Some might say I fell for acting so hard because I’m an only child, and only children crave constant attention, and what better way to get noticed than on the stage or the screen. Having known my fair share of actors who don’t have siblings, I can agree that, yes, some of these people are spoiled attention-seekers; however, I’ve met just as many kids socially damaged by the popularity of an older brother or sister.
We had a happy home, and I was always surrounded by friends and family, always busy, always sleeping over at somebody’s house, always encouraged to take advantage of everything life had to offer, always loved. (If Freddy Krueger had been brought up like me, there wouldn’t have been any nightmares on Elm Street.) My family’s only major issue was that for a few years before his retirement, Dad tended to work too many hours, and my mother got lonely and downed a few too many martinis; it was a very minor-league version of Revolutionary Road. Considering the kind of crap I saw happening to some of our family’s friends, I couldn’t complain.
MY YOUNG LIFE WAS good, but it improved dramatically when I suddenly acquired an older sister. Okay, she wasn’t exactly a sister, but I claimed her as my own.
I was almost thirteen when my parents’ goddaughter Gail’s parents passed away; good godparents that they were, Mom and Dad insisted Gail come and live with us. There was understandably a palpable sense of sadness when she moved in, but as badly as I felt for Gail, I was thrilled to have her around. Gail was lovely, poised, and graceful, and even a finalist in the Miss California pageant. She treated me like a little brother and actually enjoyed it when I tagged along with her on her adventures.
One night each week, Gail taught swimming classes at the Beverly Hills High School indoor swimming pool, the same one that opens beneath Jimmy Stewart’s feet in It’s a Wonderful Life, and she used to take me along with her in her Chevrolet convertible. After class, we’d go to a drive-in restaurant and have hamburgers and shakes. There I was, in a canary yellow Chevy, sitting next to my beautiful semi-sister, feeling like I was just about the coolest thirteen-year-old in Los Angeles. (All that said, sometimes being in such close proximity to Gail was a bit of a challenge. Her bedroom was right next to mine, and when she’d come out of the shower wearing one of her silky baby-doll nightgowns, things got a little intense for a certain hormone-raging adolescent.)
Some nights after swim class, Gail would let me come over to her boyfriend’s apartment, where the two of them would abandon me on the couch in front of the TV. These were vital formative moments for me, not because I overheard my pseudo-sister fooling around with her baseball-player, beatnik boyfriend, but rather because I was introduced to the world of late-night TV talk shows. I discovered Jack Paar, Lenny Bruce, Johnny Carson, and Don Rickles, but my late-night idol was Steve Allen … whom I had the good fortune to meet … and who, it turned out, kinda liked me.
One of Steve’s friend’s daughters was a member of the ensemble in that infamous Teenage Drama Workshop production of Pinocchio. After our highly successful opening-night performance, Mr. Allen came backstage to pay his respects. Naturally most everybody in the cast and crew surrounded him, peppering the poor guy with questions and autograph requests. He good-naturedly schmoozed with everybody, then eventually called out, “Okay, where’s Pinocchio?”
I shyly raised my hand. “Over here.”
He said, “Come with me,” then took me by the elbow, pulled me back behind the scenery, and said, “Listen, fella, you’re funny as hell. You’re special. Keep it up.”
I stared at his slicked-back hair and those big glasses and mumbled a thank-you, realizing how amazing it was to get professional approval from somebody as accomplished as Steve Allen. That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore. I’m not seeing David Letterman wander backstage at a junior high production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, seek out the kid who played Linus, and tell him he’s doing great work. Steve Allen said I was special, but in fact he was the special one.
I must’ve been doing something right during Pinocchio because Steve Allen wasn’t the only guy who singled me out for notice. Each night during the curtain call, two of the taller sixteen-year-old actors had to carry me out onstage on their shoulders so the audience could see me and give me the ovation they apparently thought I deserved. One evening early in the run, with the applause washing over me, one of the guys pinched my lederhosen-covered leg and said, “They love you, Robbie. You’re pretty good at this.” That this older guy, whom I idolized almost as much as I did Steve Allen, hinted I had a chance to do this for real further solidified my resolve to stick with acting for a little while.
