Trust Me: A Memoir

Trust Me

All the world is a stage.

From curtain to curtain, yours is the starring role.

Copyright © 2011 by George Kennedy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2011 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

7777 West Bluemound Road

Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices

33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

Permissions can be found here which constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

All photos are from the author’s collection.

Book design by Mark Lerner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

www.applausebooks.com

Contents

Preface

Reading for a Part

1: Plenty of Nothin’

Island of the Blue Dolphins

2: Hell, Oh Dolly

Patricia Neal

3: To Have and to Have Not

Battle of the Bulge, December 1944

4: California

Dean Martin

5: And Then I Slept With…

Peter Finch, Marty Balsam, and Eli Wallach

6: Let the Good Times Roll

Victoria Principal

7: Cool Hand Luck

Rex Ingram

8: Days of Wine and Roses

Kirk Douglas

9: All in the Family

Don Rickles

10: The Legend of Derek Bo Peep

Diane Sawyer

11: The Naked Gone

Elvis Presley

12: For Aspiring Actors

Henry Fonda

13: Dearth on the Nile

Mel Tormé

14: The Eiger Sanction

Robert Mitchum

15: Cogito Ergo Sum

Frank Sinatra

16: Jimmy Stewart

The Stewardess

17: Good Old Dependable

Filmography

Lyric Permissions

Trust me.

PREFACE

These are memoirs of a kid born in New York City in 1925. His dad, George Senior, was a pianist, composer, and orchestra leader at Proctor’s Vaudeville Theatre, and his mother, Helen, played in a classic dance troupe. Hanky-panky ensued. They married, and I soon was the result.

By any standard, we were doing OK. An apartment on the Hudson’s Riverside Drive in those days was well-to-do. Four-masted schooners, mostly out of service by then, were tied up in splendid symmetry about five hundred yards away. It was the Roaring Twenties.

I was four when Dad’s appendix ruptured during removal and he died on the operating table of peritonitis. They had no penicillin then to stop the infection. The year was 1929, and a dead-broke America—with no way to fight the catastrophe of a Wall Street crash—spent the next dozen or so years almost dying too. Vaudeville was history. Mom and I became part of the stockyard.

I write like I talk. A long time ago I tried making talking and telling the truth one and the same. That isn’t just difficult; it means painfully reviewing things you’ve been led to believe since you were a child. That’s very hard to do. Like many, I have marched along adhering to conventions (sex, color, church, party, gang) without examination. There’s a wonderful, protective togetherness in that anonymity. You obey or are damned, less joined together than stuck together. You become an echo rather than a voice.

This book is about what happens when you stop fearing—and think.

I like writing, but warmed-over BS is not on the menu. You are the most important thing in life. Every phrase in the book—awkward or not—is how I think, and I question everything. I wrote every word as if we were sitting together. I want you to think too.

So, we begin, only in chronological order at the beginning—not pretty, but it’s true. This is a lot about people I loved, and a lot less about people I didn’t. This is about Hollywood, of course. La-La Land in Calipornia—not quite all make-believe. We give our hearts to screen idols through laughter and tears. Many times, rejoice, with damned good reason.

You are the most important person who ever lived. You’ll see.

—GK

Reading for a Part

It can happen at any stage in a career, but it’s more terrifying when you’re first starting out. The phone rings. It’s your agent. The agent says that such and such a producer doesn’t know your work. Offhand, you don’t know his name either. The agent says he talked the producer into meeting you. It’s the remake of a classic, and they want someone new. He has no other info, but he has talked the guy into a reading the next morning, ten a.m. sharp, at his office. Your heart pumps.

It takes a while for you to calm down. A classic? A Tale of Two Cities? Anthony Adverse? You don’t sleep much at all that night, while visions of The Three Musketeers dance in your head. You idly wonder if John Mills would take offense if you imitated his bravura performance in Great Expectations. Finally, it’s morning. You don’t eat. You’re at the appointed place a half hour early, but pace up and down outside so you won’t look too eager. You enter as casually as your nervous smile permits. You’re expected; have a seat. You wait, alone except for the secretary who admitted you, never looked at you, pointed to a chair, and drifted back to the Enquirer. About twenty minutes later, a buzz. Another pointed finger at a door. And you’re in front of God.

Well, not exactly God. But you had to walk across a lot of floor to get to the only furniture in the room, his huge desk and chair. He looked like Tweety Pie behind it. He hadn’t looked up yet, scribbling something on a paper. He suddenly stands, waves the paper for you to take, the voice not quite as deep as Tweety Pie. I changed some of it….top of page three…. I need menace, but behind it a sense of childlike innocence.

You look at the page as he crosses back to his chair and holds up his two hands to frame a picture of you. You have a question, but he sucks something from his teeth. Anytime you’re ready. Apparently you’re in frame. You look back at the page. You take a breath and read…,AARRGH.

Not bad, kid….not bad at all. Do it again. This time drag your left foot.

ONE

PLENTY OF NOTHIN’

You will care. You are a human being, put on this earth without any say-so at all, who has been praised and damned from the instant you came out of the womb. Male or female, skin of any color, I am you. You have been told lies all your life, by parents and clergy, those you trusted above all others, and were not allowed skepticism. Let’s question everything I can think of.

The decade called the Roaring Twenties was roughly from 1919 until 1929. World War I was over, and America began indulging itself in excesses. There was no such thing as too much wine, women, and song. At the beginning, vaudeville and its extravagant kin, the Ziegfeld Follies, were everything that the word entertainment could provide. If you were Will Rogers, you headlined for Ziggy.

