Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (4 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 18
I am the luckiest man alive.
I am not Lou Gehrig.
I am not dying.
(Well, I guess I am, but, like everyone else, I just don't know when it will happenalthough everyone thought I might when I had that heart attack awhile back. More on that later.)
But I have always seriously felt this way about myself.
I am just . . . so lucky.
I just happened.
I happened to come along at the right time, at the right moment, for the best possible things to happen in the best possible way to take the most joy and happiness from the situations I was placed in.
Whoever's pulling the strings up there, I am one of his favorite puppets.
Whoever's pushing buttons on the time machine always has punched me up at the absolute perfect moment for the perfect things to take place in my life.
Like getting into show business.
Like getting on "Leave It to Beaver."
Classic examples of what I'm talking about.
It was at the end of second grade when I made a friend with a guy named Whitey Haupt.
He's the reason I'm an actor.
He just didn't know it.
The foundation was laid by his mother, actually. The Haupts lived seven houses from us in West Los Angeles.
Her kid was in the movies.
And I thought Mrs. Haupt's kid was kinda cool because he was in "The Babe Ruth Story" with William Bendix. Babe Ruth was a big hero of mine, because he was left-handed like me. So I thought this kid being in "The Babe" was way cool.
You've seen Whitey a million times. He was in a hundred movies. He was that blond kid with the long hair back in the '40s when Bobby Driscoll and Margaret O'Brien were stars.
Whitey wasn't a star.
Whitey was a second-banana kind of guy.
But he always had a couple of important lines in the show. So you always knew who Whitey was.
Anyhow, this one day, Whitey's mother comes over to our house and says, "Whitey has an interview at the Ben Hecht Studios this afternoon, Sylvia."
Ben Hecht is the guy who is the subject of the movie, "Gaily, Gaily"one of the great writers and producers of the first half of the 20th Century.
 
Page 19
So Whitey is going over to his studios and his mom says to Sylvia, "Could you take us over for the interview? It's 2:30 or so."
And my mom says, "I would love to, but what am I gonna do with Frankie?"
My mom is one of the few people to call me Frankie. I am Frankie to her because of Frank Sinatra. My mom loved Frank Sinatra. So did I until I found out what a nasty man he is. My grandfather was named Frank Bank and he was a bootlegger, a really cool bootlegger, although not a very succcessful one, and I'd have rather been named after him, actually, than a jerk-off like Sinatra.
But anyhow, Sylvia says what-to-do-with-Frankie.
And Mrs. Haupt says to my mom, "Just bring Frank along."
So we go.
Over to the Ben Hecht Studios on Cahuenga.
The four of us are sitting in the little reception roomWhitey, Mrs. Haupt, Mom and me. And a guy comes walking through the door toward the office and sorta looks around, then looks at me.
Then he says to me, not my mom, or anyone else, but to me: "What are you doing here?"
And I was kinda scared.
I'll never forget, they have at this time, Wheaties boxes where they put masks of, like, bears and rabbits and chipmunks on the back of the cereal packages.
And I had this mask, this racoon maskyou took a string on each side and put a hole in there and tie the string, and you put the mask on your face.
I sorta had the mask in my lap, but when this guy looks at me, I draw the mask up close to my face, because I was a little bit scared and a little bit shy.
And the guy looks at me some more and goes, "I said, 'What are you doing here today?'"
I didn't answer, but my mom says, "Well, we're here to have Whitey talk to Mr. Hecht."
And the guy points to me and says to my mother, "Bring him back tomorrow. He's not supposed to be here 'til tomorrow."
Tomorrow?
Hey, I was never supposed to be there.
So I said something like, "I'm not an actor."
He looked right back at me and said, "You are now."
And I was.
That's how it happened for so many kids those days in the movies, when you got right down to it. There was no factory somewhere, spitting out child actors and actresses. There weren't tons of schools you sent kids to, to be actors. No insightful institute where they scoured the countryside for talent
 
Page 20
and collected it and groomed it in some careful, calibrated way.
Shoot, they just found us schlumped over on a chair somewhere.
Next thing you knew, you were in the movies.
Like I say. Luck. Timing. It doesn't happen that way so much today, but it did back then.
You were in the neighborhood. They latched onto some neighborhood kids.
Was some tyke in Tallahassee or some prodigy in Pittsburgh more talented than we were?
Could well have been.
Probably was.
But they were putzes out there in the middle of nowhere, halfway across the country. We were putzes who happened to be handy.
We were accidents of birth and geography and the time period of the entertainment industry.
We were in.
You weren't.
So there.
So anyway, we do go back the next day and, sure enough, I get a job in a movie called ''Cargo to Capetown" with Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge.
I got washed overboard in the first scene. That was it for me.
All you saw was me with some water and then the next thing, I wasn't there. I was history.
That was OK.
It took one day for me to make this movie.
I made 150 bucks for that.
It was more'n my old man made in a week.
My mother made me put it in the bank and I was so mad. We always had this sign up over the kitchen sink in our house and it said, "Waste Not, Want Not." Believe me, no family ever lived by those words more than we did.
Mom wouldn't let me have the money. It was like a "Beaver" episode: "Son, you better let us take care of this until you're old enough."
Gee thanks, Ma.
I got nothing. Wait. I remember I got a chance to go over to Ralph's Five and Ten Cents Store and I bought a dollar, maybe two dollars, worth of stuff. Maybe some Hopalong Cassidy junkwhich, by the way, I should have kept. I was a big Hopalong Cassidy fan in those days. I loved Hoppy. Topper was cool, toohis horse.
Anyway, about a week or two later, the phone starts ringing. It's Bill McClain from the Screen Children's Guild, and he wants me to join. Here's the kicker. Joining is free. But he wanted me to have some pictures made.
 
