If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor (12 page)

Summer stock, I realized, is where
Prime-Challenged
thespians spend their twilight years parading in front of retirees every week. Our star-studded lineup was Doug McClure, Vicki Lawrence, Pat Paulsen, Abe Vigoda, Tom Smothers, Allen Ludden and Sally Ann Howes.

Apprentices didn't always have contact with the actors, something I was desperate to do, because it was dependent on your assignment. Thankfully, we rotated every week, and by the summer's end, I had more than my share of interaction.

As a stage crew member for
A Thousand Clowns,
I witnessed an acting technique that was new to me. The lead actor, Doug McClure, scanned the crew during a rehearsal.

"Anybody have a pen?" he asked, matter-of-factly.

"Heck yeah!" I volunteered, and raced to the stage with it.

I watched, slack-jawed as my favorite cowboy actor scribbled his lines across the entire set -- on props, furniture -- anything. Apparently, Doug used these catch-phrases to jog his memory to the next batch of dialogue. The amazing thing was how seamlessly he used these written reminders during performances.

At the time, I was shocked at what I considered to be a lack of professionalism. Ironically, years later on the set of the TV show
Homicide
, I found myself in the very same predicament. Legal restrictions forced the writers to change the names of characters and locations constantly (so as not to offend any similarly named entity) and I was handed a new name for a bank just before filming a scene. I knew right away that it wasn't going to stick in my head, no matter what association tricks I tried. So, with a nod to Doug, I wrote the name of the bank on a napkin and glanced at it as needed.

The great Karma wheel turned the following week, and I was rewarded with a key position -- that of dresser. This may seem unremarkable, but a dresser interacts more closely with an actor than any other job in theater. For me, that's what it was all about -- to find out what made these famous people tick.

The show was
Play it Again, Sam,
and the star was Tom Smothers. For such a wacky guy in public, he was amazingly shy and reserved in person -- another myth shattered.

Our intimate relationship was sealed that first weekend of rehearsals at the local laundromat. There I was, washing the underwear of a famous man I barely knew.

I began to understand, in retrospect, why some celebrities demand that assistants sign nondisclosure agreements during their employ. Think of the damning information that could otherwise be leaked to inquiring minds:
So-and-so wears little purple Speedos, so-and-so's T-shirts have armpit stains, so-and-so has really smelly socks!

As Tom and I became more comfortable with one another, I gathered the courage to invite him to a Super-8 marathon at our condo. Scott, Sam, and Matt Taylor were in town and we were all eager to show our stuff to a "professional." To my amazement, he agreed. What was an eighteen-year-old p unk to think as this man spent the night with us, laughing his famous ass off at our films? -- my diary answers that:

As an asterisk to that story, this kind man later sent us five hundred dollars toward furthering our Super-8 career.

The occasional role would crop up in the main theater that could be filled by a younger person and the apprentices provided the talent pool. For some unknown reason, my audition for a speaking role had to be in the form of a song. I couldn't hit a note if there were a gun to my head, but I had already learned the words to the hopelessly daffy,
Love.
Chris Lemmon, classically trained in piano, provided the accompaniment. What I wouldn't pay for a video of that performance.

The audition ultimately led to a speaking role in Neil Simon's
The Sunshine Boys.
I was the voice of a TV director and threw my lines from a side booth. Not quite on stage, but it was fine by me because, technically, it was my first "professional" job.

Lunch was often spent at the local diner, Stacy's. The food wasn't so remarkable, but the style of management was. As I sat eating a gravy-drowned turkey sandwich, I couldn't help but notice local businessmen lined up at the cash register -- they weren't waiting to be cashed out, they were
doing it themselves.
I asked the waitress what that was all about. Very casually, she explained that at Stacy's, you cash yourself out.

"Come on up after you eat, sweetie, and I'll show you how."

The lease on our condo ended before the season did, so the last week of work I resided in what could only be called a flophouse. One night, while watching
The Sand Pebbles
in the lobby of the "hotel," I was asked to vacate my seat -- they had rented out the couch to an elderly transient and he was ready for bed.

