Bethesda Fountain

The Socko Sixties

New York! New York!

The Return

  A day in April, 1963, snow showers on the turnpike intrude on a clear, blue sky, as we cross into Pennsylvania. The blood quickens, the heart leaps. It’s been ten years since I’ve been in this part of the country so close to New York, and we’re almost there—just one more day! Snuggled with Frank, Lollipop and Daiquiri in a Harrisburg motel room, wrapped in a dream—tomorrow! Only two hundred miles to go, north through New Jersey, Fort Lee and across the George Washington Bridge to Frank’s home in Washington Heights.

  From the bridge on a bright, sunny afternoon, to the south—there it is, Manhattan’s skyline, a magic city rising from the earth like a mirage. As we reach 181^st Street in Washington Heights (ten minutes from Times Square on the A train express, I will learn), I’m surprised to see crowds of people on the streets. Has there been a parade? I’ve been too long gone from Manhattan, forgetting crowds and heavy traffic is the norm. This is not Beverly Hills. Finding a place to park isn’t easy.

  Making our way to one of many high-rise apartment buildings lining the south side of the street, a long open passage leads us to the entrance. We fumble our way into the elevator, Lollipop and Daiquiri beginning to bark and dance a celebration—home again, now home again—enough with strange motels and L.A. and no snow in the winter! Maria is at the door, ignoring us to greet the pups with a joyous cry, “Perritos sin verquënza!  Pobrecitos!”

  Maria Dunand, short and plump, eyes me somewhat cautiously, but it’s a friendly look. Frank’s dad, the Frenchman they call “Pancho” (I will never hear him speak one word of French), is some thirty years older than Maria—somewhat patriarchal and distant. In Los Angeles, anticipating our move, when Frank spelled out his “multi-national” background, I’d asked him which language I should concentrate on—French or Spanish—or German? His father’s mother was German. “Better make it Spanish,” he said.

  Maria has learned only enough English to get by. Working as a seamstress surrounded by Spanish speaking people—all her friends are Spanish, mostly Cuban, she’s had no need to learn beyond accommodation, and Frank’s not happy about this. With me and the language, she’s kind and patient, always ready to help me. Fortunately she was born in Cuba’s eastern, south coast city of Santiago, so speaks more slowly than the Habeneras, almost pure Castilian, unlike Frank’s friends from Havana who rattle off words fast and furiously—but often with humor and a smile.

  Maria has taken care of people all her life. She  would become my “New York Mother” for many years, always on hand, even in difficult situations—like taking in a Japanese ballet  dancer who made so  much rice in her kitchen she thought she was in a culinary competition—a boy who spoke not a word of Spanish, or English—only Japanese. Taking me in, in 1976 on one of my unsuccessful “returns” to New York, even though Frank and I were no longer together.

  Now she has us to care for. We take the small bedroom next to the large master bedroom—much too small, but we are anticipating a move soon to the heart of things on Manhattan’s upper Westside. Breakfast is ready every morning with New York’s popular classic music station, WQXR playing from a small radio on a shelf in the kitchen. Dinners rivaling a Cuban restaurant, black beans and rice, flan diplomatico, arroz con pollo—and paella—although this zestful  dish of assorted shell fish in a stew of veggies and rice, more likely prepared by Chris Mena on his frequent visits. Chris is from Frank’s home town of Banes and  long-time, close friend of Maria and Pancho.

  Chris Mena—near Frank’s age (who is now  30), is dark enough to suggest African blood. In summer he practically lives at the beach. We love teasing him as his  skin turns richly-hued black. One thing for certain, Chris loves men and is inordinately promiscuous. He and I get along splendidly for awhile, until he begins to complain to Frank that I’m too damned serious and a “wet blanket,” although we  share a love pf Bea Lillie, singing ditties from her songs—“Maude, you’re rotten to the core, it’s something you really can’t ignore!”

  My audition for Joseph Papp, director of Public Theatre, is in a large auditorium on Fifth Avenue  in the 90s, above the Guggenheim Museum. Frank’s training pays off. I let go with Hamlet’s soliloquy “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” Marc Antony’s “Cry Havoc!” from Julius Caesar. No applause, I don’t expect it, but as I walk up the aisle toward the exit, Papp stops me and says, “By the way, that’s the first time I’ve heard those soliloquies performed as they should be.”

