Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment (5 page)

Originally Reinhardt intended to give the part of Isaac to my friend, Sidney Lumet. But, Sidney had a problem with the role, through no fault of his own. There comes a climactic moment in the play when Abraham takes his son, Isaac, to the top of a mountain, places him on an altar, and raises his hand to kill him. At that point, Isaac cries out in the voice of a frightened child: “Father!” According to Weisgal, Max Reinhardt rehearsed Sidney “for days on that single word.” But, Sidney, a few years older than me, was maturing, and during the course of the rehearsals his voice started changing, making it impossible for him to sound like a child. In the end it worked out well for both of us. I got to play Isaac, and Sidney, who like many people in the play had been recruited from the prestigious Jewish Theatre on Second Avenue and Second Street, stepped into a bigger role as the young boy to whom the Biblical story is told by the Rabbi.

My audition for Max Reinhardt was really strange. Reinhardt couldn’t speak English so he had his assistant, Norman Von Mendelssohn, interpret everything. But Von Mendelssohn also had to tell me what to say because I still couldn’t read very well. So there we were with Von Mendelssohn feeding me the lines in English so that I would say them, and then Max Reinhardt would listen to it in a language he didn’t understand and then give instructions in German, which Von Mendelssohn would translate for me.

But the worst for me was the makeup. Every night, Mom would cover my whole body with greasy paint so that I looked brown. It would take twenty-five minutes while I stood on a chair in the dressing room. The next day at school back in Queens, the kids would make fun of me because of the tell-tale smudges of makeup left over from the previous night’s performance. This happened every day, and I came to dread going to school after the show.

The sets, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, were spectacular. They cost a half million dollars, an astronomical sum in those days. In fact, they were so elaborate that the
New York Times
wrote a lengthy review devoted just to the set production. Bel Geddes literally built a mountain on the stage that went winding up to heaven with a synagogue at the base.

On opening night, construction was still in progress. Max Reinhardt’s son, Gottfried, recalled his arrival at the theater that afternoon. “My primary objective,” he recalled, “was the first workable toilet.” But Bel Geddes had ripped out all the bathrooms. So when nature called, patrons had to run next door to the Hotel New Yorker.

Nothing seemed ready for curtain call. As Gottfried Reinhardt surveyed the disastrous-looking scene of 350 actors scurrying about with no apparent rhyme or reason, and the unfinished construction of these massive and intricate sets, an exasperated Meyer Weisgal was heard to mutter: “Tonight the Jews
need
a miracle!”

According to Gottfried, they got it. He described three acts of “extraordinary power and poetry, moving and uplifting.” He believed it to be a great cultural moment for the Jewish people, as well as for all suffering people throughout the world. “The Jewish destiny was captured to its very core,” Reinhardt exclaimed, “and, yet, the overall effect was universal.” And the critics agreed.

I was, of course, too young to attend the production party honoring Max Reinhardt that night at the Waldorf Astoria. Mayor La Guardia was among the dignitaries, but the highlight was a brief tribute from Albert Einstein, a great supporter of the efforts of Jews fleeing persecution in Europe—just as he had done several years earlier. It is both thrilling and humbling to think that Albert Einstein watched me go up that mountain and cry out, “Father!” in the retelling of the great Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.

The Eternal Road
was an extraordinary show that captured the fear of what was happening in Europe—and what was yet to come. It was specifically about the Jewish people, but its message against tyranny and racism was, as Gottfried wrote, universal. I played a very small role in that wondrous production, but it’s one I’ll never forget.

On the third floor of our Victorian house in Kew Gardens, Queens, I built my own menagerie. In retrospect, my life has always been connected in some way to animals. I’ve been watching, riding, and betting on horses for seventy-five years. Over the past decade, I’ve represented Natural Balance dog food, both as a spokesman and part owner. But, it was back in the days of my Queens menagerie that this infatuation with animals, and not just the cute ones, really took off.

I’m not sure how it began, but by the time I was seven years old, my aunt Marjorie was taking me all over Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens to sample the different pet shops. And every week, I would get a different pet to add to the menagerie. I bought chameleons, snakes, horn toads, even pet rats.

