Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography (3 page)

It must have been a weekend because the first places we looked for him were the tennis courts. I can take you today on a tour of all Dayton’s various tennis facilities; this terrible pilgrimage is so etched in my mind. And as I sat desperately looking out the window, hoping to see him on a court, in passing cars, or on the street, I thought to myself bitterly, that’s what I get for asking the question. And with that I began to plot how to avoid any similar pain for the rest of my life. To avoid being emotionally bushwhacked on any level whatsoever. And somewhere in my unconscious, I vowed to never ask a question if there was
any
possibility of a painful or even uncomfortable answer, to disassociate from conflict. I began a life of avoidance of potential disharmony at all costs. Unknowingly, I set out down a road that cost me dearly.

I never did find my father that day.

CHAPTER
3

“I want to french you.”

“You … you want to what me?”

“French you! I want to french you!”

I’m sitting underneath a stage platform, in the dark, with a cute girl dressed in a Jitterbug costume. We are rehearsing a community-theater rendition of
The Wizard of Oz
. I’m about ten years old, she is thirteen.

“What do you mean ‘french’ me?”

“It’s kind of a kiss. Don’t you
know
that?”

I nod earnestly, but I have no idea what she’s talking about. I do know that she’s older and makes a very pretty Jitterbug. But “frenching” is not in my vocabulary, and I’m petrified of what is clearly about to go down.

“Um, I think American is better,” I say. But Julie the Jitterbug has had enough of my dithering and she promptly proceeds to stick her tongue down my throat. Ho-ly shit! I think, almost gagging. What is she
doing
? She’s wiggling it around in my mouth and I’m horrified and intrigued all at once. I’ve never had a kiss of any consequence and now I’m getting a mouth probe here in the darkness of the Dayton Community Theater.

If I hadn’t fully grasped the sexy, subversive allure of the theater until then, this little vixen, smelling of perfume and greasepaint, has put me immediately on the path of greater understanding. After a moment I gain my sea legs.

“You’re cute,” she says, finally taking a break.

I take that to mean that our rendezvous is over. I mumble some excuse and climb out from under the platform and make my scheduled entrance as Coroner of Munchkin City. I’m way too young to appreciate the timing of my opening line: “As coroner, I must aver, I thoroughly examined her…”

*   *   *

A few weeks earlier my mom and her new husband, Bill, had taken me to see a friend of theirs in a production of
Oliver!
It was a transformational experience. I watched kids my own age playing the orphans and was knocked cold. It would’ve made a great scene in a terrible Disney movie: A young boy sits in a darkened theater and is thunderstruck with a vision of his life, of his destiny, and in an instant, he discovers his passion. Some kids hear the Beatles for the first time and are set on the road to rock stardom; my trip to Hollywood began with a (probably bad) local production of
Oliver!

I was still flush with excitement, giddy, as we walked through the lobby afterward. On the wall I saw a sign-up sheet for
The Wizard of Oz
, and I asked my mom to sign me up. She and Bill looked at each other. “Why not?” They had no way of knowing how deeply affected I’d been, how electrified I was by the age-old connection of actors, material, and audience. The control, the power the actors seemed to possess while illuminated in the spotlight. And when they reached out to the people in the seats, they were heard, they were understood, and the alchemy of the theater experience transported all bystanders out of various pressures of their daily lives. Next time
I
would be up there; that was a club I wanted to belong to.

My parents’ divorce finalized, my mother had married Bill, and my dad was around for weekends of movies, pizza, and adventures exploring the woods. Our lives seemed to be stabilizing into a new, pretty good routine. But then Bill’s job required that we move into Dayton city limits proper, out of the leafy, bucolic suburbs. Bill was a profoundly principled, decent man with a deep interest in social justice and politics. He was the guy driving the VW bug and listening to left-leaning talk radio, as far back as 1970. He believed strongly in diversity, had an inveterate suspicion of the status quo and suburbia in general. As a result, he moved us to North Dayton, then an area of tough economic circumstances populated by proud, rough, gigantic Irish families, who were always on guard for any encroachment of the African American community that surrounded them. The racial tensions were thick in my new neighborhood, and things were getting worse every year.

