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Authors: Frank Bank,Gibu Twyman

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Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (12 page)

BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
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Page 60
But in order to get those bods, I decided I had to become the essence of cool.
I had this personal drive that I wanted to become king of the hill. And nobody could make me king of the hill unless I did it all by myself.
I approached it kind of like Bill Nye, the Science Guy. I made it a research project. I concentrated on gathering data and storing the understanding which would enable me to become knowledgable, witty and cool.
My bible in this spiritual awakening was the same as many a young man in the '50s.
What else?
Playboy
.
OK. So it's predictable. Sure, it's a cliche.
But it was the main tool we teenage boys at the time had available to sharpen our girl-prospecting tools.
Remember when I said everything in my life has been timing?
Playboy
comes along in '53, '54. It was new. Cutting edge. At that moment it was bold, adventurous, pushing all the societal envelopes.
Shoot, I was at least one guy who honestly did read the articles. I looked at the picture, sure.
But I soaked up all the cool
Playboy
philosophy stuff.
What sort of a man reads
Playboy
?
A man wanting to learn how to get girls.
A man like Frank Bank.
I took to
Playboy
like catnip. Here I am, this young punk kid. I almost wanted to go out and get a smoking jacket and a pipe to be like Hef. I didn't go that far, though.
But I asked myself, self, what are chicks looking for? I didn't have the body of John Derek. I was a little chunky. But I had all my hair. I had bright sparkling eyes. I knew I was smarter than all these broads put together (in a completely understanding way about the noble struggle for feminine equality, of course).
So I decided what Cool was, was a version of being smart, witty, kind and fun. And really being hip about what was going on. I started reading newspapers, watching television. These were like self-improvement books before you had self-improvement books.
In other words, how are you cool at a party?
I knew at this point in time Johnny Mathis was getting popular. I loved Mathis. I went with that trend.
There were a few things my morals wouldn't allow me to do. Drugs being one of them.
Not in high school.
In fact, not in college.
 
Page 61
Well, there was that one time I dropped peyote with Carlos Castenada at UCLA, but that comes later in the "Idiots" chapter.
I didn't do alcohol in high school.
Sex, constantly, yes.
That was my drug.
But my science project was a success. I did, indeed, become cool. I had made the total transformation. I truly was a cool guy.
I pretty much would say that I became the most popular guy in the entire school.
Before I got there, I had to change my image.
So I went and got me a real buckle-butt chinosthose pants with little buckles halfway between the pockets and the belt-line. I got these double-button-down-collar shirts. I got them in pink and orange. Those were the two hot colors.
Black polished cotton pants. That was cool, too.
Then I started giving my own definition to cool.
I became a trend-setter. Honest-to-God. Me.
Right to this day, Fonzie had nothing on me when it came to establishing the cool agenda.
Things I would start and realize were cool, things I would do, six months later would become the fashion.
Like wearing my pants with tennis shoes and no socks.
Like a barracuda jacket with no shirt, zipped partway up, with the sleeves pushed up. A barracuda jacket is a beige jacketeveryone in the world wore a barracuda in the '60s. It's got a red-plaid lining, it's got two slash pockets and a flip-up collar. You wore the collar up, zipped up to just past halfway.
No shirt. No socks. Jeans. Tennis shoes.
Tennis shoes preferably with no ties. Preferably white loafer tennis shoes. Not too many people made them. Keds might have made them. But they were available. You had to have them.
Now, if you didn't have tennis shoes, you could have worn nice loafers with no socks.
But the no-sock look was invented by yours truly in '61 and '62 in West Los Angeles.
And then everybody did it.
Once in awhile people would say to me, "Where's your socks?"
"I feel comfortable. Get off my case," I'd say.
Pretty soon, a couple other guys showed up like that. And then . . . it just happened. Everyone started doing it. I'd see it at some other school later. It came over from our school. Somewhere outside of L.A. someone may have been doing it before, but in our group it was new.
In our group, it came from me.
 
Page 62
The next thing I had to do in order to secure my position as the King of Cool was to get into the best "club" in school.
This was in the day of the social clubs in California high schools. This was snobbery. To the nth degree. You had dorky clubs. You had clubs that were smarter guys. You had the clubs that were the better athletes. You had Jewish clubs. Gentile clubs. You had the bums who were in clubs. Guys who had the fastest cars might have been in this club. The geeks were in the science club.
They all had distinct traits and personalities.
Most of them were based on being clean-cut. Remember, everything in our day and age had to be clean-cut. Tramps and bums were not normally part of society.
Our clubs were mostly named after British royalty. There were the Barons and the Regents, the Imperials and the Essex, the Counts and the Normans and the Argonauts.
Girls clubs were the Lorelles, the Sans Parelles, the Fidelts, the Adorians.
I was in the club.
I was a Knight.
I came into the Knights kinda like I did in "Leave It to Beaver." I wasn't there for the first meeting. But I was there for the fifth. The club was about a month, month-and-a-half old. We started the club in 1957. I think I was the sixth or seventh member.
We got pledges. We had our own medalions. Sweatshirts. Jackets.
Across the back of our jackets it said simply:
"KNIGHTS. West L.A."
Every guy in our school would have killed to have that on his back.
The Knights ruled.
Completely. Entirely. Abso-friggin'-lutely.
We wound up having hundreds of Knights.
Everyone in West Los Angeles wanted to be a Knight.
Every girl wanted to go out with a Knight.
Why?
Because we were cool.
What made the Knights cool was, we dressed right, we acted right, we did the right things, drove the right cars, we went to the right places, ate the right foods.
We cruised "DL's" hamburger place. That was our turf. On Wilshire and La Cienega in Beverly Hills.
That round drive-in . . . that was our domain.
DL's was actually "Delores.'" But when you saw the neon sign, the "D" and the "L" were bigger than any of the other letters. So we used to call it DL;s.
Delores's was world-famous. They copied Mel's Drive-In, in
 
