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

by Dick van Patten

  The family, of course, is properly mortified and tries to explain that it’s not true. But Timothy responds fervently: “It is so true! It’s in the history book. And a lot of the fellows won’t speak to me because it says”—here Timothy picks up the history book to read the relevant passage: “‘These despoilers of a continent were brigands who undermined the foundations of America.’ And there’s a picture of him”—meaning his great grandfather, Lacey Kincaid. The family again tells him that it’s all “ridiculous” and that he shouldn’t pay it any attention. That ends things for the moment.

  But soon, everyone sits down for dinner at the dining table and conversation again turns to Lacey Kincaid. His son, Grant, now an elderly man, suddenly picks up his glass and proposes a toast to his father, “To the man who ran a pickax up into two hundred million dollars, a real American—Lacey Kincaid.” Everyone raises their glasses to toast. It’s a solemn moment of familial solidarity as they pay homage to their forebear. But, just as they all start to drink their expensive wine, I blurt out: “Great-grandpa was an old crook!”

  With that, everyone choked on their drinks with a great deal of sputtering and spitting, and the audience loved it every time.

  It was also the moment when I really learned about comedic timing—and I learned it from the master. During one of the dress rehearsals before taking the show to Washington, we did that scene. As usual, I could see George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber sitting together in the audience watching attentively. Usually directors don’t like the writers around, but Kaufman and Ferber had a very special rapport, and she was frequently there right at his side throughout the rehearsals and productions.

  Kaufman, as always, was squinting at me through his thick horn-rimmed glasses, leaving me uncertain whether he was mad or just couldn’t see. Anyway, after I delivered the line, he stopped the action and pointed right at me. I still remember his words: “Don’t say it right away! Hold the line. Take a couple of beats. Let them start drinking and then say it.”

  The next time I did just that—holding the line for two beats—and it was magic. The whole table started spitting up their drinks as I waited until the toast was done and they were all actually drinking before abruptly announcing that “Great Grandpa was an old crook!” Edna Ferber also loved it. Afterwards, she told me if I did it like that when we opened on Broadway, I could have anything I wanted. Without holding for any beats, I told her I wanted a pet rabbit. So on opening night at the Music Box, I hit the line just right. I waited two beats and had all of them spitting up their drinks. After the show, Miss Ferber walked up four flights to the dressing room and entered with a big brown box, which she handed to me. I opened it, and there was a beautiful white rabbit inside. I was in heaven!

  16

  DANCING WITH THE STARS

  By this time I had made a final transfer to New York City’s Professional Children’s School, which was designed for kids with jobs in entertainment. Throughout the years PCS has had many students from Milton Berle, Martin Landau and Joan Blondell, to more recent alumni such as Christian Slater, Macaulay Culkin and many more. PCS is still open today.

  One day in the fall of 1941, a young girl named Patricia Poole showed up. The pretty young blonde with pig-tails sat right next to me in one of those adjoining desks.

  Although younger than me, I immediately sized her up as a superior student, which meant that with a little tact, I could start copying her homework. At the time, this was the extent of my designs on Patricia Poole, having no idea, of course, that seventy years later we would be celebrating our fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.

  Pat could dance before she could walk. She and her brother Robbie were the premier students of her mother, Helon Powell Poole, a true pioneer in the world of American dance. When Pat was born in 1931, Helon ran the biggest dance school in Charlotte, North Carolina, called The Poole School of Dancing and whenever the big name dancers traveled into the South, they would stop by to meet Helon.

  Pat’s mother was responsible for spreading new dance crazes, not just throughout Charlotte, but all across the country. Helon was a regularly featured writer in the most important dance magazine of the first half of the twentieth-century, titled American Dance. According to John Hook, author of Shagging in the Carolinas, Helon became America’s principal spokesperson for the Big Apple, the Shag and the Swing in the 1930s. Hook, who has done remarkable research on the history of dance in the American South, marveled at Helon’s accomplishments, claiming that Helon was “doing things that no other Southern gal could, or would, do.”

  He’s right. Helon was a genuine innovator. Pat recalls a time in the mid-1930s when her mom drove off on her own to Columbia, South Carolina, just because she had heard there was a new dance circulating in the Black dance halls. She went to one of the auditoriums, sat up in the balcony, and watched as they worked on a new dance called, the Big Apple. She took detailed notes, choreographing all the steps. She then went home, showed it to her students, taught the steps on Charlotte’s powerful WBT radio, and introduced it to a much larger audience in American Dancer magazine. Largely because of Helon’s efforts, the Big Apple caught on everywhere. According to John Hook, Pat’s mom was a key player as the Big Apple “exploded out of the South and across the nation and the Atlantic to Europe.”

  In fact, the Big Apple song and dance craze of 1937 was one of a number of factors that helped popularize New York City’s moniker as the Big Apple. The nickname had been used in reference to New York City a number of times in the 1920s by sports writers, but it became far more widespread in the late 1930s. There is no doubt that Helon’s promotion of the Big Apple dance played a small, but significant, part in making the nickname stick.

