The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(14)

That was the exception, though. I think my precocious professionalism is what caught Ethel Winant’s eye. I always arrived prepared thanks to Dad, who was in the process of discovering a skill he didn’t know he had: a knack for teaching a kid how to be an actor. For The Journey, he gave me a crash course in how to deliver a performance in that particular role in that particular film. Now he was giving me the tools to construct a career in this business if I wanted it. His genius was in never talking down to me, despite my tender age.


DAD’S KNACK FOR plainspoken one-to-one talk was fully on display when he and Mom broke to me the news, early in 1959, that Mom was going to have a baby that spring. She was showing, and they knew that I would start to wonder.

I was psyched to have a little ally, and to have a baby in the house. I was a little lonely in Burbank, still adjusting to a new town in a new state. That said, I also had questions, such as, Where do babies come from?

Dad didn’t respond instantly. He took his time, sitting in the living room of our tiny one-bedroom apartment, thinking through his answer. I must have started with some reference to cartoons, because he disabused me of the notion that babies arrived in little bundles delivered by storks.

“Now, some people really do say that a stork brings a baby. That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I’m going to tell you how nature works. And this isn’t just for people—it’s the way animals make their offspring, too.”

He got up and returned with a pad and a pen. He drew a naked man and a naked woman. There was a penis on the man. The woman’s genitalia was not depicted in anything approaching vivid detail, just enough to get the idea across. He drew some little dots coming out of the penis and called them seeds.

“The man plants a seed in the woman. The woman has an egg,” he said. “When the seed and the egg meet, that’s how you make a child.”

It was presented that plainly. He never mentioned the pleasurable aspects of sexual intercourse, nor did he go into any detail about penetration. He did note that the seeds come out of the same organ that pee comes out of, and he helpfully clarified that pee is totally different than seeds.

I didn’t respond. But not because I was embarrassed. I was blown away: I had never heard a thing about seeds and eggs. Wow! And I was flattered that Dad respected me enough to give me the truth. I had the real scoop while other kids were getting the fairy tale.

What I was most excited for, though, was the pending arrival of my little buddy.





4


The New Kid in Town


RON


Sweat. The prevailing sensory memory of my early acting career is of the smell, sight, and feel of my adult colleagues’ on-set perspiration. Jesus, what a sweaty business it was.

With Gig Young, it was boozy sweat: the smell of alcohol seeping through his pores. This was in an episode from the first season of The Twilight Zone that is now regarded as one of the show’s best, “Walking Distance.” Young played a cynical big-city advertising guy named Martin Sloan whose car breaks down just outside of the town where he grew up. To kill time, he strolls through his old stomping grounds, only to discover that he has been transported back to his town at the time of his childhood. Sloan freaks out when he recognizes that he is an adult from the future, witnessing the comings and goings of his younger self and his parents, long dead but suddenly alive again and in their prime. I played Martin Sloan’s little brother, who offers the first tell that things are amiss. When Gig sits down next to me on the curb and identifies himself as Martin Sloan, I get upset, protest “You’re not Marty Sloan!,” and run into the house.

It was mainly a fun day’s work for me. We shot it on the MGM backlot in Culver City, where I happily discovered a full-scale park with a real jungle gym and merry-go-round. I couldn’t define Gig’s smell. I clocked its pungency and noticed that he was perspiring so much that his makeup was dripping down onto his collar, which they kept having to touch up. Young was a good actor who inhabited his role perfectly, but I could sense in some intuitive way that this was a man who had some troubles. His unchecked alcoholism later caused his career to unravel.

Johnny Cash sweated like crazy, too. I worked with him in a low-budget crime potboiler called Five Minutes to Live, in which his character, a hard-bitten criminal, hauls me up like a sack of potatoes and takes me hostage.

Cash’s perspiration was different from Gig Young’s. He was nervous about acting, awkward and confused about what to do. Johnny’s runoff sweat absolutely soaked me as we did take after take. In retrospect, I can diagnose this as a serious case of flop sweat. The producers were trying to capitalize on the fame of Johnny Cash the music star, but Johnny Cash the actor was out of his element. Between takes, he was gentle and soft-spoken, a kind man who made a point of showing me that the gun he was holding had a metal block in its muzzle that prevented it from firing bullets. Again, I loved being in on the magic trick. But it was strange to be in on something else: adult fallibility. I wouldn’t have called it that then, but I recognized, on some level, that I was more comfortable on a soundstage than Johnny Cash was.

The sweatiest picture I ever worked on was The Music Man, which came a little later. I played Winthrop Paroo, the little brother of Shirley Jones’s Marian the librarian. I still have visions of the rivulets of sweat streaking down Shirley’s and Robert Preston’s faces, smearing the heavy makeup they wore.