Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment

by Dick van Patten

  9

  MENAGERIE

  On the third floor of our Victorian house in Kew Gardens, Queens, I built my own menagerie. In retrospect, my life has always been connected in some way to animals. I’ve been watching, riding, and betting on horses for seventy-five years. Over the past decade, I’ve represented Natural Balance dog food, both as a spokesman and part owner. But, it was back in the days of my Queens menagerie that this infatuation with animals, and not just the cute ones, really took off.

  I’m not sure how it began, but by the time I was seven years old, my aunt Marjorie was taking me all over Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens to sample the different pet shops. And every week, I would get a different pet to add to the menagerie. I bought chameleons, snakes, horn toads, even pet rats.

  One favorite was my alligator, Oscar. In those days, you could buy alligators at a pet shop. Today it’s against the law, but at the time the pet shops had big aquariums filled with baby alligators. They cost a dollar each. One day, Aunt Marjorie brought me to a pet store at 121st Street and Jamaica Avenue in Queens, and I bought Oscar. He was about a foot long, and he ate raw hamburger meat twice a day.

  In time, Oscar began growing. Finally, he got so big he couldn’t fit in the aquarium anymore, so I put him in the bathtub. For a month nobody could take a bath. That’s when my Grandmother started yelling at me: “Get that alligator out of the bathtub.” I didn’t know what to do, so I brought him to the Central Park Zoo. The people at the zoo were very nice. They said I could come and visit whenever I wanted. For a while I used to go back and look at Oscar in the cage where he sat in a pool with all the other alligators and giant turtles. I guess he could still be there because alligators live a very long time, sometimes up to seventy years. But more likely Oscar has gone to his reward in animal heaven.

  There was also a reptile show at Grand Central Station. It was located in a building above the tracks and run by a man named Dr. Ditmars. He was famous for his trips to Africa and other exotic locales where he captured various species of snakes and other reptiles, all of which he related in his best-selling books.

  My Aunt Marjorie brought me to the show and introduced me to Dr. Ditmar. He asked if I’d like to have a snake. I said, “Sure.” He opened a burlap bag and took this big black snake—called a milk snake even though it’s black—and stuffed it in the sack. I still recall him handing it to me and nonchalantly saying: “Here you are, son.”

  We got on the subway, with me holding the snake in the burlap bag. When we arrived home, my father was fast asleep in his bed. That’s when I got a brilliant idea on how to give someone a heart attack. I took the snake out of the bag, held it up in the air and yelled out: “Dad, Dad, look what I got!” The poor guy opened his eyes out of a fast sleep and saw this big black snake right in front of his head. He jumped out of bed and screamed. I’ll never forget the look on his face. Imagine opening your eyes and having a black snake staring straight back at you. Needless to say, Dad wasn’t too pleased with me for a few days.

  Along with the alligator, chameleons, and snakes, I had rabbits, and even a big goat, that I kept in the backyard. But I also loved the more traditional pets. My first dog, Skippy, was a black and white cocker spaniel. My mother bought him for me when I was six years old. Later we added a cat, Beauty, and, while cats and dogs are supposed to be natural adversaries, these two became fast friends. In fact, when Skippy died, it seemed to affect Beauty more than anyone. Beauty must have found Skippy first after he died because I still remember walking into the backyard and seeing Beauty just sitting there motionless in front of Skippy as if protecting the dog’s corpse from desecration. There was no doubt in my mind that Beauty was mourning the loss of a good friend.

  If the various animals in the menagerie were my best friends in the animal kingdom, my closest friend growing up among the humans was my grandfather—Mom’s dad, Vincent Acerno. Later he would be my best man when I married in 1954, and through the years he influenced me, for good or bad, as much or more than anyone in my life.

  10

  AND THEY’RE OFF

  My grandfather was a bookie. I know that sounds terrible, but until 1941, horse betting was legal in the United States, and bookmaking was a legitimate, if not a wholly respectable, profession. Many argue that the most serious criminal involvement in horse-racing, including mob-controlled betting, really exploded only after bookmaking was criminalized in 1941. Whether that justifies the bookmaking profession is a complicated question—one I’ll leave for others to decide. What I do know is that for over forty years, my grandfather got up every morning and headed to the racetrack just like any other man going to a job to support his family.

