The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (6 page)

“Yes,” my mother lied. The nights alone became more and more frequent the older I got. I desperately clung to my reputation as an actor. Acting would save me.

Yet visits to my father were traumatic. “I will never be like him,” I promised myself. He was doing more time in the state hospital’s mental ward. Mom felt it was her maternal duty to take me to visit him, an experience that has haunted me ever since.

CHAPTER 10
               

There was a large room, like an auditorium, lined with row after row of cots. Assuming a standing position in anticipation of our arrival, he was fairly easy to spot. Even in his deflated state, he was taller than the others.

As we navigated our way to his cot, a stranger’s shaky hand reached for me. Another one of the patients muttered something unintelligible. But most were in vegetative states, drugged out and numbed out. My dad would say “Hi,” and shake my hand. About fifteen minutes later, when the mounting silence became unbearable, he’d say, “Bye,” and shake my hand again.

Weather permitting, sometimes he’d meet us on the hospital’s front lawn. My mother attempted to instigate a conversation, which usually resulted in revisiting an unfinished argument between the two of them. On some lucky occasions, Grandma Katie came along, which normalized the disquieting situation even though my mother’s jealousy of her mother-in-law was palpable.

Grandma Katie was a sincere Catholic, not a religious hypocrite, which must have made my mother feel unworthy. My father had also cast my mother as the wife who was incapable of being as perfect as his mother. And then there was my growing affection for my grandma, coinciding with intensified feelings of distrust toward my mother.

Grandma kept things moving by relating a tidbit from the newspaper or an anecdote about a relative and always offered some insight into the weather we’d just had, were presently having, or were about to have.

My mother also resented Miss Epstein. Even though she found her mother role untenable, she didn’t want to see me playing the role of son to women I’d cast as substitute mothers. She demanded all the attention.

At some point, I realized that my mother’s support of my career was not unconditional; it was based on how my accomplishments reflected on her. While she wasn’t exactly a stage mother, she did glom onto my success. My achievements were her achievements—make no mistake about that.

When my acting teacher called to say that she’d arranged for me to audition for a role at the St. Louis Municipal Opera, my mother initially thought that it was some kind of prank. I knew otherwise and as I stood in a long row of young boys, all approximately nine years old, there was little doubt in my mind that I would be chosen to appear in
Take Me Along
with Betty White and Jack Carson.

Chosen to be the understudy of the boy they cast, I was close to being right. I attended all the rehearsals and checked in every night at half-hour to see if he was okay to go on. And I received a check for thirty-five dollars.

The Muny, as it is affectionately called, remains one of my hometown’s prize attractions. Located in beautiful Forest Park (where my near-death ice-skating mishap occurred), it is a twelve-thousand-seat splendid outdoor amphitheater.

My first professional job was a joyous experience, largely based on my interaction with Betty White. In her thirties and unmarried, Betty White chose me as her lunch date every single day of the weeklong rehearsal period. She bought me a hot dog and a soft drink and we’d each save some of the bun to feed to the birds. Why did she assume this maternal role? Perhaps simply because she could sense how badly I needed it.

Several members of the chorus of singers and dancers also parented me. This was my first exposure to same-sex couples, who behaved no differently from their male-female counterparts. My introduction to gay men and lesbian women interacting was pleasantly uneventful.

While Betty White (who sent me Christmas cards postmarked “Beverly Hills”) seemed to be a fairly healthy sort, I was warned that not all actresses who lived on the West Coast possessed her upbeat disposition.

One day on the bus, en route to acting school, a man noticed the words “Junior Theater” boldly imprinted on the oversize envelope I was clutching, crammed full with my scripts and voluminous notes. I had begun taking private classes with Miss Epstein since she had pronounced me “gifted.”

“You gonna be an actor?” he asked. “Let me tell you somethin,’ kid. I got a niece out in Hollywood. Big star. Big house. Big swimmin’ pool, the works.”

“Really?” I asked, not knowing where this was leading.

“Won an Oscar, for God’s sake,” he said. “But you know what, kid?” There was a long pause. He leaned toward me and stared into my eyes. Finally, he whispered (so the driver and the other bus riders couldn’t hear), “Shelley Winters. And she ain’t happy.”

