Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (39 page)

BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
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Page 194
I mean, any guy who can make "Northwest Passage," one of the all-time great moviesor any of the other dozen great onesmust have a hair-trigger on the machine-gun mind up there.
He must be the Dan Marino of deep-thinkingyou know, quick release and all that.
You're ready to get in Hitch's face, but he just fires off a quick salvo before you can reach him.
Direct hit. Score.
Hitch escapes the hit, unscathed.
But, frankly, I was in no mood to think about what a great director he was or how quickly he could rip off a one-liner.
I mean, if he hadn't been saying that to me, I mighta laughed my butt off.
But he was saying it to me.
And I didn't need the aggravation.
My fellow Angelinos were already out there revving their engines, willing and able to provide all the aggravation I needed on the L.A. Grand Prix, otherwise known as the drive home.
So as it turned out, what Fat A1 was saying to me didn't strike me as being so funny.
Fact was, it was irritating as hell.
I mean he started really ragging on me.
I was parked in his space.
It was like I was the donkey and he was the all-important director, you know?
He was very deliberate and very condescending.
But you know what?
I was building up a good mad myself. And then I just wasted it.
I wound up to take a mighty blow back at the old coot, and I just whiffed.
Nothing clever came out.
No heavy artillery returning fire.
All I could do at the time was look at him and say, "I'm really sorry, Mr. Hitchcock. I was only in the space a few seconds and I do apologize because I know how I feel when someone takes my space."
And I said, "It'll never happen again."
And the guy told his driver to back it up.
He let me out.
Just retelling the story I am more aggravated than ever.
I didn't fire back on Hitchcock at all.
I just took the tongue-lashing meekly.
I wish I'd have said, "Gee, Mr. Really Terribly Significant Director Person and All-Around Genius, I'm sorry you're such a pompous butthead and your car is probably broken down from trying to haul your tub of lard all over
 
Page 195
town. So naturally, you need to get it parked in the next seven seconds. Thanks for throwing your weight around. I guess that's why you're roughly 300 pounds, so you'll have a lot of it to toss.
"But now I gotta haul and get out on the freeway. So have a nice day lording your egocentric self over everyone you meet."
But I didn't.
I just rolled over.
I let him be an idiot with impunity.
As I get to the front gate, Scotty is sitting there doubled over laughing.
And he goes, "That beeetch, Frank." Which is Scotty for "bitch." And I said, "You know what, Scotty, the guy was right, I was in his space."
The truth is, of course, that was so.
I mean, I had hogged the guy's parking space. So I was in the wrong, even if for a millisecond.
But looking back on it, I still feel it's a bigger example of Hitchcock being an overbearing donkey than my being an inconsiderate whelp.
Again, it's my book.
Why shouldn't I make me look better?
In his book, Hitchcock could have prettied himself up and made me out to be a bigger ninny.
If he'd even bother.
Which I seriously doubt.
You have to think Alfred Hitchcock did not spend his latter years conjuring up Frank Bank memories.
In any case, they really should have had a space for "Parking, Five Minutes Only."
But parking was at such a premium. And everything was such a political move on that lot.
I mean, if you had a good parking space, you had to be God.
And, actually, I guess that's part of what I'm talking about the whole acting thing.
So much of it boiled down to superficial garbage. People getting excited about absolutely nothing.
What did we just spend the last few minutes discussing?
Parking.
That's a burning world issue.
See what I mean?
When you're in the entertainment industry, your parking space is what you think is a world-shaking concern.
And that's why I think so many guys and girls had trouble handling the fame thing.
Example.
 
Page 196
Right next to Beaver, they always filmed "The Virginian," and they had a guy who greatly illustrates what I'm talking about.
Doug McClure
Doug was on "The Virginian."
Doug was a cool guy.
Doug just died not long ago, very young.
He didn't have a real happy life. He did "Virginian" and "Checkmate" and after that he was scrounging for a job for 25 years.
I don't know what happened.
He was God's gift to women.
They would go crazy for Doug McClure. Big smile and the blond curly hair. Doug was a great-looking guy.
And he was a real nice guy. A lot of these guys, they work in that one big show and they can never repeat it. And they spend the rest of their lives trying to duplicate it.
They're Al Bundy.
It's the truth.
You know, Warhol says you get 15 minutes of fame. Well, I've hogged up the spotlight for some reason, but he ain't too far off base.
There is an upside to fame. The flip side is the good that you can do if you're famous.
It's the weight you can carry.
Not the kind Hitchcock liked to throw around. It's the juice you pour into the positive side of things.
It's certainly not fair that entertainers have this weight, but as they say, life's a bitch and nothing is fair.
But if you use fame in the right way it can be a wonderful thing.
If you disregard the fame and you don't care about other people and only care about yourself, then fame sucks.
And you don't deserve the fame.
I don't think Sinatra deserves the fame.
Sinatra's a mean-spirited, self-centered man.
Treats people like dirt.
I think Bill Cosby deserves the fame.
Arguably speaking, Cosby went through a period when I thought he was a hypocritical guy.
Hard to put my finger on it.
It might have been a racial thing Cosby was reflecting earlier on in his life, and I'm not a racial guy.
But I think he was into a black superiority type of thing.
I don't believe in black superiority, Jewish superiority, Catholic superiority, or any other kind of superiority.
 
