Frances and Candace Bergen.
But at that time, my only romantic interest was the wife of Edgar Bergen, Frances, who had been a high-fashion model and who was a star of the Yancey series. She played a hostess in a New Orleans’s bar, but she was tall and extremely beautiful, not simply good looking. A key element to her beauty was the refinement in her face and the exquisite manners that comes from good breeding and good ancestors. She was leggy, had elegant, blue-veined hands, and her gestures and reactions were unpretentious and graceful. She and Edgar had a daughter, Candace, who would later earn fame as the star of the Murphy Brown TV series. She and I would become very close friends.
After I arrived, I felt entirely misplaced. I felt like a spy in a foreign, dangerous country, and I was drawn to her because, she was a safe harbor in this new scary and unfamiliar world. One night, after a dinner given by the Bergen’s and about to leave their house, surrounded by strangers, timid though I was, a breeze of resolution filled my soul, and I went back in and up to Frances and kissed her smack on the mouth. A spontaneous murmuring that sprang up, and people didn’t know where to look, but I felt as if I had kept an inner promise. Courage is acting in the fear, and for a man as shy as I was, it took guts. Someone said to my father, “I thought he was supposed to be shy.” But Frances was a magical wonder in my eyes. She gave me strength. She gave me courage.
So I was witlessly smitten by Frances. Her mind was observing and articulates, and she talked with pleasant, earnest charm, her observing eyes on your eyes. Her husband, Edgar was gay, but he was very puckish and witty. I remember one time when my father and I had tied up to a dock at a restaurant in the harbor of Newport Beach to have lunch. Edgar was to meet us. He had a little steam-driven yacht called “The Poopalong.” My father had docked his boat, and Edgar waddled out and gazed at the rope my father had tied to the dock to secure the boat, and said to my father, “You tied her too loose Lautrec.” (Toulouse Lautrec, the dwarf 19th century French painter of prostitutes.) He said things like that all the time. He was a very clever man and he was also very rich.
It hadn’t been in Hollywood very long before Frances invited me over to a dinner at her house by ourselves. She lived on North Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, a very elegant neighborhood for the rich. Doris Day lived there, with her son, Terry Melcher who was a classmate at college. One day when I was at Day’s house, she and her husband, Marty Melcher, came in from filming, and the first thing Doris did was to flick on a recorder that was playing her songs at an earsplitting pitch. (Marty would soon abscond with Doris Day’s wealth. ) I would later become very close to the Bergen’s daughter, Candace, but that was to come. The dinner at Frances’ house was served by a short, dark, efficient Philippino who was also her chauffer. Immediately we found we were very comfortable with each other. She exhibited warm impulses and a generosity of spirit and as we talked I was entranced by the gentle, mild light was pouring from her eyes.
Like any son, I began to question her about my father. What was my dad like? Who were his friends? His detractors? Frances said about my dad was flamboyant and colorful character, and then she added that Edgar had said he was a genius. My soul filled with a son’s pride. I kept on, enjoying the relaxed company, the waiter quietly passing in and out, and I kept asking questions, and at some point Francis said of my father, “He’s double-gaited.” I had never heard the term before. “Double-gaited?’ What the hell was that? I was completely baffled. I asked her what it meant, and she then said, “He does it with both men and women.”
I was stunned, gutted, and speechless. There are incidents that can heavily damage your ideas of things like a car ploughing through a shop window. This was one of those. My heart sank into my shoes. I knew hardly anything about homosexuality. Oh, sure, in eighth grade, small groups of us of boys gathered in a circle to “beat the bishop or “slam the ham,” but we were entirely fascinated by woman, not men. I had never heard the word “lesbian.” I had never heard the word “gay,” other than James Joyce writing in a short story that, “The evening streets were gay.” My mother told me that homos were “degenerate” or “sexual perverts.” She had told me that homos were effeminate, wore red ties, and had handshake that was “limp-wristed;” In Hollywood, they hung out at Hollywood and Vine, and were transvestites. I myself had never pictured to myself how two grown men made love. Sodomites were way beyond the reach of my inexperienced imagination. But my father’s bi-sexual life was soon to be unmistakable except to the blind.
