a full ninety pages in the play book. It was a role that could really spark a career and, as Lynn Fontanne anticipated, such situations inevitably bring new opportunities and hard decisions that have to be made.

  It was interesting that John Chapman in his review in the Daily News captured a bit of the dilemma. He started with an extremely flattering review, but ended with an admonition: “There is an uncommonly good performance by an ex-kid actor named Dick Van Patten, who last season was playing child stuff and called himself Dickie. Mr. Van Patten is growing up fast and growing up very well in the theatre, and I hope to goodness, he stays here and does not flit off to the movies.”

  The Lunts had the same concern. It greatly increased, when shortly after the opening, I was contacted by several Hollywood studios—Warner Brothers, MGM, and Twentieth Century Fox—each offering me a standard seven-year deal to get into the movies. But there were strings attached. Basically, they said I could go to Hollywood, and they would pay me for six months while I worked. But they were under no obligation to actually use me. If, for any reason, they weren’t satisfied after six months was up, they could just let me go. Those were the terms.

  It would, thus, be taking a risk and, frankly, I wasn’t sure what to do. At the time, I did recall the advice Tallulah Bankhead gave me when I considered leaving The Skin of Our Teeth to try out for the role opposite my sister, Joyce, in Tomorrow the World: “Don’t ever leave a hit for something uncertain,” Tallulah advised.

  The Lunts also played a key role in my decision. They called both my parents in to talk in their offices and expressed their strong opposition to any such move. What’s interesting now is that I still remember Alfred using the same word the critic John Chapman has used, “Don’t let him “flit” his career away in Hollywood.” Alfred told my parents: “Dickie has a future here on Broadway.”

  In any event, I also remembered Monty Clift’s congratulatory call when he told me how much he had learned working with these legendary stage actors, and I knew that I still had a great deal more to learn from them. Most important, I felt indebted to them. After all, they had placed their confidence and trust in me. In the end, my parents and I decided that I should stay.

  At times I’ve wondered what life would have been like had I tried my hand at motion pictures. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise that Marlon Brando had lost the audition with the Lunts. Within a year Brando exploded into stardom with his extraordinary portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. The play, directed by Elia Kazan, opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947, and is often credited as the beginning of the ascendancy of the method school of acting.

  There were other contemporaries among the actors circulating in New York City at the time who made the transition to film and had great success, but I was still very young—barely seventeen when O Mistress Mine opened at the Empire—and this rare opportunity to work with and learn from the Lunts was not something to be squandered. Perhaps my career would have been different, but I have no regrets at all.

  The Lunts were the hardest workers I’d ever known. About every three weeks, Alfred would entirely change the play’s blocking just to keep it fresh. In other words, Alfred was conscious of the role of physical movement in a play and believed it should be altered before it became stale. Think of a fellow driving to work every day, taking the same route. Then one day he changes the route, and somehow there’s something new and fresh about it. The change affects his mood and, therefore, his behavior.

  Lunt understood that the same principle was true in theater. Let’s say that I had a line to deliver while sitting on the couch. The next week Alfred would change it to where I was saying the same line while walking across the stage. As we did this, I started to notice that the lines really did come out differently. With each change, there was renewed energy that enhanced the performance. Throughout the duration of the play, Lunt just kept changing the blocking and keeping the play fresh. I have never seen anybody else work that way, and I found it amazing that such a simple thing could have such a profound effect.

  Throughout the long run on Broadway, I was happy. It was a time when I was in that strange phase between being a teenager and an adult. I was also beginning to enjoy a bit of the fast life, and, for that, there’s no place on earth more exciting than New York City.

  23

  COMING OF AGE IN THE BIG APPLE

  In addition to playing the part of Michael Brown, my unofficial role during the years of O Mistress Mine was as Alfred Lunt’s personal talent scout. Whether in New York or on the road, I would head out to see the local shows and return to Lunt with a review. If I said the show was good, he would come and watch it with me. Once, we were playing in Detroit, and I saw a comedian, Irving Harmon, at a burlesque show at the Avenue Theatre who was terrific. Harmon had tremendously long legs, and he would somehow wrap them around his body and twist himself up like a giant pretzel. Then he’d sit down as though everything was perfectly normal. It looked so silly that the whole place was hysterical. I told Alfred, and the two of us went back the next day, and he loved it as much as me.

  Many years later I ran into Irving Harmon. He was a friend of Sammy Smith, an ex-burlesque comic whom I was working with in a 1974 Broadway show titled Thieves. One day Harmon came to a rehearsal, and Sammy introduced me to him. Although he had aged greatly, I immediately recognized him as the comic from Detroit. When I told him how much Alfred Lunt had enjoyed his performance, he became incredibly moved and excited. “You mean Alfred Lunt was out there watching me? My God, why didn’t you come backstage—if I had only known!” Harmon’s reaction showed just how revered Lunt was among entertainers. This old fellow was genuinely touched by the fact that he had made Alfred Lunt laugh. I went away wishing I had brought Lunt backstage to see him.

