Hello Darlin' (12 page)

You never knew with George. One day George and Brandon came to my apartment between
shows to unwind. I was barbecuing on the roof. After some drinks, I went downstairs
to get the salad, and when I returned a few minutes later, George was dangling Brandon
by his heels over the parapet, a five-floor drop to the pavement. George was screaming
at the top of his voice.

“You little son of a bitch! If you ever step on my line like that again,
one of my best lines,
I’ll drop you on your fucking head!”

I stayed calm. Showing how cool I was, I turned the steaks on the grill. Poor Brandon
was crying buckets, justifiably terrified, while promising never to do it again. I
didn’t know what George was going to do. I don’t think George knew. But if he let
go, Brandon was dead.

I pretended there was nothing wrong and announced that dinner was ready.

George glanced over his shoulder and nodded. “Oh, okay.” He reeled in Brandon, sat
down, and cut into his steak, while Brandon disappeared.

“Helluva good idea, steak, Larry,” said George as if nothing had happened.

I just marveled at the man. You don’t meet many people like him. George had charisma
and power onstage as well as in film, a rare talent that he proved in everything he
did. I was always in awe of him.

I
’ve always said there were no down periods in my life—just out-of-work periods. That
attitude has carried me through thick and thin, the only difference being the availability
of cash. Mostly we didn’t have much, and most of the young people we knew were in
the same boat.

Take Carroll O’Connor. We formed a lifelong friendship when Burgess Meredith cast
me in the play
God and Kate Murphy,
a depressing Irish story about faith and love starring Fay Compton and Lois Nettleton.
Carroll was the assistant stage manager. While we were doing the show in Boston, he
would chase my little daughter, Heidi, up and down the hotel hallway, the two of them
laughing when he scooped her up in his arms. Except for being thinner and having darker
hair, he was the same then as he was after his work as Archie Bunker in the landmark
series
All in the Family
made him the TV equivalent of the Beatles. He was bellicose and funny, 100 percent
Irish.

There was only one difference over the years. At the time we met, Carroll was so broke
he couldn’t afford more than a cold-water flat on
Forty-sixth Street. Once the play reached Broadway, he and his beautiful wife, Nancy,
made it a habit to come to our apartment several times each week to take a hot bath,
which is when I first said, “Friends who bathe together stay together.”

While we stayed friends for forty years, the play closed mercifully after two weeks.
Aside from Carroll, I remember it largely because I won the Clarence Derwent Award
as the most promising new actor of the year, one of the very few awards I’ve ever
won.

Work was so much more important than money, which I remember as more of an annoying
necessity than a goal. One day I came home with two bags packed with groceries and
Maj, pregnant with our second child, asked if I’d knocked off a store. No, the truth
was, I’d found a five-dollar bill in the gutter.

We lived off the kindness and trust of the owners of our neighborhood stores. The
Italian grocers let us run a tab, otherwise we wouldn’t have eaten. The owner of Maj’s
favorite fabric store—an opera lover named Louie—also let her pick out whatever she
needed. “It’s no problem,” he always said. “Pay when you can.” The guy at the hardware
store was just as understanding when Maj went through a nesting compulsion during
her eighth month of pregnancy with our second child.

It seemed like every day she was recarpeting, repainting … something. I came in one
day and found her standing on top of a ladder, painting the ceiling. Later that week
we bumped into several of her doctors at a party, and the following day our pediatrician,
Dr. Andy, called both of us into his office. He looked at Maj and said, “I heard about
the ladder. You’re grounded.” Then he turned to me. “Make sure she stays on the ground
till she has that child.”

A few weeks later Maj went into labor. She needed another cesarean. It was a little
easier this time since we knew she was going to need the C-section. When the doctors
came out and told me the baby was a boy, I was overjoyed. We named him Preston Benjamin
Axel, after my grandfather, my father, and Maj’s father. He weighed ten and
a half pounds, so big that Maj couldn’t get over the fact that something that large
had been inside her. I was so thrilled about our new arrival that, according to Maj,
I went into Texas mode: when we left the hospital I carried my son and she carried
her two suitcases by herself.

