The Importance of Being Ernie:

by Barry Livingston

  After two long hours of quasi-Kabuki acting, Gene chased Chris up the aisle of the auditorium, jabbing him with a sword. Taking a sharp poke in the rear end, the mute propman finally spoke up and screamed one improvised word: “Fuccckkk!!!!”

  The dozing audience of teenagers woke up, leaped to their feet, and roared their approval. The auditorium went completely nuts. It was like a prison riot triggered by a renegade convict who dares to thumb his nose at the authorities.

  Unfortunately, the school’s principal, Dr. Pack, also saw the inspired performance. He was not as thrilled as the kids, and Chris got suspended for a week. When he returned to school, my pal was welcomed back like Cool Hand Luke returning to the chain gang after another amazing escape attempt. His fame on campus certainly trumped mine.

  Chris, Gene, and I soon became the “three amigos.” We sought out all kinds of dangerous adventures around town: sneaking onto the 20th Century-Fox studio lot to prowl around the sets of Hello Dolly and Planet of the Apes, exploring the creepy Bronson Caves up in the Hollywood Hills, camping at the beach, and nighttime hikes through Vasquez Rocks, a rugged location used in many TV Westerns and outer space movies. These were some wild times, usually fueled by cheap wine.

  The three amigos also discovered a shared love for the American actor John Barrymore, perhaps the greatest thespian of all time. On the surface, he was a dashing and romantic movie star. Deep down, Barrymore had the imagination and versatility of a character actor. He was also the premier “rock star” of his day, a hard partying rebel, something that we admired. On the actor’s birthday, I’d throw a raucous drunken party at the Barrymore Suite in the Alexandria Hotel, a decaying old palace in downtown Los Angeles. Those soirees gave me the worst hangovers ever.

  Barrymore was also known for pulling outrageous stunts, which Chris and I tried to emulate. On one occasion, we dressed as priests as a ruse to get in to see The Exorcist. The movie had just come out, and lines formed around the block for every performance. To bypass the crowds at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Chris and I went up to the box office and explained that we worked for the New York Catholic Monitor and wanted to review the movie; it had become very controversial with the church. We also pointed out “Father Craven’s” foot was broken and how difficult it was for him to stand in line. The manager took a look at Chris’s “injured” foot, which was actually fine, encased in dozens of white socks to simulate a cast, and ushered us inside, free of charge. He even provided complimentary popcorn and sodas. We couldn’t tell if the manager was truly sympathetic or hoping to engender a more favorable review.

  As Chris and I watched the movie, we could feel audience members spying on our reactions, especially when the Holy Cross was being desecrated or Linda Blair was screaming blasphemous curses. It took all our strength not to giggle, which garnered even more curious stares. Our biggest fear during that scary movie was that someone in the audience might have a heart attack and we’d be asked to perform the Last Rites. Luckily, nothing that dramatic occurred.

  When the show ended, we filed out with the audience who nodded and smiled politely at the “priests.” The “holy man” with the broken foot, though, had one more miracle to perform. As we filed past the manager outside the theater, Chris ditched his bogus limp and we broke into a sprint down the street, laughing hysterically at the stunt we had successfully pulled. If there’s a special place in hell for priest impersonators, our names are surely on the list.

  Even though I was being reckless, there was one big positive: I was finally acting like a normal teenager, experiencing the risky escapades that are a youthful rite of passage. If you survive them, terrific, you’ve got something to warn your kids about. If you screw up, at least you’ve got a good excuse, young and dumb. Nobody cuts you much slack when you are older. Maybe that is why so many child actors stumble so frequently as adults; they are forever trying to experience their wild, youthful days that are long gone.

  CHAPTER 21

  The End Is Here, Now What?

  It was 1972, my senior year at North Hollywood High. Filming on the twelfth season of Sons also commenced. We had reached a TV milestone. The only sitcom that had a longer run was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, where my TV career started. To this day, MTS still ranks as the number two show for sitcom longevity. (FYI ... The longest running TV show of all time is Gunsmoke at twenty seasons.)