  I never hear from him again. This is the time of transition in Public Theatre. Papp seeks to cast a greater mix—Hispanic, African American—Raul Julia, his most notable find. As for me, I’m ten years too late, and have I ever desired to become a gypsy, taking a job as a waiter, to study with Sandy Meisner, Stella Adler? live in the East Village, haunt Off-Broadway theatres, audition for Actors Studio? Or, for that  matter, do I persist with repeated phone calls to Papp’s office to follow up the audition? (The latter failure became clear to me in 1976 when friend Robert Lupone told me about his bugging Papp’s office—and assistants—for  months before winning his role as Zach in “A Chorus Line” which won him a Tony Award nomination.

  Some pretense of “being an actor” and doing the right thing comes with working temp jobs on Wall Street for insurance companies, filing and other menial tasks—on the A-Express at 8 am each weekday morning to Canal Street, jammed among other travelers, studying Spanish from a small paperback.

  Frank is soon working at the Metropolitan Opera Guild. Jerry Katz has introduced him to the Guild’s Director, Robert Tuggle. When Tuggle hears about Frank’s photographic skills, he says, “Right now we’re buying photos for our slide program from Louis Melançon.” Melançon has been the Met’s photographer for many years.

  April—Opera season at the Old Met coming to a close, but  not before Frank gets me into a dress rehearsal of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger”—fully staged, singers belting out arias full strength. From the moment the resounding overture rocks the rafters, grand opera has got me hooked forever—more especially as the overture comes to an end—no in-concert codas here! rather fusing into a four-square chorale as the legendary gold curtain lifts to reveal the interior of a church with tall Gothic arches. And who could forget the close of Act Two as the Night Watchman goes through the narrow streets of a medieval city following a near riot; or the stirring quartet concluding Act Three, Scene One—Hans Sachs, David, Walter, Eva singing their hopes for a successful outcome of the song contest in a glorious quintet; or entrance of the Meistersingers in the next scene; the tribute to Hans Sachs—Hans Sachs! Hans Sachs! Beckmesser bungling and Walter’s ringing tenor, Morgen, es leuchtet mit rösigen gedacht. The concluding triumphant sound of the chorus.

  The Old Metropolitan Opera House resided in a building at Forty-fourth and Broadway with an unimpressive exterior from the last century—but inside, a huge theatre with two rows of gilded boxes circling the auditorium, Grand Tier closest to the stage, Parterre above; then balcony seats, then Family Circle where watching the action demands opera glasses. Standing room behind Grand Tier boxes or at the back of the orchestra seats was a good option—and only a couple of bucks.

  A bit seedy and faded, that Old  Met. sight-lines obscuring the stage in several locations. But what a tradition it had—how many great singers and conductors had spun their magic in that grand old house through the years. How many Saturdays in the late 1940s when at U.C.L.A., my close friends and I had listened to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts beamed out to California and around the country. Because of those broadcasts, I was already familiar with stars I would now see perform—Ljuba Welitch as Salomé, Bidu Sayao’s Marguerite in “La Traviata,” Licia Albanese’s  Mimi in La Bohème, Ezio Pinza’s Leporaello in Don Giovanni.  And here I am seated in the orchestra within these hallowed walls, falling apart at a performance of “Die Meistersinger.”

  Then, miracle of miracles, the Old Met hosts Rudy and Margot’s mind-boggling partnership New York debut; Rudolph Nureyev and the divine Margot Fonteyn, premiere ballerina of London’s Royal Ballet—Margot and the Royal Ballet itself with a host of avid fans in New York. But the supreme Margot will be forty-four in May—has she lost her marbles? Long time fans, Frank assuredly one of them, anticipate disaster. Will she dance with Nureyev the roles she’s famous for in “Giselle,” in “Swan Lake” both black and white swans (many ballerinas do not dance the black swan); most anticipated of all, the miraculous Rose Adagio in “Sleeping Beauty” with which the Royal Ballet has traditionally opened its seasons at the Met; Margot standing balancé, unsupported as she goes down the line taking roses from her suitors.

  Frank tells the story that after Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet (all thunder and lightning and beefy male dancers) had made their first appearance in New York in October, 1949, the following spring on opening night of the Royal Ballet in the midst of full-company curtain calls for “Sleeping Beauty,” Managing Director Ninette de Valois, clever woman that she was—she knew her New York audiences—walked  through the crowd of dancers to the footlights, and to a hushed audience said, “We didn’t think you would like us after the Bolshoi came!“ Needless to say the hysterically devoted crowd went totally off-center with a standing ovation.