  Part of the reason Lunt was so revered was because of his own willingness to learn from other actors and comedians. In the early days of his career, Milton Berle recalled seeing the same guy in his audience night after night. This fellow came so often that Milton started to assume he was some kind of oddball. Then one night the fellow came backstage. He introduced himself as Alfred Lunt. He wanted to tell Milton how much he had learned watching him. It turned out Alfred was about to do
a show with some burlesque humor in it, and he wanted to watch this young comic who was being so highly touted. Milton was floored by it, as well as genuinely humbled.

  Alfred, of course, also loved high culture, and we would occasionally see the big theater stars together. Once we went with Lynn Fontanne to see John Gielgud at the Plymouth Theater performing in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The Lunts laughed at Wilde’s wit and Gielgud’s wonderful performance. In fact, Lynn later wrote to the play’s producer Binkie Beaumont telling him how much she and Alfred enjoyed the play, saying that Gielgud “made me laugh louder and longer than I have laughed in the theatre for years.”

  * * *

  It was around this time that I ran into a young kid who had his sights firmly fixed on the big time in show business. At first, he tried his hand at acting, but his real talents lay elsewhere. Soon we became fast friends and for a while enjoyed a lot of crazy stuff together. In the end, we were both lucky to come through it in one piece.

  I, of course, had no idea whatsoever that this brash, intense young daredevil would become one of the greatest motion picture producers of the twentieth century. For those who might think I’m stretching it a bit, just ask yourself: who else can count among their credits The Godfathers I and II, Love Story, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown?

  Bob Evans was a fifteen year old kid—about two years younger than me—when I first noticed him hanging around the radio stations. In his autobiography, The Kid Stays In The Picture, he recalls the time when, as he put it, “my new best pal was Dickie Van Patten.” While I couldn’t have predicted his astonishing future career, I did instantly recognize that Bob was a real character.

  At first he kind of tagged along after me. He seemed impressed with my status, and years later he generously wrote that at the time we met, “Dickie Van Patten was the top juvenile actor in New York.” Soon I realized we had a lot in common, and for a couple of years we really were, as he says, “best pals.”

  Bob was absolutely the most determined young man I ever knew. If he decided he wanted something, no matter how crazy—or dangerous—he wouldn’t stop until he had it or was knocked cold in the pursuit. One time that was literally the case. We were on the shore at Long Beach, and we started a friendly sparring match. Even though it was “friendly” we were still tagging each other a good bit when we noticed this old, short, fat guy with an overcoat, completely out of place on the beach, watching us fight. I guess he saw that same determined insanity in Bob’s eyes that a lot of studio heads and directors would dread over the next fifty years, and so he asked: “You guys box?”

  We said, “No.” But the old guy just ignored our response and said to Bob: “You look pretty good. I’m running some amateur fights tonight. Why don’t you come, and I’ll set you up with one of them.”

  Bob was intrigued, but he told the guy, “Look we’re actors. I don’t know how to box.” That’s when I knew I had him: “Ten bucks says you’re afraid,” I blurted out without missing a beat. That settled it. So later that night we were in the locker room at the Long Beach Stadium on the Boardwalk with Bob in some old gym shorts and me lacing up a pair of boxing gloves the old man had left for him.

  Bob was in the last fight—number sixteen on the card. The beauty of going last—at least the beauty for me—was that we got to watch them all—one bruised, battered and bloodied loser after another limping all the way back to the dressing room—not always under their own power.

  Finally the time came for the final fight. Bob describes it best in his memoirs: “Entering the ring with Dickie behind me, I saw for the first time the guy I was to fight. This animal with no teeth wasn’t looking to get into flicks.”

  That was certainly true. And I have to admit I was enjoying the view as much as Bob was, wondering what in the world he was doing in there. But the power of ten bucks and a dare was more than he could handle. So it continued.

  The fight went for three rounds. As Bob calculated it that was just “six minutes to stay alive.” At first he held up pretty well, making it through the first round with no major damage. Then as he tells it: “Gong! Round two. The animal came out charging again.” Bob actually landed a pretty good right, and he made it into the third round. But then he threw another right and suddenly—lights out. Bob hit the canvas so hard I thought he was never getting back up. He was unconscious as I dragged him to the dressing room. At least he was still breathing when we laid him on the bench. A few minutes later he woke up, and I dropped a ten dollar bill on his stomach. A deal’s a deal. The old man also gave Bob a wristwatch. They couldn’t pay him money because he was an amateur, but his blood was worth something.