Page 197
I believe in: You gotta be cool.
Sammy Davis even went through it for a little while, but he rejected it in a little while.
He had a real turnaround.
And I look at Cosby at a later date and I have to admire him a lot.
I thought the original Cosby show was so wonderful.
How about the fact that he had his kids speaking English instead of Ebonics?
I mean, when you listen to Rafer Johnson and the really cool way he spokeor when you listen to French blacks, like Yannick Noahyou know.
Ebonics is all garbage.
Ebonics is not black language. It's a lazy American dialect.
But anyway, I think Cosby is a very, very good example of the American dream. I think he has used power very well. I think he has used fame very well.
He used it as a teacher. He set a good example for future generations. And I admire that.
Now look at Richard Pryor.
Here were two black comedians who started out five years apart. Pryor has had a much sadder life because of the MS he has now. But if you look at Pryor at his zenith and Cosby at his zenith, I think it's night and day.
It was a very sad situation with the drugs and all the other stuff for Richard Pryor.
But I'm talking about two very, very popular comedians, both basically doing the same kind of comedy, really hitting fame under the same guise.
But one being a totally admirable person who you would be very, very proud to emulate.
The other one, you wouldn't be proud to emulateRichard Pryor.
I love Cosby's new show and my heart breaks for him with the death of his son, Ennis.
Now, Cosby's movies were pretty bad and it's hard to figure why.
In fact, he made the all-time worst movie I think in history, next to "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" or something. What was that called, "Leonard 6"?
But Cosby is a good guy.
I like good guys.
I've always liked heroes.
Going all the way back to childhood, I always, liked Hopalong Cassidy.
I always liked Roy Rogers.
Gene Autry.
I love Sean Connery.
I like all the good guys.
 
Page 198
I couldn't vote for Bill Clinton, OK?
He's not a good guy.
I couldn't have voted for John F. Kennedy.
His charisma may have been incredible, but I knew he wasn't a good guy.
Even before the Marilyn thing came out fully before the public, I'd heard stories. I knew John F. was a far cry from his image.
I mean, I knew Kennedy was gettin' it on with Monroe from my friend, Chuck.
Chuck used to be a guy who regularly drove Marilyn out to Peter Lawford's house on the Pacific Coast Highwayit was right down just a little ways from Knights Beach, in fact, not far from the Santa Monica pier.
And Chuck drove Marilyn out there so she could make it with Jack Kennedy.
This came to light when we used to park cars at this place in Beverly Hills called Romanoff's.
And it was just like that show Edd "Kookie" Burns did on TV . . ."77 Sunset Strip."
You know the song, "Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb?"
That came out of that show and the show came out of the experience we had parking cars at these places.
Like we'd park them over on Restaurant Row at the Islander.
We'd go over to The Bistro and park cars there.
It was a happenin' scene.
In fact, pretty much like the TV show where Kookie was always pickin' up broads and meetin' and greetin' the rich and famous.
Oh, yeah.
That's what it was like.
Many's the night some chick would come out and I'd say, "Hey, I'll take you home."
And I did.
Romanoff's is where I first met Sinatra.
I had thought he was really cool watching his movies.
I wanted to be a Rat Packer and be hip like Frank and Dino and Sammy and Joey and all those guys.
But when Sinatra was hanging out at these places in Beverly Hills, I found out he was one of the world's great slithering slimes.
Lawford was a fairly nice guy.
Lawford would sit out front and shoot the breeze with us all night.
And it was from parking cars and meeting Lawford that Chuck got to drive Marilyn out to be with Lawford's brother-in-law, Jack Kennedy.
Chuck would look at me and say, "I gotta go pick up Marilyn and take her out to Lawford's."
BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
8.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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