Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment (3 page)

The Willard prize sent me across town for the final round at the Loews State, the beautiful old theater on 44
^th
and Broadway in Manhattan, which is still among the most prominent theaters in New York City. The same contest I won in Queens had been held in all the five boroughs of New York, and the winners got to perform in the finals at the Manhattan Loews.

I still remember the night. Just five years old in October of 1934, I arrived at the theater smartly dressed in short pants, blazer, and a little blue pea cap that I wore proudly as I stepped onstage for the big show. When my turn came, I walked out to the microphone and recited the same poem. As a tactical matter, I was a little uncertain about reciting poetry. Other kids were singing and dancing while all I did was recite my poem. But Mom knew better than me. And, once again, I came out on top. Now I was the proud winner of New York’s Loews/MGM Screen and Voice Contest for 1934.

The most extraordinary part—and something of which I was pretty much oblivious—was that two of the contest judges were Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady of the United States, and Fiorello La Guardia, the Mayor of New York City. I don’t recall actually meeting them at the time. The finals were recorded, and it may have been that the First Lady and the Mayor viewed the film privately before making their choice. Anyway, my mother was ecstatic. We now had our first brush with the world beyond Kew Gardens. Eleanor Roosevelt and Mayor LaGuardia were already legendary figures, and I’m still grateful to them both for selecting the kid with nothing more than a navy pea cap and a poem about his mom.

In retrospect, I also find it remarkable that the contest was filmed. Today everything is filmed; at a moment’s notice we turn our telephones into video recorders and store them as electronic files. But this was 1934. The “talkies,” beginning with Al Jolson’s
The Jazz Singer
in 1927, were only seven years old. It would take another five years before the world would know
The Wizard of Oz
or
Gone with the Wind
. To make an actual sound film of the contest meant it was something they took seriously, no doubt as a promotional piece for MGM and Loews. Winning the top prize was also a nice résumé item—one Mother was planning to use in the years ahead as she continued her relentless drive to make me an entertainer.

The personality contest was also important in showing that I had no fear of the stage. Perhaps this experience at such an extremely young age helped remove the specter of stage fright—a condition that haunts many established actors, as well as those who might otherwise have tried their hand at acting. At an early age, speaking in front of a large crowd seemed as natural to me as talking at the dinner table.

I also learned to memorize. I was too young to read, and so the poem was recited by heart. Since then I’ve never had a problem memorizing lines. I recall years later riding on the subway to performances of
I Remember Mama
, reading and memorizing the entire scripts before the train pulled into Penn Station.

Of course, acting on soap operas also requires a good memory. For two years in the 1960s I played a character on
Young Doctor Malone
, and each day we were handed a script which had to be ready the next day. And my role was relatively small. Memory block is fatal to an actor. I’ve seen it end a number of careers, and it’s usually sad—especially if the lapses are associated with aging.

In over seventy-five years onstage, I’ve been lucky to be free of both stage fright and memory lapse, and I suspect that at least a part of that good fortune is the result of standing in front of several thousand people at the Loews Theater and spouting off that poem about Mom. For me, it was the right way to launch my stage career. After all, it was Mom who made it all possible. I hope that as she sat there among all those thousands of people watching her little boy talk about how much he loved her, she knew it was much more than just a recitation for the contest.

*  *  *

Like most kids my age, I loved
Our Gang
. Spanky, Farina, Buckwheat, Pete, the black-eyed bulldog, and the whole gang were taking the entertainment world by storm in the 1930s. This wasn’t the more familiar television show,
The Little Rascals
, which began in 1955, but the film shorts, which years before the advent of television, were among the most popular shows in the country.

Mom decided I should get in on it. As always, she shot right for the top. At the time, Laurel and Hardy were the biggest comedy team in the country, and Mom discovered that Stan Laurel was connected to the producer of
Our Gang
, Hal Roach. So in 1934, when I was six years old, she wrote a letter directly to Stan Laurel, asking if he could help me get an audition for a part. She included some of my modeling pictures.

To our great surprise, Stan responded. Among my most prized mementos is the letter he wrote to my mother in 1934. In it he described me as “a cute little tyke” and at the end, predicted: “There are great things waiting for you.” Seventy-five years later, I still have that letter in a frame in my home. And as it turned out, Stan Laurel was exactly right. Great things were waiting—although there would be many twists and turns along the way.

In the spring of 1935, we lived on the first floor of a two family house in Woodhaven, Queens. We were crowded there—my grandmother, Florence, my Aunt Margie, as well as the four of us. Joyce was just a few months old, and she and I shared a bedroom in the back of the house, my grandmother and aunt had their own rooms, and my parents had to sleep in the living room.

In 1935, my Aunt Anna died, and the funeral was held for three days at our house. My parents put flowers on the front door and brought the casket right into the living room, and Anna was laid out right next to my parents’ bed. I remember the creepy feeling that kept me up at night while Mom and Dad slept soundly right next to the dead body.

In her will, Anna left my grandmother a few thousand dollars, and so Florence decided to use the inheritance to take a trip to California and visit some of her relatives. Since we had just received the letter from Stan Laurel, Mom began thinking about ways to parlay the inheritance into opportunities.

She asked Florence to take me with her. In addition to Stan Laurel’s letter, she had made a more dubious Hollywood connection, one supposedly arranged by a beautician on Jamaica Avenue named Anthony who claimed his brother worked as a makeup artist at MGM and could get me an audition for the
Our Gang
comedy show. Florence, like my father, possessed an inquisitive mind and an adventurous nature, and she immediately agreed, probably without really thinking through what she was getting herself into.

Once the money came, she and I took off on a long trip to see America, visit her relatives in San Francisco, and to try to turn my small accomplishments into a career opportunity. Although only six years old, I had already been modeling for several years, and I was the winner of the Loews/MGM Sound and Screen contest. With these various résumé pieces, my mother was sure that someone would be interested in giving me a job.

