He never projected any sense of conflicted or wounded pride. It’s possible that he felt it—he was an actor and he did have an ego. But on the other hand, he was also a farm boy who began to take on major chores at the age of five himself. The concept of a child juggling school and work wasn’t novel to him. And I suspect that he never wanted to be to me what his father had been to him: set in his ways, willfully blind to the possibilities that life held for his son.
Our Jedi training sessions continued, with him preparing me for the pressurized atmosphere of live television: the hot lights, the countdowns, the need to be fully present in the moment. I wasn’t infallible. In one of my Playhouse 90 appearances, I messed up. My character was meant to get into the back seat of a convertible, with his parents up front. There had just been a scene depicting a snowstorm, and some of the prop snow had settled into the car, where it wasn’t supposed to be. This distracted me, and, with CBS broadcasting my actions out to the nation, I couldn’t restrain myself. “Wow, snow!” I said, throwing handfuls of the stuff in the air during a scene that was meant to play solemnly. Dad must have been mortified, but the director said it was okay—he told Mom that it played as a terrific ad lib, a kid pulling stuffing out of a tear in the seats and pretending it was snow.
That was the exception, though. I think my precocious professionalism is what caught Ethel Winant’s eye. I always arrived prepared thanks to Dad, who was in the process of discovering a skill he didn’t know he had: a knack for teaching a kid how to be an actor. For The Journey, he gave me a crash course in how to deliver a performance in that particular role in that particular film. Now he was giving me the tools to construct a career in this business if I wanted it. His genius was in never talking down to me, despite my tender age.
DAD’S KNACK FOR plainspoken one-to-one talk was fully on display when he and Mom broke to me the news, early in 1959, that Mom was going to have a baby that spring. She was showing, and they knew that I would start to wonder.
I was psyched to have a little ally, and to have a baby in the house. I was a little lonely in Burbank, still adjusting to a new town in a new state. That said, I also had questions, such as, Where do babies come from?
Dad didn’t respond instantly. He took his time, sitting in the living room of our tiny one-bedroom apartment, thinking through his answer. I must have started with some reference to cartoons, because he disabused me of the notion that babies arrived in little bundles delivered by storks.
“Now, some people really do say that a stork brings a baby. That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I’m going to tell you how nature works. And this isn’t just for people—it’s the way animals make their offspring, too.”
He got up and returned with a pad and a pen. He drew a naked man and a naked woman. There was a penis on the man. The woman’s genitalia was not depicted in anything approaching vivid detail, just enough to get the idea across. He drew some little dots coming out of the penis and called them seeds.
“The man plants a seed in the woman. The woman has an egg,” he said. “When the seed and the egg meet, that’s how you make a child.”
It was presented that plainly. He never mentioned the pleasurable aspects of sexual intercourse, nor did he go into any detail about penetration. He did note that the seeds come out of the same organ that pee comes out of, and he helpfully clarified that pee is totally different than seeds.
I didn’t respond. But not because I was embarrassed. I was blown away: I had never heard a thing about seeds and eggs. Wow! And I was flattered that Dad respected me enough to give me the truth. I had the real scoop while other kids were getting the fairy tale.
What I was most excited for, though, was the pending arrival of my little buddy.
4
The New Kid in Town
RON
Sweat. The prevailing sensory memory of my early acting career is of the smell, sight, and feel of my adult colleagues’ on-set perspiration. Jesus, what a sweaty business it was.