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

train pulled into Penn Station.
    Of course, acting on soap operas also requires a good memory. For two years in the 1960s I played a character on Young Doctor Malone , and each day we were handed a script which had to be ready the next day. And my role was relatively small. Memory block is fatal to an actor. I’ve seen it end a number of careers, and it’s usually sad—especially if the lapses are associated with aging.
    In over seventy-five years onstage, I’ve been lucky to be free of both stage fright and memory lapse, and I suspect that at least a part of that good fortune is the result of standing in front of several thousand people at the Loews Theater and spouting off that poem about Mom. For me, it was the right way to launch my stage career. After all, it was Mom who made it all possible. I hope that as she sat there among all those thousands of people watching her little boy talk about how much he loved her, she knew it was much more than just a recitation for the contest.
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    Like most kids my age, I loved Our Gang . Spanky, Farina, Buckwheat, Pete, the black-eyed bulldog, and the whole gang were taking the entertainment world by storm in the 1930s. This wasn’t the more familiar television show, The Little Rascals , which began in 1955, but the film shorts, which years before the advent of television, were among the most popular shows in the country.
    Mom decided I should get in on it. As always, she shot right for the top. At the time, Laurel and Hardy were the biggest comedy team in the country, and Mom discovered that Stan Laurel was connected to the producer of Our Gang , Hal Roach. So in 1934, when I was six years old, she wrote a letter directly to Stan Laurel, asking if he could help me get an audition for a part. She included some of my modeling pictures.
    To our great surprise, Stan responded. Among my most prized mementos is the letter he wrote to my mother in 1934. In it he described me as “a cute little tyke” and at the end, predicted: “There are great things waiting for you.” Seventy-five years later, I still have that letter in a frame in my home. And as it turned out, Stan Laurel was exactly right. Great things were waiting—although there would be many twists and turns along the way.

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L AND OF B ROKEN D REAMS
    In the spring of 1935, we lived on the first floor of a two family house in Woodhaven, Queens. We were crowded there—my grandmother, Florence, my Aunt Margie, as well as the four of us. Joyce was just a few months old, and she and I shared a bedroom in the back of the house, my grandmother and aunt had their own rooms, and my parents had to sleep in the living room.
    In 1935, my Aunt Anna died, and the funeral was held for three days at our house. My parents put flowers on the front door and brought the casket right into the living room, and Anna was laid out right next to my parents’ bed. I remember the creepy feeling that kept me up at night while Mom and Dad slept soundly right next to the dead body.
    In her will, Anna left my grandmother a few thousand dollars, and so Florence decided to use the inheritance to take a trip to California and visit some of her relatives. Since we had just received the letter from Stan Laurel, Mom began thinking about ways to parlay the inheritance into opportunities.
    She asked Florence to take me with her. In addition to Stan Laurel’s letter, she had made a more dubious Hollywood connection, one supposedly arranged by a beautician on Jamaica Avenue named Anthony who claimed his brother worked as a makeup artist at MGM and could get me an audition for the Our Gang comedy show. Florence, like my father, possessed an inquisitive mind and an adventurous nature, and she immediately agreed, probably without really thinking through what she was getting herself into.
    Once the money came, she and I took off on a long trip to see America, visit her relatives in San Francisco, and to try to turn my small accomplishments into a career