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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 49
Southern California. This was 1950.
My brother was a pipe dreamer. His intentions were good, but he wasn't practical. He dreamt of everything being Utopian. My brother was a terrific writer. He wrote this one show called "The Preacher," which made them revive "Elmer Gantry."
It was voted the best play of 1958 in Beverly Hills.
Doug owned a theater called the Beverly Hills Playhouse, and he had a lot of big stars who actually did small theater in Los Angeles in those days.
Leonard Nimoy was always hanging around, and Marvin Kaplan was one of Doug's best buddies. I mean, these guys had a bunch called "The Group." The Group used to meet over on Sunset at this little hamburger stand named The Hamburger Hamlet.
In those days it was a little hash house on Sunset, near Doheny, one block up from the current Whiskey-a-Go-Go.
The cook was a guy named Harry Lewis. The waitress was a lady named Marilyn Lewis. You might know her now as Cardinale, the designer. Because that's what she wound up doing.
Harry and Marilyn Lewis started up the chain of Hamburger Hamlets that I knew when I was growing up and all through my young adult days. Hamburger Hamlet was probably the best coffee shop in Southern California. McDonald's started in the '50s and the Hamlets started in the '40s, and the Hamlets ruled, with the best burgers anywhere in the world.
Anyhow, my brother's buddies, Nimoy, Peter Leedsone of the best character actors in Hollywooda guy named Stanley Adams and a guy named Nick Adams, who played Johnny Yuma on the TV western series, "The Rebel" . . . these guys all met with my brother, Doug, in The Group.
Leonard Nimoy was probably the least talented of those guys, but "Star Trek" and Spock turned him into the biggest star. Although I think Marvin Kaplan is still one of the greatest character actors I've ever seen. I loved him. He played Topcat in the cartoon. He was Meek Millie's boyfriend.
Every time you saw a nebbish in the movies back then it was Marvin Kaplan. He was a better nebbish than Arnold Stang.
Through all this, my brother was writing and acting. My dad always said, "Doug, when you gonna get a job?"
Maybe this fell back to the dad who didn't work for seven years. He sees this kid graduate with honors from USC and not go get "gainful employment." He's just hanging out with a bunch of shiftless actors.
My brother was in a ton of movies. A ton of movies. Most of them were bit parts, but he was in them all the same.
I betcha Doug had a hundred movie credits, all like two-day wonders. Couple lines here, couple lines there. Nothing big, but he was in a lotta movies just the same.
 
Page 50
One of my brother's real close buddies was Ira.
Only you knew him by the name of Jeff Chandler, one of the major leading men of the '40s and '50s.
All I knew was, he was Ira.
Ira used to come over to our house. He was this big galloot with an Adam's apple that stuck way out.
I remember I smarted off to him once. I don't remember what I saidsome wise-ass thing. He grabbed me by the neck and he goes, "Your little brother's quite a guy."
But his voice was saying "irritating little schmuck." And while he's talking nice, he's holding me real tight in these hands like a vise and he's moving my head back and forth.
When he left, I said, "Doug, I don't like that guy."
He was a good-looking stud, Ira, was. Another guy who died for no reason at all. They killed him during an operation in Culver City. He was having a slam-dunk operation, a nothing deal. Bled to death on the table.
Big scandal.
I didn't hate him anymore. I felt sorry for him.
Anyway, he was Ira, one of my brother's best buddies, and he turned out to be Jeff Chandler.
My brother always knew people and he did have a glimmer of hope for his future. Some of the films he was in were:
"The Red Ball Express" (with Ira).
"Purple Heart Diaries" (with a guy we knew as Bernie Schwartz at the time, whom the world later knew as Tony Curtisanother guy who was in and out of The Group.
"Frogmen" and "The Good Humor Man" with Jack Carson.
Heck, Doug was in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
He was just a punk in it. He got a day's work out of it because his buddies were doing some work on the film.
My brother kept writing at the same time. And him and his buddy, Jay something-or-other, decided, "We're going to go out on a limb."
They got enough scratch together to open up this Beverly Hills Playhouse over on Robertson. This was sort of a job, but it wasn't really a job because it was just kind of drifting.
As usual, it was good old Mom who came to the rescue again.
My mother got on the horn and started selling theater parties. She kept the Beverly Hills Playhouse going. She had these parties for all these groups coming through, and the place was always full.
Then, in the late '50s, my dad went out of business with the grocery. Same deal. Mom is the U.S. Cavalry again. In she comes, riding at the full gallop to save the day.
 