So now I had just heard that my father was a homo. In an instant, my delight, my sexual desire for Frances was gone. We talked for a while, but it was if someone had poured a bucket of ice water over my head: my interest in her maimed beyond repair. Her chauffer took me home to the Santa Monica mansion where I waited, seething. There was a small room near the garage where my father kept his five cars. I sat in a rigid fury, and I thought of shooting my father when he came through the door. Why, you ask? First of all, I was not mentally stable. I had recently tried to kill myself, but mainly I was in a rage because ever since I was a little boy, my mother had dropped incessant innuendos about “queers,” “fags,” “fairies,” “flits,” “nasty spotty prancers,” etc., and I had always defended my father’s honor, defended him relentlessly, steadfastly, even ferociously, defended him almost by reflex, and now I had been told he was a queer.
So my mother had been right after all. That was the most bitter of my realizations. She had been right all along, the person most detested and who had made my life a misery.
Of course, my father’s sexuality was none of my business. Absolutely none. It was his own, period, but I was jittery and angry, and in a foul mood. Against all advice, my father always kept a loaded gun in the house. He had already boastfully shown me his loaded. 38 revolver that he kept in a drawer upstairs by his bed. I stewed for a second, and then I flew up the stairs, got the .38 revolver and came down and waited. I was going to drill him. It was that simple. I was going to put a hole in him in his center mass and kill him. I waited. I waited, boiling with implacable fury. But then I heard noises in the driveway – they were home! Suddenly the insanity of my sick idea became dreadfully overpoweringly clear, I raced back up and replaced the gun, and hurried back downstairs to wait, still in a hot, unforgivable fury.
At last, the back door came open. In they staggered. It was Mary Loos, a big, loud woman, wearing a lovely dress, who came in first. She was angry, exasperated and a bit tipsy. She jerked her thumb back, indicating my father, and spat, “Happy Jack squirrel,” and immediately left to go upstairs. My father, it appeared, had gotten very drunk.
And it was then my father than came in, only to immediately rest his large 6 ft. 4 inch body against the doorframe. He was barely able to stand. He simply stood there, and I went over and grabbed him around the waist with my one good hand and clumsily helped to lie down on the couch. I went back closed the door, and then I sat facing him on chair. He was sprawled on the couch, and I lifted up his legs so that he could lay flat. My mood was clearly lethal. The interrogation began. I said that Frances had told me that Edgar Bergen had said he was a genius. Was he a genius? Was that true? My father shook his head, no. “I’m not a genius,” he mumbled. “No; I am only a brilliant mediocrity.” I was quite stunned by that, by its honesty. We talked for a bit, but he was quite “stoned,” as he put it, and I finally went up to bed and lay awake, my soul in turmoil. I slept little that night.
In the morning, I found him, quite sober, sitting in his striped expensive silk pajamas with a typewriter in his lap finishing a script that was to have been done by 8 o’clock. It was now after ten in the morning and the script had been due by eight. I took the discards out of the waste basket. He was already on page 19 of a 30 page script. He had only made two false starts on the whole narrative, hence the discards. His thick glasses were down on his nose. Suddenly, I asked my father, “What makes a man a queer?” I was trying to be heartlessly cruel and trying to wound, but he wasn’t at all startled by the brutality of the rudeness; he simply looked terribly sad. Finally, he said, “A boy’s mother has a lot to do with it.” I replied simply that I wanted to go home,” and not long after, he took me to the airport. Later, he would tell me that when he was 10 years old, his mother, the opera singer, had molested him.
Six months after my first visit, Christmas came and I went out to visit my father. Jock and I were becoming more competitive all the time. I had begun to drink when I came out the second time. I was drinking rum and coke, and was standing up at the bar, when Jock came up. “Look at you,” he said with a quiet sneer in his voice. “You were so idealistic, so clean and upright, and now look at you.” I answered, “What’s wrong with me? I am simply having a drink,” but Jock wouldn’t let it go. He tried shoving me a bit, and I bristled. I told him that I was not my father, and if he tried to muscle in on me, to try and dominate me, he would regret it. Our eyes locked, and we calmed down. You see, my father was a defeatist by temperament, and I was not. Besides, I quickly learned that Jock only did things when the odds were entirely in his favor.
At that time, he was in training for the role of Tarzan a movie to be filmed in India. He had six weeks to get fit and he was training very hard, and I admired that enormously. But the film soured his fate. He swam in some Indian river and got dengue fever and some waterborne virus that eventually caused a fatal stroke.