In my mind, I compared my mother’s transparent sadness to the tragic Miss Winters’. I didn’t look like Rock Hudson or Montgomery Clift, actors who shared the screen with Miss Winters. I didn’t believe that I was handsome enough to be an actor. I thought, “How can I become better looking?”

I began having photographs of myself taken at Walgreens drugstore, using coupons that I’d cut from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. I’d nervously wait for a week or so to get them back so that I could analyze each and every one of them.

That smile needed some work. And the hair could undergo some finessing to bring out my features. What to do about those sad eyes?

I would save up enough money (and clip more coupons) for my next photo session. Like a sculptor, I believed my face was clay that I could mold by determination. After a couple of years, I actually began to look less ugly.

“He willed himself into being handsome,” my mother would tell people in later years, when I was considered above average. I never asked, but I guessed that she was referring to my obsession to be photographed.

I remember that she had a photo taken of herself around the same time; whether she was the inspiration for my photo shoots or I was the inspiration for hers isn’t clear. But our intentions were unquestionably the same; we were both assessing our marketability. Hers was taken in a studio; her shoulders were draped in some black fabric and she was looking a bit doomed in spite of her attempt at a half smile. If she was trying to assess her degree of charisma, I wonder if she knew that it was in serious jeopardy of becoming extinct.

I intervened, suggesting that she needed some dazzling hairstyles when she embarked on her manhunts. I had taken great pleasure in combing my Grandma Katie’s long, luxurious mahogany-colored hair as she enjoyed
The Lawrence Welk Show
.

I had developed some innate know-how when it came to Mommy’s makeover. For one thing, she needed to let her hair grow. Bigger hair was in order. The longer it got, the more creative I could be, finding many elaborate ways to make her more glamorous.

In terms of my reinvention, I would often choose my friends, especially the male ones, based on their physicality, hoping to assimilate some of their beauty by osmosis. Guys like Terry Greenberg, a very handsome young man with dark hair and a face of perfectly symmetrical contours.

CHAPTER 11
               

Terry was my best friend, my worst enemy, my nemesis and my main competition. In other words, Terry was probably my first boyfriend.

Terry wanted to be an actor, too, but did not have the benefit of Miss Epstein’s tutelage when we both auditioned for a community theater production of
Critic’s Choice
, the Ira Levin Broadway hit that was now making it to the hinterlands.

There were at least a dozen other high-strung boys vying for the role, which demanded an expansive emotional range. Because of the role’s requirements and taking the actor’s age into consideration, the part would be double cast.

The chosen actors would alternate in the weekend performances. Terry and I both got the part, heightening our evolving bond. Our similarities cemented our relationship while simultaneously threatening it.

Miss Vineyard, our fifth-grade teacher, was probably most aware of the complicated dynamics that existed between Terry and me since she observed us several hours a day, five days a week.

A bit of a floozy, Miss Vineyard wore more lipstick and higher heels than any other teacher in our elementary school. She also had a habit of wearing a black—or red!—bra under a light-colored flimsy blouse. She was the only woman I knew who was sexier than my mom.

“I want to have a little talk with you,” she said, in that soothing two-packs-a-day baritone that some women in the Fifties didn’t regret having. When all the other kids, including Terry, had vacated the classroom, Miss Vineyard focused all of her attention on me. I had never noticed how big her breasts were.

“I’d like you to do something for me,” she said. “Tomorrow I want you to stand back and observe your friend Terry very closely throughout the day. And at the end of the school day, I want you to ask yourself if that’s how you want people to see you.”

She let it sink in as she reached into her purse for a tube of cherry red lipstick and applied it, almost in slow motion. Then she smiled, like a movie actress in a close-up.

“That’s all, darlin’,” she said, a bit archly, sounding almost like a haughty drag queen and tossing the lipstick in her bag, as if she’d just taught me a geometry equation rather than a life lesson I would never forget.

I said nothing, maybe not even “thank you.” As instructed, the following day I carefully studied my buddy’s every move. He was loud and desperate, constantly demanding everyone’s attention without ever really connecting to anyone.

