Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (6 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 28
Well, I guess some magic happened. It was only supposed to be one episode, and one espisode only. But, remember, I always said I was in the right place at the right time my whole life.
This was the sixth episode of "Beaver." If I must say so myself, I was really good at the part. And you know what? I enjoyed it.
I went home and my dad asked me, "What was the name of the show you did today?"
"It's called 'Leave It to Beaver,'" I said. "You know what, I think it's going to be a really good show. These people are neat."
My dad goes, "Neat?"
I had never used the word before like that. But there were certain words that started to be associated with "Beaver." I had heard this word, "neat," a dozen times on the set that day. Wally. Beaver. Norman Tokar, the director. A couple of times it was in the script.
"Neat" and "neat-o" became part of the personality of "Leave It to Beaver."
I felt good using the word.
I felt even better about a week later. Usually I would get my paycheck on Wednesday in the mail. The day before my paycheck was to have arrived, I got a phone call from Gomalco Productionsnamed after Gobel and a guy named David P. O'Malley.
Was I available for another "Beaver" next week?
Is there hair on a gorilla?
Of course I was.
I was going to be a regular on the show.
My dad's reaction?
Not exactly neat-o.
My dad wanted me to have a "legitimate" job. To him, I was just hanging around with a bunch of no-account actors. My dad was pretty much a two-feet-on-the-ground kind of guy. My dad was not an idealist and he was not a dreamer.
I'm kind of a dreamer in some respects, but I'm also very pragmatic. When I got this call to do more "Beavers," it also seemed like a sound thing to do.
I went down to do the second show and this time when I walked in, it was like I was a long-lost relative.
"Hiya, Norman, how are you?" I said to Norman Tokar, the director.
"Fine, Frank, how are you?"
"Hey, where's Tony and Jerry?" I asked.
"Oh, they're in school."
I met Kenny on this show. He had been in one or two of the first six episodes. I was in the sixth and seventh.
 
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I also met Tiger Fafara, who played Tooey. And I met Buddy Hart, who played Chester. Judy Hensler was the girl with the pigtails who drove Beaver crazy. She was really obnoxious and good in her role.
Larry Mondello showed up about this time. Buddy Hart left pretty quickly and became one of the greatest stunt men in Hollywood. Then Tiger disappeared.
It was down to me and Kenny as the regulars.
Kenny and I were so thoroughly obnoxious that not only did we not disappear, we were workin' fools. Our entire show turned into Aesop's Fables. The show inevitably started off and the bad guys, Eddie and I, would lead Beaver and Wally astray. Beaver and Wally would find their way after talking to Ward and June. Eddie and I would be foiled and the good guys would win again.
Every week, Kenny and I, dutiful to our roles, totally screwed up Beaver, totally fucked up Wally.
That was our lot in life to booger them up and lead them down the wrong path. To illustrate the wrong way of doing things.
We were absolute idiots, morons.
And the bigger idiots and morons we became, the more we were drawn into the "Beaver" family.
I love these guys all dearly to this day.
To this day, I consider Barbara my second mother. She is the most wonderful, caring, thoughtful, kind, considerate person. She is America's mother.
This woman is more than she's cracked up to be.
Sometimes you'd hear people say, "Oh, she's so phony on the show . . . I mean, June and her pearls, nothing out of place, always perfect and all that."
She was just as she was depicted on the show. Only better.
First of all, she was flat-out gorgeous. Anyone who denies that needs a German Shepherd. Secondly, better than being flat-out gorgeous, she had a heart of gold.
She cared about everybody. She was so courteous it was sickening.
If we ever screwed up or did anything wrong around her, we felt so guilty. It was like doing something bad in front of the Pope. You didn't mess around in front of Barbara. You respected her.
You were just happy she's there.
If Kenny and I were spouting off, with our usual bad verbiage, she would go, "Boys. Boys."
That was it.
That's all she had to say.
If you flubbed a linewell, to tell the truth, we were pretty darn good and didn't flub manyshe was so good to you.
If there was a stranger who came in, who didn't know what he was
 
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doing, Barbara was kind and considerate, and tried to help them. If we had a strange directorwe didn't have manyBarbara tried to help them.
She cared so much about our crew, about her neighbors, about her family, about everyone.
I'm telling you right now, this woman's a friggin' saint.
I love her.
I actually went to school with her son, Glenn. He was a friend of mine in high school. He was a great guy. A year younger than I was. Big tall blond dude. Good athlete. Barbara was married at the time to Glenn Billingsley, who owned a chain of Golden Bull steakhouses. Later on, she married Dr. Mortenson. I know she was crazy about the guy.
We were just kids, but we knew Barbara was always there for us. If we had any problem, we felt like we could actually talk to her just like our real moms.
Hugh was the same way.
I respected Hugh Beaumont a lot. Hugh was a very, very good director. I thought Hugh was a nice, nice man. I never had any run-ins with him.
Now, Jerry and Hugh were not the best of friends. Really, I think there was just a lot of difference in personality between the two. Water and oil. Jerry was young. Hugh was older. Hugh was sterner. And I don't think Jerry liked that. I believe Jerry didn't like somebody who was that strict.
When the script called for friction between father and son, they weren't exactly always acting.
I knew there was no long lost love there between them. But it wasn't open dislike or warfare, either. You didn't do things that way back then too often. It was more just beneath the surface.
But for me, I can honestly say that Hugh was always a good guy. We never sat down and told jokes a lot, but we would be sitting there and Hugh would go, "So Frank, what's goin' on today? How're you doing? School going OK?" Something like that.
We had nice little chats, if not long ones.
Hugh was always a perfect gentleman. He had been in the ministry and he was the perfect counterpart to Barbara on and off the screen. He never used coarse language. Never.
That was reserved for me and Kenny and Pat Curtis. Pat, as I said, was a stand-in for Tony and me. But this was hardly his claim to fame.
Not by a long shot.
Not by two long shots.
He was the guy who was married to Raquel Welch.
We thought he must be some kind of god if he had Raquel.
But basically, it turned out, he was just a good guy. Pat was our friend. When we went to lunch, Pat used to come with us. Pat was older than we
 