  Vincent was born in Potenza, Italy, in 1881. Set at the top of the Italian boot, Potenza is a mountain town high in the Southern Apennine range. I’d never met anyone from Potenza until I happened to mention my lineage to Mel Brooks’s wife, the marvelous actress, Anne Bancroft, and it turned out her parents also hailed from Potenza. They would have been there just before the turn of the century, and it’s certainly possible that in such a relatively small town our grandparents could have been neighbors.

  Vincent was tough as nails. He hung out with a rough crowd from the Lower East Side tenement houses. One of those local toughs was a funny guy with a big nose from Catherine Street named Jimmy Durante. Over the years Vincent and Jimmy became good friends, and Vincent would go to see Jimmy perform at Feldman’s Bar on Coney Island where Durante got his start as a singing waiter. Like so many things, it has faded away, but the singing waiter was a common attraction at the time.

  Years later in the 1970s, I caught one of Jimmy’s shows at the Dunes in Las Vegas. Afterwards, my wife Pat and I went backstage and asked an usher to tell him that Dick Van Patten wanted to see him. A few minutes later the guy returned and said Jimmy doesn’t know anyone named Dick Van Patten. So I told him to say it’s Vincent Acerno’s grandson. Moments later, Durante came running out all excited: “So you’re Vincent Acerno’s grandson!” Then he gave me his trademark line: “What can I do for ya!” It was thrilling to hear him reminisce about the old days with my grandfather in New York City. He was so nice that it’s easy to see why Vincent became such close friends with him and why he reached such great heights as a comedian.

  Growing up, I idolized my grandfather. I loved to hear him talk about New York City in the “good old days.” The great year, he assured me, was 1920: Man o’ War ruled the racetracks, Jack Dempsey was champ, and Babe Ruth first put on a Yankees uniform. The great tragedy of Vincent’s life was watching Man o’ War lose to a horse appropriately named, “Upset”—a race that prompted the Saratoga racetrack to be dubbed “The Graveyard of the Favorites.”

  Before the First World War, Vincent and his younger brothers, Johnny and Mickey, worked at a newsstand at the Hoboken Ferry station in New Jersey. They were just kids, teenagers really, and each day they took the ferry across the Hudson River to Hoboken. Along with the newspapers, they also sold daily racing forms. One day a bookmaker asked them to pick up bets for him from the commuters who passed through the newsstand.

  It wasn’t long before they started generating business. They worked for the guy for a few months, and things were going smoothly. Then one day they took a lot of bets on a particular race, and the bookmaker never showed. Stuck holding the bets, they were a nervous wreck. If there were a lot of winners, they wouldn’t have had the money to pay.

  But they got lucky. There were only a few winners, and they ended up making more money in a day than they ever earned selling newspapers. That got them wondering why they should turn their bets over to another bookmaker when they could do it for themselves. So they continued taking bets at the newsstand, paying off the winners and keeping the profits. In a very short time, the three Acerno boys were the main bookies at the Hoboken Ferry.

  But Vincent and his brothers wanted bigger and better things. The next step was getting in the door at a racetrack. To do that, a prospective bookmaker
needed both money and political pull. It cost one hundred dollars a day to set up a bookie’s stall inside the grounds, and the competition to get in was so fierce you had to have the backing of someone with clout. Vincent knew a guy at Tammany Hall named Pete Hamill, a politician from the same section of the Lower East Side where the Acerno boys had grown up, and Hamill helped get them in the door at the Saratoga racetrack.

  There were forty or fifty bookmakers working in front of the Grandstand inside Saratoga. I remember seeing my grandfather sitting up on a big high stool, like all the bookies, with a large blackboard next to him. He hired a guy to write down the odds for each race. They controlled the odds, which they fluctuated with each race. When someone bet a lot of money on a long shot, to protect themselves from a disastrous upset, they would immediately lower the odds. It was perfectly legitimate. They just had to work it out so regardless of who won, they made money.