*********
My father, in spite of the authority conferred by his big size, was a physical coward. Back then, I was studying a lot of St. Thomas Aquinas, and I knew he had taught that courage is a cardinal virtue. So did I. Of course, when challenged, I didn’t back down. I loathed losing, but you didn’t turn down a challenge for fear of losing. If you lost, you lost. You steamed over it, you vowed to triumph in revenge, but at the moment you lacked the means to triumph. I had played water polo in college and was an excellent swimmer and won a lot of meets. In 1962, my father and step mother were out in their back yard in Newport Beach, when Jock suddenly challenged me to swim across an inlet and back to our dock. Jock was waiting for me to refuse, since it was my father’s habit to turn away, but I took him up on it. So we got set. Given the mark, we both dove in, and we flailed and thrashed away, touching the opposite shore and returning, swimming at full speed. Well, Jock finished about 5 yards or more ahead of me. I had lost. I grit my teeth as I write this, but that is what happened. It taught me a lesson: Don’t ever relax your training. You had to be ready when the time came. Of course, you are going to lose a contest if you haven’t trained hard enough to have a chance of prevailing.
******
That summer, I had become a counselor at a summer camp in Maine where I taught archery and riflery. I had a co instructor, Frank Best, (a neat name for a rifleman who was an expert,) and we competed against each other. One time, each of placed 10 empty cartridge boxes at the end of the firing range, and the first one to hit all ten would be the winner. I was firing an old .22 of mine, and we were off. I hit all ten, and Frank hit only nine. But when I went up to examine the boxes, the tenth had only a lead graze going across it, I hadn’t hit it solidly, so basically it was a tie. I was simply lucky.
At that time, I was reading a lot of St. Thomas Aquinas, an Aristotelian, who taught that those with courage must be able to “stand immovable in the midst of dangers,” especially those dangers that threaten bodily harm and death. Of course, an excessive desire to face fearful circumstances constitutes a kind of recklessness that can easily hasten one’s demise, but didn’t matter to me at the time.
I was at that stage where a young man tries constantly tried to test himself and I was teaching myself to withstand risks. I had an older friend, Richard Hass, built like a brick blockhouse, who told me that, during his Army training, a defective round had entered a recruit’s head as he was crawling under barbed wire with machine guns firing overhead. He was killed instantly.
So one evening, at the end of the day at the camp, when the kids at camp were up at mess, we went down to the firing range, and I asked Frank to shoot small cereal boxes off the top of my head. I would hold them in place, and wait until he shot and see what happened. I had a witness, Tom Parker, who was about to join the merchant marine, so that if something went wrong, and Frank killed me by accident, Frank wouldn’t be blamed. It would be my fault. So I carefully put the small cereal boxes on the top of my head, holding it with the tips of the fingers of two hands, and waited. Frank raised his rifle. Now, at a distance of 50 feet, looking into a raised rifle barrel, you got a shocked chill because the bore looks as if it’s aiming right between your eyes. Frank fired suddenly. There was a solid, sharp “thwack” as the bullet went through the boxes, and I felt it part my hair. The impact of the bullet surprised me. In the old Western Hoot Gibson movies of the 1940s, they talked of a bullet parting a man's hair, and I thought it a myth. But I could feel my hair move when the bullet went through it. At the first shot, Tommy looked as if he were about to vomit, but we persuaded him to stay. We needed a witness.
So I was pleased to discover that I had steady nerves. I certainly was no hero, but at least I could endure risks. We did this at least four times, and each time that bullet would go “thwack” and my hair would rustle as it passed.
The next summer when I went out, my father took the boat out, The Amberjack, heading for the open sea. We traveled for four hours, and then we halted. The boat was left to drift and bob on the big waves. I was still practicing shooting, and Jock and me started to shoot at empty liquor bottles. My father had played a big part in training me to shoot bottles far out in the deep swells. My favorite weapon was an M-1 carbine that had been zeroed in to perfection. We were at least 35 miles out in the ocean, and my father began to throw a single empty bottle of vodka over the side, throwing it as far as he could. I was then to wait, and then try and hit it. By then, I had my sea legs. The sea one day was disturbed, the wind was up, and it was a huge, vast field of water that sometime steeply rose and fell, and you kept our feet by quick movements and alertly using your hips. Once you had sea legs they never left you. Even in very rough seas, you were able to stand as long as your footwork was deft. So my father would throw a bottle in, I would stand out on the deck, waiting until he gave the signal to fire.
