Celebrity Stories: Famous and Soon-to-Be Famous Friends

• Posted on 5th January 2016
• in celebrity books, celebrity stories online, celebrity story, Entertainment, entertainment books, Hollywood books, Hollywood High School, Hollywood memoirs, Roy Rogers & Dale Evans
• by Ben

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In this excerpt from Three Stages I’ll tell you some

celebrity stories

of the famous folks I knew as a kid in Hollywood. Two – Roy Rogers and Dale Evans who I knew from church were already (very) famous and two more junior high school friends would soon be, if not very famous, somewhat famous within the showbiz community.

“Early in 1949 we found a terrific new home of our own, technically an apartment but it was half of a two dwelling house around the corner from the church in Hollywood.

“Our House: It was a perfect place for me. I had my own room with knotty-pine walls. There was a fine side yard where Lucy grew flowers and a few vegetables and a little two room “laundry house” in back next to the garage. I setup one of the rooms as a chemistry lab for my brief, fruitless period as an amateur chemist, then as a place for my stamp collection then as a place to collect dust. There was also a pantry with shelves where Mom stored canned food and such. This pantry had a small trap door in the floor where I stashed my highly illicit nudist magazines. This was way before Playboy and the like.

…

“I enrolled in the ninth grade at Le Conte Junior High about a mile and a half from home. I liked Le Conte much better than Audubon. For one thing I had worked on my accent so I didn’t sound as much like a redneck as I had eleven months before. And I changed my name. Up until then I had always been called “Benny” and I never liked it. So when I signed up at the new school I dropped the “ny”. I finally had a name I liked. Never having been popular before, I managed to alter my behavior sufficiently to get elected president of my homeroom class. I don’t remember what, if any, duties attached to this honored position but I was now “in”. …

“One incident stands out in my mind from that year at Le Conte. I was standing in a walkway talking to a girl about the class we had just finished when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and was immediately hit with a fist in the belly quickly followed by an uppercut to the chin. Neither blow had hurt much nor had either one moved me an inch. There was a stocky, dark skinned guy standing in front of me and I asked him why he had hit me. He stared at me for a moment then ran away. The girl said that he was her boyfriend and was very jealous. Two years later when we were on the Hollywood High football team together I was to learn that it was Frank Mazzola. He confessed that he had given me his best one-two punch and it hadn’t fazed me. Scared the hell out of him. We had a good laugh.

Frank went on to edit many movies including The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud, The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, Demon Seed and Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand.

“And then there was Miss Mae Nightingale and the Le Conte Troubadours. This was a locally famous boys’ choir. Miss Nightingale was a fabulous music teacher and, as it turned out, composer of operettas. She wrote musical theatre pieces for her boys to perform and after establishing myself as chief soloist with the group I got my first leading role in a musical. In Ride ‘em Cowboy I played the hero, Terry O’Brien. This was an all boys choir so my leading lady was played by a boy soprano in a blonde wig. This fine performer, Marvin Inabanett, later changed his last name to Marv Ingram and achieved a modicum of fame in the ‘50’s pop group, The Four Preps. We gave three performances and I had the time of my life. Believe it or not, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans came to see me play a singing cowboy.”

Click here to get Three Stages.

Tags: Dale Evans, Frank Mazzola, Marv Ingram, Roy Rogers, The Four Preps