Shortly after we brought Preston home, Maj had a dress delivery going to Tallulah
Bankhead. The costumes she designed and sewed kept us afloat. Singer Jane Morgan and
Tallulah were two of her best customers. Obviously unable to deliver the dress herself,
I went in her place. Maj warned me that Tallulah was extremely particular about who
she’d let touch her, and she preferred Maj. But as I found out, Tallulah wasn’t as
particular about who she let see her. Or maybe she was simply expecting Maj. In any
event, she answered the door stark naked, holding a glass of gin. It wasn’t a pretty
sight, at least from my perspective. But I don’t think she cared. With a naughty purr,
she told me to step inside, and in a reverse strip, she slipped the dress on right
in front of me. She looked a lot better with it on.

*   *   *

Then I got the play
The Warm Peninsula.
Julie Harris starred with Farley Granger and June Havoc, Gypsy Rose Lee’s little
sister. I played opposite June, who was in the role of a beautiful actress on the
slide. I was her young lover. The play made tons of money on an extended pre-Broadway
tour, but probably lost it all during the three weeks it was on Broadway. The cast
was wonderful. I learned a lot and made enough to keep my family afloat until my next
venture, which came soon after.

It was a musical called
The Nervous Set,
based on a book by Jay Landesman. My buddy Ted Flicker was directing it. The lyrics
were by Fran Landesman and the music by Tom Wolf. Ted had presented it very successfully
in Saint Louis and then cast me in it when he brought the play to Broadway. It was
another great stage experience for me, but the run lasted just two weeks, again. This
time, though, I’d
learned not to pay for my friends’ tickets on opening night, which kept me from going
in the red.

Then I got what was in those years the greatest chance ever invented for an actor.
I was cast on the daytime soap opera
The Edge of Night.
For more than two years, I played Ed Gibson, a young cop studying at night for his
law degree. Done in a studio on upper Broadway, the soap was extremely hard work.
It was trial by fire. I started out working three days a week, then four, and eventually
I was on the set five days a week. By the end of the first two months, they were handing
me twenty-six pages of dialogue every day.

The shows were broadcast live. There were no second takes. You had to know your stuff,
and as soon as you finished one show, they gave you a script for another. It required
intense discipline, so I developed a routine. After the show, I’d go straight home,
make a martini, then sit down with my tape recorder and read my script into the microphone.
After memorizing as much as I could, I ate dinner, and then went to bed. At 3
A.M.
the recorder automatically clicked on and replayed my lines on a loop tape, over
and over again, till I woke up.

About a month or two into it, I started to hallucinate. A doctor told me it was due
to a lack of sleep and advised me to quit playing the tape at night, which I did.
I didn’t have time to listen anyway. I started driving to the Bucks County Playhouse
in Pennsylvania every night to act with Bert Lahr in S. J. Perelman’s comedy
The Beauty Part
I’d finish
The Edge of Night
at 4
P.M.
and drive eighty miles to the theater. The play was a smash hit, and it was a great
role for me. I was on the stage for all but four minutes of the entire production.
But Bert, a wily veteran, made sure that he had the lion’s share of attention. I started
out with six really boffo laughs, but gradually, after a show, Bert would say, “You
know, that line is not really your character, kid. It’s really my character.”

By the end, I had two laughs.

But between the play and the soap I was getting invaluable training. You can’t underestimate
the value of working every day. Nothing
compares to it, especially the soap opera. That really kept me on my toes. Besides
all the lines, there were twenty or thirty characters involved in complex relationships,
and you had to keep track of every one of them. Because the shows were live, if someone
forgot their lines, you had to know what was going on in the story in order to ad-lib
without blowing the whole premise. Every day I seemed to learn something new about
cameras, blocking, how not to upstage people, or how not to be upstaged, and also
diplomacy.

