Chapter 11
When I hit Penn Station, I wasn’t alone. I had a wife.
Her name was Rhoda Kemins and she was a Navy Wave and a hospital corpswoman. She made an impression on me in 1945 when I was in the naval hospital with a cyst on my backside. And I made an impression on her. She figured she’d seen the worst part of me already and everything else would be uphill. We had a date when I got out of the hospital and then a few more until I went home. My mother hadn’t met her, but she heard the way I talked about her and was convinced that we’d end up together.
I said, “No, Ma. She won’t marry me. She’s Jewish and she can only marry a Jewish man.”
My mother just shook her head and said, “You keep her in mind.”
I did. Her family lived in Brooklyn. When the war was over she moved back with them and started writing to me.
My mother read her letters. She said, “You should propose to her. She’s going to make a good wife for you.”
I went to New York to see her, and we carried on a long-distance romance for four years. Finally, when I decided to try my luck on Broadway, we tied the knot.
We stayed for a while with her folks and then we moved to our own place in Queens. It was a thirty-minute subway ride to Times Square and it was all we could afford.
I was thirty-three years old and, in many ways, I was starting from scratch. An agent got me in to see a few casting directors, but mostly I went to open calls, things you’d read about in Back Stage and other trade papers. These are the infamous “cattle calls” where you and every other actor in town would sign in, then stand around in a theater or loft waiting to be seen. The typical wait time was two or three hours. The length of the typical audition was one minute or under. The shortest audition I ever had was about ten seconds: I walked in and they didn’t even hand me the script. The director just looked me up and down and said, “Next!”
Meanwhile, I had to earn money, so I took any work I could get. Washing dishes, unloading trucks, working in baggage rooms at the train terminals.
I began to miss the Barter Theatre, where you always knew what you’d be doing next. You had a little part in this one, or a little part in that one. You were always working and learning. Then suddenly, you’re in a world where you’re constantly being told, “No, nothing today.”
Fortunately, theater wasn’t the only place where a New York actor could find work in those days. There was a new kid in town, television. Not a lot of “legitimate” actors wanted to play there because it was rushed, crude, and only a handful of people even had TV sets. But I wasn’t picky, and when I went to audition for a director, Robert Mulligan—he later went on to direct the movies To Kill a Mockingbird and Summer of ’42—at NBC, I caught a break. He looked at me and said “Here, take this script. Take it home and read it. Come back tomorrow morning .”
I said, “Sir, I’d like to read it for you right now.”
He said, “I’m busy.”
I don’t know what possessed me to say, “Me, too,” but, luckily, he didn’t take offense. He grinned and said, “Take five minutes, go out here on the fire escape, read this thing, then come back.” So I went out for five minutes, read, and came back and we went through it.
When we finished he looked at me and he threw the script on the floor. “Goddamn it!”
I said, “Did I do something wrong?”
“No. You just gave me a whole new way to do this show.”
Well, I ended up teaching Mark Twain how to pilot a boat up the Mississippi on the Goodyear Television Playhouse. That was my first show on television. I tried hard and they were very happy with me.
One thing led to another. Mulligan introduced me to Delbert Mann, one of the hot young directors in this new medium. Delbert took me under his wing. Every time you worked with Delbert it was like learning a whole new way of acting. He was resourceful, unpredictable, creative, and articulate. I’ve been fortunate to have a number of mentors in my life, but Delbert was without a doubt the most important.
As much as this was a time of personal growth and change, it was also a time of change in the country. We’d gone from a hot war to a Cold War. This new struggle wasn’t kind to many in my industry.
That buddy of mine, Bart Burns, who had been a captain in the Marine Corps, went up and was interviewed for a part in a show. He got the part. By the time he got home they called him and said, “Bart, we’re sorry, but we can’t use you.”
He said, “Well, I’d like to know why.”
They said, “Well you just didn’t meet the requirements.”
He said, “What requirements are those?”
They told him they couldn’t take him because he was not eligible under the new rules.
“What ‘new rules’?” he demanded.
They explained that he had been hanging around with a few actors and writers who had an affiliation with communist causes. Mind you, they never said he was a communist himself. Only that he hung out with them.
Bart was furious. He went to the studio with his medals and his captain’s bars from the Marines. He put those on the table and said, “Does this look like I’m a goddamn communist?”
They didn’t answer. They still didn’t use him.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see how unjust these witch hunts were. At the time, no matter how much you hurt for the people who were affected, there was nothing you could do about it. I suppose it might have been different if everyone banded together and said we’re not going to take it. But there were a lot of folks who believed in the cause, who were afraid of the Red Scare. It was just something that had to work itself out. In a way, that’s one of the strengths of this country. No matter how far we swing one way or the other, the pendulum always returns to the middle. It’s just too bad the human toll is always so high.
