Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (11 page)

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Authors: Frank Bank,Gibu Twyman

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BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
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Page 54
soaked up knowledge. I loved soaking up knowledge.
It was something my mom and dad had loved all their lives and they passed on to me.
They passed on a love of doing and accomplishing, even with all the hits and misses of life. You just have to keep on plugging.
That's what Mom and Dad did.
Eventually, the meat business got pretty solid. And Leonard-the-Sport was really proud. He bought my mom a 1939 Willys for 50 bucks. It was 10 years old, because this was 1949, but that was no small feat. And let me tell you, that son-of-a-gun ran.
It was this ugly blue color, and you know what? I'd give a lot of money for that car today. It was really cool.
In a way, the Willys was much like my old man. Kind of an ugly blue color, but the son-of-a-gun could really run.
I'd give any amount to see him today. He was just really the coolest.
My dad had one wish that I was glad that I was able to fulfill for him.
The Jewish tradition is, when someone dies, you dip 'em in the ground the same day so the healing begins. I mean, all you other guys are barbarians. You put 'em in a room and you drink with them for a week and once they start smellin bad, you plant 'em.
But us Jews, we gotta plant 'em right away.
I couldn't do that because my dad died at this dude ranch in Paso Robles, California.
It was a challenge.
He died on a Thursday night, late at night. And because he died away from home, they picked up his body at the hospital and they wouldn't release it. Until some medical guy, whatever they had in that territory, gave his OK.
In the Jewish tradition, you can't bury them on Saturday, the Sabbath.
So I couldn't plant Leonard until Sunday.
But it was worth the wait, I think.
If you were a famous Jew, you were buried in Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles. It's right near the airport, right off the San Diego Freeway, not five miles from LAX.
My dad always said, "Son, all I ask is that you just make sure I'm next to Jolie."
It took some doing, but if you were to go visit my dad, you will see that he currently resides on a certain hillside.
Leonard is not 20 feet from Jolson,
And so is Sylvia.
Both of them are there together, Leonard and Sylvia.
Like I said, I was so lucky to be together with them all the time I got to.
 
Page 55
I was lucky, the gifts they passed on to me, of inquisitiveness and persistence and an undying interest in people.
But one thing knowing them and reading my way through the entire encyclopedia had taught me.
I had experienced the most beautiful, full, rich, incredible life with them.
But I had experienced nothing.
I was missing something.
There was more out there for me to see and do and be.
 
Page 56
Chapter Three
Beach Days and Knights
Cool.
You hear me say it all the time, as if you haven't noticed.
But it's more than a saying with me, more than just a word.
It is a belief.
It is a core tenet of my existence.
The pillar on which my psyche stands.
It is both a journey and a destination. A motivation and an accomplishment.
It is a grail as palpable and reachable as any goblet in some faraway shrine.
To me, it became almost holy.
Cool is in my bones and in my fibers, in my heart and in my soul. It flicks at my eyes and licks at my lips. I see cool coming and going.
Cool should be on the periodic table as an essential element of life. Like both oxygen and carbon, I breathe cool in and I breathe cool out.
It has permeated my life since my early teens.
I guess cool always will.
Becoming a movie star, or becoming famous, was never a goal.
The first goal I ever had was, I wanted to be popular.
I decided I was going to be cool. And to be cool, I had to be nice, I had to be thoughtful, I had to be caring, I had to be remembered.
But it wasn't always so.
If there was such a thing as the antithesis of cool in school, that was me.
I was a dweeb long before there were dweebs.
Before anybody knew what a geek was, I knew.
I was a poster child for dork.
Take every lame-o you ever saw in teenage-angst movies, roll them into one, and you've got me in early high school.
 
Page 57
Dial 1-800-IMANERD and you'd get Frank Bank on the other end of line.
Part of the trouble, if I may say so, was that I was just too friggin' smart.
I know it's immodest to mention it, but here's the deal. I was the smartest kid at Hamilton High School. Out of 3,000 kids I had the highest IQ in school.
My IQ was 203.
Yes. It sounds absurdly high. I didn't even realize it was up there for a long time. But I can document it by the fact that I also was a screw-up.
What happened was, my junior year, my counselor calls me in. My grades had slipped from A's to C's. Obviously, up 'til then, schoolwork had been a slam-dunk for me. English, history, I breezed through all that. I knew the history of the world, Part I and II. I loved it. I really dug in. Politics. Geography. All that. The only thing I hated was science. I had to study some, but still skated through most of it.
But now my counselor calls me in, this guy named Leonard Rudolph, and he says to me, ''What is the matter with you? You just took the IQ test and you dropped 25 points?"
And he showed me my IQ was 178.
I said, "Well, to be honest with you, I really wasn't thinking about taking the test that morning."
I didn't add: I was thinking of girls, which was all I thought about by now, morning, noon and night and all the hours in between.
"Would you like me to retake the test?" I asked.
He goes, "No. There's nothing wrong with what you scored, but I'm curious as to why you could have dropped that much."
The words "copping out" didn't exist as far as I knew at the time. But what I said was tantamount to, "I've just been copping out. I just wasn't thinking about tests."
So he tells me, "Well, I'm very upset because you've had the highest IQ in the school at 203. And how come the guy with the highest IQ is getting C's while everyone else is getting A's?"
I couldn't really tell him what was going on inside me.
But it was simple. In the eighth grade I was a real toad. I was socially backward. I was shy. I kept to myself. The guys I hung with were like the science club. We used to play chess, for God's sake.
In fact, if I may add an immodest footnote, I had beat the California chess champion when I was in the sixth grade. He was a coach at Shenandoah Grammar School. The guy was 40 years old and his name was John Keckhut. We'd turn a couple of trash cans over and set some carom boards across them, and play chess on top of these at school.
True story.
 