  For many years, Vincent earned a good living as a racetrack bookie. Then in 1940 the New York State Legislature passed a law disallowing anyone but the State from taking bets. In short, the government took over horse betting.

  The day that law passed was one of the few times in my life I ever saw my grandfather upset. It ended the bookmaking profession, and he was out of work. He always believed that the law promoted the development of criminal syndicates. And it was true that as soon as the State took over, the mob moved in. They had always been involved outside the racetrack, but now with the government holding a legal monopoly on horse betting, the opportunities for illegal betting skyrocketed.

  After the state takeover, Vincent continued working at Roosevelt Raceway as a ticket seller. But that also ended abruptly in 1942 when all American racetracks were shut down due to the war. In fact, the Santa Anita track, where the legendary Seabiscuit ran, was turned into an internment camp for Japanese Americans.

  As a child, my grandfather took me to the Belmont track nearly every day. He taught me all about the racing business, and by the time I was ten years old I could handicap the horses. I also came to know my way around the racetrack. There was something about the grass, the horses, the jockeys, and then the excitement of the races that thrilled me even as a child.

  At the time, I was unaware of the downside. I didn’t yet fully understand that if you spend enough time around a racetrack, you’re going to see some broken lives. Gambling can be an addiction as strong as any drug. There were times in my life when I felt that compulsion, and moments when it might have sent me, as it had so many others, spiraling downward into self-destruction.

  When the tracks closed in 1942, Vincent retired. In his later years, he would head to Woodhaven Park every day to play pinochle with a group of old guys from the neighborhood. He looked forward to the games, although he had to walk five blocks up a steep hill from his house on Woodhaven Boulevard to the Park.

  One day he didn’t make it. On December 13, 1959, Vincent, 78 years old, fell in the snow. It was freezing, and he couldn’t get up. I can’t imagine what his last thoughts were as he lay there dying on that terrible winter night. I’m told that people who freeze to death experience a warm, calm feeling just before dying. I hope that happened. Perhaps Vincent was thinking about his great Man o’ War or Dempsey knocking out Tunney, but I really hope and believe that in his final moments his mind turned to my grandmother, Rose, his wife for over fifty years, a truly wonderful woman who put up with more than her share of troubles from Vincent, but who loved him right to the end.

  I was home in Bellerose with Pat and the kids when my Aunt Lucille called with the news. When I heard my grandfather was dead, it was one of the few times in my life that I’ve actually cried. I had to go over to the police precinct and then to the morgue to identify the body. At the morgue, they opened up a curtain, and there he was. There’s no way to prepare for that. This was my grandfather, my best man, my closest friend, and there he was just a body on a slab of steel. It’s a terrible shock to anyone when they open that curtain. It certainly was for me. I remember the cop asking me, “Is that your grandfather?” I said, “Yeah.” But that body wasn’t really Vincent Acerno. It was just a shell once occupied by a man full of life, who left his mark on me and everyone else he met.

  The next day, I went to the park to hang a note on the bulletin board. I thought his friends should know he was gone. But a guy who worked at the park stopped me. “Take that down,” he barked. I guess it violated some park rule. It’s funny how some small things stick with you. I thought it was petty and mean-spirited, but I didn’t say anything. Still, it always bothered me that he wouldn’t let me notify the guys at the pinochle game that Vincent wouldn’t be back.

  But back in the late 1930s, Vincent was still very much alive, and one thing he never missed was a chance to see his grandson perform on Broadway. I was already beginning to build a small reputation as a child actor, and when The Eternal Road closed in May of 1937, Mom was busy plotting our next move.

  11

  A BROADWAY RÉSUMÉ

  In the winter of 1937, Mom heard about an upcoming play requiring an extensive and challenging child role. She thought this was our big chance. We went to the Longacre Theater on West 48th Street, and I auditioned for the role of a ten-year-old boy in a play called On Borrowed Time.

