Stay Interesting

by Jonathan Goldsmith

  And then Nicky noticed something: She double-locked the front door.

  “What’s up?” he asked suspiciously.

  “You never know, Nicky.”

  “Never know what? You said your husband was in Cleveland.”

  “Well, he is. But he’s a very suspicious guy. Sometimes he sends his friends to drop by and check on me. Oh, he’s a nasty, jealous man, Nicky.”

  Suddenly, there was a mechanical clicking sound.

  “Oh my God, Nick. That’s him. He’s the only one who can open the garage door. He’ll kill us both. Climb out the window. Now.”

  “Get my clothes,” whispered Nicky.

  She ran to the bathroom and threw open the door. The dog had shredded his clothes to nothing. She threw the scraps at him and implored him to jump out the window, promising it was a garden apartment, only one floor up. The husband was nearing the stairs. She threw a pair of leotards at Nicky and he grabbed his white bucks with the lifts.

  “Jump, Nicky.”

  “I’ll fucking die.”

  “You will if you don’t jump!”

  He leapt and landed in the bushes, leotards and bucks in hand, as the husband entered the kitchen. Nicky squeezed into the leotards and white bucks with the lifts. He must have looked like one of the frogs from the farm, with his legs thinned by the tights and his belly hanging over the waistband. He had no shirt, just his shiny Italian medallions dangling around his neck.

  He started inching his way through the foliage and down the hedgerows, trying to stay out of sight, when a cop car shined a light on him.

  “Over here, honey,” they called over the bullhorn. Nick was taken to the Hollywood police station, and if it wasn’t for a good friend bailing him out, they would have taken my roommate to the funny farm for a twenty-four-hour psychiatric evaluation.

  The Only Way to Get Experience Is to Have Experiences

  Do you know where the audition is for Gunsmoke?” I asked, peering into an empty room at CBS Studio City. I’d been called in for a role, though didn’t know which. I was wearing my blue suit and black Oxford shoes again, looking like an insurance adjuster, while others were wearing Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops.

  “This is it,” the secretary said.

  “What are my sides?” I asked, looking around for the scripts. The audition rooms I’d been in were routinely cattle calls filled with actors.

  “There are no sides,” she said. “The role of Kyle, the lead, is yours.”

  I tried to conceal the jubilation building inside me. A starring role, and the first of 350 to follow.

  “Mr. Daniels would like to see you,” the lady said.

  Marc Daniels was a famous television director, and the force behind shows including I Love Lucy, Where’s Raymond?, and, later, The Golden Girls. A few days earlier, I had been reading for a part on Ben Casey, another show, and he’d been sitting on a bench in the room, working on a script. He must have heard me and cast me without an audition.

  “Are you at liberty, son?” he said, asking if my schedule was free enough to take the role.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, leaving out the only other job I had, which was driving the garbage truck I had parked outside the studio. I used it to get myself to auditions.

  “Great, glad to have you on board,” he said, grabbing my hand and shaking it. I was ecstatic. As always, I wanted to race to the closest pay phone to call my father.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Daniels said as I was heading hurriedly toward the door. “You know how to ride a horse, son?”

  “Like the wind, sir,” I said without breaking stride, anxious to get out of there before someone changed their mind.

  I didn’t know how to ride a horse. I’d never ridden one. I sat on a pony at the zoo when I was a small child. But after struggling for so long, I couldn’t let a horse get in the way of my first real role. Besides, how hard would it be to ride a horse? I was going to find out.

  I tried to learn. I called around to the riding stables in Los Angeles, desperate to take a few lessons, but the monsoons had arrived. With all the rain, there was so much mud that nobody would rent out a horse. Still, how hard could it be? I arrived on set one bright morning at the Columbia Ranch without an hour of riding time logged and heard loud, menacing rumblings from inside a semitrailer. It rocked from side to side.

  “What’s the ruckus?” I said to a grip, trying to feign some cowboy vernacular.

  “Nothing, kid. The horses just want to run,” he said. The words of the script flashed in my mind: “Kyle vaults on horse and rides through the night.” I was Kyle.