One day, he threw the bottle in way out in the heaving waves, and I waited, nervous, ready to pounce, watching the deep, leisurely, rising and falling of the steep swells. I kept waiting, legs spread, holding the rifle at the ready and shifting my weight, staring straight into the distance. No signal from my father. I finally yelled, “Are you going to give me the goddam signal or not,” but he said nothing, staring out at the sea and its restless swells. I had become so anxious and doubtful; I wasn’t sure I could see the damn bottle, much less hit it because the seas were moving the boat away from the bottle. I didn’t wear glasses and kept staring out, the carbine raised, and practically unhinged from the suspense. All of a sudden, both of us saw a little wink of light, very far away, a minute glare that stood atop a huge swell, and my father signaled, and I fired. It demanded a reflex shot, and I took it. Suddenly, the tiny glare of light blinked out, and my father was impressed, but I was nettled. “Next time, please give me the signal before the goddam bottle reaches the coast of Japan,” I said, a bit sour.
But Jock Mahoney was becoming more and more competitive. So one day, Jock, myself and my dad went out together. Jock was a wearing a bathing suit, as was I, and he had a pistol, a .357 magnum. He often boasted of his prowess with it. I had my favorite M-1 carbine. So Jock challenged me to a shoot out, and the contest began. We fired away at the empty bottles in the water, but when Jock began to miss, he became whiney. “Of course, you’re winning – you have a rifle.” I knew it wasn’t a fair contest, but he had underestimated my marksmanship. I replied, “You wanted this contest, not me.” We shifted weapons, and did all right with his pistol, but Jock kept saying it wasn’t fair to pit a rifle against a mere pistol, so I kept hitting things to humiliated him, and he kept complaining. It was ignominious. I had not bitched when he defeated me in the swimming contest, and he should have simply shut up. But I knew I had behaved badly.
*******
I learned slowly, over time, that during the Yancey series, Jock and my father were lovers. Or had been. The hint came from my stepmother, who once morning complained that my father and Jock had stayed up late and had a quarrel which finished when my father fired his .38 pistol into the wall just above the big TV in the den. I was asleep in the pottery shed and hadn’t heard the shot. A lover’s quarrel.
Jock was not simply a bisexual, he was also a lecher. Sally Field was his stepdaughter, was the daughter of Maggie Field, an actress, but to Jock, Sally was simply another species of prey. One day, Jock’s wife, Maggie, surprised Jock putting the moves on Sally, and a very bitter divorce followed.
At that time, Jock was in training for the role of Tarzan, a movie to be filmed in India. He told me that he had only six weeks to get fit and he was training very hard, and I admired that enormously. But that film sealed his fate. He swam in some Indian river and got dengue fever and some waterborne virus that eventually caused a fatal stroke. The attachment between my father and Jock had cooled by then. And my father was quite without any expression of feeling at his friend’s death.
*******
My father was a successful Hollywood producer and writer of screen plays. He also directed films as well. In the 1950s, he wrote the original screenplay for “Around the World in Eighty Days,” but was screwed out of his screen writing credits. In order to do the script, my father traveled through Europe, including Soviet-occupied Austria. The producer was an Englishman, Alex Korda, and I was wondering why an English producer paid my father’s expenses as he traveled through Europe including Soviet-occupied Austria, for the sake of the script. I soon learned that Korda was an agent of MI6, and my father and his crew were unwitting reporting agents for British intelligence.
As I related earlier, it was in the early 1950s, that my father wrote a play called “Suddenly” about an assassin who tries to kill a president with a long-range rifle. At the time, Frank Sinatra’s career was on the rocks. In 1953 when the script was finished, my father urged that Sinatra be given the part of the assassin. It remains an excellent script. Sinatra’s acting was superb. (Except for Sinatra, the acting was poor.) Later, I learned that the singer was given only $15,000 for the gig, and ever after, Sinatra was always grateful to my father, and each year would send him a large color TV or a huge vat of champagne. As I earlier related, the FBI told me that Lee Harvey Oswald watched the film many times, and the last viewing took place a week before Kennedy was killed. (I have no way to corroborate this, but the day before he was killed, Kennedy said to Jackie that if a man with a rifle were to shoot him from a building, there was no way to stop him.) Fred Zinneman, the director of From Here to Eternity, a film that snared a Oscar for Sinatra, told me that it was Sinatra’s performance in Suddenly that gave the crooner the part in his film.
