Working with Disney (24 page)

DP:
I've read you started dancing when you were about three or four?

BB:
Yeah, I used to twirl around with the music on the radio, and my parents thought, “This boy seems to have rhythm,” and so they gave
me tap dancing lessons. I had my first partner at five, and we broke up at eight, and I thought, “I'm destined to be [part of] a dance team,” so on
The Mickey Mouse Club
it was Bobby and Sharon, and on
The Lawrence Welk Show,
Bobby and Mira, and Bobby and Cissy, and Bobby and Elaine. But, yeah, I started by taking tap dancing, which my folks thought [was] a guy's dance. They were right. And then I branched out at about eleven or twelve, doing jazz, and then I started taking ballroom dancing and then putting in some ballet and a little bit of everything and taking some singing [lessons]. When I was thirteen, I auditioned for the show.

DP:
And you did all this while living in Long Beach?

BB:
Yeah, in Long Beach.

DP:
So you were really outside of the Hollywood world, while a lot of the kids who appeared on
The Mickey Mouse Club
lived in the San Fernando Valley.

BB:
But I had a mom that would drive me up to South-Central [Los Angeles], where there was a great black tap dancing teacher named Willie Covan who had taught Ann Miller and Donald O'Connor and others. And then she would take me up to Louis DaPron in Beverly Hills and B. B. Carpenter on Slauson Avenue. So I was taking stuff here, there, and everywhere.

DP:
I know you mentioned that it was quite a sacrifice for her to drive you up to film
The Mickey Mouse Club
all the time.

BB:
Yeah, because there were no freeways then. Five trips from Long Beach, an hour each way by Western Avenue, was kind of a long trek. Finally the Santa Ana, the first freeway, got built. I remember we used to go via Downey to pick up Dennis Day and his mother because she didn't drive, so we would pick up Dennis just about every day and take him with us.

I have two sisters and a brother. My dad was a meat cutter, and he worked nine to five and my mother was a stay-at-home 1950s mom, and at that time, when I first signed for Disney, which was at $120 a week, I
was making more than my dad [made in] a week. At that time we didn't know anything about contracts, so, of course, Disney got all merchandising rights and all tour rights. Wherever we'd go touring, it was just part of the deal. Even Disneyland, we'd go out on the weekends; we'd work Monday through Friday [at the studio], then maybe Saturday and Sunday, we'd do two or three shows out at Disneyland, which was fun because we were kids and loved what we did.

But anyway, I danced everywhere—I mean, every Lions Club and Elks Club and county fair, the L.A. County Fair, and all these places, and then all of a sudden in the 1950s these amateur TV shows got going. And you could win all kinds of loot. They didn't pay you anything, but, I mean, I won my first bike, and I won my first aquarium, and I have four aquariums still going after all these years. So that was probably 1953 or something like that. That got me going with that. And I won my folks a washer and dryer. That was great back then.

DP:
Those are big prizes.

BB:
So I did seventy-five of those shows, and it was all loot. Then an agent saw me on one, and she called the station. I had won the show that night, and she called and said, “I can get that boy some professional work.” So then she started sending me out, and the first thing I went out on, I got, so that really encouraged her. It was a toothpaste commercial with Ozzie and Harriet [Nelson], and I went to school with Rick Nelson, and Ozzie directed me. That was for Listerine toothpaste. So that was fun. And then I did some episodic [television] things and a few things here and there. But then when I was thirteen, she sent me out to Disney. And I'm sure that's one of your questions, “How did you get the job?”

DP:
I'd like to hear that story. One of the things I'd like to ask you about—and I think this is probably in contrast to some of the other Mouseketeers—is that you had said somewhere that it was your decision all the way. I mean, your parents didn't push you to do this show.

BB:
I just loved to dance, and it was always so much fun to me—you know, just to get out there and hoof away or whatever. And I think you'll
find the same with Sharon. She just loved to dance. But that was my first big thing, getting on
The Mickey Mouse Club.

DP:
You said that was why you were smiling so much.

BB:
And I was just going crazy that first year. Luckily, by the third year I was a cool adolescent, and I had settled down, and I was like everybody, kind of got cool and sharp. Like Darlene [Gillespie], she was pigtails and freckles [at the start], and by the time the third year came around, she was blond with false eyelashes and had a sexy voice. You know what I mean?

