He was my father. I loved him. He loved me, and he loved Ronnie too. I know he did. He never said it out loud. I never heard those three words from him. But I saw it in the way he smiled at us over those Sunday hot dogs, and in the fact that he worked so hard to do all he could to support us. When I was ten or eleven, he moved us into a small rental house, which was a step up from that railroad apartment. When the booze wasn’t in him, he was the sweetest man. I kept hoping that things would change.
Then, one day, they did.
My dad had been feeling sick, and on this particular morning my mom finally convinced him to go to the doctor. He hated going to doctors, but this had “gone on long enough,” she said. I went off to school, and when I got home that day, my mom wasn’t there. My dad wasn’t there, either, but that was expected. I assumed he was still at work.
Four o’clock rolled around and the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Allan?” It was my mother. “I’m at the hospital with your father.” She instructed me to run over to my uncle Jimmy’s house right away. “I need you to go over and tell your uncle that your father has cancer. They’ve given him six months to live.”
Alone in that house, I started weeping. It was unimaginable. I didn’t know what else to do, so I heeded my mother’s instructions. I ran out the back door as fast as I could, over a brook and across the highway and the train tracks, up to my uncle’s third-floor apartment, just weeping and weeping as I repeated what my mother had said.
The only time I ever saw my father cry in my whole life was about two years earlier. He came into the house, sat down, and wept. I can still see him on that sofabed in the living room. The reason? His best friend had gone to the doctor and found out he had cancer. His friend was so distraught that he got in his car, drove to a remote area, took out a shotgun, and killed himself. It broke my father’s heart. I don’t think he ever got over it. And now my father had cancer himself.
At some point they brought him home from the hospital. They didn’t have shots for pain and things like that back then, and as the days dragged on my brother and I used to hear him wailing. I prayed that God would take him so he wouldn’t have to be in such agony. I watched this vibrant human being, my strong father, reduced to walking on a cane. He was only thirty-nine years old. How could this happen?
After a few months, even the cane didn’t help. He couldn’t walk at all. So they took him to the hospital for the last time. Hospitals were restrictive in those days. They wouldn’t allow Ronnie and me in to see him. We both have memories of standing outside that hospital room window, looking in at our father lying helpless in that bed.
We prayed that he would get better, even though the doctors said it was impossible. We prayed for our mother. We prayed for ourselves. I’m only thirteen, God. Please don’t take my father!
We prayed to God for a miracle.
A miracle that never came.
2
LIFE GOES ON
I’LL NEVER FORGET SEEING MY FATHER’S BODY IN the casket in our living room.
It was the Irish way, they told me. We held the wake in our house, and all these people showed up. I couldn’t understand why they would want to have a party when my father was dead.
We had a little white dog named Suzy then. At the end of the wake, after everyone was out of the house—including my father—we finally let her up from the basement, and that dog went right over and lay on the very spot on the floor where my father’s casket had been resting. She knew.
The hearse that carried my father’s body was the same one I used to sweep out with a whisk-broom when I helped him down at the gas station. I kept thinking about what it felt like to crawl on that floor in the back—what it looked like from the inside.
Everyone kept telling me that my father “was so well liked.” It was “the biggest funeral Pleasantville had ever seen!” Somehow, that wasn’t a comfort.
I remember walking with my mother from the Episcopal church when the service was over and all the people coming up to me: “Well, Allan, you’re the head of the family now.” I guess so, I thought. That is quite a responsibility to throw on a little kid, especially when he’s grieving. But I listened. And a big, big part of me wanted to live up to that responsibility—for my mother, if no one else.
My mother was only thirty-nine. She would never get married again. She never even dated. There were plenty of men interested in her. She was still so young and beautiful, and the sweetest person you could ever meet, always going out of her way to help everyone around her. But she was never interested in anyone besides my father.
My dad’s death changed everything. My mother had to get a job. She went to work for a bank over in Croton-on-Hudson, which meant a long drive back and forth every day. She couldn’t be home after school to take Ronnie and me to practice or rehearsals or anything anymore. I had to go to work, too, and thankfully people were glad to help us out. The ladies in town would hire me to clean their kitchen floors or bathrooms. I had a set of clippers and I had certain people who would hire me to do their hedges. I mowed lawns for a dollar apiece. I even mowed at the Masonic temple and some of the other big places in town.
The summer after my dad died I took a job mowing lawns and landscaping at a cemetery two towns up. I had to walk all that way just to get there. We needed the money but, boy, that was a strange job. I remember this one person used to come every day and sit over one grave and read the newspaper to the deceased person. I had never seen anything like that in my life. I used to wonder, Why doesn’t she read the funny parts? She’s reading the bad news to this dead person? It was the weirdest thing. We were all young people working in that cemetery except for this one old Italian guy. He used to go into the mausoleums to eat his lunch because it was cool inside. Imagine eating surrounded by a whole family of dead people! Like I said: strange.