  Suddenly, it was time for my scene. I was nervous. Okay, I was so shaky the grips had to help me. They boosted me up into the saddle.

  “Where’d they get this lox?” I heard someone snicker. I was then given the reins and left to make good on my assurance that I knew how to ride. However, this horse clearly hadn’t reviewed the script. And those bastards know when you’re afraid. And off he went.

  “Pull him around!” Daniels called, prompting two cowboys to chase after the horse and rider.

  The crew was cracking up, laughing at me. I had to control this fucking horse. And I couldn’t. “Turn him around,” everyone yelled. I pulled so damn hard I thought I would break his neck, but he did run in a circle. Right around the director and his camera. Each time I circled out of control, Daniels would follow me with his narrowing eyes.

  “Like the wind, eh?” he muttered. I will never forget the look on his face.

  Okay, I couldn’t ride a mule. But I’d gotten the part. All told, I appeared in sixteen episodes of Gunsmoke, and then most of the other popular Westerns of the day: Bonanza, The High Chaparral, and The Virginian, as well as Hang ’Em High with Clint Eastwood. I may hold the record for falling off more horses than anyone else in Hollywood. And once you can stay on, there’re saddle sores. They are a very real thing. On The High Chaparral, I went to work with Kotex pads on my ass. I still left blood in the saddle.

  Eventually, I did learn to ride. A wonderful old cowboy named Don House, who was Gary Cooper’s double, took pity on me. We became good friends and I spent many days on his ranch getting far more comfortable in the saddle than I was on my Gunsmoke debut. But that day on Gunsmoke . . .

  “Cut!” yelled the director.

  Allow Yourself a Very Wide Margin of Error

  My speaking-role debut was less than auspicious as well. I was an extra on The Doctors, one of the longest-running shows on television. I received some fan mail; they decided they had a rising star on their hands. They gave me one line.

  “Doctor, she has a contusion on her ankle.”

  I practiced. I had forty different dramatic renditions. After all, I had been to the most prestigious acting school in the East. I alerted friends and family from coast to coast: I would be heard for the first time, live, NBC, Friday at two thirty. I was so ready.

  My moment came, and I stepped up to the star of the show. And went completely blank. I was like a deer in the headlights, frozen. It felt like days. But then I said it. My first line ever:

  “Doctor, her left ankle is corroded.”

  Live television. No second takes. I didn’t wait to get fired. I just walked out.

  • • •

  Cut!”

  There it was again. Fred De Cordova, the director of My Three Sons, shouted it after I flubbed my lines. I had been cast as a paparazzo and couldn’t get the sequencing down. The star of the show was Fred MacMurray, playing a widower, and our episode featured Dana Wynter in a guest appearance. In the script, MacMurray’s character was having an illicit lunch with Wynter, who played an heiress. My job was to sneak up on them, snap a few pictures, give my lines, and disappear.

  The set had been converted into an elegant restaurant, and the table had been wrapped in fine white linen and set with freshly cut flowers and spa
rkling crystal wineglasses. Along with the shine of the crystal, I could see the rich patina of MacMurray’s hair and the exquisite beauty of Wynter, looking radiant in her elegant beige dress. I had the photo man’s attire and props: a vest for lenses and batteries and film and flashbulbs and who knows what else.

  I wanted to get familiar with the props before shooting. After all, I was a method actor.

  “It’s nothing really, just an old Speed Graphic,” the prop man told me, handing me the camera. “Nothing to it.”

  “Um, okay . . . ,” I said.

  “Here, look,” he said impatiently. “This is simple. All you have to do is switch the plate, deliver the line, put the plate back in, take the picture, deliver your second line, expel the flashbulb, and then leave.”

  It was a dizzying amount of information to absorb, and even more so when I was as nervous as I was. He tried to explain further, but the sound of the director’s bullhorn broke his concentration.

  “All right, let’s take this . . .”

  The prop man placed a camera bag on my shoulder.

  “Your bulbs and plates are in the bag,” he said, ushering me to the stage.