DP:
She had a very mature voice. I was listening to some recordings of her and she had a beautiful voice.

BB:
To me, she was the most talented Mouseketeer overall. I mean, she was a comedian, she sang great, she danced great. In fact, after
The Mickey Mouse Club,
she really got serious with her ballet and was on toe and doing all kinds of stuff, and then, you know, she changed her name to Darlene Valentine and became a country singer. I don't know if she moved to Nashville. I think she did. She did some recording. But there was the Annette charisma that came across, and everybody will tell you that it was the audience that discovered her, but, of course, Walt Disney discovered her. But she always said to everybody, “Well, I didn't really sing and dance that great,” so I don't know. She was just so natural, and she had sex appeal. Plus I think she was the first Mouseketeer to blossom, so to speak. Do you know what I mean?

DP:
I do! Just to jump back to when you came to
The Mickey Mouse Club
audition: What was that like?

BB:
You know, I can remember that first audition like it was yesterday. It was really, really, really hot. We were outside with our parents, outside the soundstage. I can just remember how hot it was. Because it was Burbank in, was it May or June? Well, anyway, it was just so hot, and we went in, and actually we got individual auditions. I think I did “Blue Skies,” which was a tap dance I had learned that had lots of taps—pretty hot for a kid who's thirteen. But my gimmick was my “Rock around the
Clock,” my barefoot jazz dance, because rock was just coming in—it was 1955 and Bill Haley and the Comets [were very popular]. And so that was something different. But I went through five auditions. I remember one time I came back and it was Jack Lavin, Lee Traver, Hal Adelquist, and Dik Darley, and then it was Walt Disney with everybody at the very end. And they would line up different groups, which was weird, in the soundstage where we eventually recorded all the stuff. And they would say, “Okay, here's these eight, and then here's these eight kids. Now, this one, Cubby [O'Brien], plays great drums, and this one is a really an outstanding dancer, but he sings too.” And that would be me, you know. “And this one is really cute,” and it was Bronson [Scott] or it was Karen [Pendleton] or whoever. So there were twenty-four [Mouseketeers] the first year, which people don't realize; they just know the roll-call kids. [Those Mouseketeers who were identified by Jimmie Dodd in a roll call.] Basically through the first years, they just knew the nine of us pretty much [Bobby, Annette Funicello, Darlene Gillespie, Tommy Cole, Doreen Tracey, Karen Pendleton, Cubby O'Brien, Sharon Baird, and Lonnie Burr].

DP:
So when you went back for these five auditions, did you think after the first one that you might get this, or were you worried because you kept having to go back, or was each one encouraging?

BB:
No, encouraging. I told you the very first thing I went out for was the Spin and Marty serial. They had all these guys. And I thought, “Well, I've done some acting,” and I'd taken some acting lessons since I was four or five years old along with everything else. So I read, and it was fine. They said, “Do you sing and dance?” and I said, “Well, that's mainly what I do.” And they said, “Well, down the hall at two o'clock we're having Mouseketeer auditions.” So I did my tap dance there. But the main audition I remember was that hot day where we were all standing outside on the asphalt.

But no, each one was encouraging, and then at the very end I got it. But so many of them moved to Hollywood U.S.A. And a lot of the moms and dads actually used the kids' money to enhance their lifestyle or even live on it. Some built swimming pools or bought new houses
with their Mouseketeer money. Mine didn't touch a penny. And my mom said, “I don't want to move away from Long Beach.” My dad had the job with Safeway that he'd had all of his life. In fact, when he retired at sixty-five, he had the record for all of the Safeway stores for never missing a day for being sick. So he was always real loyal and always did his job. So no, she didn't want me to be the Hollywood kid like so many. And you know the famous story about how Walt Disney used to take everybody around the neighborhood and say, “See those [kids] over there? That's what I want to be Mouseketeers,” and the producers or whoever he had with him would say, “Well, what do you mean?” And he said, “I don't want those slick professional kids, I want the kids next door.” Of course, we had to learn how to sing and dance and do that whole bit. But he didn't want the phony voices and that kind of thing. He wanted to make everybody think that they could be Mouseketeers.