Page 51
Sylvia got on the phone again. She picked up the phone book and said, "OK, we're gonna start another business. This time it's the meat business."
My mom started the meat business out of the back of our house. My dad would go down and get the meat.
They would cut it up on the washer and dryer.
I would wrap it on the kitchen table and deliver it in the afternoon.
Sylvia got the biggest people in Hollywood as customers. I was a movie star and I was delivering meat in the afternoon. It was 1958 and '59. I'm a regular on "Leave It to Beaver."
And I'm walking up to Edward G. Robinson's house with his meat.
I'm walking up to Jack Benny's house with his meat.
They all knew I was in the movies and on TV. But it was cool. It's just the way things were back then. Movie stars were more regular people. So it was only natural that I would be walking up their driveway with a load of meat and I'd be a guy they'd flip on the television that night and see on a hit TV series.
"Oh, look, there's Leonard and Sylvia's kid. Didn't he deliver nice meat today?"
That was their reaction, rather than: What in God's name is he doing soiling his delicate hands with common labor when he's a movie star?
It was only natural, you'd pitch in on the family business. Almost all the big stars just seemed more like normal, flesh-and-blood people.
I don't know how many times you'd go to a restaurant in the '50s and see a movie star and it was no big deal. "Oh look, there's Jack Lemmon." Go back to eating. Let them eat. No big commotion.
We'd go to a place called Wil Wright's on Saturday night for ice cream sodas and constantly see Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart. We never said a word to these guys.
Why can't we do this now? What has changed? I don't know. People are weird, I guess.
People weren't so much into idol-worshipping, it didn't seem to me, back then. We'd respect them. We'd leave them alone. I mean, keep in mind, I lived in West LA, where a lot of stars did live. They'd go to the market themselves, instead of sending the servants or whatever. A guy like Gary Cooper, maybe, had to hide a little. If you were Dick Clark, you hit the market yourself.
If you had a lot of confidence in yourself, you'd be a high visibility person.
To this day I don't know how many times I ran into Walter Matthau in West Los Angeles. A million times maybe. He doesn't hide from anybody. He leads his life the way he wants. He's a bright man, a really cool old guy. He used to live at the race track and I'd see him there when I went with my old
 
Page 52
man. Him and Jack Klugman. They were always at the races.
And speaking of off to the races, the meat business was doing pretty well with Mom and Dad busting their humps and me dropping deliveries all over town.
But Sylvia was far from satisfied. I told you she was a go-getter.
She was very creative. And when I was 5 or 6, I used to wonder why we didn't have a Christmas tree like you'd see on the lots all up and down Wilshire Boulevard.
I was a rotten little putz. "Wah! Why can't we have a Christmas tree?" I whined.
Well my mother always felt bad about that. All of a sudden she gets the bright idea. God's truth, Sylvia Bank, my mother, invented Chanukah decorations.
All Chanukah decorations.
At least any of them you ever saw out on the West Coast.
I mean, she didn't invent the dreidelthis toy top with the Hebrew letters on each of the four sides, which kids spin at Chanukah. That was invented thousands of years ago.
But Sylvia invented the folding dreidel, the folding starall of the paper ornaments, all the paper streamers, the banners with the letters spelling out "Happy Chanukah," the electric menorah.
She invented all of this to keep me quiet.
Actually, some of it was to keep me happy because I was spoiled and I felt bad being a Jew in the middle of all this Christmas stuff. I sat there and watched her. I watched my mother with her scissors, take a great big white Christmas bell that she bought at Woolworth's and cut it into a folding Jewish star.
Sylvia started a company called Jewish Holiday Novelties, at our house. In those days there had been none of this stuff. My mother went to all the rabbis in Los Angeles and all the synagogues and all the gift shops, and they started selling.
Boy, they caught on big time.
We were living in the Fairfax area, which was the big Jewish district at the time. Still is, in fact. Within two years, our house and our garage was filled to the rafters with boxes of my mother's stuff.
Maybe it was watching my mother's motivation, the strong desire she had to accomplish and succeed at things, that got me to teach myself to read and do addition and subtraction along about the time I was 4 years old.
I learned to read and do math off the old Racing Form.
Maybe I was just bored. I was, in effect, an only child at the time. My brother had gone away to World War II, then come back, then moved out. He came over for dinner maybe twice a week and did his laundry.
 
Page 53
That was about it, because he was out with his pals and girl friends.
So what did I do with no television and time on my hands? I was kind of an introverted kid at the time. I wasn't really a loner. I had a few playmates in the neighborhood. But I was comfortable being by myself at that stage of my life, I guess.
Anyway, I would sit home and listen to the radio in the afternoon. Instead of listening to some other weird stuff, I'd listen to the race re-creations. From 4 to 5 o'clock, they'd run the races from Hollywood Park or Santa Anita or Del Mar.
I liked some of the names, like Citation and Coal Town. I got fascinated by this stuff. Then my dad said if I picked up the Los Angeles Examiner, I could see where they had all the horses rated. And he sort of helped me sound out the words. An "a", a "b", a "c."
I was born in '42 and this was '46 when we started with the words. And now I'm learning to read. But then came the numbers, because I was talking about prices. My dad wasn't a teacher, but he explained to me about a zero and a 10 and the way they worked.
Then I would put Tinkertoys together. I would put three together over here and three together over there, and I'd say, "Mom, if I have this and I put these Tinkertoys there and those Tinkertoys here and push them together, is it six Tinkertoys?"
And she'd go, "Yeah, honey."
And she'd walk away, not knowing that I was learning to add and subtract and multiply and divide. This was before school for me. I just sort of learned by accident. I figured it out for myselfwith a little help. Because I had time on my hands.
Time?
Did I tell you I took the time, when I was in the second or third grade, to read the entire encyclopedia?
That's right.
I did.
I said there wasn't a whole heck of a lot to do in my neighborhood. Maybe there wasn't anything to do.
Because I read all 20 volumes of the "World Book Encyclopedia" when I was 7 years old.
Every word, A to Z.
It took me about three months.
I was kind of a knowledge junkie. I learned all these crazy things.
Here's the thing. I learned a bunch of garbage that didn't mean anything. I mean, I knew that the markets closed on Catalina Island at 6 o'clock. I knew that kangaroos sat on their tails.
I mean, how do you apply these things to regular life? But I dug it. I
BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
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