Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment Page 12

  I saw a yearling colt at the auction—a beautiful bay, meaning he was a rich, dark brown color. He was Jersey bred and best of all, he only cost $900. His name was Penetrator. We took him from the auction and shipped him by train to the stables at the Aqueduct in Ozone Park, Queens, where it cost $8 a day to keep him.

  My father was also excited about my owning a horse. He came to my first race at Jamaica racetrack. Proud that his son had a horse in the race, he said to me: “I don’t care who is in the race, I’m betting on Penetrator.” But I knew the horses far better than Dad, and Penetrator didn’t have a chance. So I argued with him: “Forget about Penetrator, play the seven.” That was a horse named Mist O Gold. But my father was adamant. He wouldn’t change his bet. He said he just couldn’t bet against his own son’s horse.

  Mist O Gold won, and my father missed an excellent payday. I couldn’t wager myself because you’re not allowed to bet against your own horse. But I would have liked to see Dad win a few bucks, even if it did mean betting against his son’s horse.

  Penetrator nearly brought me a touch of immortality. There had been racing at Monmouth Park in New Jersey from the 1870s until it was shut down twenty years later in the 1890s. Then, just after I bought Penetrator, the racetrack opened again. The first races were held on July 19, 1946, and we entered. I was lucky to have a jockey named Ronnie Nash, who was one of the top riders. I remember being the youngest guy in the owners’ box as they went through the ceremonies commemorating the reopening of the track after fifty-three years.

  When the ceremonies finished, they started the first race of the day. This was Penetrator’s race, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. As they took off, he was out among the leaders. As they came into the stretch, I was all excited. But there was another horse, Blind Path, also in the mix. In the homestretch it was just the two of them—a photo finish! But, we lost. The next day, even the New York Times covered the opening race, noting that Blind Path “got on the inside going into the stretch and withstood a challenge by Penetrator.”

  About five years ago, I went back to Monmouth Park. I hadn’t been there in over fifty years. I saw above the entrance a big picture of that very first race run at the new Monmouth Park. I looked up, and there’s my Penetrator—getting beat by a nose.

  To make it even worse, at the bottom of the photo, it named the jockey, the owner, and the trainer of the winner in big black print. Penetrator and I could have been immortalized.

  25

  SIDESHOWS

  I’ve mentioned scouting for Alfred Lunt, but I also scoured the streets of New York to satisfy my own penchant for oddities, often by heading over to Hubert’s Museum on 42nd Street where they frequently featured a variety of freak shows. I can still remember the names of all the stars at the Hubert: Robert Mervin, the boy with two faces; Betty Lou Williams, the girl with four legs; Francesco Lentini, the man with three legs; Coo Coo, the bird lady; and, of course, Zip and Pip, advertised by the Hubert’s barker as “the human pinheads, whose heads were no larger than the size of my fist.”

  One day at the Hubert, they announced a coming attraction: “Albert/Alberta—the world’s only living hermaphrodite on exhibition today.” That was just the thing to get my juices flowing. I was performing before thousands of people every night at the Empire with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, yet after hearing that announcement all I could think about was that upcoming freak show with a half man/half-woman.

  The big day finally came. I watched as Albert/Alberta stepped onstage and announced: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m half man; and I’m half woman. As you can see on this side, I have the lovely complexion of a woman. And over here, I have a beard.” He/She spoke with a thick French accent: “Over here, you see I have no breasts. Over here, I have these beautiful breasts. I’m a very feminine woman.”

  I was amazed. I went straight back to the Empire that night, knocked on Lunt’s dressing room door and exclaimed: “Mr. Lunt, you won’t believe what I just saw at the Hubert—a half man/half woman.” I kept going on and on, and Alfred Lunt kept listening intently, just saying: “Hmm. Hmm. Yes. Yes.” I knew I had him hooked for the next show.