LATER THAT YEAR, I had an aha! moment that convinced me that the world of theater was where I belonged.
Back in school, in my much hated algebra class, I looked up from the empty answer column of the test that I was probably flunking and glanced out the open door. The room was adjacent to the gym field, and, stumped by a particularly difficult equation, I craned my neck so I could see what was going on outside and was treated to a vision of the senior girls, clad in their sexy gym shorts, busy at their archery drills. Their targets were posted on bales of hay wet from a recent rain, and the scent of wet hay reminded me of the scene-paint odor that permeated the backstage area at the Teenage Drama Workshop. It made me pine for everything about the theater: the rehearsals, the performances, the applause, the making out with the girls who played the harem in Aladdin. I wasn’t even fourteen, and I knew what I was going to do. There was no turning back. The decision was made for me. Everybody should be so lucky.
Throughout both junior high and high school, I took as many drama classes as possible. We were allowed to take drama electives as a replacement for English electives, which appealed to me because the stage was far more enjoyable than the classroom. I studied the history of playwriting, from the Greek comedies and tragedies, to Shakespeare, to contemporary theater. I did well enough that a couple of my teachers told me I qualified to be a teacher’s assistant for credits, including a wonderful high school teacher, the character actor James Rawley, who played the mad scientist in the 1956 creepy cult classic The Creature Walks Among Us. (Considering my future in horror, it was ironic that I became the mad scientist’s assistant. Hey, where’s my hunchback?) But truthfully, the motives behind my desire to act weren’t entirely pure. I had learned even in high school that it’s far easier to meet girls when you’re an actor.
Now, in those days, most boys didn’t consider acting to be particularly cool—for that matter, the majority of the guys in my school thought we actors were sissies, believing if you didn’t want to be a football player or an engineer, something was wrong with you—however, that meant the girl-to-guy ratio at your average drama party was about five to one, which was great news for yours truly.
I went to one of my first drama-class cast parties during my sophomore year. The hostess’s parents were out of town, but even though we had the run of her house, we didn’t have the typical get-as-drunk-as-you-possibly-can get-together because this wasn’t the kind of girl who would throw a kegger; she was a “thespian.” We’re talking mixed drinks, and sophisticated older kids, including an openly gay bartender, with Cal Tjader albums spinning on the turntable. At this classy affair, nary an inebriated linebacker or puking shot-putter was to be seen. (A quick side note: I was also a surfer and a baseball player at the time, and the girl-to-guy ratio at the jock parties was about one to five.)
By the time I showed up, this very adult party was in full swing. The girls had blond hair, parted in the middle, ironed straight, Cleopatra eye makeup, and natural pre-pilates thin figures. They were wearing bikinis, floating in the shallow end of the pool, and sipping on drinks garnished with little umbrellas and slices of fresh fruit. I smiled and thought, These drama kids sure know how to throw a party.
I never told my surfing and baseball-playing pals the specifics about the bikinis and frou-frou drinks because I wanted to keep the whole thing to myself. Nonetheless, they were intrigued wi
th what I was up to and sometimes showed up at my performances. Despite being thoroughly confused by our Nazi-centric version of Julius Caesar, some of my delinquent buddies realized that theater looked like fun and actually enrolled in a couple of drama classes on their own. So I guess I can take credit for saving a handful of young minds … which will hopefully make up for the legions of young fans I’ve terrorized over the years.