  It wasn’t meant to be. Two other youngsters attracted the director’s attention, and it seemed to me that he had settled on these two fellows from the outset. Still, there was a smaller part for me, and a small part was better than none at all. Also, the director, a young man named Joshua Logan, was making his Broadway debut, and he had very much impressed my mother. Her instincts proved correct as Logan went on to become a legend in American theater and film, directing such Broadway classics as South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun, and Mister Roberts, the latter a play where Joshua and I would again cross paths many years later.

  It was always fun when there were other kids in a play. Once we came offstage, we were all equals. And we always found ways to enjoy ourselves in this adult world into which we’d been placed. The two boys, Peter Minor and Peter Holden, were each about a year younger than me. I like to think they got the part because I was too old. That’s what my mother told me. In truth, they were both excellent. Peter Minor had opened the play on the road in New Haven, but when we arrived on Broadway, he became ill, and Peter Holden took it over and never let it go.

  I’m not aware of either boy moving on to other roles or having careers in entertainment, but they certainly had the talent, and, at least for a time in 1938, Peter Holden dazzled New York City and the Broadway critics. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times affirmed that Peter had, indeed, “won the hearts of the audience.”

  On Borrowed Time was a play about death—or more to the point—a play about what would happen in a world without death. Even as a child, I thought it was an interesting idea. Set in the post-World War I years, it opened with the sudden demise of a young boy’s parents in a car crash. Their death leaves him in the care of his grandparents, who love him deeply. But the boy’s aunt wants to adopt him. Her motives, however, are suspect. She knows his parents left a large sum of money that she could only get her hands on if the boy, named Pud, was in her custody.

  Pud’s grandfather sees through the designs of the aunt and determines that she should never get custody. But, it’s not so easy. Soon, Granny dies, and then death comes for Gramps. Taking a human form, “Death”—who is dressed in a business suit and refers to himself as “Mr. Brinks”—tells Gramps it’s time to go.

  But Gramps has a card up his sleeve, which involves a special power he learned about at the expense of another young boy who keeps going into Gramps’s tree and stealing his apples. That was my role. At first he can’t catch me, but then Gramps, who has a birthday wish coming, blurts out in anger at me: “I wish you would stay up in that tree.” With that, I became magically stuck. My repeated attempts to jump down were to no avail.

  Eventually I did manage to loosen my clothes and drop from the tree. B
ut, Gramps’s now turned his new powers on Mr. Brinks, wishing him into the tree. It’s never fully explained how I managed to get down, but Mr. Brinks couldn’t. Still, it established the plays principal conflict: what would happen to the world if Death were caught in a tree and was unable to get on with his daily work?

  Death on holiday sounds great—at least at first. And in my eightieth year it seems even more appealing than before. But as the old adage goes—be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.

  With Mr. Brinks in the tree, the play confronts the unforeseen consequences of a world without death. Those who should die naturally, linger on. They endure great and pointless suffering. One of Gramps’s friends, a doctor, discovers that death has been suspended. He recognizes the problems of life without death and tries to talk Gramps into letting Mr. Brinks out of the tree.

  Things offstage were getting as dicey as they were onstage. Shortly before taking the part, I had switched from public school to Holy Child, a Catholic school run by the Saint Joseph’s nuns. One of the very first things the nuns drummed into our impressionable heads was that cursing of any kind was a serious sin.

  The lesson must have stuck. Although I’ve certainly had my share of vices, I never really felt comfortable around a lot of cursing, and I seldom do it myself. It just rarely seems appropriate to me. I’ve heard about people who learn to curse while serving as soldiers, and I imagine that living under that kind of stress one might be more inclined to let out some colorful language. In any event, my reticence to curse was never more pronounced than during the days when the Sisters of Saint Joseph hammered into me the dire consequences in store for anyone with a foul mouth.

  That brings us to the crisis of On Borrowed Time. Back in 1938, Gramps was originally played by Richard Bennett, a giant on the American stage for half a century who had made his Broadway debut as far back as the 1890s. Bennett was Joshua Logan’s absolute first choice for the part. In his memoirs, Logan confirms that “[O]ne actor and one actor alone seemed perfect: Richard Bennett.” When it turned out Bennett was available and interested, Logan was sure he had a winner. But, again, be wary what you ask for!