One favorite was my alligator, Oscar. In those days, you could buy alligators at a pet shop. Today it’s against the law, but at the time the pet shops had big aquariums filled with baby alligators. They cost a dollar each. One day, Aunt Marjorie brought me to a pet store at 121
^st
Street and Jamaica Avenue in Queens, and I bought Oscar. He was about a foot long, and he ate raw hamburger meat twice a day.

In time, Oscar began growing. Finally, he got so big he couldn’t fit in the aquarium anymore, so I put him in the bathtub. For a month nobody could take a bath. That’s when my Grandmother started yelling at me: “Get that alligator out of the bathtub.” I didn’t know what to do, so I brought him to the Central Park Zoo. The people at the zoo were very nice. They said I could come and visit whenever I wanted. For a while I used to go back and look at Oscar in the cage where he sat in a pool with all the other alligators and giant turtles. I guess he could still be there because alligators live a very long time, sometimes up to seventy years. But more likely Oscar has gone to his reward in animal heaven.

There was also a reptile show at Grand Central Station. It was located in a building above the tracks and run by a man named Dr. Ditmars. He was famous for his trips to Africa and other exotic locales where he captured various species of snakes and other reptiles, all of which he related in his best-selling books.

My Aunt Marjorie brought me to the show and introduced me to Dr. Ditmar. He asked if I’d like to have a snake. I said, “Sure.” He opened a burlap bag and took this big black snake—called a milk snake even though it’s black—and stuffed it in the sack. I still recall him handing it to me and nonchalantly saying: “Here you are, son.”

We got on the subway, with me holding the snake in the burlap bag. When we arrived home, my father was fast asleep in his bed. That’s when I got a brilliant idea on how to give someone a heart attack. I took the snake out of the bag, held it up in the air and yelled out: “Dad, Dad, look what I got!” The poor guy opened his eyes out of a fast sleep and saw this big black snake right in front of his head. He jumped out of bed and screamed. I’ll never forget the look on his face. Imagine opening your eyes and having a black snake staring straight back at you. Needless to say, Dad wasn’t too pleased with me for a few days.

Along with the alligator, chameleons, and snakes, I had rabbits, and even a big goat, that I kept in the backyard. But I also loved the more traditional pets. My first dog, Skippy, was a black and white cocker spaniel. My mother bought him for me when I was six years old. Later we added a cat, Beauty, and, while cats and dogs are supposed to be natural adversaries, these two became fast friends. In fact, when Skippy died, it seemed to affect Beauty more than anyone. Beauty must have found Skippy first after he died because I still remember walking into the backyard and seeing Beauty just sitting there motionless in front of Skippy as if protecting the dog’s corpse from desecration. There was no doubt in my mind that Beauty was mourning the loss of a good friend.

If the various animals in the menagerie were my best friends in the animal kingdom, my closest friend growing up among the humans was my grandfather—Mom’s dad, Vincent Acerno. Later he would be my best man when I married in 1954, and through the years he influenced me, for good or bad, as much or more than anyone in my life.

My grandfather was a bookie. I know that sounds terrible, but until 1941, horse betting was legal in the United States, and bookmaking was a legitimate, if not a wholly respectable, profession. Many argue that the most serious criminal involvement in horse-racing, including mob-controlled betting, really exploded only after bookmaking was criminalized in 1941. Whether that justifies the bookmaking profession is a complicated question—one I’ll leave for others to decide. What I do know is that for over forty years, my grandfather got up every morning and headed to the racetrack just like any other man going to a job to support his family.

Vincent was born in Potenza, Italy, in 1881. Set at the top of the Italian boot, Potenza is a mountain town high in the Southern Apennine range. I’d never met anyone from Potenza until I happened to mention my lineage to Mel Brooks’s wife, the marvelous actress, Anne Bancroft, and it turned out her parents also hailed from Potenza. They would have been there just before the turn of the century, and it’s certainly possible that in such a relatively small town our grandparents could have been neighbors.