  But things didn’t go as planned. A few days later, I went to a double feature at the New Amsterdam Theatre. I should mention here that my father had always told me there might come a time when a man would make an advance toward me. I remember his exact words: “If you are ever in a place like a movie theatre, and somebody sits next to you and you feel their hand on your body, just say in a very loud and clear voice: ‘Stop what you are doing. Stop what you are doing immediately.’” He assured me the person would stop, but he stressed that I had to say it loud and clear.

  Sitting in the New Amsterdam, I noticed the balcony was empty. Suddenly a man came in and sat right next to me. It sounds like a cliché, but he was actually wearing a trench coat. I thought it was creepy. Sure enough, a moment later, I felt his hand on my knee. With that, I remembered what my father told me and was just about to say very loud: “Stop what you are doing” when I glanced over at him—and it was Albert/Alberta!

  I was stunned. I just couldn’t bring myself to yell at this great celebrity. Instead, I got up and left. The worst part was that I was totally disillusioned. The great hermaphrodite, Albert/Alberta, was a fake. I went back to Alfred Lunt, and he had a big, long laugh at my expense.

  I also saw the great boxing legend, Jack Johnson, at the Hubert Museum. The first black heavyweight champion, Johnson’s rise to the title set promoters on a desperate search for a white contender. When no one could touch him in the ring, they coaxed Jim Jeffries out of retirement, calling him “the great white hope.” Their fight in 1910 was one of the biggest sensations in boxing history. And to the disappointment of the promoters, and many others, Johnson demolished him.

  Jack Johnson was no ordinary champ. He was truly great—in fact, one of the greatest heavyweight fighters in boxing history. But he also refused to play the role of a submissive black, grateful for being allowed to participate in a white-dominated business. On the contrary, Johnson was a supremely confident, even arrogant, man who, at a time when Jim Crow was the law of the land, refused to bow to the prevailing racism. For that, Johnson paid an enormous price, both professionally and personally.

  Johnson came out onstage at the Hubert wearing a brown suit with a white shirt and tie and his trademark navy-blue beret. Self-assured and well spoken, he pointed to a picture on the wall of himself lying on the canvas in Havana, Cuba, after losing to Jess Willard in 1915. At the time of the fight, Johnson was under indictment for a Mann Act violation, accused of bringing a woman across state lines for illicit purposes. He was literally a fugitive, exiled from his country and on the run, and also under enormous personal and financial pressure.

  Johnson told us that he took a dive for a cash payoff. He wanted us—and the world—to believe that Willard had not actually beaten him. Taking a pointer, he directed it at the picture of himself lying on the canvass. “If this were a true knockout,” he explained, “I wouldn’t be shading my eyes from the sun.” And it’s true, in this famous picture of Johnson on the canvas, his hands are raised in the air as if shielding his eyes from the brutal Havana sun.

  Shortly after I saw him, Johnson died in a car crash in North Carolina. No one will ever know for sure whether he took a dive or legitimately lost the fight. Today most of the experts are against him. Some twenty years later in 1966, a film of the fight was discovered that seemed to show that Willard won. Either way, Johnson was one of the most charismatic men of the century, a legend both in and out of the ring, and it was fascinating and a little bit sad, to see him at the close of his extraordinary life working for fifty bucks a week at the Hubert trying to undo a wrong committed so long ago. On the other hand, there was also something uplifting about a man who, against all odds, kept on fighting right to the bitter end.

  26

  MAMA: A BRAVE NEW WORLD

  The national tour of O Mistress Mine closed in the su
mmer of 1948. The play had been a tremendous success and helped to establish my reputation as a comic actor. As I looked ahead, I had no idea that my immediate future would see another turn to a new medium that would become one of the most important developments not only in entertainment, but in every aspect of life. Television had arrived in America.

  To appreciate the stunning suddenness of the transition, it’s worth considering that when we entered World War II in 1941, there were just 7000 television sets in the entire United States. Most of these sets were owned by very wealthy people. Just eight years later, when I Remember Mama first aired in 1949, the number had grown to about 3.5 million sets. But even with this tremendous increase, televisions were still largely a phenomenon of the cities—nearly all of them were located in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major urban centers.

