Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment (4 page)

In 1917, at age ten, Mom and her family moved to Lincoln Place in Brooklyn, where they stayed for five years. Eventually, they bought a bungalow in Ravenhall, a small town near Coney Island. At age fifteen, they moved again to Woodhaven, Queens, where they lived until she married my father.

In Woodhaven, Mom attended Richmond Hill High School, where she excelled at athletics. She was particularly good at both swimming and field hockey, unusual choices for women at the time. Eventually she became an instructor in Physical Training at the Kew Forest Public School in Queens.

Unlike Mom, my father came from an old Dutch family. His mother, Grandmother Florence who took me to California, was a Tyler and proud of her family’s distant relationship to President John Tyler. Her husband, my paternal grandfather, John Van Patten, came from Saranac in upstate New York, eventually moving to Brooklyn where he met and married my grandmother. A milkman in Brooklyn, John died at age thirty-six of pneumonia in 1912, and my father, who was just five years old at the time, barely remembered him.

With my grandfather’s death, the family needed money to survive. Florence took in roomers, and for a long time they lived off the rent. Because of their circumstances, my father went to work at a relatively early age. His first job was turning off the street lamps in Green Point. This was around 1915, and the streets were lit with old kerosene lamps. Early each morning Dad would make his rounds on roller skates to turn off the flames.

At eighteen, Dad met my mother at a local dance contest in Richmond Hill. Dad was a judge and Mom a contestant. With Dad’s support, Mom won and soon afterwards they began dating. In the spring of 1925, she brought Dad to her senior prom at the Hotel Nassau in Long Beach. Dad later recalled the evening as “a beautiful spring night on the ocean front. The Nassau was still an elegant hotel. The chandeliers in the ballroom sparkled.” They danced The Charleston and The Black Bottom together, and Mom gave Dad her sorority pin, which as Dad later told us was tantamount to a betrothal.

Mom continued school at Savage, a Physical Training Academy on 59
^th
Street in New York City. Dad proudly attended her graduation ceremony held at the Mecca Temple—later City Center at West 54
^th
Street. After the ceremonies, Mom was the star of the dance production. “She had all the grace and style of a professional,” Dad told me and Joyce. “You would have been proud of her!”

They married in 1927. The wedding took place at the Republican Club on Woodhaven Boulevard. It was a typical Italian wedding—“robust, noisy and unorganized.” Dad recalled how he and Mom sat at the front of the room while the relatives put envelopes with money into a white satin bag. Later that night, in their room at the Hotel Astor, they sat on the bed and counted their take.

My parents were inseparable. They played bridge together five nights a week and developed a mutual love for the theater. Through the years, they went to a play in New York City every Friday night. On one of these excursions in 1928, they saw Edna Ferber’s
Showboat
. Mom was dazzled by the show and always described that night as a turning point for her. She was pregnant with me at the time, and I can’t help but think that the enthusiasm of both my parents was somehow sensed by their unborn child.

Mom later told me that she was stage-struck at
Showboat
. Edna Ferber’s courageous story, centering on an interracial marriage, became an instant classic. Mom and Dad heard the Ziegfeld Theater ring out with
Old Man River
, the timeless, plaintive ballad of life’s relentless movement, like the currents of the Mississippi River that “just keeps rollin’ along.” Over sixty-five years later in 1995, my parents’ two children worked together in a revival of that great production that had so moved and inspired them to believe that their children could one day be a part of this marvelous world of entertainment.

On December 27, 1935, I took my first step onto a Broadway stage. I’d just turned seven, and already we’d made it onto the Great White Way.

I had good company that night at the Shubert. Melvyn Douglas, one of the biggest stars in America, played my father in a short-lived show called
Tapestry in Gray
. A drama set in World War I,
Tapestry
told the story of a doctor who operated on the bullet-riddled face of a wounded soldier. A careless nurse prematurely removed the soldier’s bandages, and her mistake scarred him for life. Melvyn Douglas played the doctor, and Elissa Landi was the nurse.

Melvyn was among those great actors who would win all the awards—an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy. A few years before I met him, he starred alongside a famous Broadway actress, Helen Gahagan, and they married shortly afterwards. Later Helen Gahagan would launch a second career in politics, becoming well known as the Congresswoman who ran against Richard Nixon for the California Senate in 1950 and was dubbed by Nixon, “The pink lady.” She got him back, though, derisively referring to Nixon for the first time as “Tricky Dick”—an unwelcome moniker he never shed.

I landed the part because of my great shock of blond hair. It actually made me look like Melvyn’s son. I still remember opening night, walking onstage and looking out into that great darkness that every stage actor knows. I wasn’t nervous. I guess I was too young to be nervous. I also remember that the director, Marion Gering, had to tell me my lines because I couldn’t read yet. I listened to him and memorized them. It was a good start.

I didn’t talk much with Melvyn Douglas. He seemed like a very private person. But I loved Elissa Landi. She was warm and accessible. I thought she was wonderful—and beautiful too. Elissa was about thirty years old at the time of
Tapestry
and already an accomplished actress. The previous year, 1934, she had won acclaim for her role in the film,
The Count of Monte Cristo
.

Elissa always found time to talk with me. And I quickly became very attached to her. One day she said: “Dickie, I have a present for you.” She handed me a box. I ripped off the paper, and it was a game with racing bears. I loved it—just as I’ve always loved all things about animals.

I was twenty years old when I heard that Elissa had died of cancer at age forty-three. I was deeply saddened. She was so full of life and to have it cut down so early just seemed wrong. Elissa Landi was my very first friend on Broadway, and now seventy-three years after she gave me that game of racing bears, I can still see her gorgeous smile, and it brings me back to those days that are so long gone.