But you don’t always realize you’re in the middle of world-shaping events. Sometimes you’re too busy trying to survive. I know I was. On stage, I got myself a job with the great Helen Hayes and Jules Munshin in a play called Mrs. McThing. Julie Munshin went on to play with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in the movie version of On the Town, among many others. Also in the cast were Professor Irwin Corey, a very funny guy, and Fred Gwynne, who would go on to star as Herman Munster on TV.
One of the best things that ever happened to me occurred during the run of the show: my daughter Nancee was born. I’m sure that what I felt wasn’t new, but it was new to me. I was now responsible for guiding and supporting a new life. That was a different kind of responsibility than any I’d had before. No new parent is ever quite ready for it. However, I did have one advantage that most people don’t: Helen Hayes said to me, “I’m going to be the godmother.”
When Miss Hayes spoke, no one argued. Anyway, it was a great idea. She became Nancee’s godmother, remembering her on birthdays and holidays and writing her letters from the road. Miss Hayes took that role as seriously as she took every other one. I was glad for her interest because I had my hands full! I was working on Broadway and doing television work. Somehow I made enough money to support my little family. I was promised a certain fee, but the show wasn’t getting the kind of advance sale they’d hoped so I got a pay cut. The way I found out was just plain lousy. Just before I was ready to make my entrance, one of the producers came over and said, “We can only afford to give you $125 a week. Take it or leave it. If you don’t want the job, we’ve got your understudy waiting to go on.”
Well, where the hell was I going to get $125 a week? I still had it better than my poor buddy Bart and I took the deal, but I swore that if I ever made good and worked for that bastard again I’d charge him a million bucks.
I learned a lot about the art and craft of acting from Miss Hayes, who had the kind of concentration that actors strive for. She could get into character in a heartbeat, and stayed there till the curtain came down. Then she was Miss Hayes again, charming and warm and great to be around.
Meanwhile, with plays running only a few weeks or my parts in them being relatively small, television proved to be my real bread and butter. My name was not well known but people in the street would occasionally look at me and say, “Didn’t we see you on television?” It was nice to hear that. Unlike the theater, you worked in a studio, live but without an audience. It was nice to know people were seeing my work! I was doing okay, even if I wasn’t Charlton Heston, who was the leading man in television at that time. Given his stature—six-foot-four—his chiseled good looks, and his sonorous voice, he was perfect for the new medium. He broke through that fuzzy black-and-white screen and tinny audio and in short order—by 1951—he made the same impact on the big screen. I had to wait a little longer.
The show that kept me going during this period was Captain Video and His Video Rangers. I owed that gig to a woman named Elizabeth Mears, the casting director for the short-lived DuMont network. It was a raggedy thing, but it paid. If you worked every day you got $300 for the week. Captain Video, played by the square-jawed Al Hodge, zipped around in a jet, aided by super-advanced TV recon capabilities. He battled bad guys with futuristic-sounding names like Mook, Nargola, and Clysmok. One of his cohorts was played by Don Hastings, brother of Bob Hastings, who worked with me later on McHale’s Navy. I played a variety of parts in the show, usually bad guys.
One of those bad-guy roles was Captain Neptune. They photographed me through a goldfish bowl to show the fish swimming by. I would go around with my mouth looking like a fish going, “wa wa wa wa.” It was the craziest thing you ever saw. It was a popular show and when I’d come home at night the kids would throw stones at me because they watched the show that afternoon and knew who I was. That kind of recognition I could have lived without!
Talk about recognition. Let me tell you about Wally Cox.
The Copper was the name of a TV show I did with Wally. It was a Goodyear Television Playhouse episode and he was playing a New York cop. His character wanted to marry my character’s daughter. Only problem was, I was in Sing Sing, where I was due to die in the electric chair. Somehow, Wally had to save my hide before he could marry my daughter.
Once we started rehearsing—which we usually had no more than a day or two to do—we realized we had to make numerous cuts to fit the slot. Delbert Mann was directing, and he was frustrated at how we were literally gutting the show. Finally, as airtime approached, he sighed and said, “Okay. Let’s go ahead and see what the hell we can do.”
Delbert continued to work on the script, and in all the confusion he forgot to tell us that not only were we going live, but we’d be seen coast to coast, for the first time. Back then, live shows were literally filmed off a television screen for viewing in other time zones. This meant we were going to be seen by at least twenty million people.
He added, “So give it all your best.”
We finished that show with time to spare, enough so that we could do a complete crawl of credits at the end of the show. That didn’t always happen.
Wally Cox was a funny little man. Most of you probably remember him from the Salvo laundry detergent commercials in the 1960s or later on the original Hollywood Squares. Back then, though, he was a real up-and-comer. He used to ride a motorcycle through Manhattan with his roommate and best friend, Marlon Brando. They made quite a sight, the scrawny Wally and the brooding Marlon pulling up to this diner or that theater. Marlon was appearing in A Streetcar Named Desire. They got a lot of press at the time. You need that to survive in this business, too.