Bewitched and Beyond: The Fan Who Came to Dinner (9 page)

Left to right:
KR as Elizabeth the First, Me as Sir Walter Raleigh, being boiled in my own bath water at Calico Ghost Town and Kasey after her Jurassic drenching!

Chapter 10

Clifton and Ina

After umpteen trips to several graveyards, we were walking in Hollywood Memorial Park (Today Hollywood Forever. For you
Bewitched
fans, that’s where David White has been laid to rest with his son, Jonathan.)

Kasey and I began walking down the hollow aisles of one of the mausoleums in search of Clifton Webb who has been reputed to haunt that cemetery. As I was relating this story to Kasey, our footsteps began echoing off the marbled walls, floors, ceilings, and monuments, and we quickly found it to be a very cold unsettling place. We were a bit spooked, but finally found Clifton in a wall vault about waist high. Kasey told me to hurry and stand beside the vault so she could take the picture and we could get out of there!

I walked over, leaned against the marble piece that had his name on it, and as I did, the wall gave way and landed with a resounding “CLUNK” against his casket! I screamed (again!) and I also ran behind her! I am such the hero! HA!

At any rate, Kasey began snapping pictures like mad, just waiting for the ectoplasm to come seeping out.

We got the photos back and guess what?! NOTHING!

That August, Kasey’s mom, Ina, celebrated her 92nd birthday. Ina couldn’t remember very much, but she used to smile from ear-to-ear when I’d come into her room at the nursing home. Apparently she had an eye for the “gentleman callers.”

Ina, who had been an upstanding member of the Eastern Star organization, and used to throw many formal parties for them, always felt she was in charge at Dryer’s Nursing Home in Burbank.

For her birthday, Kasey and I planned to pick up Ina and go across the street to meet some other family members at Bob’s Big Boy restaurant.

This was all dangerous business because we had to wheel Ina over in her wheel-chair and cross traffic on a busy street. Ina made things all the more difficult because she kept dragging her feet! Finally I popped a wheelie with her in the chair and flew across the busy intersection with Ina screaming all the way… Geeze, I coulda killed us!

Mr. Webb did not have the decency to show up on film!

Me and Kasey’s mom, Ina.

Chapter 11

A Precursor of Things to Come

In late September, Kasey felt a lump on the side of her neck. It proved to be a rather large benign tumor, but the doctors still felt it should be removed if only for precautionary measures. It was located in the parotid gland so they removed it along with most of her thyroid. I can remember being scared, because no one I had ever known had had any surgery. As they wheeled her into the operating room at the Motion Picture Hospital, she made sure to tell me that if anything happened, “Tell my children I love them.”

It was all quite nerve wracking!

After she was out of sight, I rushed to the mall where she had recently seen and fallen in love with this big, clay Jack o’Lantern in a coffee shop. I bought it and went back to her hospital room to wait. Luckily, the surgery turned out to be rather simple, and she awoke to this big grinning clay orb staring at her. She loved it.

That woman could heal faster than anybody I’ve ever known and because of that, our Hallowe’en preparations were still on for that year.

Our first Hallowe’en party was a blast! Kasey wore the pink lamé Victorian gown that I designed and brought with me the previous year (She trusted my costuming ability by this time) and looked like a million bucks!

On Hallowe’en night, we went to Beverly Hills and ran into Milton Berle who was in full drag, completely blitzed, and constantly pulling up his skirt. It was kinda like looking at a train wreck… You don’t want to watch but you can’t help it… So we wisely decided to go elsewhere!

Christmas that year offered another opportunity to dress-up; the annual St. Nicholas Ball that our dear friend Julia DelJudge chaired every year at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel.

It was a lovely affair! Every ballroom was decorated in a different color. One that I especially remember was decorated with a live tree that reached all the way to the ceiling, completely dressed in Tiffany ornaments!

The stipulation for the ball was that you had to dress Victorian. Of course the Victorian era offered up several different dress styles, so Kasey wore a huge red and black lace hoop dress of the Civil War period that I had made a few years earlier.

There was just one problem… she couldn’t get in the car while wearing it! So when it was time to leave the ball, the valet brought the car around and I stepped behind Kasey, pulled two draw strings simultaneously, and down came the huge skirt and hoop. She casually stepped out of it wearing nothing but the top, her feathers, and a pair of black leggings! The poor valet stood there mortified, having just seen this gracious lady drop her dress in public!

After picking it up and stuffing it in the trunk, I tipped the valet and off we drove, laughing the whole way home.

Could it be that McMann and Tate were romancing an account from NASA? Why else would the agency owner’s wife, Louise be with Majors Nelson and Healey on a tarmac?

Kasey’s gown had 52 handmade dark pink lamé roses across the top and front and over 100 green lamé leaves. Each flower and leaf was “dotted” with several sequins in the same colors. Matching feather headdress and hot pink boa completed the look! I’m just a devil. HA! 27 years after it was first made, I gave it to my dear friend Roberta.

The St. Nicholas Ball acting like mannequins with our friend Julia!

Chapter 12

Son of a Witch

1993 was a fun year! My sister was married on the 30th of January, 1993, and I was asked to sing at her wedding (I had been a night club singer for years back in Georgia). I remember the day was cold and rainy and there were a billion crows on the lawn of the church. Odd the things you remember… But Kate, my sister, looked beautiful!

During that time, I also began training to be a tour guide at Universal Studios. It was such a kick getting to
play
in the back-lot on all those famous exteriors and sets — The Munster’s House, The Psycho House and the Bates Motel, The Chicken Ranch, and the New York Street where
The Sting
was filmed.

But that situation didn’t last long when I found out that in order to get you to work there, they lure you with the possibilities of getting to meet the big names in show business, and then after graduating (I was one of only nine that made it out of thirty) it really doesn’t pan out that way. They never intended to give us a chance to work with the big names. They used that as a come-on. It’s as if they train you and then say, “Just kidding!”

I did have a fun time doing my first musical in California that year. The show was
Carousel
and I played Enoch Snow. Actually I played him the way I thought Jim Carry would. (Isn’t that what musical comedy is for?!) The audience laughed but the director didn’t… sigh, why does genius always go un-rewarded?! HA!

Kasey and I also attended her 50th High School reunion that year in Burbank. Looking back, it was kind of funny. Kasey, being the only one in her class to go into show business, showed up with her “boy-toy” on her arm! We never thought anything about it, but we found out during the course of the evening that’s exactly what everyone was thinking!

We also visited the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles that year. Kasey and I walked over to where a bunch of kids had gathered. They were looking at the remains of a 4000 year old mummy that was on display and partially unwrapped.