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were by, oh, maybe five years.
By now, we're all driving. I'm driving a Corvette, a cool, '58 custom-colored, metallic turquoise little number. Tony was driving the salmon T-Bird that his mom had always driven.
Jerry, of course, wasn't driving, though.
Kenny? Let's go to Kenny.
Do you remember what a Renault-Dauphine looked like? Kenny had a Renault-Dauphine with an antenna coming off the back bumper that stretched over, and he used to tie it down on the front bumper.
And he wore a crash helmet.
Now, if you ever in life could have known a more consummate nerd, it was Kenny.
We loved him. We used to tease him to no end.
Always. I mean, when we used to see him driving onto the lot, we couldn't understand how he could have figured a way to do anything nerdier.
Actually, there was no word, "nerd," at the time. We used to call him putz. Schmuck. Peckerhead. Whatever derogatory words we could.
But we all loved him. Kenny was a good guy. But Kenny could not figure out "cool." Kenny was great, because when Kenny did it, you didn't want to do it.
The crash helmet was hysterical. The Renault. The antenna. If someone had taken dork lessons and graduated at the head of the class, Kenny was it.
Even Jerry bagged on him and Jerry was a little punk kid. Jerry is five or six years younger. All the time we were on the show, Jerry was in grammar school a lot, while we were in high school.
Jerry was a neat kid. He never got a really big head. I think at least some of that had to do with Hugh, even if they didn't get along incredibly well.
But Jerry just naturally wasn't the kind to go ego-crazy.
And Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher. They never put anyone on a pedestal.
"Kids," they would say, "There's no horsing around on the set. If you're gonna play ball, you go outside and play ball. You don't throw the football on the sound stage."
Luckily, he did not say we couldn't go over to Stage 16 and yell, "Up yours" at Brando.
So we didn't disobey a direct order there.
But we had father figures up the ying-yang.
We were flush with father figures and basically we did not putz around too much at the studios.
We did all go out to lunch sometimes, and when we did it was mostly to hit Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake. Now, imagine, here we come into Bob's Big Boy, all of us at once. We didn't think anything of it, but the people at Bob's in Toluca Lake did.
 
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They'd see the whole cast come rumblin' in to order a Big Boy Combination Plate and a lemonade and we'd say, "Make it snappy. We gotta get back to work."
This would be Tony, me, Osmondoh, no, not Beav. He usually did not come. I told you. He was a squirt. Just like Eddie Haskell called him on the show. Sometimes, we'd give Jerry a thrill and let him ride in my Corvette with us and go for burgers. Pat would come with us, too.
We didn't have to go looking for girls. Girls found us. Everywhere. Wherever we went. It wasn't too bad, believe me. Not too bad at all.
Understand something. Arguably speaking, Tony might have been the biggest teenage heartthrobe in the country at the time. It was real close between him and Ricky Nelson.
I always thought Tony was better than Ricky. Ricky seemed a little hung-up or something.
Tony was always a shy guy, but believe me, he had his share. He had a girlfriend for a long time. Not really from the cast.
Mary Ellen Rogers? Well, Cheryl Holdridge, who first played Mary Ellen, turned out getting married real young. She married some poor slob from the backwoods.
His name was Lance Reventlow. He was the heir to Revlon.
He was a race-car driver and he got killed. Guess who inherited it all? Girl named Cheryl.
But Cheryl was a doll. I loved Cheryl. We all did. She was a good kid. And she wasn't stuck up either. She was good people.
Everyone was good people on the show.
As a fellow bad-lad on the show, I asked Kenny Osmond what he thought about the "Leave It to Beaver" years. What he thought of the cast, the way the show developed, our different personalities, pranks we played.
I find it pretty interesting after all these years to get Kenny's take on things.
Here's what he had to say.
About me:
"Frank was an older kid and even back then he was a sharp dresser. God, it seemed like he changed cars like underwear. They were always nice cars. Brand new. Usually a convertible, bright red, some other bright color. Always a nice car. He looked like he was enjoying life. That was impressive.
"I know it was neat having a guy with a driver's license and a fancy convertible to shoot over to Bob's Big Boy.
"I don't know if 'admired' was the word I'd use for him at the time. I was raised considerably different, I guess. He was definitely flashier than my

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