  But that was about to change. And it did so just as I Remember Mama took to the airways. By the time of Mama’s final performance in 1957, there were nearly 60 million television sets nationwide. Not only did television explode, but it exploded throughout the duration of our show.

  Mama was originally planned for radio. When I went to audition at CBS studios on Madison Avenue, it never crossed my mind that this would be a television program. At that point there were no situation comedies on television—the first was The Goldbergs, which debuted just six months before Mama in January of 1949. Most of the programming consisted of news and variety shows, often the latter would have a comedian, like Jack Benny, hosting. But the idea of a television sit-com was the furthest thing from our minds, and I recall being skeptical when told that the format was being changed from radio to television.

  It turned out to be a brilliant decision. I Remember Mama, which was eventually known as simply Mama, was a groundbreaking show that helped push the brand-new medium of television forward. But at the time, I certainly wasn’t thinking about that. Television was untested, and we were all uncertain how this would turn out.

  The Mama story was adapted from a best-selling novel, Mama’s Bank Account, written by Kathryn Forbes, about a Norwegian immigrant family who settled in San Francisco in the early years of the century. The actual time in which the first show took place was 1915, thus World War I was already underway in Europe, but the United States had not yet entered the conflict.

  The show told a series of stories about an idyllic family, as it was later recalled by one of the children, Katrin, who was wonderfully played by my good friend, Rosemary Rice. Although the family life was idyllic, there was always a constant struggle with the small salary that the father, Lars Hansen, played by Judson Laire, was able to eke out in his job as a carpenter. Many of the storylines dealt with Mama’s imaginative ways to stretch their small income and make ends meet.

  Before being tested for television, I Remember Mama had been a big hit on Broadway in 1944. Ironically, as earlier mentioned, the very first actor to play Nels Hansen, the eldest son, was Marlon Brando. In fact, it was Brando’s debut on Broadway and helped move him into the spotlight. His success in the role contributed to the reason why the Lunts were so interested in him for the role of Michael Brown in O Mistress Mine.

  Thus, Marlon had played Nels in I Remember Mama before we both auditioned for the Lunts, while I played Nels after finishing with the Lunts. Of course, it worked out much better for Marlon, since he soon landed the role in Streetcar that launched him into arguably the greatest acting career in the history of American film.

  But the role of Nels didn’t fall so easily to me. In fact, I lost out at first—something that would also happen years later with Eight Is Enough. The part first went to Jackie Ayers, a child actor whom I knew from The Professional Children’s School. I still recall the producer using those polite, but gut-wrenching words that every actor has heard: “You were very good, but we’re going in a different direction.”

  They rehearsed for a couple of days with Jackie when suddenly they called and asked me to come back. I believe the change was prompted by Ralph Nelson, whom I had worked with in The Wind Is Ninety and was now a producer and the principal director of Mama. I returned, but I did feel sorry for Jackie. He was a friend, and I know how tough it can be to lose a part—especially after you think you already have it.

  Once we started shooting, I immediately learned something about this new medium: it was powerful. I had already been well known as a model, a child actor, an adolescent star who worked on Broadway with the Lunts, and an actor with major roles in hundreds of radio programs. But all of that paled next to television. Even at the height of my career with the Lunts, I could walk into a restaurant, have a quiet meal with friends, and never be recognized. All that changed overnight. Suddenly everywhere I went people were coming up, asking me if I was that guy Nels on TV.

  I was also among the very few people who immediately transitioned from a large role on Broadway to a large role on television—and the difference was truly dramatic. I had been in front of large crowds since I was five years old, but I never felt like a celebrity. With television, that also changed—both for good and for bad. It made me recognize not just that my life was changing, but that the whole nature of American entertainment was in transition.

