The Importance of Being Ernie: (2 page)

Read The Importance of Being Ernie: Online

Authors: Barry Livingston

Tags: #General, #Fiction

BOOK: The Importance of Being Ernie:
9.52Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
PROLOGUE
 
It’s Sunday afternoon at the celebrity autograph show. The famous, the semi-famous, and the barely famous greatly outnumber the few fans lingering at the Burbank convention hall. Hours before, the place was swarming with people, but it’s quiet now.
Retired elderly stars sit at tables and stare blankly into space. People are finished buying their 8 × 10 photos, publicity pictures of them from an old film or a classic TV series shot decades ago. They looked young and vital back then. Most of these actors are unrecognizable now; wrinkles and hair loss have overwhelmed them. Other aged familiar faces in the room thought they could defy aging with plastic surgery. They’ve turned into mummified versions of their former selves. Not a good look.
The autograph show has another class of celebrity: the middle-aged thespians. They’re divided into two groups. The first type in this category hasn’t acted professionally for years, because they quit the business. The industry rejection was too painful. They’re now content to bask in the praise of loyal fans instead of getting kicked in the groin by Hollywood on a regular basis. Smart. The second type is a more complicated breed: they are the stubborn veteran performers who’ve remained in the game, still chasing acting jobs in Hollywood like they were hungry rookies. There are only a few of these crazies at the show. I’m part of that odd little sect of masochists.
My table is also covered with 8 × 10 pictures from past projects I’ve acted in. Most of them were taken a long, long time ago, when puberty had just kicked in and I was smiling like a Cheshire cat. Who knew that one future day I’d be selling these photos for twenty bucks a pop? Pretty surreal. In fact, the only thing more surreal is when someone actually buys one. That hasn’t happened in hours, though.
The clock on the wall says it’s three o’clock, two more hours until closing time. I’ve officially entered the
Twilight Zone
, when there’s nothing to do except gaze at your peers ... and wonder.
On my left is Richard Dreyfus, star of
Jaws, Close Encounters of a Third Kind
, and a few other bona fide movie classics. During the lull, Richard is counting a fistful of bills, twenties I’m guessing. He rakes in the bucks at these events on the weekends and works in prestigious film projects on the weekdays. On my right is Jay North who played Dennis in
Dennis the Menace
, the 1960s TV series. Jay is counting a tall stack of unsold photos and looking glum. One of these two actors is an Oscar winner and the other is employed as a prison guard somewhere in Florida. I’m sure you know which one is which. What do I have in common with these two guys? We were all successful child actors.
If you didn’t already know me by name, my early renown came from
My Three Sons
, a 1960s TV series that ran for twelve years. I was the youngest “son,” Ernie Douglas, a prototype nerd, which is how one excited fan once described me. I like that label, especially since fellow nerds like Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, now rule the planet.
I can’t help comparing my life to guys like Richard Dreyfus and Jay North. Our journeys have gone to such different spec-trums of success. Richard climbed to the pinnacle of acting acclaim while Jay’s career plummeted to obscurity. Currently, I’m somewhere in the middle, not an Oscar winner but not patrolling Cell Block 11, either.
I am a character actor who works on a regular basis. I’ve recently appeared in high-profile films with Robert Downey Jr., Katie Holmes, and Adam Sandler, and been seen on such acclaimed TV shows as
Madman, Big Love, Desperate Housewives
, and
Two and a Half Men
. No small achievement in my mind, because it hasn’t always been this way. There was a prolonged, painful dip in my fortunes and self-esteem after the first massive wave of fame disappeared. That was about four decades ago. I had to fight my way back to become credible again. “Reinventing yourself” is the term people in the film industry use for such transformations. It sounds simple, but nothing is
simple
in Hollywood.
People ask me: Why do some child actors lose everything—their money, their reputations, even their lives? Conversely, a few child stars have beaten the odds and gone on to great success as adult performers. There has to be more to it than luck and talent. It’s a tricky question, and the answer involves parents, siblings, friends, and life experiences, the good, the bad, and the embarrassing. Sometimes you’ve got to go back to your beginning to understand the ending. It’s been a long, twisting roller-coaster journey. This is what I remember about the ride ...
CHAPTER 1
 