  Gala opening night, April, 1963—standing room is all we can afford, two bucks a shot, joining other would-be aficionados at the rear of the orchestra seats, all rabid Margot fans and holding their breath anticipating the Rose Adagio. Frank says,  “I can’t take it anymore, Margot’s too old to be dancing “Sleeping Beauty.” How wrong he was! She was fantastic! at least to this neophyte. Could detect nary a wobble in the balances. The aficionados breathed a sigh of relief.

  Rudy and Margot would dance “Giselle,” “Swan  Lake,” “Le Corsair,” a new role for Margot, and on the same night as Corsair, “Les Sylphides,” in which Nureyev allowed himself to be hardly noticed as her partner, a subtle presence, squelching rumors that he is all flash and show-off. (I was to have an intense argument with Frank’s friend Chuck Gerhardt about this—Gerhardt did  not like Rudolph Nureyev! But then I don’t think he was too happy with Frank’s taking up with a new lover sharing a bed each night.)

  The night of “Les Sylphides” and “Le Corsair” opened with Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” without Rudy and Margot. This night Frank and I had seats on the  right in the third row balcony with excellent and  close enough view. “Les Sylphides” affirms Rudy and Margot’s extraordinary partnership élan, perhaps only an echo of their soon to come White Swan pas de deux—poetry in motion. As Rudy would say, “The difference in our ages didn’t matter anymore. We were one body, one soul. Audiences were enthralled.”

  “Le Corsair” – Nureyev leaps into the scene in pantaloons, bare chest, head band with feather, defying gravity, twirling in the air, circling the stage in turns and leaps, legs extended, feet tucked into his small, lithe body, flying into the wings to thunderclap applause, bravos.

  The house is silent now, not breathing as Margot appears upstage left, looks out at us with those dark piercing  eyes, “which make you want to cry” as Robert Helpman, her first partner in the 1930s. puts it.

  We are  not disappointed—we are astonished and thrilled—joy in the land!! as Margot tops off her variations in a series of turns downstage, each ending on point in unsupported balancé, holding the last for several seconds without a waver, closer to us now, her eyes challenging, Here I am! still here! and what do you think of that? (Was I really there to see this? Or is it a dream?)

  Rudy and Margot finish off the Corsair with sensuous splendor. We are seeing a performance that will not be seen again for generations, if ever. Now, stamping feet shake the Hall. In front of the gold curtain, Margot takes a rose from the bouquet and hands it to Nureyev. They disappear . . . solo bows . . . together again. Now the forestage, empty. gold curtain closed—much too long! forcing a surge of rhythmic applause, “Rudy! Margo! Rudy! Margot!” After a full fifteen minutes, the gold curtain parts for the final offering—the only way the ovation can be stopped. I do not remember the name of ballet following.

  Spring! May, 1963. Frank longs to show off New York’s outdoor wonders, especially the eastern reaches of Long Island, its multiplex of cities, beaches, communities with romantic names, history dating back to the 1600s. Lollipop and Daiquiri, brother and sister from the same litter, were born in distant Springs, close to East Hampton, bred by two of his “run-around with buddies,” Pookie and David, boys who have lived together many years. Not unknown to me are Patchogue, in 1950 meeting Julia Evergood’s artist husband, Philip; 1952, clamming with Daisy’s daughter Ruth and husband Alonzo in Great South Bay at Ocean Beach, Fire Island.

  Frank’s tour begins with weekends at Maria and Pancho’s small summer house in Shirley-Mastic, fronting an inlet which could harbor a small boat. Houses in Shirley couldn’t compare with the more elegant houses to the east in Moriches nearby with their large, dark and brooding framed mansions, coves and ponds, or Quoque with its lush trees and gardens. Most Shirley houses were small, displaying plaster Madonnas and ducks in front yards, compensated in spring by magnificent red azalea bushes, wild climbing roses in June.