It was a culture shock. Until I enrolled in Van Cleve Elementary School for the second grade, I had never met kids who had no parents at home, had never heard the term “food stamps,” or seen people beaten to a pulp on the playground for a quarter. Black or white, everyone was completely unlike anyone I had ever encountered. This exposure was all part of Bill’s design for equality and enlightenment. I might have been more interested in these ideas if I hadn’t been so busy avoiding getting my ass kicked on a daily basis.

My newfound passion for acting wasn’t helping matters. This was Dayton, Ohio, 1972. Not Beverly Hills 1982. There was no
People
magazine yet. No
US Weekly
. No
Entertainment Tonight
, no MTV, no Disney Channel, no Nickelodeon or E! channel. In Hollywood there was zero premium placed on youthful actors other than one-offs like Tatum O’Neal or David Cassidy. With the exception of forerunners like
The Brady Bunch
, movies and television were the exclusive domain of stories about adults, acted by adults. Kid actors played the children of the stars, passing in and out of a few scenes, if they were lucky. In other words: the modern entertainment industry, in which that scenario would be forever inverted, had yet to be created.

The notion that some kid from Ohio could become a succesful child actor was ridiculous on its face, particularly to the kids of North Dayton. It was another reason I was different, another reason I felt alone, not to mention it was the constant source of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and more than a few fights.

But it was a small price to pay for having an interest that consumed my imagination. I “tried out” (I hadn’t yet heard of the term “audition”) for any child part at the community playhouse and local traveling repertory theater, in college plays, you name it. It made me feel like my life had direction, that I was no longer adrift in the pain and uncertainty of divorce and a bitter move to a tough neighborhood. Onstage I felt a confidence and sense of accomplishment I rarely felt anywhere else. If I happened to be in a production with other kids, though, I could tell I was different. They were in the play to have fun, and to do well, for sure, but it could just as easily have been a Little League team or summer camp project to them. I had fun, too, but I looked at every play as a step on a ladder that would lead me to my future. I was just too young and unsophisticated to know what that future would look like, or how to get it.

*   *   *

My heart is pounding. I am trying to calm my nerves by telling myself that this is how the “real” actors do it, every day of their lives, but I am only eleven and I’ve never had a professional “audition” before. My mom and I are driving up to Columbus so that I can take part in a statewide tryout for the Midwest’s biggest traveling summer stock circuit, the Kenley Players. I may even get to meet John Kenley himself, the legendary producer/owner, who brings some of Hollywood’s top stars to a circuit that includes Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Warren in Ohio, and Flint, Michigan.

To me it is the height of the theatrical world to see Sandy Duncan in
Peter Pan
, Shirley Jones from
The Partridge Family
doing
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
, or Dom DeLuise in
Under the Yum Yum Tree
, when they play huge fifteen-hundred-seat memorial halls for a week in each city.

At the hotel in Columbus I stand with about forty other kids. They are all holding eight-by-ten photos of themselves. I have no pictures and I’m embarrassed; clearly these kids are pros. A man wearing eyeliner asks us to do some rudimentary dance moves. I am fixated. Why would a man wear eyeliner?

One, two, kick ball change, he shrieks at us. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Kick ball change? Kick what ball? All around me kids are pirouetting, spinning like tops. I’m lost. My mom is nowhere to be found. She thinks it’s important that I find my own way, so she is not among the lineup of other mothers holding their kids’ photos, combs, and hairspray.

Next comes the singing. A twelve-year-old belts out “Gary, Indiana” from
The Music Man
, complete with a fantastic lisp. (Later, when I talk to him, I realize the lisp is real.) I get cold feet and decide to shit-can my bold choice to do “Where Is Love?” from
Oliver!
and instead fall back on my go-to musical audition piece, “Happy Birthday.” I get through it fairly well and am immediately led to a huge oak door.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To meet Mr. Kenley.”