Page 63
"American Graffiti," after DL's. That was exactly what DL's looked like.
What you drove to DL's had to be cool. Not necessarily the fastest. Fast. But more importantly, the coolest.
You had to drive Chevys. Or Corvettes. . .'57 Chevys. Impalas. Four on the floor was OK . . . 409's were cool . . . 335 4-speeds. The hubcaps had to be Moons, Chrome Reverses. Had to have the tubular grille.
It had to be shaved and decked.
There used to be a big "V" and it said "Chevrolet" on the front of Chevys. And on the back there was also a "V" and it also said ''Chevrolet."
You took off the "V's," filled in the holes, sanded and painted it. Shaved is the front. Decked is the back.
So it was painting. Nothing ostentatious. It had to be cool. Clean. Sharp.
I had a metallic turquoise '58 Corvette, one of my sharpest cars. My '57 Chevy was black. I later painted it that '58 Corvette metallic turquoise. I sold it for a ton of money, but I wished I'd kept it.
I had lots of cars. I had a ton of them. I used to get a car every six months. Like Kenny Osmond said, I changed 'em like underwear.
I had convertibles. Chevys. Corvettes. Always my cars were cool.
Saturdays, you drove your cool cars over to the Miracle Mile. The Miracle Mile started at Fairfax with the May Co. and went down toward LaBrea. You had men's shops like Phelps-Welger, and you had Broadway and Ohrbach's and all these places.
And you'd always meet girls out in front or inside the department stores.
Or we'd stop at Van de Kamp's for a cherry-lime Ricky. Van de Kamp's was this big bakery and coffee shop on Wilshire Boulevard. You'd get a cherry-lime Ricky for a nickel. A cherry-lime Ricky was a lemonade-limeade with some red juice and some cherries on top.
I don't know why they were called Rickies. They just were.
The other drink was a Green River. Green soda pop, more or less just coloration with cherries.
The cherry-lime Ricky was tart. The Green River was just sickenly sweet.
We'd walk down to the LaBrea Tarpits and hang out in front. There was a lawn there and we'd sprawl out on that.
Wherever you looked, you saw all these kids on the Miracle Mile hanging out all afternoon.
It was a major Southern California scene.
Everything you saw in "Grease," we did first.
You saw it every Saturday, on the Miracle Mile.
The girls wore poodle skirts. Sweaters. They had their bucks and saddle-oxfords. Ponytails. Girls would do the French twist.
Us guys, we greased. We were very, very big on pomade. I'd have to degrease myself before I walked back on the "Beaver" set. We had to be pretty
 
Page 64
middle of the road, normal, when we walked onto the set.
But out on "The Mile," you did the pomade. Still, we were never greased to the max, because we didn't have that long of hair. Remember, flat-tops and butches were still fairly popular.
Sometimes, you'd bring the hair back on the sides with the flat-top. Bring it down in front to a point or flip it up.
Some guys wore ducktails. But ducktails were more for eses. That was the term we borrowed from the barrios for tough guys, rogues, punks.
Ese or ese vato mon.
That's what we called them.
We had our share of fights with them.
We used to have fun at these fights, mainly because we always won. We would kick butt and all the tough guys knew it.
We were Knights and we were tough, too, and we didn't back down.
Nobody screwed with us on Knights Beach.
That's right.
We had our own beach, named after us. Of us. For us. By us.
Knights Beach was the best stretch of beach in Southern California. It was right at the end of Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. A couple blocks from the Santa Monica Pier. Right by the Jonathan Club.
That was our turf. Nobody messed with us on Knights Beach.
We invited our friends there, so you could come if you were not a Knight, but invited. If you weren't invited, you weren't welcome.
We protected what we had. It was part of the job. It went with the turf.
We'd walk up and go, "Hey, uh, I hate to tell you this, but this land is spoken for, But why don't you guys maybe head out over there somewhere else?"
We were very nice about itwe tried to be gentlemen.
Every once in awhile we ran into some jackass who wanted to stay.
"Screw you." You didn't say that to us.
Thirty or 40 kids might show up each night from the Knights. With the girls, it might be 50, 60 kids. If a Norman or an Imperial or an Argonaut tried to hit Knights Beach without being invited, he didn't last long. He was asked to leave.
Yet, he could come back the very next day with a Knight and all is forgiven and forgotten.
Crazy, but this was the law of the jungle. It's the way it worked.
The Imperials were an older club than we were and probably our chief rival. But we were much better. They thought they were cool, but we used to have what we called "pulling" guys from other clubs. We could have pulled any Imperial we wanted, and we knew it.
They all would have quit the Imperials like dogs to be a Knight.
BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
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