The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(34)
This would never, ever be allowed on a film set today. But the ethical mores of the 1970s were different. Nevertheless, killing a bird did not sit well with me. I had worked with animals for the better part of my young life. My costar in Gentle Ben was a bear, for Christ’s sake! I made my feelings known to Bob. He told me to man up and just do the deed. “The bird is going to take one for the team,” he said. Dad reassured me, saying that a natural predator would likely eat the buzzard anyway.
We had an animal-welfare guy on location with us, and I still can’t imagine how this was sanctioned. I was already worked up about the emotional aspect of the scene, as it was a climactic moment for my character. Now I also had to execute a bird, and in a single take, so that I didn’t have to murder more than one.
Bob called “Action!” and everyone’s eyes were on me. He staged the scene so that there was a conveniently protruding flat rock right where I stood in the stream. I picked up the buzzard by its legs and whacked its head on the rock. Mercifully, it only took a few whacks for the bird to die. You can watch the scene and see for yourself. But I can’t. It’s too painful. In what was otherwise the high-water mark of my juvenile career, that experience scarred my psyche.
As Ron has said, we were privileged to be treated respectfully as peers of our adult colleagues in the workplace. Occasionally, though, these adults lost sight of our sensitivity and innocence. We were precocious and talented, but still very much children.
MOST OF THE time, fortunately, Mom and Dad zealously protected us from the dark and predatory aspects of the business. A lot of child actors weren’t as fortunate; their own parents were the predators, withholding affection and frittering away their kids’ earnings. Our folks were scrupulously honest about money. In the 1960s, as Ron worked on Andy Griffith and I had episodic work on such shows as The Fugitive, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and The Virginian, we brought home some serious paychecks. Even so, Mom and Dad never lived outside of their means.
Let me emphasize, their means. As soon as we could understand, Dad explained to Ron and me what was happening to the money we earned. By state law, 15 percent of our earnings were automatically placed in a Coogan Trust Account, whose funds could not be accessed by anyone but us when we turned eighteen. These accounts were named for Jackie Coogan (not to be confused with Jackie Cooper), the child actor who had starred opposite Charlie Chaplin in The Kid and made boatloads of money in the 1920s, only to discover at the age of twenty-one that his fortune had been squandered by his parents. In the aftermath of Coogan’s successful lawsuit against his mother, the State of California passed the Child Actor’s Bill, which most people in the industry referred to as the Coogan Law.
As for our remaining earnings, Mom and Dad put every penny into savings accounts and U.S. bonds in our names, apart from a 5 percent managers’ fee that they drew for looking after our careers. That’s a bargain—most managers charge triple that amount. Much later on, Dad explained his reasoning to Ron and me. He said that if we kids had ever gotten the idea that we were the household’s breadwinners, it would have messed up the family dynamic. With Mom’s help, he was making just enough as an actor and part-time manager to support the four of us. Preserving a sense of normalcy was a top priority for Dad.
IN 1963, WE moved from Hollywood back to Burbank, where Mom and Dad became homeowners for the first time. Three forty-six North Cordova Street was a small tract house just half a block from our old apartment: three bedrooms, one bathroom, and, best of all in my view, a pool. Boy, I loved to splash around in that pool. Ron and I shared a bedroom, and Dad used the spare as his office.
When the family car, the ’52 Plymouth Cranbrook, finally gave out, Dad gave no thought to a Jag or a Mercedes. He splurged on a new car for the first time in his life, but it was a red Chevy Nova Super Sport in candy-apple red. Dad was proud to own a new car and even prouder that he paid for it in cash. Somewhere along the way, Mom got a new car, too, a big, bulky Plymouth whose yellow body was pocked with parking-lot dings within a few months of its being in her possession. She was a solid driver but the other Burbank moms who frequented the local supermarkets were not.
We rarely went on vacation, busy as we all were with work. When we did, our trips were austere affairs. One of our reliable destinations was the Apple Valley Inn, located in the high desert a hundred miles from Burbank. The resort was run by Roy Rogers, who tried to do for Apple Valley what Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra had done for Palm Springs. It never quite took. Maybe the cold, thirty-mph nighttime winds were too much for the Rat Pack. But Dad loved the inn’s western kitsch, the decorative wagon wheels and wood paneling. He was in his element, and his happiness at Apple Valley was contagious.
CORDOVA STREET WAS nevertheless a big step up for us. Within a few blocks stood the entire world that Ron and I occupied when we weren’t working and just being kids. Two blocks away was Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School, a campus of low postwar buildings and wide-open asphalt and grass playgrounds. You name it, we played it at recess: softball, basketball, kickball, dodgeball. I never understood the appeal of dodgeball. It seemed unnecessarily cruel, with some poor kid, usually a nerd, getting whacked in the face with the ball.
A few blocks past Stevenson was a public parks and recreation center, Verdugo Park, which had a gym where Ron shot baskets at every opportunity. I still live a few minutes away from the site of our ancestral pile. With the exception of our house, which has since been torn down and replaced with a McMansion, very little has changed.