The Importance of Being Ernie: Read online

  Every day at three o’clock, my mom would be parked in front of my school in our ugly old Nash Rambler, honking and yelling, “Get your ass in the car! Hurry up!”

  We were perennially late for an audition, sometimes a Cheerios commercial or bit part on Dragnet. We found ourselves speeding across Los Angeles to towns that I never knew existed: Culver City, Burbank, North Hollywood! As far as I had figured, there was only Hollywood.

  Once we arrived at our destination, my mom, Stan, and I would stake out a place in a cramped waiting room overflowing with kids and stage moms. Most times we’d have to wait an hour or more for the actual audition. It was hell.

  Mothers would jockey for empty seats in metal folding chairs and chitchat. The fidgety kids were relegated to the floor and ordered to do their homework or doodle on paper. Eventually, some kid would crack, losing his mind from the boredom, and whine like a stuck pig. The casting director would usually appear just in time to see a stressed-out mom twisting “Little Billy’s” forearm. That kind of sadistic parenting technique never got good results. Little Billy’s whining always got louder, and the casting director would order the kid and mom to go outside to restore order. Of course, that kind of thing never happened to Stan or me. Not! I’ve still got the Indian burn scars on my forearms from my mom’s attempts to stop my bitching and moaning.

  If you survived the wait in the outer office, and your brain hadn’t gone to mush, the casting director would call out your name and lead you to an inner office. Once there, you’d be presented to a parole board of stern-looking adults. These solemn people were the producers and director, the people that do the hiring. They’d study your every move as you read lines like: “I can run really fast in my new Keds sneakers!” or “Ipana toothpaste tastes suuuuuper!”

  Once you finished the reading, the director would mumble: “Thanks for coming. Next.” The casting director would then give you the bum’s rush out the door. You were in the inner sanctum for no more than a minute. It seemed like a helluva long trek to North Hollywood just for that.

  After a few dozen auditions, Stan and I started to get the hang of things and we booked a couple of projects. I got a Buster Brown shoes commercial, and Stan booked a couple of TV shows, The Whirly Birds and The Bonnie Parker Story. My parents were completely amazed when Stan landed a really plum job in a big MGM movie, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. It starred Doris Day! She was one of the biggest stars in the world.

  Stan and I suddenly had acting careers, and this really pleased my mom. The success of her children gave her bragging rights. It also gave her a project to pour her pent-up energy into.

  My dad was pleased, too, but as usual was pretty negative and pessimistic about our future as actors. I say this about him with no malice whatsoever. I loved my dad. He was a brilliant, gentle soul who rarely lost his temper, unlike my mom who could turn on you like a pit bull. He just couldn’t embrace the idea of schlepping his kids all over the city for auditions. It was too much of a distraction from his favorite pastime: analyzing the mysterious demons in his head that were holding him back. Unfortunately, his dark deliberations never yielded any conclusions, just more questions and angst.

  Stan’s recent film work on TV, coupled with the Daisies film, was now making him recognizable, famous even. I was wowed. My brother was a Movie Star! I was proud as hell of him, and he was still my hero. Secretly, though, I was a little jealous of the new perks that were coming his way. Sibling rivalry, I suppose.

  Young pretty girls at the pool giggled when Stan arrived; the guys chose him first to play Marco Polo; even aunts and uncles fawned all over him during visits. I noticed how fame changes the way people relate to you. Plain and simple, they like you better. Not a bad thing to aspire to when you’re five years old. I craved for a piece of that fame pie, too.

  I finally got my first major movie acting job in 1958 when I tagged along with my brother who was auditioning for a movie called Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! The film was going to star a hot young actor, Paul Newman, and his wife, Joanne Woodward; Stan was being considered for a role as one of their sons. Right after his audition, he was offered the part. When the producers saw me in the waiting room and found out we were brothers, I was asked to read for the role of the younger son. I got the job on the spot, too. Bingo! The sibling rivalry eased now that the playing field had leveled.