Was Miss Vineyard suggesting that I acted like that? Yes, of course she was, and she cared enough about me to tell me.

At the conclusion of the day, as everyone was storming out of the classroom, I deliberately walked slowly enough so that I could make eye contact, thanking her without words.

To this day, I don’t know why she chose me over Terry. Maybe it was arbitrary. For years I told myself it was because I showed more potential. But at some point I realized that she could have gone through the same machinations with Terry, having him observe me.

It didn’t matter. I learned that I needed to lessen the volume on my quest to be accepted. The additional benefit was to know that she cared; to know that I mattered to the fifth-grade teacher with high, high heels.

Miss Ellis, my sixth-grade instructor, could not have been a greater contrast to the flashy Miss Vineyard. Fulfilling the stereotype of the old-maid teacher, she wore flowered print dresses that covered every inch of her ample frame, one for every day of the week.

While she instructed us on all subjects, it was her devotion to language that transformed her from a rather by-the-book teacher into an impassioned goddess of words.

As a fledging actor, I had probably been exposed to more language than most kids my age had, but it was Miss Ellis who instilled an appreciation of words that continues to feed my creativity.

Learning how to compose a haiku was almost as thrilling as learning how to apply the tool of sense memory to an acting assignment. As taught by Miss Ellis, in a rhapsodic voice that didn’t sound at all like her Math voice or her Science voice, the origin and meaning of haiku ignited my love affair with stringing words together.

Bill Holmes was far more interested in bouncing basketballs than writing haikus, but since his house was directly adjacent to ours, we became friends by proximity. Bill was butch to the core. When his parents had to go out of town unexpectedly, they asked my mom if he could spend the night at our house.

She said yes. Mommy was home more evenings and weekends those days since she had moved Charlie, one of her drunken, mongrel-faced boyfriends, in to live with us.

Charlie had one of those W.C. Fields noses, red and bulbous, tattooed with broken blood vessels. Like many alkies, he possessed an irresistible charm until he chugged the poisonous drink that transformed him into a seething monster.

Not unlike my father, Charlie was immobilized by the prospect of going to work. When he wasn’t replacing Daddy in the bedroom, he replaced him on the couch. My mom rarely missed a day of work.

To avoid the inevitable mayhem that I knew Mommy and Charlie would stir up, Bill and I retreated to my bedroom, steering clear of them. I remember listening to “Take Good Care of My Baby” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” on a transistor radio.

When it sounded as if the happy couple had passed out, Bill suggested we play a game. “You lie with your head at one end of the bed and I’ll lie with mine at the other,” he said, as if teaching me a move on the Monopoly board.

“Then, at the same time, we put each other’s dicks in our mouths.”

He was whispering, of course, and I felt myself getting hard. Then, he delivered the clincher. “It will taste,” he promised, “just like apple pie.”

He didn’t have to convince me. We must have stayed in that position for hours, as one song on the radio melted into another. At one point, Charlie pounded on the door. “What’s goin’ on in there?” he slurred. Bill and I jumped up, sticking our stiff peters in our underpants, as Charlie stuck his head in the door.

“Turn that fuckin’ noise off, girls,” he said, as if he owned the place. Girls? Had he heard us? Or was it a reference to girls having slumber parties?

“Yeah, sure,” I said, missing the taste of that apple pie in my mouth.

Charlie exited, and Bill and I glanced at each other, looking at each other differently than we had before the hours of cocksucking. We waited—two minutes, maybe three—and resumed the position, slurping away until dawn.

The next time I saw Bill, we were back to the routine of being friends by proximity. It was as if it had never happened. I never tasted his creamy pie again.

Now that I had tasted and been tasted, I wanted more. It was my father who, unwittingly, put me within reach of more cocksucking.

CHAPTER 12
               

He’d been released from the hospital and was given back his job as a maîtred’ at downtown’s snazzy Mayfair Lennox Hotel. One of the job’s perks was getting tickets to the traveling shows that played the American Theatre. While he had never come to see me in a play, he respected my interest in the theater and arranged for me to see shows, most of which were way over my head.