Mom didn’t have to think for long. “East!” she said. New York it was.
LIFE IN THE big city was no cakewalk for the newlyweds. Mom quickly discovered that, for all the joy that acting had brought her at school and on the road, the treadmill of auditioning in New York wasn’t for her. She got some parts in some regional and off-off-Broadway productions, but the constant rejection inherent in a young actor’s life was more than she could bear, as was the prospect of taking on work that would require her to be geographically apart from Dad. This issue came to a head when she was offered a role in a touring production of a play. My parents took a long walk along the Hudson River to discuss the matter. Dad encouraged Mom to accept the job, but she decided that she couldn’t bear to part from her husband in this early stage of their marriage. When they got home from their walk, she called her agent and declined the role.
This marked the end of her pursuit of an acting career. Beyond the odd role here and there in a regional production in which she and Dad could act together, Mom essentially retired from show business in her early twenties. At that point, she redoubled her efforts to help her husband succeed. If she wasn’t going to act, by God, she would do her damnedest to earn enough money for the both of them to live on while Dad went out on auditions. To that end, she took a job at Macy’s, spritzing perfume samples on the wrists of lady customers, and another as a hatcheck girl at the Copacabana nightclub.
For a while, even this wasn’t enough. Dad wasn’t landing any parts, so he, too, took on nonacting work. He loaded fresh fish and produce onto refrigerated trucks at the docks. He worked as an usher at a seedy grindhouse theater in Times Square, his job really more akin to a bouncer’s. The theater was open all day and all night, playing the same double feature over and over again. Many indigent men more or less lived at the theater. There were constant fights, and it often fell to Dad and his fellow ushers to break them up, armed only with their flashlights.
Dad was a pretty good fighter himself. He had boxed competitively in his teens in Oklahoma. In New York, he started working out at a gym favored by pro fighters. His sparring sessions impressed a trainer there, so much so that the trainer offered to develop Dad as a light heavyweight. Needing the money, Dad announced to Mom his intent to train for his pro debut. Mom, horrified, extinguished that plan before it went any further.
Fortunately, Dad soon got the break he had been waiting for: a call to audition for the touring company of Mister Roberts. The show had been a hit on Broadway for more than two years. For part of the tour, Henry Fonda was going to step back into the title role, which he had originated. Fonda was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, known for playing the title role in Young Abe Lincoln and Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. He was also to become a significant figure in our lives, offering counsel both to Dad and me as our paths crossed with his in the decades that followed.
At his audition, Dad read for two theater legends, the producer Leland Hayward and the director Joshua Logan, the team that brought Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific to the stage. This was the big time. All the actors had to take off their shirts to prove that they were, quite literally, in shipshape condition. Dad easily passed that test. But he didn’t win the colead part that he coveted, of Ensign Pulver, the role that I would later act out as a precocious three-year-old. Still, Logan took a liking to Dad and found a part for him, as a crewman named Lindstrom. The pay was one hundred dollars a week for the run of the tour—not Hollywood money, but a princely sum for a working actor, especially given that the tour was to last nearly a year. He and Mom were ecstatic.
By this time, they were living on their own, at last with no roommates, in an apartment in Chelsea. They spent much of Dad’s off-hours from rehearsal sunning themselves on their building’s roof, to ensure that Dad would look convincingly like a sailor who has spent months in the South Pacific. When the Mister Roberts tour began, they gave up their apartment and Mom joined Dad on the road in such cities as Boston and Chicago, occasionally parting from him to visit her family in Oklahoma.
My folks were happy and in love, and Dad believed he was on the cusp of making it in the business. When the tour arrived in Los Angeles, he took a meeting with Republic Pictures, a prolific producer of westerns and B movies, and the incubator of Roy Rogers’s and Gene Autry’s careers, about possibly becoming a contract player—a prospect that excited him no end.