Birth of a Nerd
 
I was born in Hollywood, December 17, 1953. My first home was located in the heart of town on Formosa Avenue, north of Santa Monica Boulevard. This is the city that gave birth to world-famous studios, Paramount, Columbia, and 20th Century-Fox, and we were living a half block away from one of the best dream factories, the Samuel Goldwyn Studios.
One of my earliest memories is walking with my mother past the Goldwyn lot, a fortress-like compound with high walls and guarded gates. I was just three years old and fascinated by the place. It reminded me of a fort, specifically the cavalry outpost that I saw on my favorite TV show,
Rin-Tin-Tin.
The series featured Rusty, a young army mascot, and his beautiful German shepherd, Rin-Tin-Tin. I wanted a life like Rusty’s, living in a fort with a really cool dog.
I was in awe of the studio’s big iron gates, which would open up for only a few lucky people. I couldn’t help but wonder, What could be happening behind those massive barriers that was so important that it required guards to keep out the common rabble? My mom said she’d heard that the Samuel Goldwyn Studio is where they actually filmed
Rin-Tin-Tin,
and then I understood: important activities really were going on inside the “fort.” I wanted to go inside, badly.
Without a doubt, my parents stoked my interest in movies. Not intentionally, though. I absorbed cinema history through osmosis because my mom and dad talked about it with such love and knowledge. They owned two theaters in Baltimore during the 1930s and 1940s, and saw every film ever released in those decades, over and over. The film bug infected their blood, and when I was born, it became part of my DNA, too.
According to family lore, my dad inherited the theaters from his father who was a bookie, who acquired the cinemas as payoff from a debtor. The story of how my parents met is even more colorful. My dad hired my mother to work at one of his theaters located on The Block, an infamously seedy part of town. Her job wasn’t ticket-taker or usher. My mom was a “fan dancer” like the famous stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee. Not your average mom and pop.
Back in the era, the theater business was open night and day, presenting films and live entertainment. There were multiple showings of the A movie—the main event—and the B movie, making it a double feature. They also screened newsreels, short subjects, and cartoons, and live entertainers performed between the films. Comedians, singers, and of course, fan-dancers would trot out to charm the rowdy crowd, mostly troops on leave and the local down-and-outers.
By all accounts, the routines of fan-dancers were tame compared to the nude pole-dancers of today. Mom dressed in a one-piece bathing suit and hid behind giant peacock feathers, strutting around the stage and flashing a little skin to the beat of a drum. It’s creepy to think of your mother doing such things, but it’s kind of cool, too, for its shock value if nothing else.
After the war ended, a little invention called television got very popular, and attendance at the movies nose-dived. The independent theaters couldn’t compete. They became dying relics of a lost world and faded away like the dinosaurs ... and fan-dancers. In 1949, my parents unloaded the family business and headed for Hollywood, hoping for a new start.
My mom and dad never lost their love of films, though. After watching a movie, my parents would rattle off the names of practically every actor we’d just seen. Not just the stars, they knew the names of every supporting actor, too.
My dad would say things like, “Bogart was okay, but Sidney Greenstreet stole the movie.”
My mom would counter, “Honestly, I think Ward Bond is sexier than Bogart!”
Ward Bond? Sidney Greenstreet? Better than Bogart? Their list of unheralded actors went on and on: Frank Morgan, Edward Everett Horton, Billie Burke, Sam Jaffe, William Bendix. Some of these actors were fat, bug eyed, or jolly, while others were frail, pompous, or morose. The one thing they all had in common:
character.
You could tell my parents loved these guys for their oddball personalities and quirky looks. That impressed me. Being a character actor seemed like something to aspire to.
During our first few years in Hollywood, we weren’t living like ex–movie moguls from Baltimore. It was a paycheck above poverty level. Our rented two-bedroom cottage on Formosa Avenue was so shabby and old that it nearly collapsed in an earthquake that hit Long Beach, a hundred miles away.
