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

Authors: Frank Bank,Gibu Twyman

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Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (36 page)

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

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Page 179

But I don't think it was really me.

And I didn't like it.

All we did was stand around exchanging incredibly banal observations about what we were spending and all the labels and how to buy the next Rolls or how to buy the next Ferrari or Mercedes.

The designer vacations or summer homes or boats.

What happened was, there was so much pretentiousness that the real feelings got lost.

That's what was sad.

Maybe that's partly why my first marriage fell apart.

Whatever we could spend, whatever we could grab, whatever we could flaunt or flash aroundit was like getting caught up in a spider's web.

And you kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper until you weren't going to get out of the web. Not and feel alive.

It was a competition.

I didn't want to compete in this manner.

I mean, I still had my big house.

And we were a two-Mercedes house.

We had the 450SL and the big sedan.

The color of the SL was red.

The color of the sedan was chocolate..

For a playtoy I went out and got an old classic Corvette Stingray with two tops.

We had so much status junk.

We had motorcycles.

We bought golf carts for our second house.

Almost got a boat.

My friend, Anita May, talked me out of it.

I was almost the proud owner of a big old Uniflight out at Marina Del Rey.

But then, Anita said her dad had made the statement to her one time: "Show me a boat owner and I'll show you a boat for sale."

That got me just in the nick of time, because I was getting ready to buy a boat for about 50 grand.

This boat was going to be like a 35-footer.

That doesn't quite qualify as a yacht. But a junior one.

Helluva boat, man.

Sleeps eight or 10 people.

Not too shabby.

Yeah, I could have run around like all the other Thurston B. Howells and had Skippers and Little Buddies hopping-to-it all over the thing.

But I got away from that.

Page 180

As all my fellow would-have-been yachters might have put it, "Thaaank Gawwd!"

Didn't ever come close to the airplane thing.

Why should we?

None of the gunk we'd bought up to then meant anything.

None of it mattered an iota.

It was all just for show. To out-accumulate the people next door or down the block. To put a sheen on the surface while everything inside felt like rough-grit sandpaper.

All this was why my first wife said life was so shallow.

(Incidentally, in case you're wondering why I keep referring to her as "my first wife," she asked that I not mention her in this book. So I'm honoring her wishesby not naming her. I admire her and respect her, so this is fine by me.)

Anyway, my first wife said that one day she was gonna write a book about our lives.

It would be called "The Shallow Pond."

It would be a great title.

I hope she writes it and makes a million.

The one excess that worked into anything good at all was our second house.

It was in Rancho Mirage.

That's how I got down there.

By that time, my first marriage had taken a turn for the worse. Becka and I had met and we began living in Rancho.

Why was I drawn to her like magnetic true north on the compass?

Beauty alone?

Absolutely not.

Becka has that in great abundance.

But that isn't it.

It's her warmth.

I mean, Becka is extremely physically captivating. And I remain enormously attracted to her.

But that had nothing to do with it.

Everything had to do with her warmth and the way she would talk to me.

She was like my coach and my team player at the same time. She was like my cheerleader.

From the very first moment we were together, she was going, "You can do it. You can do anything."

She said, "You're kinda like a hero guy. You gotta be that way, Frank. You're always gonna be that way. That's your lot in life."

And her belief in me kept me going.

Page 181

There are times, you know, when you don't believe in yourself.

Even someone like me, who had been striving so hard to develop a healthy ego since adolescenceand succeeding quite often.

But through all the errant ways of ego-stroking, I was missing something huge in my life.

Becka was it.

We just sat on this couch and got so close the first time we talked.

We said we both were the type of people who could give love. But we needed love back.

We had both just split up with our spouses, and we both just babbled on.

We must have talked five, six hours.

We didn't go to bed together that night.

That came a few times later.

We got very solid in this thing.

I mean, when we did dive into bed, it was the most incredible thing for both of us.

I promise you.

I'd never felt anything like it.

It rekindled my youth.

It was torrid.

What it did, it brought me back to that huge sexual appetite of my youth.

Which had sorta been dormant.

And I truly did not know it still existed at that point.

I probably had left my sexual drive back in Haight-Ashbury. It was probably leaning up against that lamppost on the corner I told you about earlier, panting for breath like a whipped puppy. Or over in a corner, passed out in some nameless coffee house.

I'd probably burned that baby out quite a bit on Cadillac with the towels and the togas and the musical partners.

But it had gone kaput in San Francisco.

But Becka woke up everything in me.

She's my soulmate.

She's my best friend.

She's my gin partner.

The gin sheets bearing the scores of our 16-year gamehowever long it gets to bewill be buried with the first one of us who dies.

The current decks of cards we're playing with will be buried in there, too.

We have been through cases and cases and cases of cards.

When we went to Europe one year and traveled all over everywhere, we played in every city.

We'll go to Las Vegas sometimes and we'll say, ''Hey, let's go up in the room and play a couple sheets."

Page 182

Wherever we're at.

We just refer to it as The Gin Game.

I mean, when I hit two million points in the gin game in Kansas City, I was gonna hire a skywriter and put a big ad in the paper.

I was gonna write the score in the sky and say, "I love you, Beeky."

Becka's a good person.

I found my One, without question.

It wasn't all smooth, though.

There were a lot of problems with my children and hers.

Becka and I both had two daughters. So we have four daughters between us.

And I think the problems are healed now.

Originally, my kids probably resented my taking another woman. And hers probably did the same with her about taking me.

In the beginning there were no how-to books on step-parenting, and we kind of trialed-and-errored.

But I think our kids all know that we love them now . . . and always did.

Maybe one of the kids felt they didn't want to call me Dad. Or another one didn't want to call Becka, Mother.

Which is fine.

That's cool.

These were all pretty basic things, the kind of animosity being built up.

And, you know, when we felt that animosity being built up, we figured, well, we've gotta let loose of the whole thing.

Otherwise you build up this big, huge, impenetrable wall.

We had half a wall built, and we finally just kind of let the kids go and have their space for awhile.

But we still stayed with themevery single second of every single dayin our hearts and minds.

I was always my kids' biggest cheerleader.

And, as it turns out, we came out with four really good kids.

Julie's 26. She's gonna become a teacher. She's a graduate of Arizona State. She's my oldest.

Becka's oldest is Michelle. She's working on her doctorate. She already has her Masters in early child development. Oh well, I guess there'll be a doctor in the family after all.

Kelly just graduated as an English major from San Francisco State. She's my baby. She's 21. Kelly's gonna go into showbiz. Not on the front end of the camera. On the back end.

She wants to write. Or possibly be a casting director. Something in that vein. She enjoys the business.

Page 183

Her boyfriend Mike, whom we love like a son-in-law already, is a great kid. They live with each other . . . actually with us, right now. They just moved down to Southern California, where we relocated a few months ago.

Mike was Kelly's best friend in the eighth grade. And they've been best friends ever since.

They love each other, a lot like Beeky and me.

I love it.

It's a good situation.

I thought I'd never allow another guy near my girls.

But it's cool.

Then there's Joanne, who's Becka's youngest. She's 23.

She now works for a Lexus dealer in the San Fernando Valley. She's in the business end.

Julie and Kelly are my kids with my first wife.

Michelle is Becka's kid with a guy named Paul.

And Joanne is Becka's kid with a guy named Elliot.

Whoa.