This period in my life was an intense mixture of fantasy and hyper reality -- sort of a jump-start to adulthood. In a footnote to all of this, I ran into several of the "stars" years later.

Tom Smothers was waiting for a car at the Detroit airport.

Bruce: Howdy, Tom! Bruce Campbell. Hey, you remember that summer of 1976?

Tom: Uh, no, not really.

Bruce: In Traverse City... I was your dresser and we showed you those wacky films of ours?

Tom's blank look told the whole story. Clearly, his gig in Traverse City was one of many that year.

Doug, the Western star, had the same nonreaction when I collared him after a screening in Hollywood. The summer may not have been a memorable one for them, but it certainly was for me.

7

"COLLEGE SCHMOLLEGE"

SIX MONTHS IN LIMBO

The person who dragged himself to college that fall was a changed man.

Three months in a dark theater left me pale, rail-thin and
convinced
that this was the life for me, and this damnable "college" thing seemed like a traffic jam on my road to the big "H."

I was so busy over the summer that I wasn't able to register for college classes at Western Michigan University. In a panic, I begged my cousin Nancy to do it for me since she already lived in the college town of Kalamazoo.

"Just sign me up for a bunch of theater stuff," I told her over the phone from Traverse City. I ended up with four classes -- all but one related to the theater.

My dorm was Draper Hall. Some clever frat boy had removed a few key letters from the building and it became Raper Hal. As a starving, ex-apprentice struggling to get back to his fighting weight, this was the right place to be -- though not known for its selection of stunning coeds, Hal boasted the best food on campus.

The dorm also housed a fine array of quirky collegiates. Richard, a dope-smoking guru, would wander daily into our four-man room at the end of the hall, plunk down on a vinyl chair and expound on the mysteries of life -- the most mysterious of all being how he managed to stay in college.

Every college kid is required to endure an insane roommate. I was no exception. My roommate, Brian, had suffered a traumatic motorcycle accident a few years earlier. I made the mistake of asking him why he limped slightly, and he explained in lurid detail.

"One afternoon, I was pulling my bike out of the driveway. The sun was low, so I couldn't see if a car was coming or not -- that's when I got hit head-on."

Brian was quick to produce grisly Polaroids of his motorcycle and point to the large dents in the gas tank, courtesy of his knees. One of his all-time favorite things was to lay the hand of an unsuspecting hall mate on his knee and demonstrate the nonaction of his shredded cartilage.

This life-altering incident left Brian in a fragile state -- he would defiantly skip tests, opting to drown his sorrows in pints of low-grade bourbon. At night, he would sooth his tortured soul to sleep with a stack of Barbra Streisand records. He used headphones, but my lower bunk was close to the record stylus and a tinny "The Way We Were" haunted me for six months.

It's safe to say that Brian got on my nerves.

One night, after I challenged how bad he really had it, Brian insisted on wrestling. This was not the same as those playfully adolescent, big brother/little brother matches, this was worthy of a Cage Match. Brian was so serious that when he got the advantage, late in the fight, he groped for the location of my kidneys -- presumably so he could focus his punches there. In utter terror, I managed to elude this, along with his attempt to belt my hands behind my back and inflict God-knows-what on my person. Brian turned out to be his own worst enemy and eventually fell off the face of the earth when year-end finals rolled around. If you ever come across a guy offering to show you dubious Polaroids of a 1974 Honda 350 --
run.

My college sexual experience consisted of turning down an advance from a male theater classmate. His words, "I just don't want to be alone" resonated with me, but not enough to experiment with sexual orientation -- I was far too bent on unraveling the female gender.

College wound up being a blip on the radar screen -- six months to be exact. As thankful as I was to Cousin Nancy for enrolling me, I found college to be a step backward. I had tasted the real enchilada and felt betrayed by preliminary theater classes -- I knew the difference between "up-stage" and "down-stage" and couldn't see how "trust" exercises were going to help me in the real world. After semester finals were done, I called it quits.