We were eating dinner, and the ground started to sway. My parents, East Coast “rookies,” were kind of giddy at first. The shaking wasn’t as bad as they’d heard. Then the quake grew stronger as the walls buckled and light fixtures swayed.
My mom hissed, “Hilliard, what’s happening? What are we supposed to do?”
Nobody knew what was coming next. My dad finally said, “I think we’re supposed to get in a doorway.”
I don’t recall any of us moving an inch. We just sat in our breakfast nook, peering through a big picture window, half expecting to see a swarm of locusts or a biblical flood. It was pitch-black outside, and I saw my family’s ghostly reflections vibrating in the shaking glass. As the ground settled, I sensed that mysterious forces were loose in the world. It was unpredictable, scary, and kind of fun, too.
The fun ended fast, though, once we saw that our shack was shaken off its foundation. The landlord was in no hurry to fix it, either, and our future slipped from bleak to dire. The pressure to rescue the family was on my dad. My mother often said he was a genius.
Troubled
genius would have been a better description.
My father suffered from a paralyzing inferiority complex, perhaps the result of too much pressure applied by his parents, Jewish immigrants. It may sound like a cliché, but all their children had to be high achievers ... or die. My dad certainly had the potential to excel; he entered NYU at age sixteen as the designated family lawyer. After four years, he finished the law program but was too young to take the bar exam. He decided to switch majors and become a psychologist, another parental-approved profession. Not long after that, he focused on foreign languages, becoming fluent in French and Spanish.
My dad devised a pretty clever plan: keep switching majors so you never get a degree in anything; that way you’ll never have to get a real job and be judged.
Eventually, my father found a better way to escape everyone’s expectations. When his dad died, he abandoned college altogether and assumed the job of running the movie theaters. With one ingenious stroke, he became a hero for saving the family business, while forever avoiding a college graduation day. Thus, he became the “promising genius” in perpetuity. It was the bane of his life.
Despite all his hang-ups, my mother never gave up hope on my dad and a brighter future. She had met him when she was sixteen, after running away from her dreary home in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. He seemed like a knight in shining armor, with his good looks and sterling academic reputation. She was going to be the “woman behind the great man.” Over time, when she realized she’d invested in a flawed “diamond,” her disappointment grew.
Now that our earthquake-damaged house in Hollywood was tilting like the leaning Tower of Pisa, my mother wanted the “great man” to get off his butt and do something about it. She wanted action, and fast. Doing anything, let alone doing it fast, wasn’t my father’s style. Apathy was his middle name. That might explain why he chose to work as a salesman at Charles Furniture in South Central Los Angeles, a job he held his entire life.
My dad inspected our battered home and seemed unfazed. Even the hole in our living room ceiling wasn’t too bad. He said, “Let’s just stay here and try to get the landlord to repair the place.”
My mother flipped. She said, “If you want to stay here, with the cracked walls and hole in the roof, you are nuts! I’ll be goddamned if I’m staying!” She swore like a drunken sailor. Most ex–fan dancers do.
Somehow my mom scraped up the money to rent a dinky duplex on Wilcox Avenue in Hollywood and even arranged for movers to haul our secondhand furniture. As we vacated the shack on Formosa, my sullen dad followed us like a sad puppy, tail between his legs.
We didn’t live in our new duplex for very long, though. The place turned out to be a bigger dump than the shack. Worse yet, it was infested with roaches. This was no big deal to my dad; nothing a couple cans of Raid couldn’t fix. Mom flipped, again, and we hauled our meager belongings across the street into our new apartment home on Wilcox. This turned out to be a great move because the building was crawling with kids. This is where my life really got interesting.

Other books

So Much for That by Lionel Shriver
La cena by Herman Koch
Match by Helen Guri
Deception by Christiane Heggan
Marines by Jay Allan
Valley of the Kings by Cecelia Holland