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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 70

"Eat me?"

"You wish."

"Come 'n' get it."

People jumpin' in and out of cars. Swinging off into the side streets to get laid.

Again, back to DL's to talk about it. Share war stories. Keep score.

Hollywood Boulevard was one reason I changed cars so often. I wanted to keep my repertoire fresh.

I had a '62 Cadillac convertible, pale yellow with a yellow top.

I had a '61 Impala convertible.

I had a '61 Bonneville convertible. Metallic green. Tri-power under the hood.

A '62 Corvette.

A '61 Corvette that was red. Fuel-injected 4-speed.

But you couldn't just depend on cars and clothes and cuckoo buddies at the beach to impress girls.

I wanted the all-round approach.

I always wanted to use my mindif not for grades, something far more important. To up the cool quotient. To impress my friends. Make them look up to me. So girls would want me more. So I could get laid more.

So I decided to make myself an expert on rock 'n' roll music. Well, actually, all kinds of music. I love music. My absolute favorite music was Broadway show music. I knew it all. I still do.

But rock 'n' roll was the way to go in high school. So I got real good at knowing it.

It used to kill me when people would say that "Sha-boom" was the first rock 'n' roll song. I'd say, "No. It wasn't. It wasn't even the second rock 'n' roll song."

People forget about the real roots of rock 'n' roll. The first hit song was called "Gee" by The Crows.

The second hit was "Work With Me Annie" by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.

And "Work With Me Annie" also became "Dance With Me Henry," which Georgia Gibbs did. Georgia Gibbs did it on Mercury. The Midnighters did it on Atlantic.

These two songs were at the end of '53. Then "Sha-boom" comes out by The Chords on the Cat label.

Immediately, The Crewcuts cover it. A "cover" record is where someone records a song, and then along comes someone else and "covers" it with his own version. They would both contend on the radio for the most popular rendition. This happened all the time back then.

Both "Sha-booms" went No. 1, actually. Of course, the version that gets

Page 71

the most popularity is by The Crewcuts because they were more from the music establishment at the time.

Which sucked. The one that was really great was The Chords' version, which was the black rendition on Cat records.

Here's a guy who got famous, never did an original song in his life, until "Love Letters in the Sand" and a few others: Pat Boone.

Pat Boone started off covering records all over the place.

There was a guy named Randy Wood, who owned a record company in Mee-umphisas Elvis would have pronounced itTennessee, called Dot records. And Pat Boone is this young kid who happens to be a direct descendant of Daniel Boone.

(Also, he happened to be a client of Frank Bank when Frank Bank opened his own financial-consultant business, but that's for another chapter.)

Anyhow, Pat was signed by Dot recordsyoung kid, married this girl named Shirley, pumpin' kids out like Eddie Cantor. His first hit was called "Ain't That a Shame?" which was done by a guy named Antoine Domino on Imperial Records. Fellow we came to know by "Fats."

Within a week, a version of "Ain't That a Shame?" by Pat Boone comes out on Dot records.

Shortly thereafter, the El Dorados come out with a song, "At My Front Door""Crazy little mama comes, knockin', a-knockin' at my front door, door, door." Guess who comes out with a hit? They hadn't even let the ink dry on "Ain't That a Shame?" and here comes "At My Front Door."

So Dot records was made by covering records with all their original artiststhey had the Fontaine Sisters, Pat Boone, Billy Vaughan, Jim Lowe. Well, Jim Lowe actually did an original record, a great hit called "The Green Door."

But anyhow, what I did, because I have pretty much of a photographic memory, I started using it on rock 'n' roll. I'd always had pretty good retention. If they showed me a script, I read it twice and I knew it. Reading the encyclopedia, things in school . . . anything that seemed worth remembering.

Now rock 'n' roll was worth it.

When a song became half-popular, I remembered the artist. I remembered the label. The chronology. What was on the other side of the record, how long the record was, who produced it, who the bandleader was, who the people in the band were.

I almost made a bundle off this essentially useless knowledge.

Almost, but not quite.

Remember my great timing?

Well, it almost always was perfect.

There were exceptions.

Such as this major one.

Page 72

The "$64,000 Question" is on the air along about now. It's become the biggest show in the country.

In my quest for greatness, I said to myself, "Self, what could you do with $64,000?"

Then I tried to say to myself, "How could I get tripped up on a category when I knew every single record?"

I had every copy of
Cashbox
magazine in a stack in my room from 1953 on. I had every copy of
Billboard
. I knew how high the record got on the charts, when it hit the charts, how many weeks, how high the cover record was.

I was like so good, I was incredible.

You take songs like "Ivory Tower." Most people didn't know the original one was by Cathy Carr. To make a long story short, I didn't think there was any way I could lose.

So I went down and took all kinds of exams at CBS Television City. I'm just into teenage-hood, about ninth or 10th grade.

They would have taken me . . . the younger, the better. And they were going to.

So now I am scheduled to go on the show. But there was a waiting list of people in different categories. They wanted to switch categories around so it was interesting.

Five guys in a row come on doing English literature, it gets pretty boring.