Vincent was tough as nails. He hung out with a rough crowd from the Lower East Side tenement houses. One of those local toughs was a funny guy with a big nose from Catherine Street named Jimmy Durante. Over the years Vincent and Jimmy became good friends, and Vincent would go to see Jimmy perform at Feldman’s Bar on Coney Island where Durante got his start as a singing waiter. Like so many things, it has faded away, but the singing waiter was a common attraction at the time.

Years later in the 1970s, I caught one of Jimmy’s shows at the Dunes in Las Vegas. Afterwards, my wife Pat and I went backstage and asked an usher to tell him that Dick Van Patten wanted to see him. A few minutes later the guy returned and said Jimmy doesn’t know anyone named Dick Van Patten. So I told him to say it’s Vincent Acerno’s grandson. Moments later, Durante came running out all excited: “So you’re Vincent Acerno’s grandson!” Then he gave me his trademark line: “What can I do for ya!” It was thrilling to hear him reminisce about the old days with my grandfather in New York City. He was so nice that it’s easy to see why Vincent became such close friends with him and why he reached such great heights as a comedian.

Growing up, I idolized my grandfather. I loved to hear him talk about New York City in the “good old days.” The great year, he assured me, was 1920: Man o’ War ruled the racetracks, Jack Dempsey was champ, and Babe Ruth first put on a Yankees uniform. The great tragedy of Vincent’s life was watching Man o’ War lose to a horse appropriately named, “Upset”—a race that prompted the Saratoga racetrack to be dubbed “The Graveyard of the Favorites.”

Before the First World War, Vincent and his younger brothers, Johnny and Mickey, worked at a newsstand at the Hoboken Ferry station in New Jersey. They were just kids, teenagers really, and each day they took the ferry across the Hudson River to Hoboken. Along with the newspapers, they also sold daily racing forms. One day a bookmaker asked them to pick up bets for him from the commuters who passed through the newsstand.

It wasn’t long before they started generating business. They worked for the guy for a few months, and things were going smoothly. Then one day they took a lot of bets on a particular race, and the bookmaker never showed. Stuck holding the bets, they were a nervous wreck. If there were a lot of winners, they wouldn’t have had the money to pay.

But they got lucky. There were only a few winners, and they ended up making more money in a day than they ever earned selling newspapers. That got them wondering why they should turn their bets over to another bookmaker when they could do it for themselves. So they continued taking bets at the newsstand, paying off the winners and keeping the profits. In a very short time, the three Acerno boys were the main bookies at the Hoboken Ferry.

But Vincent and his brothers wanted bigger and better things. The next step was getting in the door at a racetrack. To do that, a prospective bookmaker needed both money and political pull. It cost one hundred dollars a day to set up a bookie’s stall inside the grounds, and the competition to get in was so fierce you had to have the backing of someone with clout. Vincent knew a guy at Tammany Hall named Pete Hamill, a politician from the same section of the Lower East Side where the Acerno boys had grown up, and Hamill helped get them in the door at the Saratoga racetrack.

There were forty or fifty bookmakers working in front of the Grandstand inside Saratoga. I remember seeing my grandfather sitting up on a big high stool, like all the bookies, with a large blackboard next to him. He hired a guy to write down the odds for each race. They controlled the odds, which they fluctuated with each race. When someone bet a lot of money on a long shot, to protect themselves from a disastrous upset, they would immediately lower the odds. It was perfectly legitimate. They just had to work it out so regardless of who won, they made money.

For many years, Vincent earned a good living as a racetrack bookie. Then in 1940 the New York State Legislature passed a law disallowing anyone but the State from taking bets. In short, the government took over horse betting.

The day that law passed was one of the few times in my life I ever saw my grandfather upset. It ended the bookmaking profession, and he was out of work. He always believed that the law promoted the development of criminal syndicates. And it was true that as soon as the State took over, the mob moved in. They had always been involved outside the racetrack, but now with the government holding a legal monopoly on horse betting, the opportunities for illegal betting skyrocketed.