These parties were amusing diversions, but the acting came first. I was game to try anything. I’ve always desired to stretch on the stage or in front of the camera—horror, comedy, drama, whatever; as long as it’s interesting, I’m interested. During my freshman year, I was asked to wear a pigeon costume and do some filler shtick during a junior girls’ fashion show, which seemed like a plan because, as we all know, one of the ways to a young lady’s heart is through her funny bone. Aside from the two zit-faced tech crew geeks up in the rafters—both of whom are now probably wealthy business associates of Bill Gates Jr.— I was the only male in the production, so again, the odds of meeting a girl were in my favor. So there I was, hanging out backstage, sneaking looks at twenty-six wannabe models from the junior class bouncing around in their matching Maiden-form bras and panties in between outfit changes … the whole time hidden inside that fucking pigeon get-up.
About a third of the way through the evening, it dawned on me that I could play the pigeon horny, which, considering what I was watching backstage, wasn’t that much of a stretch. So I started chasing the girls around the stage, flapping my wings, humping their legs, and pretending to pigeon poop on a papiermâché fountain. The sillier I got, the more the crowd cracked up; and the more the crowd laughed, the further I pushed it. A kind of rock-star power comes from making people laugh—or, as I found out a few decades later, making them scream with fright—that’s indescribable. It’s an ephemeral thing, and it’s addictive, getting the perfect laugh or scream at the right moment. It was like a drug, even more seductive than a mai tai–clutching senior actress.
After the show, I sat in the dressing room—trying to be cool and not gawk at the girls in their underwear—thinking, My God, how did I get here, how did this happen? This is like a dream. Ahh, show business.
CHAPTER 2
NIGHTMARE #2:
Stanley Kramer’s film The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T was based on a story by Dr. Seuss. In the film, a high camera shot looks down on a giant grand piano, the object of a little boy’s fear and dread of piano lessons. For years as a child, whenever I had a fever, I had a nightmare in which I was free-falling, spiraling down, down, down in slow motion toward that evil black piano. This dream haunted me until I was fifteen. Dr. Seuss had damaged me for life.
WHEN MY GRANDFATHER DIED, HE LEFT MY mother an apartment in Laguna Beach, and my family summered down there at some point most every year throughout my childhood. One summer, we invited my friend Stephanie from the Teenage Drama Workshop to join me, Mom, Dad, and my stepsister, Gail. The girls were dating a pair of brothers, both of whom were bona fide Newport Beach cool guys, both of whom I worshipped the same way in which I looked up to the older actors in the Workshop.
As was often the case when I was in my early teens, Gail had to drag me around whenever my parents went off to do their own thing. Fortunately, she and Stephanie liked having me around as a third wheel, especially when they were bored. They would amuse themselves by doing things like dyeing my hair platinum blond. I was actually okay with that, because even though I didn’t surf at the time, I wanted to look like all the older surfer guys. I begged their boyfriends to teach me; since I was hanging around anyway, they reluctantly agreed to give me surfing lessons. I’d always been a good swimmer, so it was relatively easy for me to become a decent surfer. I kept working at it and kept improving, eventually evolving into a solid California surfer, somebody who’d earned his place in the lineup.
Surfing is one of those rare sports that’s noncompetitive; it’s you against yourself, you against the ocean. It’s about balance and timing and knowing how to manipulate a floating object that glides across the face of a wave, a liquid wall that’s collapsing across the surface of the sea. The ultimate free ride. Exhilarating. Kind of like acting.
My entry into surf culture couldn’t have been timed better. During early high school, the most popular people were the football players and the cheerleaders, but by the time I was ready to go to college in 1965, the cool kids were the Beatles wannabes and us surfers. Times had changed, but I’d already done my changing, so socially speaking, I was in pretty good shape.
The surfing in California was good, but not always consistent. My crew liked to explore, so now and then we would sneak off down to Baja, Mexico to find better waves. None of our parents had any idea that we were outside of the country— I’m not sure what kind of excuses my friends came up with, but I’d generally tell my parents that we were camping up north of Malibu—and, God, if we’d been arrested south of the border, they would’ve had no clue where to look for us. With the omnipresent banditos, the bald tires on our ’56 pickup, and the fact that often the person who drove was underage or inebriated, it’s a wonder we didn’t end up dead or in a Mexican jail.