  Despite an onslaught of daring new shows like M*A*S*H, Maude, and 60 Minutes, our episodes still revolved around lost bicycles, missed dates on prom night, and cookie drives at school. Amazingly, the show was still in the top twenty in the TV Nielsen ratings. With all the turmoil and strife in the real world, perhaps the TV audience needed a retreat from reality. You could always count on MTS to transport you into an alternate universe where life was sweet as Uncle Charley’s cherry pies.

  The producers did make a few halfhearted attempts to reflect the current times. Hair could cover the tops of our ears now, khaki pants didn’t always have to be baggy, and we occasionally talked about rock-and-roll music. One episode in the later years even had a story about an English rock star who meets the Douglas family. The producers wanted to hire a real musician and weren’t sure who to approach, so they consulted with Stan and me.

  Being a huge fan of the Rolling Stones, I suggested Brian Jones, the band’s original rhythm guitarist. I thought he dressed cool and that his haircut was impeccable. I was a fan, not necessarily a deep thinker.

  Of course, nobody knew that Jones was a flat-out junkie and raging hedonist. It would have been the best inside joke ever if he had accepted the producer’s offer and visited our wholesome little universe. As it turned out, Jeremy Clyde from the English pop duo Chad & Jeremy did the episode.

  As work on Sons plodded along, I began to think about what I might do when the show ended. College was beckoning. My parents advised me to continue my education and pursue an acting career later if I still wanted it.

  On the other hand, I was getting solid feedback from our new director, Earl Bellamy, who thought that I had real talent as an actor. He advised me to go straight for a career as an adult performer. I loved the idea, but I also knew that most young performers rarely have careers after they’ve grown up.

  Typecasting was the biggest obstacle to continued success, no matter how talented you were. Once your face is associated with a character from a long-running series, nobody will believe you in a new role. Of course, there were exceptions. Mickey Rooney certainly takes the honors for career longevity. He was MGM’s biggest child star in the 1930s and has continued to work throughout his adult life. Elizabeth Taylor made it. So did Roddy McDowall and Jackie Cooper. It seemed like a real crapshoot, though. I knew there were far more casualties than survivors.

  One thing was clear in my mind: if I chose a show business career, I wanted to be a character actor, particularly since guys like Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, and Warren Oates were changing the face of movies. They were being cast in lead roles, parts that were once the sole domain of classically handsome guys like Rock Hudson or John Wayne. The rise of the character actor in the 1970s gave me a glimmer of hope. I was never going to be the new Robert Redford, but I might have a shot at being the new Dustin Hoffman.

  Hard decisions about my future were suddenly upon me at the end of shooting that year: My Three Sons was axed. A new CBS programming chief, Fred Silverman, issued an edict: kill every folksy, cornpone comedy that the network aired. MTS was being canceled along with Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, and The Beverly Hillbillies.

  Ironically, we were still among the top twenty shows in our final season, popular in the Midwest and with older people. Younger TV audiences, the kind that advertisers crave, had abandoned us. It was unlikely that another network would renew the show again, despite our high ratings.

  It was time to let it go. All of the original TV sons, Mike, Robbie, and Chip, were no longer living at home. I was the only son left, and I wasn’t even a biological offspring, I was the adopted one. I
t was just Ernie and Dodie holding down the fort. Pretty weak.

  On the final day of shooting, there was no great party given by the producers to celebrate our achievement. As in all things with the show, Fred MacMurray set the tone in saying good-bye. He gave me a stiff hug and handshake. That was it. No “thanks, kid, great job” or “here’s a gold commemorative wristwatch.” That just wasn’t his style, and that was okay. MacMurray was full of contradictions, and we just accepted him. He was sweet and gentle, cold and distant, self-effacingly funny but very conservative.

  A description of Fred MacMurray wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention his famous frugality. He was perhaps the wealthiest man in Hollywood, which made his tightfisted ways all the more baffling.

  One of the funniest stories about MacMurray’s penny-pinching ways came from John Stephens, our production manager. MacMurray asked Stephens to round up a few crew members to have a meal with him and then they’d all head to the Pantages Theatre to see a closed-circuit televised heavyweight fight.

