Doesn’t Look Like a Hollywood Memoir, Stay Tuned

• Posted on 1st March 2016
• in Entertainment, entertainment books, Hollywood books, Hollywood memoirs
• by Ben

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These are the opening pages of my

Hollywood Memoir,

Three Stages, Chapter One A Big Small Town (Bristol, Tennessee 1935–1948). My first public performance.

“At seventy-six [Wrote this four years ago.] with both parents no longer alive it’s tricky trying to remember my earliest years. Being certain what’s a memory and what’s a story so often heard that I think it’s a memory is not easy. But I think I remember: The East Tennessee Light & Power Company Christmas party in 1939 when I was four, standing in front of my first audience reciting The Night Before Christmas.

“Fixated on my mother in the third row of the assembly of my dad’s fellow linemen, their colleagues and their families, I found that I must have had an inborn gift for lip reading because I was saved from embarrassment by my mother who mouthed the words. Even then I was a slow study. (More about this much later when I become an actor.) But that night, even though I struggled to recall the poem, I enjoyed that feeling of having a hundred or so pairs of eyes and ears focused on my small self.

“As an only child I spent a lot (most) of my preschool years either alone or with my mom. She had quit her job as a long-distance telephone operator to be home with me until I started my formal schooling. I say “formal schooling” because my mother, Lucy, taught me to read and to do basic arithmetic during those early, solitary years.

“My dad, Bishop (not a clergyman, that was his name) “Bish” to his friends, built me a sandbox under a big maple tree right outside the kitchen window so Lucy could keep an eye on me. We lived a few blocks from what was known in prewar Tennessee as “nigger town”. A “colored” boy about my age often walked past our house and we became friendly. I invited him in one day to play in my sandbox. That is when I got my first lesson in race relations. Lucy explained to me that there was nothing wrong with “darkies”, they were just different. They weren’t inferior in any way but if God had wanted us to mingle he would not have made them a different color. This was among the first things I was taught that somehow, in the darkest recesses of my immature mind, seemed questionable.

“Which brings me to Church. We were Southern Baptists. In this context “southern” is not a regional distinction but a denominational one. Southern Baptists were the true Baptists. We believed the (King James version of the) Bible literally. And I mean literally – with one exception; when Jesus turned the water into wine it meant grape juice. (Yeah, right!) Yet another questionable teaching. But the Baptists of our ilk had a really slick rule about sin. It was called the “unpardonable sin”. Guess what it was… Questioning!

“And there were lots and lots of other sins beyond the obvious Ten Commandments kind: dancing, drinking any kind of alcohol, going to the movies. If it was fun there was a pretty good chance that it was sinful. (Strangely, in retrospect, smoking was not a sin. Almost all the men did it. I think maybe it was a sin only for females.)

“Church was the center of our lives. Sunday School followed by Sunday Morning Worship – hymns, prayers, the choir anthem, more praying, the soloist, scripture reading and the (seemingly endless) sermon. Then Sunday evening service, slightly less formal but more of the same, then there was Wednesday night prayer meeting. I never knew why they called it that because there was no more praying on Wednesday night than there was in the Sunday services.

“Even though I was devout as only a child can be, studied the bible and all that stuff, I was always getting into trouble at church. I was a “cutup”. In retrospect that seems a strange usage but at that time and in that place behaving differently than required and/or expected by adults was called cutting-up. It was also known as misbehaving. Whatever you call it, it was my specialty. In Sunday school I talked too much and asked a lot of questions (cutting up). During the morning worship service Dad was an usher and Mom was in the choir. So I usually sat in the front or second row with another boy or two and we talked, wiggled, giggled – in short acted like boys (cutting up). Damn near every Sunday when we got home from church I got a switching.

“When I was eight or nine and Brother Roberts was “called” to another (bigger, better paying) church we got Dr. Graham as our pastor. He had two boys around my age. The cutting up reached a new level. One Sunday Dr. Graham actually reprimanded us from the pulpit. Man was I in deep shit. Major switching that day. And in spite of all the cutting up I was still a good Christian.”

It would be nine more years before I was liberated from Tennessee and introduced to Hollywood. Then another nine before my introduction to the business of show. Read all about it when you click here and get Three Stages.