One day, during the long walk home, a dog bit me on the leg. (I’ve got thick legs. There’s a lot of meat there!) A lady came out and helped me, and it turned out she owned a restaurant that was opening nearby. She offered me a job as a waiter, so I quit the cemetery job and started at this restaurant. The first person I waited on was a boxer, with his nose flattened to the side from one too many punches. He ordered soup and something else. It was my first day, so I wasn’t too sure of myself and, well, you can probably tell where this is going: I dropped the soup all over him. I apologized profusely. I was worried the guy might stand up and punch me! He might have if I wasn’t such a little kid. And I was so upset. My father dies and I leave the cemetery job and now I’m going to lose this job!
The owner came over and said, “Will you come with me?” She took me in the back and said, “Let me tell you something. What you just did is a sign that you’re gonna be a great waiter.”
I was shocked. “No kidding?” I said. “You’re not mad?”
“No. I’m not mad,” she said.
We cleaned the whole thing up, the rest of the meal went fine, and the guy left me a $1.25 tip. That was more than I made in the cemetery for a whole day’s work!
That moment taught me how important it is what you say to people. She could have dressed me down to a point where for the rest of my life I would’ve been too scared to pick up a fork. But she didn’t. And guess what? She was right. I became a very good waiter after that. Right from the beginning I loved serving people. And having that higher-paying job turned out to be more important than I could have imagined.
When someone dies, everybody seems to talk about how “So-and-so left this or that to so-and-so in the will.” All my dad left us were bills.
The finances were the least of my worries, though. Nothing compared to the heartache of losing my father to cancer when I was just thirteen years old. I’ve often reflected on what he would have done with his life had he lived. He missed out, and so did I.
I could have closed up into a ball right there. Could have turned into a “bad kid.” Could have given up. But instead, I did the opposite. I s
et myself on a trajectory to do something else. To go somewhere else. I wanted to get out of Pleasantville and to do something with my life. A lot of that attitude, I think, was thanks to my dad’s older brother, my uncle Al.
Uncle Al was a merchant marine—and he loved the theater. He took my brother and me to our first Broadway musical, Helen Goes to Troy. It was glorious. I wanted to be on that stage so badly, and I admired every one of those actors for getting up there and performing like that. It was amazing to me that people could be so talented (including Donald Buka, a star I would meet fifty years later on Cape Cod).
My uncle didn’t have any kids of his own, and he really took to Ronnie and me. He was always coming back from some faraway place. My grandmother kept a stack of postcards from Al next to her chair—postcards from all over the world. I remember one time he came to my class, I think in the sixth grade, and talked about his recent trip to Alaska. He showed us all sorts of artifacts, and he wore his uniform, and I was so proud to be his nephew. Then at Christmastime, in the town of White Plains, which is as close as we have to a big city in that part of the state, he would put on the red suit and play Santa Claus in Woolworth’s. I thought that was the greatest thing! But my mom and dad didn’t appreciate it very much. They didn’t appreciate much at all about Al. They thought he was nuts or something, which made it a little uncomfortable for me one day when they looked at me walking down the sidewalk and said, “You walk just like your uncle Al!”
I just loved the guy. He took Ronnie and me to Madison Square Garden; he took us downtown Manhattan to the merchant marine headquarters; he took us to see Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun on Broadway; he bought us our first take-out Chinese food. He wasn’t like most people in the family, who just settled in Pleasantville forever. He was an adventurer. My family would say all this negative stuff about him when he was off in India or somewhere, but I thought it was great! I’m not putting my family down; they just weren’t educated enough and their view was very, very small. My mother often told me that my father would’ve been “so happy” if I’d been an accountant. But I couldn’t do that. After a while, you wonder what’s really important. You look at all the possibilities of what you want to do with your life and ask yourself, “Can I do anything?”
I knew one thing I could do for certain: I could act.
Shortly before my father died, when I gave up the football team to focus on acting and music, it made me happy. I remember getting my first real laugh in a high school play, and it was almost as significant as that first applause I heard way back in preschool. Now that my father was gone, I had even more reason to throw myself into the areas I loved and to work as hard as anyone ever could. I became an all-state timpanist. I entered one-act play competitions and won the best actor award three years in a row. No one had ever done that before! I don’t know how I did it. I just did it! I’m certainly not an overachiever. I’m just a happy guy. That’s who I am in my heart. I loved this stuff, and I wanted to be happy, so I set goals for myself that I thought would continue to make me happy—little things I’d try to achieve—and then I’d achieve them.
If there’s one thing life had taught me it’s that life can end. At any moment it can all go away. So what choice do you really have? You’ve gotta live!
Again, I attribute a lot of that outlook to my uncle Al. He inspired me to march to the beat of my own drummer, and that’s exactly what I would do.
