The Importance of Being Ernie: Read online

  The Importance of Being Ernie

  From My Three Sons to Mad Men, a Hollywood Survivor Tells All

  BARRY LIVINGSTON

  CITADEL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  WWW.KENSINGTONBOOKS.COM

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  There are so many people—family, friends, and colleagues—who I owe a debt of gratitude, for enriching my career and my life. To them I offer my heartfelt thanks. One person deserves so much more, my wife, Karen. She has been my touchstone for over three decades. Her patience, wisdom, humor, counsel, and love elevate me in every way. To her I dedicate this book.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1 - Birth of a Nerd

  CHAPTER 2 - Wild on Wilcox

  CHAPTER 3 - Swim School and the Big Break

  CHAPTER 4 - A Well-Rounded Performer

  CHAPTER 5 - Working with Legends

  CHAPTER 6 - Memories Are Magic

  CHAPTER 7 - The Top Secret TV Series

  CHAPTER 8 - Moving Up in the World

  CHAPTER 9 - My Six Loves

  CHAPTER 10 - The Amazing TV

  CHAPTER 11 - My Three Sons

  CHAPTER 12 - Ernie Becomes Famous

  CHAPTER 13 - My Pal, Lucille Ball

  CHAPTER 14 - Bub and Uncle Charley

  CHAPTER 15 - Ernie to the Rescue

  CHAPTER 16 - The CBS Years and Fred De Cordova

  CHAPTER 17 - Making a Best Friend, Losing a Best Friend

  CHAPTER 18 - The Times They Are A-Changin’

  CHAPTER 19 - My First Girlfriend

  CHAPTER 20 - A Kindred Spirit and Partner in Crime

  CHAPTER 21 - The End Is Here, Now What?

  CHAPTER 22 - Free to Be Me

  CHAPTER 23 - The Well-Rounded Performer Sings and Dances

  CHAPTER 24 - Moving to the Bunker

  CHAPTER 25 - Work After My Three Sons

  CHAPTER 26 - Myrna

  CHAPTER 27 - Meanwhile, Back Home at the Ranch

  CHAPTER 28 - Life Beyond the Camera

  CHAPTER 29 - My First Mentor

  CHAPTER 30 - Starring in a New TV Series

  CHAPTER 31 - The Skin of Our Teeth

  CHAPTER 32 - Back to Los Angeles, Yawn

  CHAPTER 33 - The Slow Slide into Oblivion

  CHAPTER 34 - Love at Long Last

  CHAPTER 35 - Big Changes for One and All

  CHAPTER 36 - The Poison Donut

  CHAPTER 37 - The Darkest Hours

  CHAPTER 38 - Staying Sober with John Cassavetes

  CHAPTER 39 - Finding My Soul Mate During CPR

  CHAPTER 40 - The Worst and the Best

  CHAPTER 41 - Wanted, Again

  CHAPTER 42 - Unwanted, Again

  CHAPTER 43 - Back to the Dinner Theater

  CHAPTER 44 - New Roles

  CHAPTER 45 - A Brave New Nerd

  CHAPTER 46 - My Dad

  CHAPTER 47 - Nerd in the New Millennium

  CHAPTER 48 - A My Three Sons Movie?

  CHAPTER 49 - Embracing Ernie

  CHAPTER 50 - More Top Secret Projects

  CHAPTER 51 - Working with Future Legends

  CHAPTER 52 - Big Love

  CHAPTER 53 - The Social Network

  EPILOGUE - Back to the Autograph Show

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  by Stanley Livingston

  My brother Barry and I have shared a lifetime together. We shared a bedroom growing up. We broke into show business together. We shared a ride to work together. We shared a dressing room. We shared credit, appearing in some of television’s most memorable shows together. We share a legacy in showbiz together.

  Although there exists a little thing called nepotism in show business, I have to set the record straight. My brother has always been his own man (even as a child). Each and every television and movie part he landed—in an extraordinary fifty-plus-year career—he fought for and won because of his determination as a person and his undeniable talents as an actor.

  I watched my brother wisely re-invent himself as an actor after My Three Sons ended in 1972. Most actors would have packed it in and started selling insurance or used cars. Not Barry. He headed off to work on the stages of Broadway and Off-Broadway, and began his career and life anew.

  I watched my brother go through some challenging moments as well as some high points as an actor—and as a human being. I never heard him complain about the hardships or brag about his good fortune. My brother is stoic and relentless. He always stays the course.

  Along the way, my brother found love and marriage, and became the quintessential family man. As a busy working actor, he has never put his career in front of his family. Sometimes I think my brother is “Steve Douglas” or “Ozzie Nelson” reincarnate. He has more than a picture-perfect home life. He has the “real deal”—a wife, a son, and a daughter who are truly loving and not afraid to express it.

  This book is a new venture for my brother and will show another side of his many talents—his amazing gift as a writer. Of course, I already knew that. But you are about to find out. My brother can spin a yarn and has a dazzling way with words. The Importance of Being Ernie proves that.

  For my reel- (and real-) life brother I have only love, admiration, and respect. I’m not sure we ever had a real fight. We have never been rivals—only supporters of each other’s endeavors and dreams. The truth is if Barry weren’t my brother, he’d be my best friend. Can a brother be a best friend? I’m sure of it!

  With Love ...

  Stanley Livingston

  Los Angeles

  March 2011

  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 b
y 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.