I’ll never forget the train ride. We took off from Penn Station and switched to the Pacific Limited in Chicago. With Florence’s inheritance, we went in style. Pork-chop dinners were served every night in a beautiful dining car, resplendent with white linen tablecloths and fancy silverware. I came to see for the first time the vast and beautiful American countryside, standing for hours on the viewing platform of the train’s observation deck as we roared across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains.

We stopped in Arizona, and I recall seeing Native Americans for the first time in my life. They were selling jewelry and other trinkets at the train station. We stopped in the middle of the desert in Needles, California, which they told us was the hottest place in the country. I was really in the spirit of the western motif, and I wore my star-spangled cowboy outfit and ten-gallon hat every single day. We also saw the Grand Canyon, and I can still remember my amazement at this remarkable natural wonder.

And I could not have had a better travel companion. I loved my grandmother, and she was not only full of enthusiasm for the trip, but an encyclopedia of interesting anecdotes about every place we passed. It was a glorious five days on the train to the West Coast.

But the rest of the trip wasn’t so much fun. Florence was a very different woman than Mom. In fact, my grandmother didn’t really approve of pushing children into the entertainment world. She was, moreover, more reserved and uncomfortable with the idea of trying to maneuver her way into some executive’s office. If someone said “no” to my mother, that was just the start of the conversation. She knew how to push, plead, threaten, and manipulate to turn that “no” into a “yes.” But Florence accepted “no” as “no”—and that was a frame of mind ill-suited for the competitive business of motion pictures.

Arriving in Hollywood, Florence took me to Stan Laurel’s office. I still have the note she wrote on a photo taken that day: “We called on Mr. Laurel of Laurel and Hardy.” But, when we got there we were politely brushed away. And Florence didn’t put up much of a fight.

Discouraged, we went to the MGM studios where we thought my winning the MGM sponsored Personality Contest at the Loews would get us in the door. It didn’t. Instead Florence and I ran headfirst into a bunch of disinterested functionaries guarding against the star-seekers who even in 1935 were arriving in Hollywood from all over the country.

My mother didn’t take the news well. She was as unyielding as the studio guards. On the phone at the hotel, I could hear Florence patiently listening as Mom railed on about how she should have just barged in on Hal Roach and Stan Laurel. But Florence couldn’t do that. It was sad. I’ll never forget standing at the gate of MGM Studios with my Grandmother as the guards told us to go away. Even at age six, I could sense a profound conflict in Florence. She didn’t want to be pushy; she didn’t want to cause a scene, but at the same time, she knew she would end up fighting with Mother for failing to get us in.

I have no doubt that had Mom been there, dealing with all those guardians of the inner sanctums, she would have viewed their denials as little more than a minor inconvenience. One way or another Mom would have gotten us inside. In short order, we would have been talking with people who could make things happen. But she was three-thousand miles away, and, instead, Florence and I just stood on the street with the gate closed. For me, it was a poignant moment—and not because we didn’t get in or because I lost out on opportunities—in truth I was too young to fully appreciate all that. It was sad because I hated to see my Grandmother sad and helpless.

But things got even worse. My mother was infuriated with what she regarded as Florence’s timidity, indifference, and even incompetence. Mom was unable to see that others might have difficulty doing things that came so natural to her. The result was a profound rift arising between Mom and Florence. It lasted the rest of their lives, and they never spoke again.

And so, the joy of seeing America from the deck of the Pacific Limited was a little tainted. No doubt, my mother was more to blame for the ensuing conflict. She had no right to expect from others what they couldn’t give. Florence’s inaction was not, as my mother thought, a betrayal and Mom should have known better and let it go.

Florence died of pneumonia in 1940, when I was twelve. It was a terrible blow for me, but even more so for Joyce who was really the apple of her eye. When Joyce and I first heard that Florence had been taken seriously ill, we went running down Queen’s Boulevard to the Kew Gardens Hospital, praying that we would find her okay. But it was too late. They told us Florence had died. Joyce and I sat there in the hospital room unable to stop crying.

In the end, I’ve tried not to be judgmental, either about Grandmother or Mom. Just as Florence couldn’t find a way past those guards, Mom couldn’t find her way to reconciliation. It was Mom’s nature that accounted for her seeming intolerance, but it was that same nature that made her the person who turned two obscure kids from Woodhaven into child stars. And so I’ve made my peace with that aspect of Mom’s character. I also believe that Joyce, who suffered more from Mom’s relentless ambition, has come to terms as well. In the end, I’m forever grateful to my mother for dragging me to all those auditions. By doing so, she gave me this wonderful life. At the same time, I loved Florence dearly and I hope, and believe, that by now they’ve made their own peace together in a far better place.

My mother was born in 1907 in Queens, New York. The daughter of Vincent and Rose Acerno, both Italian immigrants who arrived separately in America in the 1890s, Mom moved with her parents and five younger siblings to Catherine Street in the crowded, vibrant neighborhood of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There they were part of that melting pot of migrants who poured into New York City from every part of the world in the early years of the twentieth century.

There was considerable poverty in the immigrant community. Conditions were certainly an improvement from the circumstances back in Italy that prompted my grandparents and so many millions of their neighbors to brave a voyage to America in search of opportunity. Still, it was a tough life on Catherine Street.

My grandfather, Vincent Acerno, always made a decent living so my mother never experienced hunger or lack of shelter. But she witnessed poverty all around her. I believe that youthful experience in the immigrant communities of the Lower East Side played a large part in shaping her character and sharpening her determination to move out and get ahead. She spoke Italian at home and was very conscious of the prejudice against Italians and Jews that was fairly widespread at the time.