My surfing buddies and I tended to get wrecked on beer, sake, shitty wine, and Mexican peach brandy. That’s pretty much all we drank; we were so afraid of getting Montezuma’s revenge that we refused to touch the water, choosing instead to throw down jug wine and all kinds of fruity alcohol. Of course, it being the midsixties, drugs were always around, but at first they didn’t infiltrate our little group. The first time my surf crew smoked weed was during Easter break on one of our Mexican camping trips; we all huddled under a huge blanket so when we exhaled, we wouldn’t lose any of the precious smoke. We were total weenies. Timothy Leary would’ve been embarrassed for us.
Then, right before high school graduation, much to everybody’s surprise (mine included), I ran away from home. Walkedout. Just left. I got into an epic argument with my father.Part of it was inane—I believed that he’d reneged on his promise to pay my car insurance if I got good grades, and he believed it was my responsibility to pay my own damn car insurance—and part of it was deadly serious: he was pissed that I’d chosen to pursue acting rather than attend a good university and go to law school. Armed with the kind of righteous indignation that only an eighteen-year-old actor can muster, I threw my car keys at my father and stormed out of the house. It would be a while before I saw my parents again.
MY PLAN WAS TO go to college at California State University at Northridge. The college had an excellent drama school and a state-of-the-art stage tech department, plus, some of the old directors from the Teenage Drama Workshop were on the faculty. I was familiar with the campus, so I knew the transition would be fun and relatively easy. In the end, though, my decision to attend Cal State over the more prestigious UCLA came down to two basic facts: one, I could afford it; and two, UCLA didn’t allow freshmen on the stage, and I wasn’t about to sit out a year.
That summer, I moved into the basement of an old Hollywood building where some of my drama department classmates and I were planning to start a summer theater. (The space, in Los Feliz, used to house an old beatnik poetry coffeehouse, and it must have been the most revered beatnik coffeehouse in the history of coffeehouses, as demonstrated by the map on the ceiling that featured the addresses and phone numbers of a network of beatnik coffeehouses across the country. What better place for a bunch of artistic types to convert into a temple of theater?) The other actors, many of whom had had similar battles with their own families, had no problem letting Rob Englund, the runaway, crash in the basement.
My best friend was an actor named Hugh Corcoran, and Hugh’s family was minor Hollywood royalty. His sister Noreen was the costar of a hugely popular 1950s TV series called Bachelor Father, and his brother Kevin—who eventually became a producer on The Shield—had starred in Old Yeller, Swiss Family Robinson, and Pollyanna … not to mention that he was Moochie on the old Mickey Mouse Club. I was fami
liar with all their work and couldn’t help but be quietly thrilled when they made me part of their family. Something was always simmering on the stove at the Corcorans’, generally an enormous pot of Irish stew, and fascinating people were always coming and going in and out of the house, and they all treated me like an equal; I don’t know if it was because Hugh told everybody that I had some talent, or if they were just being nice. But their motivations didn’t matter to me—I was just happy to be there, chowing down, listening to stories about auditions, learning about the joys of cashing residual checks, overhearing gossip about Hollywood greats, and being invited to the sets of their respective television shows. That these accomplished people treated me as though I belonged gave me another layer of self-confidence that I took to the stage. As was the case after Steve Allen gave me that first taste of professional encouragement, I felt included.
Hugh and I became the managers of our little theater, which we dubbed Théâtre Intime, French for “intimate theater.” That may sound pretentious, but it was more about marketing than anything else; that name was our way of putting a positive spin on our having only forty-six seats. We produced two summers of innovative theater and got rave reviews in the L.A. Times, Variety, and Hollywood Reporter—no small accomplishment because, at that time, there were just as many plays for journalists to review as there are today, with only a fraction of the media outlets. The highlights of our repertoire were our West Coast premieres of Arthur Miller’s play about Marilyn Monroe, After the Fall, and Megan Terry’s controversial antiwar piece, Viet Rock. Considering our tender ages, what we accomplished was incredible.
Hollywood Monster Page 2