  Getting ready for the premiere of Mama was a difficult task for everyone. Besides The Goldbergs who had started just a few months earlier, there was no precedent for the kind of live episodic television that we were shooting. Worthington Minor, a CBS executive—and also the father of Peter Minor, the boy from On Borrowed Time—was involved both with Mama and The Goldbergs and described the uncharted waters of live television: “It was all new and terrifyingly complex. Since until now no one had ever tried to do it before, nobody really knew how to do anything. An ‘old hand’ was somebody who’d worked on the show last week.” Minor was right. Nearly everybody involved with the show, including me, had the majority of their experience in theater and radio.

  I Remember Mama opened on July 1, 1949. It was an immediate hit. Within a short time millions of people were tuning in every Friday night to watch the travails of this family of Norwegian immigrants. Until the show closed in 1957, we performed 500 episodes. I remember Ralph Nelson joking to me during the last show, “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you 500 times….” During those eight years, I grew from a young man to an adult. I married and had all three of my children before the final performance of Mama.

  As with Tom Bradford in Eight Is Enough, when you perform a role for that long, particularly a part that changes with each performance—unlike those long-running plays where the story is always the same—it’s hard not to develop a sentimental attachment to the fictional character. For me, Nels Hansen was almost real.

  Like all the characters, he was the original brainchild of Kathryn Forbes. But Nels also became a creation of the principal writer Frank Gabrielson and, ultimately, my own interpretation and personality added to the mix—all of which created the young man who came each week, with his family, into the homes of millions of Americans.

  During the years on Mama, the producers would bring in different people to play mine or Rosemary’s friends. Often these would be recurring roles. Three young actors who played for varying periods would later become film legends: James Dean, Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon.

  The one most involved was James Dean, and we became good friends for a while. He was a couple of years younger than me and seemed to like to tag along all the time. Often that meant going to the Forrest Hotel for a game of poker. Jimmy never played, but he was content to sit behind me and get us cigarettes and cokes and hang out all night just watching the game.

  In 1952, I was going to be away from the show for a few weeks. I suggested to Ralph Nelson that James take over as Nels while I was gone. Ralph agreed, and for several weeks James Dean played my part on I Remember Mama. I’ve noticed that in accounts of James Dean’s life, this fact is usually downplayed. But, the truth is that his first national exposure came playing Nels in Mama.

  Although I wasn’t there at th
e time, Rosemary Rice remembers it well. It was clear to her and to others that James really wasn’t suited for the part. There was always something a little dark about James’s personality, very unlike Nels, an upbeat, happy member of an idyllic family. Later, when asked about the short-lived change in Nels, Rosemary would pay me a wonderful compliment, saying that “Dick Van Patten was irreplaceable.” I don’t know whether that’s true, but I can say that there was a special magic among all the cast members that was, indeed, irreplaceable.

  Of all the stars who appeared on the show, including Paul Newman, James Dean, Jason Robards and Jack Lemmon, Jimmy was the last I would have expected to become a star, much less an iconic figure in American culture. But, looking back, it’s also not so surprising that he would come to symbolize a kind of disaffected element of American youth. He was brilliant in Rebel Without a Cause and his role was, of course, far more tailored to his particular personality than Nels Hansen.

  Like millions of Americans, I was deeply saddened by James’s premature death in a car crash in 1955. I still think of him as that interesting young kid who used to tag along to my poker games and who took over my spot for a few weeks on the show. But, of course, he became much more than that, and I’m proud to have worked with and gotten to know him in the days before he really entered our consciousness as the ultimate American rebel.

  * * *

  Live television was very different than the recorded shows we watch today. Sid Caesar, one of my all-time favorite comics and among the earliest stars of television with his 1950 show, The Sid Caesar Hour, said it best: “People today have no idea what live television means.” It meant “flying by the seat of your pants.” There were “no cue cards, Teleprompters, no second chances and no net. You only had one chance and that’s it. If a fly landed on your nose, you squinted and you kept walking and talking, or you incorporated the fly into the scene.”