Page 21
Now, my old man, Leonard, didn't exactly throw dollar bills around, as indicated by the sign in the kitchen. We were truly lower-middle class in those days.
But I didn't really put it together, what a strain they were under. Brat that I was, I went, "Ma, I want the pictures!"
Whiney and all that kind of stuff. I was an obnoxious little twerp.
So we went over to this guy, John Reed. I blew 60 bucks of the $150 at the John Reed Photography Studio. Man, that was a car, in those days. We're talking 60 bucks in 1949. Sixty bucks.
I threw my tantrum and I was in the Screen Children's Guild.
But I got my clock cleaned.
I guess I should have listened to Leonard and Sylvia. I didn't and paid a price.
But then, I couldn't have felt too bad. I mean, it turns out ever since that first transaction, I have pretty much made my own decisions in my career.
I can thank Sylvia and Len for allowing me to fall on my face and make my own choices, however stupid they might have been sometimes.
Besides, I guess they appreciated the fact that I have been gainfully employed since I was 8 years old.
I have not had a day off since I was 8. 'Scuse me. Two months off when I had the bypass surgerythe longest I ever had off.
From the beginning I loved work, really. It started with my paper corner, at La Cienega and Cadillac. After school, I was out there in the middle of the street with the
Herald Examiner
and the
LA Mirror.
"Getcha papuh right he-ah."
I was really good. I had my little skirt on with the change in there, ya know? S'great. Get my customers coming home from work, 4 to 6 o'clock.
After that I had Hebrew school.
I was a busy little bee.
Hebrew school was for religious instruction, all that good stuff. Patch it up with God for, you know, overcharging on a newspaper once in awhile. (Ward and June would have gotten me for that one, too, huh? And been right in doing so.)
Anyway, I'm in the Screen Children's Guild along about now and they have this little catalogue. The next thing you know, someone has looked me up in the catalogue and I get a phone call from Columbia Studios.
And I'm on the initial go-round of a series called Ford Theater. I do a show with Will Rogers, Jr., Margeruite Chapman and a guy named John Archer called "Life, Liberty and Orren Dooley."
I spent a week with Will Rogers, Jr., out at "the ranch." It was on Riverside Drive, over by the Burbank Airport. It was called the Columbia Ranch. It was kind of plowed-up ground, out by nowhere.
 
Page 22
But I'm out in the middle of nowhere with Will Rogers, Jr., for a week.
Will Rogers.
He taught me to twirl a rope, he sure did. I was a rope-twirlin' fool. I could get that big loop going. You think Monty Montana was good in the "Rose Parade?" I could do everything Monty Montana could do. I could step into it. I could twirl it around, step out of it.
I could lift it up over my head and then I could getcha with it.
Absolutely. Thanks to Will.
Will was a nice, nice guy. The joke was, ironically, I wound up playing Will Rogers as a kid in the "Will Rogers Story," for Warner Brothers, not that long after. Four years later. I had a line or two. No big deal.
But Will loved his dad. He listened to everything Will Rogers told him to do. He thinks everything he was as an adult was because of his dad. It was a pleasure to be around him.
After that, I had a little hiatus as an actor. The whole thing kicked back up again right at the beginning of 1952. It was Washington's Birthday. I was 10 years old.
That's when I got on the "Jack Benny Radio Program."
Jack Benny had this club called the Beverly Hills Beavers (again with the Beavers, huh? Beavers have always been good to me, in more ways than one).
The Beverly Hills Beavers was a kid's club that Jack Benny sponsored on radio.
What it was, was an imitation of Benny's own show with kids. He thought it would be cute to have kids play the parts of all the regular people on his show, and play it out over the radio.
I wound up getting the part of Don Wilson, the announcer. Could it have been the silhouette? Gee, I wonder.
Don was the fat guy on the Benny show. I was a fat little kid. Even though the show was on radio, and they couldn't see me, Jack Benny was such a perfectionist, he had us completely in character, right down to our appearances.
He had this little Irish kid, Stuffy Singer, who I knew pretty well. Stuffy had a voice like an angel until it changed. He played Dennis Day, because Dennis Day sang tenor on the show, and Stuffy brought that Irish trill.
Rosemary and Patty Ianone were the girls. They played Mary Livingston, Jack's wife. And they had this other kid, a funny little black kid, who did Rochester. He was nervous as all-get-out and the only one of us who didn't sound professional on the air, because he was so scared.
Somewhat understandable, since we did the show in front of a live audience, and live listening audience, coast-to-coast, on Sunday afternoon, on CBS Radio.
Television City was not built yet. The CBS Radio studio was on Sunset

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