Tapestry
, unfortunately, bombed. Five weeks was all the critics and audience could take. When it closed, no one was more disappointed than my mother. She had worked so hard to get me on that Broadway stage. Finally, she saw it happening with two giant stars like Melvyn Douglas and Elissa Landi. And just as quickly it was over.

Still, Stan Laurel’s prediction held true. Within several months of his letter, I was on Broadway alongside two of the biggest stars in America. Stan had said, “There are great things waiting for you”—and he was right. For a seven-year-old, it was quite a beginning.

Most important, I was a happy kid. I genuinely enjoyed my life onstage. Unlike many other children, I never really internalized any of the pressures associated with performances. That’s not to say I was immune to the curves that come our way in childhood. In fact, at age seven, I was about to find out about another side of life, one I was not at all prepared for.

Every child—whether an actor or not—is going to learn that life is tough. Some of my very favorite scenes from
Eight Is Enough
involved those moments when one of the children would go crashing headfirst into some harsh reality. They would, of course, come to me, as the father, with their problems, and I would have to explain—or attempt to explain—what no child is anxious to learn; that life is often difficult and sometimes terribly unfair. I came to that knowledge myself on a bright summer afternoon in 1935.

You don’t hear much about it nowadays, but Italian families in New York City were closely following Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in October of 1935. It was in the newspapers, on the newsreels, and we would hear about it in school. Every day there were pictures of Mussolini and Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian king who was eventually defeated after putting up a courageous defense.

We kids were unaware of the dark side of this war. We didn’t know that innocent people were dying or that a country was being torn apart. And we certainly didn’t see that the war was a prelude to a far darker alliance with Nazi Germany that would soon throw the entire world into chaos. For us, the war was nothing more than the inspiration for a kids’ game like “cops and robbers,” only we played, “Italians and Ethiopians.”

We began by choosing sides. Since all of our relatives were supporting Italy, the losers had to be the Ethiopians. There were no rules, we just chased each other around, throwing things, and pretending we were fighting the war.

One afternoon after school, we stopped at my house in Woodhaven, Queens, and everyone left their school books on our porch as we went into the woods to play “Italians and Ethiopians.” We chose sides, and I was one of the Italians. So was Renee, my aunt who was actually just my age, and my friend, Robert Johnson. At the edge of the woods, there was a hill that sloped down to the tracks for the Long Island Railroad. We started running down the incline, pretending to be having our little war, with everyone throwing pebbles at each other. At the bottom of the hill Renee and I crossed the tracks.

Just after crossing, I looked back. I saw my friend, Robert Johnson, trip. As he fell, I watched his chin land directly on the electrified third rail. I can still see him as if it were yesterday. Robert’s face and his arm were touching the electric rail, and instantly I felt sick as I saw smoke rising out from his head.

It was a horrible sight, and for a moment I was frozen with fear. I was just seven years old and didn’t know what to do. Renee and I began screaming and crying out, and then we took off running for home. We reached the house where we found my Uncle Albert. We told him what had happened, and he dashed out of the house. Uncle Albert was actually a great track star. In the 1920s he beat two world champions, Glenn Cunningham and Gene Vesky, in the mile at Madison Square Garden. But I doubt he ever moved a step faster in his life than he did that day. When he got to the tracks, Albert found Robert’s body just as we had left him. He was dead. Albert came back to the house and told us it was too late. Our friend was gone.

Our parents had warned us not to go near those tracks. I remember them talking about the dangers of the third rail. They came home shortly afterwards, and soon they were both crying. I never saw that before, and I never remember them so angry with me. While all this was going on, I still remember seeing Robert’s books on our porch. It was so sad. He was dead, and all his school books were still there as if waiting for him to come get them.

It made the headlines the next day in
The
Long Island Press
. My father wrote a letter to the Railroad expressing his anger that there was not a fence around the tracks. Things were different in the 1930s. People didn’t pay as much attention to safety issues as they do today. But, after a while, they did build that fence. It was the middle of the Depression, but they came up with the money.

Robert’s parents were foreigners, either German or Swedish. They were superintendents of an apartment building about a block from my house. I don’t think they spoke English. One day I remember walking by their building, and they were outside. I could tell they were visibly shaken just by seeing me. I felt terrible and avoided that house in the future. There was no way I could understand the depth of their grief, but from the day Robert Johnson died on that track, I’ve understood that life can be tough and terribly fragile.

In the decade from 1935 to 1945, there were many plays on Broadway responding to events in Europe, especially the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. As children, Joyce and I were fortunate to have been a part of several of these major productions: I was in
The Eternal Road
,
The American Way
, and
The Land Is Bright
, while Joyce had a starring role in
Tomorrow the World
. When I look back on those plays, I find it remarkable to see the insight and sensitivity of the various writers, directors, and producers concerning the dark clouds hovering over Europe and the world.

The Eternal Road
was among the biggest productions in the history of American theater. We had a cast of over 350 people, and the sets were so huge and extravagant they had to literally tear out the orchestra pit, as well as a large portion of the seating in New York’s Manhattan Opera House.

The play began as the brainchild of Meyer Weisgal—who in 1933 conceived an idea he thought of as “our answer to Hitler.” Weisgal approached the great German émigré director Max Reinhardt, and in 1934 they met to discuss the project at Reinhardt’s home in Salzburg—a locale ironically situated within view of Hitler’s summer home in Austria. The group of people involved grew as the composer Kurt Weill, the writer, Franz Werfel, and the designer, Norman Bel Geddes all joined in.

The Eternal Road
told the story of a European dictator persecuting the Jewish population of his country. At the outset, many of the Jews fled an angry mob, finding refuge in a synagogue. There the Rabbi, played by Sam Jaffe, comforted a young boy by recounting the history of the Jewish people.