My father had colorful stories about Sinatra. The offshore island of Catalina was clearly a place where many orgies occurred. One night, Humphrey Bogart’s yacht was anchored in the cove, and Sinatra came in, (by plane or by boat, I don’t know,) but he was being rowed to the yacht in a tiny boat by Lionel Newman, the father of Randy, and who was singing ribald songs, “My prick fit her clit,” sort of thing, and Sinatra was singing along with the jolly obscenities, when, nearing the yacht, the singer suddenly dropped a big bottle of bourdon into the water of the cove. Sinatra, who was by then, utterly and completely drunk, yelled out mightily in alarm, then dove in, swimming to bottom to search for it. Sinatra was a feisty little devil. He reemerged spluttering, yelling at the top of his lungs, “The booze! The booze!” And he dove back down again. Sinatra’s clothes were sodden, and onlookers on the board thought Sinatra was going to drown, when an actor, Dewey Martin, who had starred in Daniel Boone, and The Land of the Pharaohs, dove in and rescued Sinatra just as someone else dove down and rescued the booze. (This is the same Sinatra who delivered $4 million in cash to the Mob in Havana.)
I liked Dewey very much. He was a handsome man of medium height, with dark hair and alert intelligent eyes and a modest manner. His body was fit, and he had charm. There was nothing showy about him, and his good looks had none of that vulgarity which you sometimes saw when you saw male actors up close. He often went to sea with my father and me.
When we were far out to sea, Dewey and I would get off the boat and swim with the sharks. The movie "Jaws" would later captivate the nation, allowing a lot of drunken idiots to rent a boat and slaughter the creatures, but in the early 1960s, sharks in the ocean off of California were not that dangerous. The blue fin sharks we saw were slow, lazy swimmers compared with dolphins. If you were ten miles out on the ocean, you would sometimes spot the sharks in a flat sea, and they did not manifest any ominous, huge, black fin ploughing along, but instead displayed small fins wallowing along atop the shallow swells of ocean. I always swam with my eyes open under water, in spite of the salt, and the only incidents where I had brushes with them, occurred when a shark got curious at seeing me swim, and he came up to investigate. I would take his measure, make a ferocious face, and then hit him quickly on his nose, not hard, and he would dart way immediately. I was not afraid of them, neither was Dewey. The real danger came, not from the sharks, but my tipsy father who was standing guard, pointing his .30.6 at the water. I tried not to think of that as we swam.
As I’ve made clear, my father was a superb story teller. He could do superb impressions, his lively, expressive face would assume odd shapes or expressions for effect, and it made all of us laugh. He knew Bogart well, and once told me how Bogart had a sailing yacht, the Santana, and he enjoyed going to sea and putting into port at Catalina. (His wife Lauren Bacall used to get seasick, and she disliked going.) But all the actors respected the fact that the yacht was the couple’s love nest. No one was allowed to set foot in the cabin where he and Bacall made love. It was extremely private, off limits to everyone. The two were very private people in real life.
Except one night, Bogart had sailed to Catalina without Lauren, and Dewey Martin was on board, drinking, when he confessed to being extremely horny, He used the ship to shore phone and got Gloria de Haven, a popular starlet, on the line. She agreed to take a motor launch from L.A. over to the Santana if Dewey paid for it. He happily agreed. It took an hour and a half before Gloria arrived, all decked out and showy, and no sooner had she alighted and had been rowed over to the Santana and gotten aboard, when she and Dewey went into the hallowed cabin and closed the door. It was clear that Bogart had made an exception for Dewey.
It was after two in the morning – the cove at Catalina Island was utterly quiet and sound asleep -- when suddenly the loud hailer came on and that incredibly unmistakable Bogart voice announced– “Now hear this! Now hear this! The fucking lamp is lit.” That story is the favorite of my Hollywood stories.
As hilarious as those stories are, what makes one sick about Hollywood is the constant obsession with pleasure, with a side of life that demanded large sums of money, endless spare time, an empty head, and the belief, fundamental to their character, that going out and having sex with as many people as possible, was not only a very important thing in life, but it was the only important thing in life. In Hollywood, the endless smut, the lewd, the lascivious, the voracious and unstrained play a big part in the life there.
Most such encounters were transitory, their infatuations held by the thinnest of threads, most of those infatuated lived in suspense, expecting to see the threads broken or discovering, to their horror, that they had never been fastened to anything of significance at all.
If Pat permits, I will submit Part Three for his approval. We are not trying to do War and Peace here, and I have gone far enough as it is. I don’t want to weary busy people.
Note on Money
I noted that my father earned $1.5 million in 1958. To try and translate that into day’s terms, “Bogart and Bacall moved into a $160,000 ($2,100,000 in 2010 dollars) white brick mansion in an exclusive neighborhood in LA's Holmby Hills.” In other words, it was a lot of money. But it should be made clear I never cared for money, not my grandfather’s or my fathers. There were many things in life that I valued more.
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