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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 76

Right about now, I can imagine some of you are skittish reading this.

Or appalled.

What could we have been thinking? How could we have gotten away from the wholesome norm we'd all known as a country up through the 1950s?

How could we have left behind the puritanical ethic which had under-girded our culture?

That's just it.

The norm and the ethic and the culture were busy changing. The new wave became a riptide in the early '60s, then swelled to a tsunami throughout that decade and the next.

It engulfed the whole country eventually, but the first breakers in this new wave were definitely sighted in Southern Californiaas with many trends that swept society.

The epicenter of this sexual earthquake was right in my midst.

I rode it outquite willinglywith the rest of my age group.

You can condemn us. And you may be right in doing so.

But it was a different time of lifeboth in our lives and the life of the country.

That's really the crux of the matter.

We didn't really stop to ponder all the nuances of this shift in morality. We were teenagers.

And we hardly were unique in what was to follow. The sexual revolution has lasted into the '90s with no clear sign of letting up.

We just happened to be Minutemen, as it were, in the revolution, firing some of the first shots heard 'round the world. We were at Bunker Hill and we had plenty of willing bunkermates.

When I say ''we," it's safe to say that means the majority of kids who were my age in the '60s.

Some were conscientious objectors in the war on chastity.

Most were not.

Most kids joined up and fled to the frontline with reckless glee.

I'm not excusing us with all this social analysis.

I'm just telling you how it was.

Were the girls who joined in bad girls?

Nah.

I couldn't honestly say so. They were good kids from good families.

They were just looking to have a good time.

I mean, being a hormone-driven adolescent, I used to work hard to get laid in the 10th grade.

That was coming out of the '50s when nice girls just didn't do stuff like

Page 77

that. I used to take out a lot of cheap girls in the hopes that they would go to bed with me.

But by '62, it was the "substantial girls," as we called them, who wound up doing it more than the cheap girls.

That's just how the times changed. Everybody's morals were in a state of flux, and everybody saw that and picked up on it.

My first lieutenant in my own branch of the revolutionary army was my roommate, Billy Byron.

Billy moved in after Marlene split. I was there alone for a couple of months and then Billy needed a place to stay.

And I have to say, it worked out great because Billy the Kid, as we called him, was one truly amazing butt bandit.

Billy was one good-looking dude.

He made Richard Gere look like a monkey.

Every chick in the world loved Billy.

Billy had the same general type of look as Jan-Michael Vincent, only he was much better-looking than Jan-Michael Vincent. Blond hair, almost a Patrick Swayze look, but better-looking than Patrick Swayze, too. Great build. A personality so out-going.

"Hey-y-y-y, girls, hey-y-y, man, party's over here. Come on over for a towel party,"

Wherever we went, Billy just reeled 'em in like Mark Trail snatching up boatloads of fish.

These chicks would wind up riding back to the apartment with us. And we gotta do it quick because these other chicks would come knocking on the door. It was like, take a number. They'd come over from West L.A. They'd come from Gazarri's on Sunset. The Whiskey-a-Go-Go. They'd drop by Billy and Frank's apartment.

When they got there, a towel party was often in progress.

A towel party went like this: You walk in and there's a towel sitting by the front door with a note attached saying, "Here's yours. Meet us in the other room."

You'd take your clothes off, put on a towel and go in the other room. The towel comes off and you put it down on the floor. We had a couple hundred bucks in the deposit for the apartment, so we didn't want to mess it up too bad, either the beds or the carpet. So the towel was just a house rule.

Billy and I started out in a one-bedroom apartment with him sleeping on the couch.

But traffic became so heavy we needed further accommodations. We switched to a three-bedroom unit.

It wasn't just total, wall-to-wall sex there.

Page 78

We did a lot of cooking. Lots of gourmet meals.

We played lots of poker. There was always a card game in the dining-room-kitchen area while the other festivities went on in the bedrooms.

But sex set the undertone and overtones to each day.

We'd be playing cards, someone would want to change partners, come out and drag you out of a game. You'd excuse yourself, join your partner in the bedroom.

Come back out.

"Now where were we?

"Whose deal?

"Let's play cards."

You could say we took advantage of the girls who came and went at Cadillac.

I would say you were wrong.

We cooked meals. Billy and I were actually pretty decent gourmet cooks.

We'd have big feasts together. Sit and talk and eat and shoot the bull.

It's just that sex was always the dessert.

The girls weren't coerced. They weren't hoodwinked. Weren't sweet-talked or tricked into bed.

They were there fully aware of what they were doing.

They were there because they wanted to be.

Again, it was a time of life for them, just as it was for me and the rest of the country

Girls just wanted to have fun.

And they did.

If I had to capsulize everything in one sentence, I'd say: We never left any of these girls not feeling like they haven't had a good time.