  There were three “obsessions” that, according to Bob, he and I shared: “danger, women, and gambling.” I need to clarify that a bit. First, Robert Evans was an absolute magnet for women—and I’m talking about when he was still fifteen! Walking down the street with Bob was a guarantee of female company whether you were “obsessed” or not.

  One day Bob and I were on Fifth Avenue and spotted a stunning young lady walking opposite us. He said to me, “That’s Lana Turner.” This was at the height of her popularity. Bob then said, “I’m going to go talk to her.” I told him: “You’re crazy.” I bet him ten bucks he couldn’t get a date with her. I wasn’t stupid. I knew how good he was with women, but, this was Lana Turner. A few days later, he showed up at the Empire with his new date. When she wasn’t looking I gave him the ten bucks.

  Bob also dated Grace Kelly. A few years later, he and Grace came to see me in Mister Roberts and afterwards, we went out to Ruby Foos on 52nd Street for dinner. Grace was one of those young women who had it all; beauty, intelligence and a wonderfully charming personality. If anyone was to become a real-life princess, it should have been Grace. In 1982, I went to Monte Carlo on a celebrity tennis tournament and met her again, now as the Princess of Monaco. We had a wonderful time chatting about Bob Evans and the old days in New York City.

  I also remember that trip because my son Nels won the celebrity tennis tournament. His doubles partner was O.J. Simpson. I got to know O.J. a little from the various celebrity events. He was always nice to be around. And I can attest to his inclination for women. Once at a celebrity tournament in the Bahamas, I was awakened at around 1 a.m. by a knock at my hotel door. I got up, opened the door and there were two beautiful girls standing in the hallway. They asked, “Is O.J. in here?” I politely told them he wasn’t. It’s hard to imagine that the guy those girls were looking for, and the good-natured fellow we played tennis with, would be accused of murdering two young people in cold blood. I didn’t follow the case very carefully, but it did seem they had a lot of evidence against him. It ended up a tragedy for all involved.

  As for Bob Evans, he wasn’t just obsessed with women, they were obsessed with him. I’ve never seen anything like it, and after eighty years, I’m guessing I never will again.

  As for Bob’s claim that we were obsessed with danger, he gives me too much credit. My real obsession was getting him to indulge his own amazing appetite for putting it on the line. One day he was hanging around the NBC Studio where we broadcast, Young Widder Brown. When I finished my part, I went out in the stairwell and had a cigarette with the other kids. At the time, smoking didn’t have the kind of taboo that’s attached to it today. Bob was also there in the stairwell—the ambitious kid who would do just about anything to be the center of attention. Knowing that made me think. How could I get him to entertain us? I looked down the middle of the stairwell—it was a straight drop from the third floor to the bottom. So I said to Bob: “A buck says you can’t hang by your fingers for five minutes.”

  Bob couldn’t resist a challenge. Before I knew it he had lowered himself from the stairwell and began hanging with his feet dangling in the open air. If he fell, he was dead. I started counting. Bob held on for dear life. “I hung, and hung,” he later wrote. “I shut my eyes and counted off the seconds, trying to block out the pain.”

&n
bsp; When three minutes were up, we all grabbed him and pulled him to safety. I’m sure it was just in time. Looking back, it’s hard to believe we could have done something so incredibly stupid. But we were young and reckless—and Bob Evans, as Hollywood would soon find out, was one of a kind.

  * * *

  While working with the Lunts, I moved out of our apartment at the Des Artistes, on 67th Street in Manhattan, where I had lived with my Mom and Joyce for the past several years. I was nineteen and dating a woman, Lois Woodson, who happened to be a friend of my mother’s. That made things awkward at home so Lois and I moved in with her friend, an actress named Norma Anderson and Norma’s boyfriend, also a struggling actor, named Burt Lancaster.

  The four of us lived together in an apartment on 55th Street. Burt was about ten years older than me and working in a play called The Sound of Hunting. The play bombed, but Burt received excellent reviews, which helped launch his career.

  Burt was a quiet and reserved guy, though very nice. While living together we pretty much went our own ways. He did tell me that he was an acrobat. In fact he had just returned from performing a circus act on a USO tour. It was there he met Norma, and when I moved in, Norma was pregnant. Later I recall them telling the newspapers they had adopted a child. In those days it was a way to avoid any kind of scandal. Soon afterward, they moved to Hollywood.

  My coming of age in New York also involved the acquisition that was most important to me. I had spent a good portion of my youth at a racetrack, and now I was going to see it all from a new vantage point.

  24

  PENETRATOR

  Early in my run with the Lunts, I became the youngest racehorse owner in America. That had been one of my dreams, and now that I was making $750 a week, an enormous sum in those days, I decided it was time to buy my own horse. With my mother’s reluctant acquiescence, I took a train to Lexington, Kentucky, where all the big horse auctions were held.