  Helon was also the first to explain the choreography of the Swing in American Dancer. People all across the nation, who took part in the great Swing movement in dance and music, could learn the steps by reading Helon’s articles. After all of his research, John Hook found it interesting that even some of Helon’s relatives were unaware of her great influence on the dance world of the 1930s and 1940s.

  Her best students were her children, Pat and her brother Robbie, who was three years older. With Helon working out their routines, the kids began dancing together in the late 1930s and soon became mainstays at all the dance exhibitions. Eventually Robbie and Pat appeared in American Dancer, billed as “The Youngest Exhibition Ball Room Dance Team in America.”

  Helon would also take her classes on the road. She brought her best students to competitions in all the big cities, including New York, Chicago and even London. She and her students did the Shag, the Big Apple and the Swing, and her teams won prizes everywhere. She also would attend the conventions for dance known as the Dance Masters of America held in different cities across the country. It was there that she first met a talented young dancer from Pittsburgh named Gene Kelly.

  As a child, Pat remembers some of her mom’s local celebrity. One memory from early in her childhood is seeing her mother on the big screen at the local movie theater where they played newsreels featuring dance exhibitions before a show. She recalls being amazed at seeing her mom’s face so large up there on the screen.

  In 1939, Helon brought her students to the World’s Fair in New York City. They danced and twirled batons while leading the North Carolina Day parade. Pat, who was eight years old, was selected to pin a rose on the lapel of the North Carolina Governor, Clyde Roark Hoey. She had to stand on a chair to do it. The next day, the picture was on the front page of the New York Times.

  Helon was never satisfied in North Carolina. Like my mother, she had bigger ambitions, including the chance to be around the great dance halls of New York City. She also recognized the talent in her own children and wanted them to have the opportunity to dance on the big stages—something unlikely to happen if she stayed in Charlotte.

  But Helon’s husband, Robert Poole, like my own father, was less interested in promoting the careers of his children. He wanted a stable family life
and was satisfied with things in North Carolina. They were far from rich, but he made enough to support his family. Nevertheless, in 1941, Helon decided it was time to go. She packed up the kids and together with Pat’s grandmother, headed to New York City. Although she separated from Robert, they stayed married. Pat was ten years old at the time and remembers her excitement about the move.

  Still, the transition was difficult. At first, they all crammed into two small rooms in a hotel on Madison Avenue and 35th Street. Pat and Robbie enrolled in a nearby public school for a short time, but a few months later they again moved to another tiny apartment, also with just two rooms. Coincidentally the new place was on 67th Street, the very same street where I would soon be living. As it turned out, Pat and I actually continued living on the same street just a few blocks apart for years, and not once did we ever see each other out on the street.

  At the time, there were five of them crammed into their apartment. But, to make matters still worse, Pat’s grandfather just showed up at the door one day. Out of work and with no place to stay, Pat remembers thinking to herself, “Not another one.”

  The overcrowded living quarters made it difficult for Pat to do her schoolwork, and she was constantly worried about getting enough sleep with all the chatter going on with so many people crammed into just two rooms. As a result, to this day, Pat cherishes her privacy. When we raised our own kids, if they complained, she would remind them how lucky they were to each have their own room. Even now, Pat likes to set time aside when she locks the gate and enjoys just being alone for a few hours in the afternoon out in our backyard by the pool. It drives me crazy, because I like a big crowd around. No doubt growing up with everyone on top of each other, she learned to appreciate having a little space of her own. I’m sure that’s true of many people raised in overcrowded city apartments, who turn to the suburbs for more space—even if it means a longer commute to work.

  Helon found work dancing at the 52nd Street nightclubs. These were the bars where, in the 1940s, comics, singers and dancers of New York City congregated. The first time Helon met Jackie Gleason was at one of the clubs. Among her friends was a dancer named Sally Marh, the mother of comic legend, Lenny Bruce. It wasn’t glamorous work, and she would always have to share a drink or two with the patrons between dance numbers, but she scraped together enough money for the family to survive.

  Pat and Robbie took classes in the evening from New York’s premier dance instructor, Alberto Gallo. They were grueling sessions—each night, Pat and Robbie rushed home from school, did their homework amidst the constant noise in the small, over-crowded apartment and then headed off to dance practice until late in the night.

  Despite the grind and the overcrowding, Pat remembers her childhood in New York City as happy years. Like her mom, Pat loved dancing. She was a natural and dreamed about dancing on the big stage. One day that dream would be realized, but that was still a few years away from her arrival in the seat next to mine at New York’s Professional Children’s School.

  17

  THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH

  Meanwhile, in 1942, I received a call to try out for the stage production of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth. It would be the first major Broadway production of a new, young and innovative director, Elia Kazan. Eventually recognized as one of the most prominent stage and film directors of the twentieth century, Kazan was especially known for his association with Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio and the emergence of “method” acting—a style in which actors attempt to draw upon their own emotions in their portrayal of a character. If done well, “the method” can result in a performance that is more “real,” and thus more believable.