  When the dinner bill was delivered, it totaled around fifty dollars, this being early 1960s prices. Rather than pick up the check for the crew members, MacMurray scrutinized the bill and announced the dollar amount that everybody should pay to cover their individual order. Stephens snatched the bill and paid it, pleasing MacMurray immensely. Then, the group piled into the star’s station wagon and they were off to the theater.

  Once they arrived at the Pantages Theatre, MacMurray realized that the parking lot required one dollar to gain entrance. That was too much money to pay so he scoured the streets for free parking. Eventually, MacMurray gave up the hunt after Stephens pointed out that the prizefight was about to start. MacMurray pulled his wagon into the parking lot, and the attendant asked for the dollar fee. Without a moment’s hesitation, the star held out his hand to the group in his car and asked everyone to chip in to help pay for the fee. Everyone obliged.

  MacMurray was an enigma, an intensely private man caught up in a high-profile career. He liked being an actor but hated being a celebrity. I could relate, being so uncomfortably famous at public school. In some ways, he was more of a role model than I had realized.

  Bottom line: I was very fond of my surrogate “dad.” I liked all the members of my TV family and would miss them greatly. After twelve years, some of us were at the end of our careers, while others were on the verge of starting new journeys. I was among the latter.

  I was turning eighteen and soon to receive the tens of thousands of dollars from my acting work as a minor. Such a large amount of money was a blessing and a curse at that young age. One way or another, it felt pretty damn exciting.

  CHAPTER 22

  Free to Be Me

  First event on my to-do list was a road trip with buddies. Chris, Gene, Danny Muldorpher, and I piled into my 1969 Camaro and headed north to Sequoia National Forest for a camping trip. Four guys, plus gear, in that little Chevy! I don’t know how we managed it, but we did.

  I tasted freedom for the first time in my life. No parents, no work schedules, no school! It was magical walking among the giant redwoods, especially after smoking some weed, the new drug of choice among my peers.

  I was a sponge, soaking up all the simple joys that I’d been missing out on while I was working. We partied around the campfire, swapped stories about UFOs and Bigfoot sightings, hiked, tried to pick up campground chicks, and slept on the cold ground in sleeping bags. The frozen morning would wake us up, hungover, happy and ever ready for the next adventure.

  Once back in Los Angeles, I mulled over my future goals: college or acting. The fall semester at school was a couple of months away, so I thought I’d check out some adult acting classes. I’d had some coaching as a kid with a lady named Lois Auer but never any formal training. One acting teacher’s name kept coming up: Jeff Corey. I’d heard that he taught Jack Nicholson, Jane and Peter Fonda, and James Dean. Not too shabby. It seemed like a reasonable place to start, so I enrolled hoping for the best. Instead, I got the worst.

  After a few sessions of listening to Corey expound about acting theory, I did a monologue for his class. It was the role of Don Baker from the play, Butterflies Are Free. After I finished, Corey proceeded to rip me a new asshole. Apparently, my performance was exemplary of everything that was wrong with “representative acting” as seen on TV. That was a real slur, especially if you subscribed to a Stanislavski “method acting” approach, which Corey did.

  Perhaps he was right about my work. I really didn’t know. I was just acting by instinct, which had served me pretty well over the years. In any case, there wasn’t a tempered, constructive word in Corey’s entire, bitter critique. I was barely eighteen, the new kid in class, and got sucker-punched. Perhaps Corey thought he was enlightening his students. Nice for them. He made me feel like I’d farted out loud ... through my mouth. I looked for another class pronto.

  One ironic footnote: A few years later, after I’d studied with more helpful teachers, I starred in a new CBS series called Sons and Daughters, and Jeff Corey was hired to direct an episode. When we met on the set, he was suddenly full of praise for my work and said I’d really improved as an actor. Still smarting from his verbal spanking, I replied, “Not in your class I didn’t.”