  Shirley-Mastic is just east of Patchogue—Mastic Beach, a short ride from the house across a bridge to a spit of land on the Atlantic, beginning just east of where Fire Island ends, and extending to the Moriches inlet on the east. Our explorations will extend beyond the Moriches to Quoque, Shinnecock and the Hamptons, Sag Harbor, and as far as Montauk Point; to Riverhead and North Fork’s farmlands—cauliflower and potatoes mostly; cities with Native American names—Cutchogue, Mattituck—steamed clams, Heineken beer and two pound lobsters at the Barge in Southold on Peconic Bay—to North Fork’s Orient Point where we will catch the car ferry to New London, Connecticut, through Boston, south to Cape Cod and Provincetown.

  First weekend in Shirley, however, is troubled by our uncertain futures, especially mine. Frank doesn’t want to live in the East Village in a run-down flat while I pursue and acting career. “It’s not really what you want, is it?” Frank asks, “and it’s certainly not what I want. I have no wish to spend the rest of my life in standing room at the Met, or living in a hovel on Avenue B.”

  For me, the same old story—career or comfortable home life shared with another guy? Perhaps it takes growing older to discover one’s “mission” or “original intent” in life. Seen in the perspective of years, how can one regret or  complain about roads taken, paths followed, if eventually they reveal what the original intent of destiny has been all  along? Hopefully, we’ll remain healthy and of sound mind when the time comes to fulfill it.

  And thus, in the early summer of 1963, I segué from temp to permanent at a Wall Street insurance company—salary, ninety dollars a week. Frank has  found a home for one hundred and ninety dollars a month, a ground floor, newly remodeled brownstone garden apartment, one bedroom and separate bath, kitchen on one side of a large living room; a great location on West 69^th Street only a block from Central Park West and Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, soon to become Daiquiri and Lollipop’s playground, and several years later, summer concerts, and eventually gay pride celebrations.

  Carol Burnett’s friend (and mine) from U.C.L.A., Beverly Dixon, is still residing in an apartment in a brownstone down the street west of us, shared with Carol before Carol ascended to stardom. Carol’s autographed photograph hangs in the window of the neighborhood cleaners. Beverly and I try to put together a scene for an audition at Actors Studio, but never carry through, never schedule it.

  Our building is owned by Mr. Rothschild (not related to the rich and famous Rothschild family), a tall, enthusiastic man near retirement age, all fired up about the neighborhood, telling us that in the same block on West 68^th Street writers and painters have lived for years. (Philip Evergood had a studio there.)

  We’re well aware of the upper Westside’s beginning transformation from the West 40s all the way to 100^th Street, triggered by construction of Lincoln Center For the Arts at 68^th and Broadway (where Columbus Avenue begins). Newly completed New York State Theatre will house New York City Opera and Ballet; Avery Fisher Hall, the New York Philharmonic. The new Metropolitan Opera House, still under construction; a theatre complex, soon to open. “Hell’s Kitchen” of “Westside Story” is vanishing fast—sadly many of the Kitchen’s large Puerto Rican population are forced to move to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, resulting in interracial riots there in a few years.

  Unfortunately, the walls and floors in Rothschild’s building are not sound-proofed—much too thin, and it doesn’t help he’s leased the apartment in the floor above to entertainer Ronnie Graham and his blonde girlfriend, and her pink toy poodle. At four o’clock in the morning we’re serenaded with either Ronnie on the piano, or panting sighs as they hump in the bedroom directly above ours, “Get that damn dog off the bed! I wanna make babies. . .” “Oh, Ronnie . . .”

  Affecting the good neighbor police, we rap politely more than once on Graham’s door, greeted with surly snarls. Graham looks in person as he does on film, his face gray and leathery like a man who’s never been out in the sun. He almost slams the door in our faces. We appeal  to Rothschild who makes an attempt to arbitrate, with no success.

  Complicating matters, Lollipop and Daiquiri do not like the mostly dirt outdoor garden, so Frank hires an attorney and we succeed in breaking the lease, moving to another garden apartment on West 70^th Street, still only a block away from Central Park, although not as close. The whole area of five-floor brownstone houses on the Westside continue to be renovated into one floor apartments and we’ll learn of an exception. Across the street on our block closer to Central Park, a brownstone lived in and owned by actress Maureen Stapleton.

  Daisy Belmore once again will  haunt me at Food City on Columbus Avenue. Maureen appears behind me in the  checkout line.

  “Pardon me,” I venture, “you look just like Maureen Stapleton.”