So they went for odd angles. They loved it when Joyce Brothers was on and she'd do boxing. I mean it was all bogus in a way, because she didn't give a hoot about boxing. The whole deal was to have this cute little, sweet, petite, blonde psychologist come on and talk about boxing. She wanted her name around, so it was a good stroke by her. She got what she went after, but she wasn't really a boxing fan.

Boris Karloff was another good example of the off-beat contestant. Having "Frankenstein" come on for children's literature. I thought that was great and the whole country did.

So having me onthis was before "Beaver", so I wasn't Lumpy Rutherford yetas a 1314-year-old kid who was an expert on rock 'n' roll would have worked.

I was all set.

Then the Charles Van Doren scandal hitthe whole thing about Van Doren being set up on the show "21." They found out he'd been fed some answers and groomed as a star. The next thing you know, all those shows are poison. "The Question," "21," all of them go kaput.

It went from:

"Sorry, kid, we're puttin' you on hold."

To: "Well, we're gonna go on hiatus."

Page 73

To: "We're canceling the show."

Oh well, it didn't cost me anything.

Like hell.

There was no way I was going to be tripped up. I knew what records Elvis made before he went to RCA. What his first RCA record was, what his last Sun record was. How many copies did

"Blue Moon" sell?

All that junk . . . I was really great at it.

And they took it off the air.

The way I figure it, I got hosed out of 64 grand.

'Cause I woulda made it unless they drugged me or something. I didn't even need the "expert" they give you to help prepare you for the show.

I was my own expert.

And I got nothing for it.

Except lots of chicks.

Girls loved it when you could spout all that crap about records and artists and all that.

So what did I need with the "Question?"

I still had "The Quest."

To get laid as often as humanly, or inhumanly, possible, as the case may be.

Without the quiz show I could go back to concentrating on what really mattered.

Sex.

It's all I thought about, pretty much, anyway.

Hell, at that age was there anything else to think about?

Page 74

Chapter Four
Speaking of Lots of Beaver

I have slept with over 1,000 women.

I don't exactly say that with pride.

I'm not exactly apologetic, either, although I'm sure there are good reasons to be.

But the fact is, I engaged in a perpetual sexfest in my youth, and there's no expunging it from the past.

And if I stand back and take a clinical view, what I see it as, more than anything, is a kind of footnote to history.

It was the product of being in the business I was, in the city I was, at a particular time when the first furious fusillades of the sexual revolution in America were being fired in earnest.

That's what turned the sexual spigot on for me. Turned it wide open. I drank from it. I bathed in it. Heck, I did the backstroke and breaststroke in it.

When everybody went into the pool, I dived into the deep end, the shallow end and all the ends in between.

Which may seem preposterous when you think of the muddled, dumpy, awkward character most people saw in me when I played Lumpy Rutherford.

It also may also sound bogus, in a Wilt Chamberlain kind of way.

Remember when Wilt the Stilt, the Hall of Fame pro basketball star, claimed to have bedded over 5,000 women? Malarkey, is what I'd say. I don't know if his stilt would have wilted, but it seems like a logistical problem anyway.

Figure the man-woman-hours available, and it seems beyond time management.

Five thousand? Can't be done.

One thousand? Can be done.

Believe me.

The bulk of my sexploits came in an apartment I rented at 8939 Cadillac

Page 75

Avenue in L.A. Actually, it was left over from my first official marriage, to a woman named Marlene, hereinafter referred to as my Six-Day Wonder. Yes, that's right, I married this girl and six days later we ended the marriage.

We had it annulled. But I'll tell you more about that later.

What happened was, Marlene moved out. I kept the place on Cadillac and it became my first real bachelor pad. It turned into something of a drive-thru sex market. Every day women would show up at the front door. They weren't always there to see me. My buddies were in on the act, too. But starlets and harlots and girls from high school, college girls, girls we hustled cruising Hollywood Boulevard and the Sunset Strip several times a weekthey just knew there would be action on Cadillac Street.

That's where the boys were.

That's where the girls were.

We each made sure we got together.

There were many nights and days when I had sex with four or five women.

Lots of toga parties.

Lots of towel parties.

I didn't even know the names of half my partners.

Was it socially responsible?

No way.

Safe sex?

Absolutely not.

This was before AIDS. This was even before Roe v. Wade.

I had one close buddy who had to get this one girl an abortion, and one of the reasons we could do it was because I knew the generalissimo of the Mexican army and his brother-in-law was the biggest abortionist in Tiajuana. So my buddy took her down there. The generalissimo's name was Victor Fuentes. He was a Beaver fan and he took care of it.

Of course, this was all selfishness on our part.

All I was looking for was a good time.

It was 1964. I was 22. What red-blooded American boy wouldn't have wanted this? What was the No. 1 thing on the mind of the average 22-year-old, single American male?

Girls.

Hey, I guarantee, every red-blooded, 22-year-old American girl, the only thing on their minds was boys. So I didn't do anything they wouldn't have done.

And, you know what? If they wanted to have sex with my roommate or my buddies after me, that was fine and dandy. A lot of them did.

So they had a wonderful sexual time.

BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life

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