  The start of filming was an exciting time. Especially the first day when we drove through the gates of the mighty film factory, 20th Century-Fox. I finally made it inside a “fort,” given permission to pass by the uniformed guards. I was working for the company that made stars of Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, Betty Grable, and the biggest child star of all time, Shirley Temple.

  Some actors make their screen debuts in very dramatic ways: John Wayne, Winchester in hand, flagging down help in Stage Coach, or Peter O’Toole galloping across the Arabian desert on a camel wearing a flowing white gown and a golden headdress in Lawrence of Arabia. My debut in Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! was upside down, being pile driven into the ground like a posthole digger.

  When I first appear in the movie, Joanne Woodward is holding me in the air by both feet, talking into a phone cradled against her shoulder and shaking me up and down. I had supposedly swallowed a penny, and she was trying to dislodge the coin from my gullet. We did this scene numerous times. I don’t know who suffered more: me, who was hanging upside down, or Woodward, who had to do the heavy lifting. Despite the strain, she was sweet and gentle as a movie mom could be. I had one heckuva headache after we were done filming.

  Paul Newman, ever the method actor, tried to foster a fatherly relationship with his “boys,” popping into our schoolroom to chat and sometimes help with our work. The only “fly in the ointment” was our director, a cranky old-timer named Leo McCarey, who was known for directing the Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup. McCarey had a reputation as a screamer, the kind of set boss who would verbally abuse an actor if they messed up. At first, McCarey seemed to like me and was satisfied with my acting. Then, one day, everything changed.

  We were shooting a scene in the family living room. Stan and I were directed to keep our eyes glued on a TV set, engrossed in a program, while Newman entered the front door.

  “Ignore him, no matter what he does or says, just keep watching the TV,” ordered McCarey. Easy enough, I thought. We did that all the time with our real parents.

  Take one: Newman made his entrance and paused behind the sofa where Stan and I were sitting. He says, “Hi, boys!” We give him nothing back, ignoring him. Then he waved, still trying to get our attention, and we stayed riveted to the TV as instructed.

  McCarey’s voice yells out from behind the camera, “Cut! Let’s do it again. Barry, keep your eyes on the TV.”

  I replied, “Huh? Uh ... okay.”

  Take two: Newman enters, tries to get us to look at him. Once again, I am focused on the TV.

  “Cut!” screamed McCarey. “Barry, you’re not looking at the TV like I told you to do. Now let’s get it right this time!”

  Take three: Newman enters and ...

  “Cuutt!” We didn’t even get to the part where Newman says Hi.

  McCarey emerged from the darkness, his eyes bulging, jowls jiggling. He gets right in my face and snarls, “Barry, you keep looking away from the TV! Don’t do that! Do you understand? Keep your eyes on the TV! Please!” Then he retreated into the darkness behind the camera like a pissed-off ghost.

  Take four: McCarey bellows, “Action!” ... “Cut!” McCarey reappears again, looking like he wants to slap me silly. By this time I am ready to slap myself silly. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong; I had never, before or since, looked at a TV as hard as I was doing it that day.

  Before McCarey could throttle my neck, Newman intervened. The star said, “Leo, take it easy, he’s just a kid. Listen, I’ve got an idea: You’ve already got a master shot where you see me enter and come up behind him, right? All you really need is the boy’s close-up to show
that’s he’s watching the TV and ignoring me. Let’s just shoot that now and let the kid rest. It’ll work out when you edit.” The star was already thinking like an award-winning director, which he later became.

  Not wanting to waste more time and money, McCarey agreed to Newman’s suggestion.

  We began my close-ups with high hopes. After one take, it was back to the same old nightmare with McCarey screaming, “Barry, you’re still not looking where you should be looking; your eyes are all over the place!”

  Newman, ever the hero and cool dude, decided to crawl inside the empty TV cabinet off-camera and give me something interesting to focus on. To make his live presentation more entertaining, a prop master delivered a hand puppet to Newman so he could wave it at me.

  While the whole hubbub was unfolding off-camera, I sat there thinking: There is Paul Newman, a major movie star, waving a hand puppet at me from inside an empty television cabinet. Weird.