  I was confused. Nervous again. Do what with the plate? Then deliver the lines? What, what, what were the lines?

  The first take was a dud. I couldn’t remember the damn first line. Sitting at the table, Fred MacMurray, the Hollywood star, waited patiently across from the vixen Wynter.

  “Let’s take it again,” the director said.

  I got back into position, adjusting the camera bag on my shoulder and feeling the familiar nervous sweat coating my body.

  “Action!”

  Wait, what were the fucking lines again? Did I press the plate first?

  “Cut!”

  Over at the table, I noticed Wynter looking over my way, sympathetic, like I was a helpless child. She must have had children of her own, I thought. I was humiliated. My body was drenched.

  “Mop him down,” the director called, and soon the makeup lady appeared, blotting the sweat from my forehead. This measure, however, wasn’t enough.

  “Can you get him changed and put some shields in his shirt, for Christ’s sake?”

  Shields?

  The wardrobe lady returned.

  “Hopefully, this will help you,” she said, lifting my arms to place the pads under my armpits to keep rivulets from dripping down my shirt.

  “Can we please get this before lunch?” the director called. “Action!”

  I walked out and crushed the line, delivering it perfectly. Now it was time to take the picture. I walked over to the table, mastering the sequence. Just when I got in range, I put the camera to my face, focused the lens just so, put my finger on the camera, and pressed the button.

  The wrong fucking button.

  The blast of the flashbulb sounded like a mortar round had exploded. Instead of pushing the button to take the picture, I had pushed the button to expel the goddamn flashbulb, and now it was flying. I wanted to jump out into the air and snatch the fucking rocketed bulb, but it was too late—the bulb was high in the air, and my arms were in straitjackets. I could only watch it sail toward the table, over the assembled diners, just missing Fred MacMurray’s nose, and landing directly in Dana Wynter’s wineglass with a large plop. Of course.

  The wine splashed over her beige dress, over the white tablecloth. I had ruined the set.

  “Cut!”

  Once again, I fled. I had a really nice jacket in the dressing room. Instead of going to get it, I just left it there. I got out of the studio. If I couldn’t get it right by now, would I ever? I couldn’t do this simple thing, and I felt like such a fraud. I wanted to be an actor, and I felt like I couldn’t even play a monkey.

  • • •

  In fact, I couldn’t play a monkey. I got rejected from playing one of the gorillas in Planet of the Apes. I had come to be friends with the director Ted Post after he cast me to play alongside Clint Eastwood in Hang ’Em High. Eastwood never talked to me again after the film (a dalliance I had had with his girlfriend in Las Cruces, New Mexico, during filming might have had something to do with it), but I became a lifelong friend of Post’s, who thought I’d make a good ape.

  “Report in on Monday, three A.M. Makeup and wardrobe,” my agent told me. “It’s a fairly small part, but you got it, and it runs through the picture.”

  I was thrilled. Playing a minor ape didn’t necessarily forge a clear path to major roles in films, but it was finally a steady income. The film was a long contract, spanning several months, and the best part was the overtime coming my way. Those ape costumes took hours to create in makeup and wardrobe, and, along with special effects, it guaranteed a very good year. Again, I called my father.

  “Poppa, I’m going to be a star,” I gushed. “I’m playing a monkey in Planet of the Apes.”

  He was so thrilled. How supportive.

  “Great, kid. I always knew you had it.”

  I had hardly hung up the phone when it rang again. It was my agent.

  “J-J-J-Jono? What . . . color are your . . . eyes?” he stammered.

  “B-B-B-Blue?” I stammered back.

  “Sh-sh-shit. All the apes have b-b-brown eyes,” he said. “No time to get lenses.”

  Jesus, I thought. Thirty years old and I couldn’t even play a fucking monkey! A tough break, for sure, but a punishment I had become heartbreakingly familiar with. Like the time I was cast to play alongside Danny DeVito but was too tall. Or the time I wasn’t tall enough, and my agent stuffed the soles of my shoes with gobs of wet toilet paper in the studio’s bathroom. I could hardly walk. My calves were spasming. I made it to the reading hobbling. After the audition the director said, “He’s great, just put him in lifts.”