I guess it sounds arrogant, speaking of these hundreds of sex partners. But they weren't "conquests" to me. I always liked to think that I left all those girls a little bit happier for the experience.

That may sound immodest. Self-serving. Just plain selfish or insensitive or ignorant. And it definitely wouldn't fly in today's politically correct environment.

But that's how I felt. I'm not a malicious guy. I don't like malicious people. I think this world is such a great place and that if we don't take advantage of how good it can be, we can only blame ourselves.

I was simply dedicated to getting my share sexually. Mine and three or four other guys' shares.

Just like a Chicago election, I started voting early and often in throwing my support to the coming sexual revolution.

I broke my first cherry just before I was 13. I was 12 years and 10 months old. It was February of 1955.

Page 79

I was at a party, a junior-high school party house, and I was making out with this girl on the couch. She was in my class. She was 12 also, maybe 13. Her name was Diane. Diane was outstanding. Very lean. No breasts to of. I guess they were just forming. I don't know if they ever did get big. But she was awfully cute and slender and tight in all kinds of good places.

We got to petting heavily at this party, you knowon top of each other. She lifted her dress up and I opened my pants. I got, for a little kid, this great erection. And before you knew it, I got snagged on something.

She like wheeled on top of me and pushed and the next thing you know, we are doing it.

It was dark at this party and the whole scene was pretty scary, with a lot of people in the room. There were other people making out, but I don't think anyone else was doing it in the room at the time.

The only light you could see was the light on the phonograph. It was a 33 1/3. A Webcore, I think.

The music was Nat King Cole:

"Darling, j' vous aime beaucoup."

"Je ne c'est pas what to do."

"You've stolen my heart . . . night time too."

She kept calling me, "Frankie, Frankie."

I don't know what else she said. I was really trying to concentrate on what I was doing.

I wasn't too scared or anything when she called me and said, "I didn't get my period."

Suddenly, I'm thinking, here comes the bride. I mean, I was 12 years old, man. I didn't exactly sleep a heck of a lot. This was only six months after I decided I wanted to be cool, but I didn't want to be quite that cool, that I was gonna be a dad. OK?

Actually, I panicked.

I was real a-scared.

I was worried about going to "Juvie," as we used to call it. Juvenile Hall. I was telling myself, "Oh my God, I could go to Juvie." This was in the days of "Blackboard Jungle" and movies like that. I'm going, "My God, what did I do?"

I'm a stupid little kid. What did I know?

It was more than a week between the time she told me she didn't get her period and when we found out she wasn't pregnant. I felt bad because this was not a cheap girl and this was not a fast girl. I don't know how many of her girlfriends she told about this. I told no one.

I just told God. I said, "God, I'll never do it again if she's not pregnant."

And then after that, it was, "Sorry, God, I was just kidding about that."

Page 80

The next time I had sex it was six months later, with a girl who was in the ninth grade.

I didn't get snagged like the first time. It didn't "just happen."

I did it to her this time, and I was really proud of it.

It was in her bedroom. My pants were offa me. I had a shirt on and I remember it was open, but my pants were off, my underpants were off, her pants were off, her underpants were off. I mighta had socks on.

This girl was Paulette.

Paulette was all-right looking. She had dusty blonde, curly hair. Real nice chest. Kind of medium-to-big butt, but she wasn't fat at all. She didn't shave her legs real good. I noticed a little stubble.

The thing with Paulette started out one night at the Stadium Theater.

Everyone made out at the Stadium in the balcony. There were times I could go to the Stadium with a couple of guys, and there were a couple of girls there and we would pair off.

So I was at the Stadium this one night and hooked up with Paulette.

Well, this one night, while we were making out in the balcony at the Stadium, I put my hand under her blouse and undid her bra and felt her breasts.

And I went, "Oh, my God, I went to first base by the end of the first movie."

It was a double feature.

I think "Giant" was showing.

Then I made a date to meet her at the Stadium the next Friday. The farther up in the balcony, the easier it was to do some serious necking. There wasn't anyone looking over your shoulder. We were in the very back row. I almost felt secure enoughand reckless enoughthat I could pull her down and try and screw up there, you know? But I wasn't really about to try that because a lot of kids in my class were there. Not that it wouldn't have been cool if I did.

I'd have been a pretty big hero if I'd pulled it off.

She wore a three-hook bra, I remember that. A three-hooker was a tough one. But I always used the "one-hand pinch" to release them, and I felt pretty sure of myself with the pinch. You needed to have a good thumb to roll the bottom under while at the same time pinching.

I must have been doing all right in her eyes, anyway.

After the second movie, she told me that her parents weren't home. I remember waiting outside, watching her flash the porchlight, which meant that she'd put her brother to sleep.

I went inside, right into her bedroom, and we started making out.

The radio was turned to "Lucky Lager Dance Time." Lucky Lager was a beer and they were the sponsor to this radio show we used to listen to.

BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life

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