  My first acting role post–My Three Sons was in a USC student film titled Peege, a tearjerker about a family visiting their invalid mother in a rest home. It hardly seemed like the next big step in my career. I was hoping for another TV series or a feature film. My agent, Wally Hiller, insisted that I do the film, though. According to Hiller, the film’s writer/director, Randal Kleiser, had caught the eye of industry insiders and was destined for big things. My agent was right. Kleiser went on to direct the highest grossing movie musical of all time, Grease, among other hits.

  Over the years, Peege became the highest grossing short subject in film history and won numerous awards, including the prestigious honor of being added to the permanent film collection of the Smithsonian. To this day, over forty years later, I still get a few dollars in residual payments from the small percentage of profits that I was given in the film.

  My Three Sons was off the air in prime time now, but that wasn’t the end of it. CBS brokered a deal with a syndication distributor to air reruns of the show every day in non–prime time markets all across America.

  CBS offered me $50,000 to buy out my share of future payments. That was a whole lot of dough in 1972. I was tempted to take the money and run. If the show flopped in syndication, though, MTS would be headed for the vaults, never to be seen again, and I’d be $50,000 poorer. I wasn’t hurting for cash at the time, having just received my trust money, so I rejected the CBS offer. It seemed like a good gamble because MTS had great ratings its twelfth and final season, meaning the public might not be tired of it yet.

  My theory proved to be right. The show was a huge hit in syndication, and I made at least four times the amount that CBS offered. Over the next ten years, that residual money kept me solvent while I figured out what to do with my life.

  The next big move I made after MTS was leaving my parents’ home and getting a residence of my own. I rented the top floor of an old brownstone castle on Detroit Street in Los Angeles, just north of Wilshire Boulevard and the Miracle Mile. The lunatics (Chris, Gene, and me, among others) suddenly had their own playpen. It was nonstop laughing, yelling, pulling pranks, and, of course, pot smoking.

  I suppose a disclaimer on the use of drugs should be offered at this time, particularly if any children (including my own) read this book. My friends and I used marijuana to hot-wire our imaginations, not to sedate our senses or get mellow. Getting “high” to us meant getting outside our normal mind-sets. Nonsensical verbal rants were roundly applauded and definitely encouraged. These outbursts occasionally bordered on the poetic, although that was never the intent. The goal was to unleash an unhinged stream of consciousness just to see where it took you. The results were usually hysterically funny, if not for the verbal riffing
then for the stupidity exhibited.

  Silly characters were sometimes born out of nothing more than a mundane prop that was within reach: a portrait of a Spanish peasant, a bird cage, a vacuum cleaner, anything and everything. Sometimes our word games were coupled with spasmodic dancing or elaborate vaudevillian dance steps, whatever got a laugh. All in all, it was flat out fun. It enabled me to experience a freedom of mind and spirit that I never knew existed. Eventually, this wild improvisational theater was given a name: Beretdom. A friend of mine, Bob Barrios, attended our gatherings and always wore a beret-style hat, thus the inspiration for the name. It had no significant meaning, which in turn gave it great meaning. Beretdom was just a goofy name born out of a wild and crazy theatrical experiment ... with pot. It seemed to fit, but you probably would have to have been there.

  Beretdom was breaking out almost every evening on Detroit Street. These wild improvs were helpful in liberating inhibitions, but I wasn’t sure how to apply such madness to the subtleties of acting. It was just too unhinged for scripted material. Eventually, I found another formal acting class taught by Ned Mandarino.

  The Mandarino school of acting turned out to be almost as off the wall as Beretdom. Class would start with a lengthy relaxation period sitting in a chair onstage, eyes closed and head drooped forward. Ned would verbally encourage you to imagine things like tiny rodent claws crawling over your skin or enormous pepperoni pizzas hovering above your head. The idea was to open yourself up to a sensory stimulation that would get you up and moving about the stage.

  It was funny as hell to watch the actors going from a relaxed stupor to jumping around the stage, crying or laughing hysterically. Mandarino, who was serious as Moses, would bellow random suggestions: “It’s raining ... it’s raining puppies ... it’s raining Hammers!” The actors would react to whatever Ned threw at them. The process wasn’t that much different from Beretdom, except I was paying a few hundred dollars a month for his class.