I had a terrible time with the leading man, John Larkin. He made fun of me at every
opportunity. He was full of little put-downs and slights that were probably his way
of keeping a younger guy like me in check. Finally I faced him down and we became
good friends. When he left the show to try his luck in Hollywood, they offered me
the leading role and said they’d increase my salary just $500 a week. John was making
considerably more than that, so I thanked them and got it in my head that I should
start making plans to leave for Hollywood too.

*   *   *

I resigned from
The Edge of Night
when I rejoined
The Beauty Part
for its Broadway production. There was no way I could’ve done both. On opening night,
Alice Ghostley decided she’d been in the business a lot longer than I and she wanted
a dressing room closer to the stage, namely mine, which was two flights up from the
stage. The new room they gave me was on the sixth floor. That didn’t leave me any
time to get offstage, go back to my dressing room, change clothes, have a cup of tea,
and whatever during the brief break. That meant I’d have to spend the whole time in
my changing tent on stage right.

I was pissed. Alice had a nice part, but nothing like mine. I was onstage all but
two minutes of the play. Charlotte Rae heard what happened and asked if I wanted to
share her dressing room. She was just one flight down, in the basement. I said, “Wonderful.”

For the whole run of the play, Charlotte and I shared a dressing
room, and I was very happy with that. She was a wonderful lady. But the way Alice
pulled rank showed me that the business could be callous and uncaring, and also that
I should not expect any special treatment. Talent didn’t mean anything. It was all
about how much clout you got.

Bert had plenty. The star of the play, he was still as difficult as ever, maybe more
so, and this time working with him was downright painful. Bert had a lot of lines
and at his age he was having a difficult time remembering all of them. He didn’t go
through a single performance without going up somewhere. Each time that happened,
he’d grab the back of my arm in a panic and squeeze until my eyes teared.

“Kid, what’s my line?” he’d mutter.

Worse, he somehow made it seem as if I’d gone up and he was saving me.

This happened every night.

Then one night while I was taking a bath Maj saw the green-and-purple bruises on my
arm.

“What the hell, did you get rolled or something?” she asked. “Look at the marks on
you.”

I looked over my arms and gently rubbed them.

“That’s Bert,” I winced.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s where he grabs me and pinches me and gets the lines out of me.”

“How are you putting up with that?” Maj wondered.

A good question.

“I’m thinking of getting out of the business after this show,” I said. “This is too
hard.”

Bert had no clue what he was doing to me. As with most people who are brilliant, funny,
and demanding, he was in his own world, operating from his own agenda. In this case,
he had a piece of the box office. Before the first act of each show he stood backstage,
peering at the audience through a hole in the curtain. Unwrapping a hard candy, he
would count the house—always coming within ten people—while
providing an equally accurate critique: “A bunch of losers tonight.” Or, “Okay, we’ve
got a bunch of jewels in the front row. A first-class audience. There’s money out
there.”

I learned a lot from Bert. He was driven and had a toughness that was acquired from
years of playing the Borscht Belt. In
The Beauty Part,
he had a great advantage—after all, he had been the Cowardly Lion in
The Wizard of Oz.
The audience adored him before he stepped onstage. He was also a great comic and
it was hard not to break up onstage every night.

He’d work a laugh till the audience was crying. Some nights the curtain would ring
down twenty minutes later than normal because Bert was on a run. Nobody left the theater
wanting their money back. He might approach the curtain before it went up like a man
walking the last mile without energy, worried and glum; however, when the curtain
did go up he turned into a dynamo with the energy of a nine-teen-year-old boy. When
the performance was over, he was wired.

He taught me what it was to be a straight man, which is essentially what I was on
I Dream of Jeannie.
He also taught me to hang tough when I felt like my career was collapsing. If you
wanted to succeed, you had to be strong. I owe a lot to Bert, and after a while, like
in most of life, the bruises disappeared.

The show had bad luck, though. We got great reviews, but there was a newspaper strike
so nobody could read them. Then we moved theaters. Because of the newspaper strike,
nobody knew where we’d moved to. The show should’ve run a couple of years, but we
closed after about ten weeks, and as they say, that’s showbiz.