The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(44)

I was the last boy to audition. By that point, late in the day, the bear was tired and hot from working under the lights. As I later learned from working with them, bears, when they are hot, sway back and forth in place, paws on the ground. That’s how they cool themselves off. But I did not know that then. I was just a kid actor persevering through the dialogue that I had rehearsed with my dad. There was no way for us to anticipate or replicate the experience of working with a six-hundred-pound animal who stood over seven feet tall on his hind legs, and whose head was now swinging back and forth like a pendulum. The cameras were rolling and I had a problem.

I finally broke from the script, but I guess not from the character. I grabbed the bear’s steel chain close to his neck and gave it a yank. “Ben,” I said, “you knock it off and listen to me when I’m talking to you!”

At that, the bear held still and I finished the audition. A few days later, Dad got a call from Ivan Tors Productions, saying I had won the part of Mark Wedloe, a boy who befriends an orphaned bear cub against the wishes of his father. Ivan Tors was a Hungarian immigrant who had started out in Hollywood producing sci-fi B pictures but had made his name and fortune with family-friendly movies and TV shows starring animals. He created Flipper, the TV and movie juggernaut that featured a trained dolphin, and Daktari, the TV series about a veterinarian who looked after lions and chimps in East Africa. Apparently, Tors had watched my screen test and was impressed by my handling of Bruno.

This was big news for little me. Also big: The actor cast as Tom Wedloe, my character’s father, was—and this seemed too good to be true—Dennis Weaver. The same Dennis Weaver who had introduced Dad to Mom at the University of Oklahoma twenty years earlier! He had since become an Emmy-winning actor beloved for playing the funny sidekick, Chester, to James Arness’s Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke. This was his moment of transition into leading-man roles. In a few years, he would star in the TV series McCloud and the TV movie Duel, the directorial debut of Steven Spielberg.

The actress Vera Miles, a favorite of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, was cast as my mother, Ellen. And, as with Bonanza, the producers gave Dad a little part as a villain so that he could be doubly useful to the production.

The filming was to take place in Florida. Thanks to the success of Flipper, Tors had built a four-stage studio complex in Miami for his ever-expanding roster of animal-themed productions. For this reason, Gentle Giant, the movie, had a different setting than its source material, Walt Morey’s novel Gentle Ben. The action was relocated from Alaska to the Florida Everglades, and Ben was changed from a grizzly—which is native to the upper latitudes of the United States and Canada—to a black bear. Which is just as well. Grizzlies are bigger and meaner.

Dad and I flew first class to Miami from Los Angeles on National Airlines, a routine I would come to cherish over the next few years. In those more elegant days of travel, the flight attendants conducted trivia quizzes and raffles for which the prize was a bottle of champagne. I won it an inordinate number of times. Never drank the bubbly, but it was momentous to be sitting in first class with a bottle of champagne.

Once we arrived in Florida, the trainers reintroduced me to the bear, Bruno. We had met fleetingly at the screen test but now we had to get to know each other as peers. Bruno was in a large chain-link cage with a cement floor at the Ivan Tors complex. The first thing the trainers did was toss a steak to Bruno. He sniffed it and turned away from it. Lesson: I am meat, and the steak is meat, but the bear doesn’t like steak, ergo the bear will not try to eat me. I am not a meal.

Next, the trainers threw a box of doughnuts into the cage. Bruno tore the box apart as if in a diabetic frenzy, consuming its contents as fast as he could. Lesson: Bears love things that are sweet. Sweets will be used to incentivize the bear to do stuff.

Bruno’s trainers, Vern Debord and Monty Cox, then stepped into the cage and playfully wrestled with him. No injuries incurred. In fact, it looked like a lot of fun. I was too little to wrestle with big bears, but later on, I did get to tangle with some of the cubs in the Tors menagerie. Everything was cool. I saw that Bruno wasn’t going to hurt anybody, and Vern and Monty were really comfortable with the animals. They were always going to be on set, ready to assist me and bring Bruno under control should anything ever go awry. Furthermore, they had declawed Bruno and removed his incisors so that he posed no deadly threat—measures that would be considered inhumane today but were routine in show business back then.

I am still asked if I was ever afraid of the bear. I just wasn’t. The trainers and Ivan Tors saw to that. It was a different story when the big cats were around. A big cat is a natural adversary of a bear, and once we went to series, they occasionally brought in a cougar to play the heavy in an episode. On those days, it was like having the Secret Service around. There were men standing there with tranquilizer guns at the ready, and the guest animal was doped up a little to keep him off his predatory game. Suffice it to say, they never let me get too close to the kitties.

Bruno really was gentle. When we were making the movie, I was still so small that I could climb onto his back and ride him. He didn’t respond to affection the way a dog or cat does, with purrs and big-eyed tenderness—bears have small eyes, which inhibit their expressiveness as actors—but he was always fine with me petting and hugging him. The only negative I could hang on my costar was that he smelled. He also took prodigious dumps due to his equally prodigious diet. Every day, he consumed a dozen loaves of bread, a few heads of lettuce, some carrots, a couple of bags of Purina Monkey Chow, and several boxes of day-old sweets. If I had that diet, my poop would smell bad, too.