  One time, after the umpteenth rejection, flub, or failure, I found myself lost on Wilshire Boulevard. As I walked, I passed a cemetery, small and odd-looking. I found an entrance on Glendon Avenue and walked in, shuffling aimlessly among the tombstones. Then I stumbled on a familiar name. Norma Jeane Mortenson, whom we knew as Marilyn Monroe. She’d become so famous, so lusted after, and yet she’d committed suicide, unable to cope with her own pain. Just like Inge, she’d surrendered to her own dark thoughts. And I felt like such a worthless, inadequate failure. Perhaps this was the way to make the pain of rejection disappear. Maybe dying would be my lot in life.

  For a while, it kind of was. But fortunately, I didn’t need to kill myself. In fact, I learned I could make a decent career having others do it for me.

  It’s Better to Die Onstage Than to Not Get Onstage at All

  I may well have been killed more than anyone else during my time in Hollywood. I was pushed off a roof as a drug dealer in T. J. Hooker. I was thrown off a roof as a drug addict in Dallas and was tossed off another roof or two in The Streets of San Francisco (and also, in a later episode, drowned in a bathtub by a gang dressed up as nuns). I was mowed down by a machine gun, and once I was electrocuted. I was blown up by dynamite and run over by a car. Several times. I was killed so many times that Leonard Katzman, a close friend and director, refused to use me anymore.

  “I can’t do it, Jono,” Katzman said. “Maybe if you come back as a blond or something?”

  He was joking. But I wasn’t. That afternoon, I went out and had my hair dyed blond. I came back the next day, got the part, and got whacked again. I don’t know what it was about me. I guess people just liked seeing me die.

  “It doesn’t hurt, does it?” director Don Siegel said, after I got shot in the head by John Wayne for the seventh time in just a few hours. Don Siegel had become famous directing a cult picture called Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was on the set of The Shootist, the last film Wayne ever made. I had just crashed through a glass window to shoot the Duke. Of course, I missed. He didn’t. I was rolling around on the ground in pain, where Mr. Wayne was to
give me the coup de grâce.

  Wayne was huge, towering over me, firing a prop pistol from six feet away. The gun had blanks, but out of camera view, there was a prop man with an air gun who fired pellets filled with fake blood. So, every time Wayne shot me, the prop man fired a blood pellet at my head, which stung and left a nasty welt. Now, after seven times, they were wondering if it hurt.

  “Just a little, Mr. Siegel,” I said, seeing double. I was about to pass out.

  “That’s great! Okay, everybody, let’s take it again,” Siegel called, and Wayne shot me for the eighth time. My head was throbbing and I could hardly see, my head riddled with blood pellets.

  Siegel got out of his chair to inspect the set. He looked down at the welts on my head.

  “How much they paying you for this, kid?” he asked.

  “Seven hundred.” I winced.

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better, most of the people the Duke shoots turn out to be stars.”

  How nice, I thought.

  “All right,” Siegel yelled. “One more time! For safety!”

  The Duke did shoot me. And I did become a star. But I’d have to wait thirty-five years. In the meantime, my death run continued. I was pushed off a boat in some mucky swamp, shot too many times to count, strapped to the electric chair, and hanged from the gallows in Cutter’s Trail by Joseph Cotten, who, incidentally, had just had false front teeth fitted. As a result, he had quite a bit of trouble with my character’s name and his line.

  “Any lastht requesthtsth, Jesstheee Bowen?” he asked, again and again, tears rolling down his cheeks. We had to keep taking it and taking it because, frankly, an outlaw with a noose around his neck shouldn’t be laughing so hard.

  Then I was buried alive.

  I’d been cast in The Law & Harry McGraw, a television show, in a leading role. I played Flash, a Broadway star and bon vivant known to cavort with numerous showgirls. I don’t remember how I was killed, but what’s the difference? Dead is dead, so we had to do a funeral scene. Instead of shooting the funeral on set, the production had rented out a decrepit funeral parlor in Pasadena.