  A couple more aborted takes ensued. Finally, there was an eerie quiet from behind the camera. I heard urgent, unintelligible whispered words offstage and one of them sounded like seizure. I didn’t know what the word meant, but it didn’t sound good. Then McCarey, Newman, and my studio teacher approached me. The teacher felt my forehead and gently asked, “Barry, are you all right?”

  “I feel fine,” I replied. And I did, too, except for the embarrassment of Newman’s puppet show.

  The three adults hovered over me. Their expressions weren’t showing frustration anymore, only grave concern. I heard a voice in the darkness behind the camera whisper, “Call an ambulance.”

  Moments later, my mother and I were being whisked away, sirens blaring, to the nearest hospital. In the ER, the doctors ruled out seizures as the cause for my wandering eyes. I seemed to be healthy as far as they could tell.

  After that, the hospital’s ophthalmologist was called in to perform some tests. His diagnosis: astigmatism. That explained why my eyes were randomly darting back and forth, like a broken cuckoo clock. He prescribed glasses to remedy the problem.

  After the eye doctor’s exam, I was led into another room where a big wooden box was set in front of me. A nurse carefully opened the lid, as if it contained something rare and valuable, like rubies or even kryptonite. Inside the box, on a bed of blue velvet, were ... eyeglasses. There were round wire-rimmed ones, massive steel rectangles, and stately tortoise shell designs. I was told to pick from the selection. This clearly was an important life decision; a whole new identity would be defined by this choice.

  Frankly, I wasn’t too pleased about the whole scenario. I didn’t really want glasses. They were for the weirdos at school, the oddballs everybody called “four eyes.” Then something dawned on me: Superman wore glasses, when he was Clark Kent, anyway. I also remembered seeing Buddy Holly wearing big horn-rimmed spectacles, and the girls still seemed to think he was pretty neat. Even my dad wore glasses, and he was the smartest guy in the world. My anxiety eased.

  I reached for the horn-rimmed glasses, put them on, and gazed in the mirror. I liked what I saw. I looked more intelligent than before. I already had a feeling that I was above average in intelligence, but this new prop really sold the idea.

  Presto, chango! Just like that, a new me was hatched. I now had horn-rimmed glasses to go along with my large buckteeth and my Moe Howard bowl cut. I believe this new persona was correctly identified decades later and given the proper label: nerd. Jim Carrey may have actually borrowed this look for his character in Dumb and Dumber. He either took it from me or from Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. One way or the other, all three of us were nerdy dead ringers. I had the dubious distinction of being the first on the block with that particular look.

  When I returned to the Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! set the next day, I was sporting my glasses, and the film’s producer wasn’t pleased. Apparently, it was already a stretch in his mind that Paul Newman’s son would have buckteeth and a cheap bowl haircut. Add on the horn-rimmed glasses, I suddenly looked like Mr. Moto, the bespectacled Japanese movie spy. That was a creepy image, far from the ideal 1950s American boy. Actually, my brother Stan was a great example of that prototype: blond hair, blue eyes, little freckles on the nose. He was a lovely little Aryan child, a real purebred. As for me, I was a mutt, lovable but not yet ready for prime time.

  The producers told my mom that I would have to be let go. They tried to buffer the blow by saying that I could remain on the production as a “stand-in” for the child actor who was going to replace me. She rejected their offer and grandly announced, “My Barry is going to be a star, not a stand-in!”

  I’m sure her bold declaration, done in my presence, was meant to bolster my hurt feelings. After that single outburst, she clammed up. She couldn’t afford to get overly indignant or Stan might get fired, too. We were just actors, after all, employees like everybody else. I was politely asked to leave ... now.

  As our car passed through the “fort’s” main gates, I grumbled to my mom, “This is how Johnny Yuma from TV’s The Rebel must have felt.” It was one of my favorite Westerns, and during the show’s opening credits Johnny was stripped of his soldier’s stripes, tossed out through the gates of Fort Apache, and left to wander a desert wasteland. I was being ejected, too, for the unforgivable crime of looking too weird.