Page 58
So I was still doing this kind of thing in high school.
I did all the things you expect a nerd to do.
And then it hit me.
Like the Elvis movie, I went Girl Crazy.
I discovered girls-girls-girls-girls-girls around age 12. My first real love was a girl named Joyce, who lived around the corner from me. Man, I was madly in love with Joyce.
I never had sex with Joyce or anything. You don't always nail the first girl you love, but Joyce just got me thinking about it.
Everything took a backseat to girls. I'm still doing the movies and television. But the movies and television took second place to my new-found ambition:
Getting laid.
And suddenly, I saw the way to getting what I wanted.
I would become the most popular guy in school.
I would become . . . cool.
My libido was pointing the way. But I also decided to train my mind on the whole matter of becoming cool.
That's when I decided to become a people person.
I realized as a kid I'd spent all this time listening to race results, reading the encyclopedia, doing all these mano a mano projects.
But gregariousness was a much better project and I honestly did love being with people. This was a natural part of me I'd inherited from Leonard and Sylvia, who never knew a stranger. I'd just never thrown the switch in that part of my brain or heart.
I loved being with people.
The cool thing was that I wasn't phony about it. Because I really did abhor phonies. I liked being genuine. And I genuinely liked everybody. I genuinely wanted to do good. I was a do-gooder.
Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties was cool. He was. That was another thing that goes back to my father. My father said to me, "I always want you to be the guy in the white hat, not the guy in the black hat. It's much better to be good than bad."
Everything was black and white to my dad. Black stood for evil, white stood for good. Well, I gotta tell you something. He was right. Leonard was really cool in his own funny kinda way.
And so my heroes were all good guys. I had so many heroes when I was a kid, it was terrible. I mean, more than the average guy.
Remember I am left-handed? I go to buy my first baseball glove and I'm all upset because my buddies are all righties and I can't borrow one of their mitts because I'm a lefty.
But my dad pointed out to me, "Hey, son, here's a lefty. His name was
 
Page 59
Babe Ruth."
And I went, "Really? Wow! Hey, cool. Babe Ruth is a lefty." I was so excited, I can't begin to tell you. I was thrilled.
Where do you think my love for Sandy Koufax comes from? It wasn't just the fact that he's Jewish and a lefty, was it? C'mon. Get real. Let's go for it. Sandy Koufax. The greatest pitcher in the history of baseball is a lefty?
Sandy was my man.
But it wasn't just sports guys.
Albert Einstein. Lefty all the way. I loved Einstein. Einstein was cool. He was great.
And I loved Jonas Salk, another lefty. I so admired guys who I thought were good guys and who were smart enough to figure things out and help other people.
I saw that if you weren't smart, you were going to get trampled on. You either had to be strong physically and fightwhich I was fairly strong and was a fairly good fighter . . . I had my share of them. Or you could go one even better than fighting. You could outsmart 'em.
So smart guys were my heroes, too.
But my Big Three heroes, by far, were Ruth, Koufax and Einstein.
Pretty decent trio, isn't it?
And because I had that complex a lot of left-handers do about being lefty in life, my dad also told me, "Frank, lefties are special. They're probably a little smarter and they're probably a little more intuitive."
Whether that was true or not, my father thought it was cool, so I did, too.
So I wanted to follow my heroes and be kind and generous and do good to people.
This would help me be liked by them and popular with them, and I wanted that more than anything.
But especially I wanted that with girls.
I used to really get off when I'd have four or five girls around me. I liked that. I think I was interested in some of their causes. I've always been a feminist before feminism was popular. I know that sounds crazy for the son of the world's greatest male chauvinist pigand a guy who's done some pigging in his own right. But I always thought chicks got a rotten deal in the world, in general.
So I played that chord and joined their chorus about uplifting and celebrating women.
Even more important than my baseline beliefs on the subject, of course, was the fact that I most definitely saw this as a good angle to lead me to the ultimate conquest.
I felt their pain.
I also was feeling for their bods.

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