Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (40 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 199
Chuck got there and he'd see Secret Service guys. Big guys with 18-inch collars, you know?
And you could see 'em lurkin' in the bushes.
And Kennedy used to arrive by helicopter a lot.
And Chuck would wait outside two, three hours while Marilyn and Jack were in there.
All right, I guess you can say Chuck never actually saw what Marilyn and Jack were doing in there.
But I guess we can safely assume they weren't talking the balance-of-trade deficit and normalization of Sino-Soviet relations.
You'd have to assume it was state-of-their-union addresses. Or undresses. Wouldn't you?
On a somewhat eerie note, because of the whole car-parking thing, I think we figured out that the last person Marilyn ever spoke to quite possibly was Joe DiMaggio, Jr.
Joe DiMaggio, Jr., used to hang out at Romanoff's.
He wasn't one of my buddies. He was buddies with a couple guys I knew there.
But I do remember that when she died in August of '62the day after that, my friend told me, "Joe Jr., was talking to Marilyn last night."
I said, "Really, what time?"
He says, "Around 9 o'clock at night."
He said, "She died around 10 or 11, didn't she?"
I said, "Yeah."
He said, "Wow. Wow."
But anyway, I have no admiration for Jack Kennedy.
Not just the Marilyn thing.
Obviously I've been a womanizer myself, so I can't point any fingers.
But I still just think, looking at his entire life, he was one of the most ruthless men of the 20th Century.
Of the presidents I look up to, my hero of the last 30 years has to be Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan is not the smartest man who ever lived, and he'll be the first one to tell you that.
But he was just like The Gipper.
He tried.
He constantly tried.
And every time he truly wanted to do the right thing.
His heart was in the right place.
I always felt that.
So whatever he did, I voted for him.
He was my leader at the Screen Actors Guild.
 
Page 200
He was the president of the guild and he got me new contracts and he did a great job.
He was my governor for two terms. He was the best governor California ever had.
Because he left the state with no debt. The state had grown tremendouslyyou'd never seen such growth in your life. And we became a major force in the world economy while Ronald Reagan was governor.
Not the Browns.
Ronald Reagan.
Not when George Murphy was senator.
Ronald Reagan was the man.
Ronald Reagan was not just an actor.
He was way beyond that.
He was a man.
By and large actors have trouble with that one.
Being sound men.
Or sound women.
They are insecure.
They want everyone to like them.
I'll give you a good test.
You can walk up to an actoran up-and-coming young actorand you can go, "Heyyy, Joe, how are you? Remember, we met at a party over at Fox?
"And da-da, da-da, da-da."
And you know what he's gonna say?
"Yeah, how are you?"
Even when he doesn't know you from a box of rocks.
Ninety times out of a hundred that'll be his reaction.
Some totally surface response.
Because of the insecurity.
Then if you turn out to be a schmuck, he's gonna come back at you and shine you off.
But by and large his first comeback will be some tentative B.S. because of that insecurity.
They want to be loved.
That goes for all of us, of course.
It's human nature.
But for people in the arts, its magnified a millionfold.
You are changing your personality. You are becoming somebody different every week.
Unless you're me, who was Lumpy, and then I was Lumpy every week.
But I had done so many shows around the Universal lot, I also had been a different guy at times.
 
Page 201
So if you prepare for that, usually you were that different guy the night before you go to the studio, and you try and wake up as that character.
And I would try all the way to the studio to get into my role, because I know I'm gonna spend a lot of time as that character. So you want to become that person.
In doing this repeatedly, it becomes fairly easy to forget who you really are.
If you ever knew.
Why do you think a lot of these people turn to drugs?
Turn to suicide?
Turn to alcohol?
Because it can just be a terrible pressure as an actor.
I mean, I saw some of the leading child actors that were my contemporaries become drug addicts.
One girl who was a big, famous star, turned to prostitution because she couldn't get a job.
These other guys wound up on heroin.
Their lives were so jacked up.
After they were a star . . . once they got cancelled . . . they never got that next big vehicle.
For child actors, I think it's so much tougher than people who got into the profession later.
As adults, we spend our entire lives dealing with rejection.
It's persistence in overcoming this which makes a lot of people successful.
But if you're starting off with major rejection that early, it's just more of a mountain to climb.
But not every actor goes into the toilet.
There are lots of healthy ones.
They're normal peopleor as normal as any of us is likely to get.
How do some of them stay away from drugs and other abuses?
Maybe they find more valuable things in their lives than acting.
That's the way I feel about it.
Maybe you find love.
Maybe you can find books.
Other arts.
Painting.
Singing.
Some people find religion, OK?
I always tell people I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I truly believe that.
I've haven't just had my time.
I've been having my time, forever. I haven't had great periods. I've had one hell of a great life.
 