I feel like I’m going to see the wizard. The minion ushers me into a huge suite. I’ve never been in a hotel room this big. There’s a dining room table in it! A man rises from the couch and comes to greet me.

“Hello, son, I’m John Kenley.”

Mr. Kenley appears to be wearing whiteface and red lipstick, like Cesar Romero as the Joker from
Batman
. He looks anywhere from 80 to 180 years old.

“So you want to be an actor?”

“Yes, sir,” I manage.

“Well, we always need local actors and I hear you are getting a lot of experience in Dayton. You are in a song-and-dance group, is that right?”

“Yes, sir, we play birthday parties and stuff like that. We even just did the opening ceremony of the new courthouse square in downtown Dayton,” I say.

“What is your group called?”

“Peanut Butter and Jelly.”

Kenley eyes me. “Mmmmmmmh,” he says.

For the first time it occurs to me that Peanut Butter and Jelly is probably not a very exciting name. He offers his hand. It is translucent white and utterly smooth.

“Good luck, son. We will keep you in mind.”

My moment with the master behind me, I ride down in the elevator with my mom and two women who proceed to tell us that Mr. Kenley lives during the winter months in Florida as a woman named
Joan
Kenley. My mind boggles. I look up at my mom, who rolls her eyes and makes a clucking sound, which she does whenever she thinks something is entertaining but highly unacceptable. (I would elicit that cluck often later in life.) As we walk through the lobby, I see a man wheeling industrial traveling cases with the name Liza Minnelli stenciled on them.

My mom lets me ask the guy what’s going on. He tells me he is a “road manager” for Ms. Minnelli, who is giving a concert tonight.

I turn back to my mom. “I want to meet Liza Minnelli!” I announce. (Liza has just become a superstar in
Cabaret.
) In keeping with her ethos of letting me explore the possibilities of my own life, my mom says, “Well, Robby, why don’t you try and find her?”

With that I’m off. I march right up to the front desk. “Liza Minnelli’s room number, please,” I say. I figure if I can meet a real actress maybe I can learn something about how to be a real actor myself. Incredibly, the man at the desk says, “Ms. Minnelli is in suite 528.”

Mom smiles at me and I run for the elevators. In a moment I’m standing outside of the suite. I knock as if it’s the most natural thing on earth, as if she would be expecting me. In most other areas of my life I am slightly behind the curve, retiring, sometimes unsure, but when it comes to anything to do with dreams of being an actor I am filled with what I would later learn is called chutzpah. I knock again. There is no response. Now I can hear the sounds of stirring behind the door and a male voice says, “Just a minute.”

The door opens. A man with no shirt stands there, looking down at me. “Who are you?”

“My name is Rob Lowe. I want to be an actor and I was hoping to meet Miss Minnelli.”

The shirtless man stares at me for a very long beat. “Come in,” he says finally.

I enter the suite. A few bottles of wine, some burnt candles, and room service remnants are scattered about.

“Liza! Are you awake? You have a visitor.”

He leads me to the living room. Liza is propped up on the couch, eating chocolates and drinking wine. “Well, hello there, kiddo,” she says in her unique, crackly, high-ended voice.

Mr. Bare Chest tells her that I am a young actor who has come calling.

“Well, isn’t that
marvelous
!” she says, batting her incredibly long eyelashes. “What’s your name?”

I tell her and she introduces me to the man, who turns out to be her husband, Jack Haley Jr. I have just played a munchkin in
The Wizard of Oz
and here I am with Dorothy’s daughter and the Tin Man’s son! Liza asks me to sit and offers me one of her chocolates. Gracious and warm, she doesn’t seem to mind for a minute that I have intruded on her privacy. Faced with this proximity to a true superstar at the height of her fame, I’m tongue-tied, but she draws me out, chatting with me about theater and music, asking me questions about myself. It is surreal.

When I sense that it is time to go, I thank them for letting me come say hi and she kisses me on the cheek.