  Kazan later described method acting as less complicated than some have imagined. The technique, he said, “consists of recalling the circumstances…surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the actor’s past.” Lee Strasberg would have his actors take a moment “to remember the details” of that emotional experience just before their performance. Marlon Brando, with whom Kazan would work on numerous films, including the classic, On the Waterfront, became the most successful and popular representative of the method-acting style.

  The Skin of Our Teeth starred Fredric March, his wife Florence Eldridge and Tallulah Bankhead—all practitioners of the older, classical model associated with the Barrymores. There was, however, an up-and-comer in the play named Montgomery Clift, who would eventually be cut more from the new style. At the time, Monty was in his early twenties and had recently finished working with the great team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Kazan needed a teenager to play the role of a telegraph boy, and Fredric March recommended me for the part.

  Although it won the Pulitzer Prize, The Skin of Our Teeth was a strange, if not downright bizarre, production. To be honest, I was fourteen years old when I first read the script, and I didn’t have a clue as to what it all meant. And I wasn’t alone.

  One critic described the play as an “abstract allegory that portrays the difficulties of life through a series of scenes starting with Adam and Eve, through Noah’s Ark and then finally a Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.” Well, that didn’t help much. To further confound us, the play had a range of weird characters, including monsters and mammoths and dinosaurs. And the main character, Mr. Antrobus, was, through the course of the play, engaging in such eccentric endeavors as inventing the wheel and creating the alphabet.

  If all that sounds strange, it was even more peculiar when performed live onstage. We took the play for tryouts in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New Haven, and we bombed everywhere. Nobody understood what it all meant, and the critics were savage.

  In Washington, things got stranger still. I was in the middle of a scene with Tallulah Bankhead when suddenly these two ladies—and I shouldn’t say this, but I remember so clearly that they were two tremendously fat women—came right out onstage, grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me off. I was stunned, and I said, “What’s the matter?” They told me, “You’re too young to be onstage.” It turned out there was a law in Washington, D.C. that nobody under sixteen years old could go onstage professionally.

  Laws protecting child actors were not unusual. They affected me at an early age. I was just six years old, and my mom couldn’t get me roles on Broadway. I debuted in Tapestry in Grey, just a month after turning seven, which was the age limit. Laws protecting young actors were essentially child labor regulations, and a group called the Garry Society shielded children from abusive labor practices. In Hollywood, the Jackie Coogan Law forced the parents of a child actor to put ten percent of his income in an account they couldn’t touch. Coogan had been a famous child star, playing with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid and many other roles. But when he became an adult, he discovered all his money was gone and he was broke. Years later, when my son, Vincent, worked on several television shows, a percentage of his earnings had to go directly into a trust account, which was turned over to him when he turned eighteen. There is no way to completely protect child actors against abusive or excessively greedy parents, but these laws certainly helped to ensure that situations like Jackie Coogan’s were less common.

  Anyway, these two women yanked me off the National Theatre stage, and the show came to an abrupt stop. After a short break, the curtain raised again and another actor, actually an older man, Stanley Prager, went on in my place. He looked silly playing the telegraph boy, especially after the audience had already seen me. But I’m not sure that it made much difference. The Skin of Our Teeth was such a strange play anyway—with actors periodically coming out of character and talking directly to the audience—they probably thought my being dragged off the stage was all part of the show. In fact, in the beginning of the play, Tallulah, who played Mr. Antrobus’s maid, Sabina, stepped out of character and told the audience: “I hate this play.”

  The Skin of Our Teeth barely made it through the tryouts. Because it was written by Thornton Wilder, who two years earlier had pe
nned the prize-winning play, Our Town, the theaters were generally full. But that didn’t mean the audiences enjoyed it. In fact, some of the crowds literally booed us and walked out on the performance while the out-of-town critics brutalized the play. In the midst of all this, the actors began to grumble, and soon there was talk about getting off what seemed like a sinking ship.

  Thornton Wilder, at the time, was serving as a captain in the United States Army. As previously mentioned, directors typically don’t want writers hanging around too much, but this case was different. And so Kazan asked Wilder to come speak with us. Wilder agreed, and he showed up while we were in Baltimore.

  Wilder spoke to us while in full military uniform. There were about forty of us present, and Wilder said: “I know that the critics don’t understand my play. That doesn’t bother me as long as you understand it. So I’m going to explain it to you now.” He said the play was about the human spirit; that all people in all places and all times experience obstacles in life that threaten their happiness and even their survival. Nevertheless, said Wilder, we manage to get by—and we do so, “by the skin of our teeth.” It was that simple. The play was the story of human persistence in the face of obstacles and crisis. Wilder also predicted that the catcalls and vicious criticism would end when we got to Broadway.

  He was right. After bombing everywhere, we opened at the Plymouth Theater in New York on November 18, 1942, and suddenly the play was a smash hit. Furthermore, the critics were now writing great reviews. Howard Barnes of the Herald Tribune exclaimed: “Theater-going became a rare and electrifying experience” with Thornton Wilder’s “daffy and illuminating” The Skin of Our Teeth. The play ran on Broadway for nearly a year.