If you were Helen Meade (my mother-to-be), you were part of a classical dance team called Le Ballet Classique, and you played at Proctor’s Theatre, where pianist and pit-orchestra leader George Kennedy held forth. They married, and I was born on February 18, 1925. I weighed twelve pounds, and when the nurse first hefted me up for my mother to see, she said, Geez, kid….get a job. Being that oversized provided me with an abnormally curved spine (see the baby picture? Scoliosis. Severe spinal curvature. That’s as straight as I got), and the doctor’s first sure prognostications were for an arthritic future.

When you’re a little child, everything is in such a formative stage that you really don’t file things in your mind the way you do later in life. They are there, all right, but you wouldn’t know where to find them. In writing this book, I’d look for one thing and find something quite different. It has to do with opening doors. I’m eighty-six years old, and some doors have been rusted shut and out of reach all of my life. There were many surprises, considerable good and bad.

George Kennedy

12 lbs, 4 oz.

February 18, 1925.

The expression born in a trunk applied to me. There were never fewer than three shows a day, and near the end of vaudeville’s reign as many as five. You were hardly ever in one place more than a week. Your act was part of a circuit, which might include theaters in eight or ten towns. If your act was doing well, you might play all of the towns on that circuit. Vaudeville was fading, and already, live acts were being intermixed with rudimentary silent films. Films were the draw. My mother and father were both working, and we had a waterside apartment in the Bronx.

I was raised on stories of how Will Rogers would lasso me and make me laugh backstage. I was two years old when an act called Jiggs and Maggie (based on a popular comic strip called Bringing Up Father) provided my stage debut. Comic John Jess (Jiggs) would call me from the wings, and I would sit on his lap and laugh and wave while he was the ventriloquist. As long as I didn’t wet my pants (and his), I was a hit. And when the prima-red-hot Mama Sophie Tucker dropped a dime, I picked it up and pocketed it. He an actor, all right, she said.

All of my life I have deep-scanned my brain for any image of my father. The single memory I have of him shows him in a somewhat gruesome light. It starts with Mom and me in a careening car being driven by an unknown drunk Mom called Harold, with me an unconsulted backseat passenger. She was blotto, laughing uncontrollably as they wrestled in the coupe while it zigzagged and bumped back and forth across trolley tacks. Harold was so drunk his bobbing head kept hitting the steering wheel. My screams were ignored, so I got on the floor and stayed there until somehow we got home. My father carried my mother into our lobby apartment, threw Harold across the marble floor, and then threw him out the front door. The pillow on the bed was soaked with blood. He put a wet compress on her. It wasn’t blood at all. It was henna rinse from her hair. When she passed out, he sent me to bed. I have no recall of his face or words, but I was glad it was over.

The one father-and-son picture I have warms my heart. Mom often told me that next to her and me, his favorite things in life were a piano; our Boston bull terrier, Rowdy (under the car); and the prized Nash automobile. Roads weren’t much when I was born, but he’d come home and say, Let’s take a drive. She would always agree, but sometimes she wished she had asked where. She thought we were going to a local show one afternoon, and he took us all to Canada.

Next was my earliest recollection of death. I was four years old, and they posed me on a photographer’s pinto pony outside our apartment as I watched my father’s ambulance leaving. I didn’t see him—just the ambulance going away. Within an hour, he was dead. His appendix burst and peritonitis killed him. The crash of ’29 was already at the door, but penicillin was a dozen years off.

Though we looked alike in many ways, my father has been the missing link of my life. As life evolved, I never would know a man of the house. From the day he died until I went into service in 1943, there was no male influence. I had a stepfather for seven years who never spoke to me, but as you’ll learn, words were hardly at his command. Let me be clearer. He couldn’t read or write, or communicate. My mother had an unfinished grade-school education and could laugh, dance, play piano, sing, and drink. That’s it. The largest bill my hand ever held was five dollars, and I’d never traveled more than twenty-eight miles from home until World War II.

New York City is and was a very dirty city. When someone would take me by the hand for a walk, I wasn’t aware of the clutter everywhere, the manholes, the layers of dust and dirt, the horse-drawn carts selling fruit, and the smell of decay. The hospital burned to the ground a few years after I was born. We lived within sight of the Hudson River until the crash, then were on the street and penniless in less than twenty-four hours.

Part one of the world-class film The Godfather shows a typical Lower West Side neighborhood during a religious holiday. From pushcart to penitent to rooftop, no verbal description can match Francis Ford Coppola’s visual recall. Brilliantly researched, it captured the way it was: Catholic, Italian, Irish, Jewish, and broke. No one had any idea of the totality of the cataclysm that arrived on Black Tuesday. My mother sadly told me many times she spent the last few dollars they had on renting a gold piano next to my father’s bier. She told me that she loved many men, but he was the only man she ever loved. Vaudeville died; money was gone, and so was credit. Overnight, thousands begged, and countless men jumped off buildings. One almost hit me. When I was six, on Twenty-First Street, our neighbor Mr. McHugh passed through the air a few feet in front of me and THUCKed to earth from his roof. The picture and sound will live with me forever. Half of him was on the sidewalk, and half bled in the street, shaped like a broken swastika. I sat there on a stoop step biting on my knuckle and staring until a policeman walked me home. Mind you, this was some years after the crash itself. To a hopeless Mr. McHugh, though, there was one less mouth to feed. I can’t even imagine him being sent to hell for that.

If it wasn’t for my mom’s older sister, Alice, we wouldn’t have eaten. She was a waitress and married to a five-foot, three-hundred-pound man named Mike Chusano who found something to be cheery about no matter what. One day the three of us were bringing home a sweet roll to Mike, and we found him dead in his chair. His stomach had burst. Alice’s heart,