DP:
Which we all did. I mean, that was part of the allure. We all sat there with our ears on.

BB:
I kind of think the way they did it was the right way if they wanted that because pretty much they got kids and amateurs who hadn't done much. Now, Sharon had and Lonnie had—just a few. Even Darlene and Doreen and some of them just came from Burch Mann's dancing school, and Darlene sang with a trio, but they had her come out and sing by herself. But they were amateurs coming in fresh, so you know we had all that enthusiasm. In my case, because I did those seventy-five amateur TV shows, I was so glad to get a paying job.

You know, one thing I always say is I was lucky to go from one family institution to another, from Walt Disney to Lawrence Welk. I learned my discipline from
The Mickey Mouse Club.
I learned to be prepared and to be on time and to not touch the props and have respect for the people who are doing their job. That was taught to me on
The Mickey Mouse Club,
and then when I got on the Welk show, Lawrence Welk used to say, “I never have any trouble with Bobby because he was raised by Walt Disney.” I mean, that was such a great thing to say and a funny thing to say. But it's true.

DP:
What do you remember about the first day, once you got the job?

BB:
It was all done on that big orchestra stage. It was done where we actually recorded the music. It was all done on that stage, and the auditioning, too. Then, of course, the filming was done at Stage [2]. And then the [school] trailer was parked right there. I don't know—it was a really unique experience. It was really, really fun.

DP:
Somewhere you had said it made you feel small to be on this huge soundstage.

BB:
Even where everything was [recorded] had a huge tall ceiling. I just remember when we were actually filming the first time, the lighting was interesting because we had a cameraman named Gordon Avil and he was actually telling us about lighting. In those days, they had what they call the central arc, and you would hear it go, and then you would feel this big main light on you, and you knew that you had to be in this light, and I think a few of them learned how to cast shadows on the other ones. And then you were learning about all of these different things. I became friends with all the crew, too.

I was fourteen, so I must have auditioned before my birthday—like the beginning of May—and so we probably started filming in June. We filmed all that summer. So I was filming from fourteen to seventeen and then I went back to my high school and graduated as a senior.

DP:
I know some people had problems returning to public schools. Was that particularly hard for you?

BB:
No, it was fine. I had a lot of my same friends. You know, I'd walk down the hall, and my name had changed to Mickey—“Hey, Mickey!” You know, that kind of thing, but that didn't bother me.

DP:
And how about college?

BB:
I thought I needed to get back to trying to be a little bit of a normal guy even though I was in show business and taking dancing lessons. At nineteen I got the Welk show. But I went to Cal State–Long Beach and got in a fraternity, Sigma Pi. It was a real great and real friendly active
chapter at Cal State–Long Beach in those days. I was a theater arts major and a Spanish minor.

DP:
One of the people I wanted to ask you about was Jimmie Dodd. I know you met him at the audition, and I think you had said on one of the shows that one of your favorite things from
The Mickey Mouse Club
was the father-son dance number you two did.

BB:
Jimmie was just this really special guy. The good thing was that he wasn't partial—I mean, he made all the kids feel special, like they were all really equal.

DP:
And that's how it felt to us watching, that he treated everybody the same.

BB:
But in my case, especially after the show, in [May] 1959 and 1960, I was the only one that didn't have a parent going to Australia [on the Mouseketeers' tours of the country], because my mom was still with my brother and sisters. I was eighteen or nineteen. I was right at that point where I was trying to get my own head together. So I didn't really want my mom to go. But the littler kids needed [a parent]. The first one I was really in “love” with was
Sheena [Queen] of the Jungle
[played by Irish McCalla], who went with us. But anyway, Jimmie and Ruth [Dodd] kind of took me over, and that's when this real Mousekeson/Mousekedad [relationship] came into being. They threw a big birthday party every year, because I was over there for my eighteenth and nineteenth birthday, and all the little Australian girls in those days sent boys handkerchiefs. I got about a hundred handkerchiefs those two years, and koala bears and boomerangs and all kinds of stuff. But Jimmie and Ruth kind of watched out for me. And then he got me going to the Hollywood Christian group.