Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment Read Free

the shoots. Dressed in the clothes they were advertising, I had to sit there still as a corpse for fear of blurring the shot if I dared to move. The photographer held up a stick with a little fake bird on the end, while in his other hand he kept a rubber ball attached to the camera, which he squeezed as he took the picture. And right before shooting, he would bark out the same monotonous instructions over and over again: “Watch the birdie! Watch the birdie! Stand still! Don’t move! Now watch the Birdie!” There were, of course, times when I did move, ruining the picture. Then he’d become exasperated and yell at me: “Do it over! Now don’t move! Don’t move!” This would go on for hours, and the truth is I couldn’t wait until it was over. I was just a kid who wanted to be running around and playing games rather than stuck in those studios standing perfectly still for hours and wondering why they needed so many darn photographs. What’s the big deal, I thought. Just take the picture and let me out of here.
    Even worse, as I got older I took some ribbing from the kids in the neighborhood. They knew I was going to Manhattan for these modeling jobs and would call me a sissy. That was horrible. I remember them yelling at me on the avenue: “Hey, Dickie, tomorrow we’re going to play punch ball,” knowing full well that I had a modeling job. Kids can certainly be cruel.
    While I hated modeling, modeling didn’t hate me. I’ve made a point of never taking myself too seriously as an entertainer, but it’s true that I was a photogenic kid. Once I started with the Powers agency, the jobs just kept coming. I modeled for everything: Wonder Bread, toothpaste, endless clothing lines, and everything else imaginable. I was in all the Montgomery Ward catalogues wearing children’s clothing, especially the stylish pea caps that were so popular in the 1920s and 1930s.
    My modeling was a financial bonanza for the family. In the middle of the Depression, I was getting five dollars an hour—more money at four years of age than most working men in the country. I now wonder how many hundreds or thousands of desperate people I passed by on the E-Train headed to these jobs. How many people would have given anything for the few bucks I made just by standing still for a photographer?
    My modeling career peaked when, at age seven, I appeared on the cover of The Pictorial Review , one of the top magazines in the country. In 1935 making the cover of The Pictorial Review would be like being on the cover of Life magazine in the 1960s or maybe, Vanity Fair , today. Also, it was a color picture—which was rare in those days.
    My mother considered that cover shot for The Pictorial Review one of our greatest achievements. She kept a copy hanging on the wall at the foot of the staircase, conspicuously placed so nobody who entered would miss it. The picture remained there for many years after I left home, and even my nephew Casey, who lived with Mom before his marriage in 1974, remembers the photo still on the same wall, some forty years after it first appeared on the newsstands of New York City. Mom took those baby-carriage compliments seriously and that cover shot was as meaningful to her as anything we would ever accomplish.
    But modeling was just the beginning. Although it proved to be a needed financial boon, and certainly elevated Mom’s status among her friends who perused the magazines and were bombarded with pictures of her little Dickie modeling all the children’s clothing, still it was not really entertainment. Being a mainstay at John Robert Powers was great, but Mom had her sights on bigger things—especially the Broadway stage. She was working on that all through the modeling years, although the road we took was anything but a straight path.

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M R. P ERSONALITY
    The 1930s was a decade of pageants and contests. I like to believe it’s not so long ago when it seemed like every mother in America was marching their children