I shot up in height during my high school years. Maybe it was all the odd jobs I worked or just a change that came after puberty, but I lost all my “Tubber” weight too. My first girlfriend of significance was Martha Lois Meyer. She was a cheerleader. I was crazy about her. Acting, singing, music, and Martha—those were the things that mattered to me most, all through high school. To this day I still have great Martha memories.
As graduation drew closer, the pressure to think about the future started to build. What am I going to do with my life?
I had opportunities. A friend of mine was gonna get me a roofing job. There was good money in roofing! My family supported that choice wholeheartedly. I didn’t really like heights, but no one seemed to take that into account. I had also been playing in a dance band on the side and making pretty good money doing that, but it didn’t seem like steady enough work that I could make a career out of it. I never thought about going to college. No one in my family had gone to college, and I didn’t take any college preparatory courses. It just didn’t seem possible.
There was really only one thing I wanted to do, but no one I knew made a living as an actor. Judson Laire, an actor who played in one of the very first television series, Mama, lived in Pleasantville. I knew where he lived. I used to walk by his house wondering what he was up to, having no idea how he broke into the business or managed to get himself on TV. I had won all of those competitions. People told me I had talent. But I certainly didn’t have movie-star looks. In many ways, acting didn’t seem like a real career choice for me, either, even though it was the only thing I felt I knew how to do.
It was a daunting and frustrating time—especially when my girlfriend started asking what I was going to do with my life. Martha wanted me to get out of showbiz when I wasn’t even in it yet. I wanted to act! She knew that. So what if I didn’t know how to start? I didn’t need discouragement. And her asking me about what I was going to do after graduation made it seem like she didn’t understand me. I know she was thinking about marriage. In those days, getting married out of high school is what a lot of people did. But as our senior year progressed, I knew in my heart it wasn’t going to happen.
But what was going to happen? For a while there, I was full of questions with absolutely no answers.
I should’ve had more faith. Wouldn’t you know it? Before my senior year was up, God sent an angel my way—in the form of a college girl carrying flaming batons.
Shirley Ballard was her name. I was busy performing with my high school choir, doing some sort of big show at the White Plains County Center, and Shirley was one of the other performers on the bill—a baton twirler who yelled, “Turn out the lights!” halfway through her act, as she lit her batons on fire and got the audience oohing and aahing. She was fabulous!
I didn’t know Shirley, but she apparently knew me. She walked right up to me backstage at one point and introduced herself. “Allan? I go to Ithaca College, and I’m going with a guy from Pleasantville. Lou Gallo,” she said.
I remembered Lou Gallo. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school. He was an actor too!
“He thinks you’re a really great actor and that you should try to get a scholarship to go to Ithaca.”
I had never even heard of Ithaca College. I never thought about going to school for acting. I dreamed about going to New York and getting in with Lee Strasberg and that whole crowd, but it all seemed so far away.
“A scholarship to college? For acting? For real?”
“Why not?” Shirley said. “Tell your counselor and see if they’ll set up an audition.”
Wow, I thought. God sure works in mysterious ways. Back at school, I did just what that flaming-baton-twirling young lady said to do. My guidance counselor wrote a letter to Ithaca College on my behalf, and they soon wrote back asking to see my transcripts. I thought that would be the end of it. I was pretty sure my transcripts would do me in, since I was a B student at best. But somehow word of my ambition got around to Walter Roberts, the head of a well-known children’s theater company in Pleasantville. Walter had seen me perform in a play called Captain Applejack, and he liked me. Turns out he was a former professor at Ithaca. “I’ll write them a letter,” he said, and that’s what he did! Next thing I knew, Ithaca wrote back and set up an appointment for me to come up and audition.
My good friend Jimmy Downey drove me up that day in his ’33 Chevy. Because of those one-act competitions I’d done, I had a knack for putting stuff together that would pull at the heartstrings and show off my range—from slapstick comedy to tear-jerking drama. So
I worked up the drunken porter scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and juxtaposed that with a bit from Balcony Scene, a new one-act play from Yale University about a guy sitting in a balcony and looking down at his own funeral. I had a lot of emotion to draw on for that one.
I did my best, I met some people, and I shook some hands. Some weeks later I was sitting on a swing in the woods with Martha when I saw my brother come running up the hill with a letter in his hand. “Allan! Allan!” he yelled.
“What? What is it?”
“The mail just came!” he said. “I couldn’t wait! I opened the envelope. You got a scholarship!”
I could hardly believe it. I must’ve read that letter a dozen times. I won the scholarship. I actually did it! I was about to become the very first person in my family to go to college—and it happened because of my acting.
Just as I lost my “Tubber” weight in high school, I lost my boyish blond locks at college. It was incredible how fast that hair disappeared from my head. Luckily, on the college stage, it didn’t matter. There were young guys playing senior men in lots of those plays. If anything, my early baldness was an asset! Ithaca College was fertile ground for me. I blossomed quickly and was given the chance to play all kinds of delicious, varied roles under the tutelage of some fabulous professors.
This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life Page 3