  Once I was back home, I felt like Cinderella after the ball. The day before, I was a pampered rising star at 20th Century-Fox; now I was headed back to Vine Street Elementary and more “drop and cover” drills. I was certain my fiery demise would be coming soon. The only one who truly seemed happy about my return was that goddamn carpenter bee in the telephone pole. On my first walk home after school, he took after me with a vengeance, like he really missed me.

  Even though another child actor replaced me in Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! I still consider this my film debut. That’s because I’m still in it. Remember the scene where Woodward was holding me in the air by my shoes and tapping my head on the floor? The producers decided to use it. I was upside down anyway and practically unrecognizable. For the following scenes in the movie, when the son is upright, it is the kid who replaced me. The producers figured nobody would notice. And nobody did ... except me.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Well-Rounded Performer

  After being fired on my first movie, my mom began hustling me around the town for more auditions. Nothing much came my way, though. I had hit a lull. Our agent put it in my mom’s head that Stan and I needed to cultivate more skills in the performing arts if we were to increase our odds at booking jobs. I started hearing the phrase “well-rounded performer” a lot.

  “The people who make it in show business aren’t just merely actors; they also dance, sing, and play musical instruments like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Those guys are really well-rounded performers!” my mom would exclaim.

  This was an era when tap dancing was still thought to be the height of artistic expression ... along with playing an accordion. If you could do both, the next stop was The Ed Sullivan Show.

  Stan and I were soon enrolled in Madame Etienne’s Dance Academy on Hollywood Boulevard. We joined a chorus line of aspiring child stars, learning our tap “time steps,” sashaying to rumbas and slinking across the academy’s glossy hardwood floors with some pretty sexy jazz moves. When I saw myself gyrating in the floor-to-ceiling mirror, I definitely didn’t see suave Gene Kelly looking back. With my big glasses and buckteeth, I looked like Theodore from Alvin and the Chipmunks, and he sure as hell was a crappy dancer.

  Stan and I sacrificed our Saturday morning cartoons every weekend for the next year to attend the academy. I worked hard to learn jazz, ballet, and tap. You had to. If you lagged behind, Madame Etienne would whack you on the butt with her cane. Long ago, perhaps the turn of the twentieth century, she danced with the Moscow Ballet Company. She was a diva from a foreign land and took no guff.

  After dance class, my mom shuttled me to a different school to learn another kind of performing art: ice-skatin
g. That was fun. Our classes were held at the Polar Palace, which burned down in the 1960s. (How an ice rink could catch fire was beyond me.) The Polar Palace held a huge oval ice arena that was as big as a football field. I learned to twirl, do a single-axel jump, and skate backward. According to my mother, you never knew when a job call might come along looking for the next Dick Button.

  Now that I was on the road to becoming a well-rounded performer, I started to book more jobs. That was my mom’s rationale, anyway, which I realized was a clever ruse to keep me going to dance classes. I knew that my clumsy modern jazz skills had nothing to do with getting hired for a 1963 Western, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, starring a young Kurt Russell. I wasn’t required to flamenco dance on The Dick Powell Theatre, either. Moms just can’t be trusted sometimes.

  The latter program was a dramatic anthology, and the episode I did was called “Somebody Is Waiting,” starring Mickey Rooney. He was one of the biggest child stars ever, a top box-office draw in the 1940s, and had become an acclaimed adult performer. In fact, he won an Emmy for his performance in this drama playing a lonely merchant marine sailor who is killed while on shore leave.

  The director thought he’d be clever and get my “real” reaction to Mickey’s death scene. I heard him whisper to the cameraman, “roll film,” and then he told me to ride my bike down a studio alley where I found Rooney lying on the ground, blood oozing from his mouth.

  Rooney gasped, “Little boy, help me ... help me!” I was a seasoned pro by now and instantly knew they were trying to trick me. I played along anyway. I gave out a yelp and a shudder, the one that I’d practiced the night before while learning my scene with my dad. The director loved it, assuming he outsmarted me. I just accepted the compliments, never mentioning that I was onto their scheme.