Page 202
I mean, I wound up making more money than I ever dreamed I could possibly make, being more successful at a job than I ever dreamed I could possibly be.
And guess what, that job wasn't being Lumpy.
Or any other make-believe part.
That job was the self-satisfaction of becoming a great financial analyst.
The other things that saved me were my families.
Both the one I have now and the one I had growing up.
I can't emphasize enough how great Leonard and Sylvia were.
I had two of the greatest parents anyone could ever wish for.
They were not rich.
They were not the smartest people.
They had all heart.
They loved me incessantly.
I told you my dad was my best friend. And that we were sports junkies.
Well, as shallow as that may seem, our shared love of sports just seemed to make our relationship so easy to take.
It smoothed out a lot of rough places.
It gave us common ground.
Even though, yes, it was just a bunch of people running around in funny-looking clothes engaged in a basically meaningless pursuit, when placed on a world scale of any real significance, it still gave Dad and I bond.
And that bond meant everything.
It wasn't built on sports alone.
Hell, no.
There was lots of stuff about acting right and working hard and trying to be a decent person and all that kind of thing.
But sports just gave us a peace between us.
All we ever did was talk about baseball and football and basketball.
I'll never forget one night, we were listening to the Lakers on the radio.
It was during a Passover seder.
When Pops Selvy missed this really famous shot, Dad spilled the wine on the table.
We were so shaken.
That was the shot heard round the worldor what passed for it in our own little corner at the time.
Selvy, in the last second of the seventh game of the NBA finals against the Boston Celtics, throws a ball up.
It's the winning shot.
It's in the basket.
It rims the basket.
It comes back out.
 
Page 203
It was in and out, and it cost the Lakers their first world championship in 1962.
So Leonard the Sport spills the wine.
It's this traditional seder and Leonard says, ''Son of a bitch." Leonard was livid.
I was livid.
And then my mother's going, "Len. It's Passover."
He goes, "Yeah, I know it's Passover. But the son-of-a-bitch missed that shot."
And my mom goes, "Len, don't get your balls in an uproar."
My mom always told my dad that whenever he blew his stack.
And my dad goes, "Yeah, Sylvia. But my balls need to be in an uproar. The son-of-a-bitch missed the shot."
And the thing is, I understood.
I was on a perfect wavelength. With both of them.
It was a sacred moment, the seder.
I got that point.
Mom was right in getting the message across.
But, hey, the son-of-a-bitch did miss the shot.
And I understood that, too.
I'm sittin' there pretty much in total agreement with my dad on the matter.
How often do you get that growing up.
Yeah, Dad.
Right on, brother-man.
Hey, we had a right to be hacked.
Even at a seder.
Hell, Moses would have spilled the wine.
Abraham would have been upset, too.
I believe God understands this.
And I mean, we had plenty of opportunity to be pretty torqued at the local talent on our sports teams at the time.
We were big Ram fans, too.
The Rams.
My cousin, Sid Gillman, was the coach.
He was married to Bailey Bank. She was a cousin of mine. Actually, she was my father's cousin, but that made me a second or third or whatever cousin.
Close enough kin to inject additional suffering into the Rams picture.
The last fond remembrance of the Rams I have was the championship game of 1950 against the Cleveland Browns.
With Tommy Fears and Elroy Hirsch at the ends, Bob Waterfield and

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