  “Probably because I am,” she says, close to a  laugh.

  “You remember Daisy Belmore in the Rose Tattoo. I was studying Shakespeare with her then, she  was a close friend.”

  Maureen’s large, dark Irish eyes widen, trancelike. She says, “Ah, yes, Daisy. . .”

  My groceries bagged, I move  away.

  Hardly any time at all to wile away at Smith Point beach in Shirley-Mastic. Frank’s closest and long enduring non-Cuban friends in New York, David Meeker and Stanley Zaneski, once upon a time breeders of poodle litters in Springs, now their summer home, a cozy cottage with two bedrooms and outdoor patio behind Zaneski’s family home in the unfashionable side of Southampton; Pookie’s father (Polish) in the construction business. David a step above in class, his family owns a house in Quogue, and apparently “come from money.” He  and Stanley, or  rather “Pookie,” have lived together for several years—not a smooth relationship—Pookie loves sex and drinks heavily; David, somewhat of a  martinet and unsympathetic, although he adores Pookie. We call David the Nazi sometimes, and he only laughs.

  They live in town most of the year. Pookie, as decorator at the Design Center on Lexington Avenue, David as liaison with movie theatre chains, setting them up, managing their finances. He travels a lot. They have always lived in luxury apartments on the upper Eastside—and wouldn’t think of living anywhere else in Manhattan. (Adam, one of their friends, also decorator at the Design Center, will tell me he wouldn’t go the West Side if Christ himself was there.)

  And so, weekends in Southampton, staying in Pookie and David’s cozy cottage, alcoholic—vodka-tonics with lime twist (can taste them now), blurred dinner parties, barbecues—days at Two Mile Hollow beach in East Hampton, with their large coterie of friends—Eastsiders to the core.

  I’ve had it with the stifling atmosphere at the insurance company, but will never forget November 22^nd when we heard via radio that President Kennedy had been shot, and soon was dead. We closed for the day. Waiting for the A-Express at Fulton, crowds drifted aimlessly, silently, stunned, staring into space—until the A train’s horn blasted a  death  knell as it roared out of  the tunnel.

  In December I begin interviewing for a job  in public relations—any job that will  take me away from Wall Street. A creative job—one that is challenging.

  I get my wish, and never in my wildest dreams could have imagined what a strange, exotic world was about to draw me  into its net for the next two years.

  And only in New York.

Next – Kochiro Koso – Working with young university students from Japan.

The Socko Sixties

First Memoir

Prelude to the Socko Sixties

  When David and I return to Southern California in September 1957, the “beat” generation is in full swing, the movement barely brushing our lives, as it had minimally in Ohio, but in Ohio were we not fighting the establishment? Two guys living together? Seen in public with black guys?

  A month before leaving Columbus, David performed with a theatre company at the Jewish center, cast as Finian in “Finian’s Rainbow” with a mixed cast of whites blacks, Jews and Gentiles. (My boss at the Department of Highway Safety, Al Schwartz, called blacks, “negroes.”) Rebels we are, as I drive down High Street in Columbus in our top-down, black and white Mercury convertible with two handsome black guys, one beside me; David nestled with his black friend in the back.

  Our first year in Columbus, we’re totally wiped out after seeing James Dean in “East of Eden,” the ultimate “beat” icon of  angry young men; shattered when, coming out of the movie house downtown, news headlines glare, “James Dean is Dead,” and here we are two thousand miles away from the lonely intersection in northern California where Dean had died in a fatal collision.

  Shortly after performing in Stadium Theatre in August 1957, in the theatre nestled beneath Ohio State’s football stadium, we’re on our way west, arriving in California in our snazzy convertible, beginning our “near-beat” existence launched from an apartment on North Serrano, a couple of blocks down from old Twentieth Fox sound stages at Western and Sunset where I’d worked as an extra in “The Eve of St. Mark” in 1943—the studio, still standing. Not exactly home again, but close.

  “Home” begins when we lease a rambling two-story frame house on Effie Street in Echo Park, garage tucked under one side, a large yard bordered by white picket fence, replete with white and blue working fountain with an off-and-on switch just inside the front door, a short flight up wooden steps. The fountain’s on-and-off switch recalls hilarious moments in a movie we’d seen in Columbus, Jacque Tati’s “Mon Oncle.”

  A venerable free-stone peach tree which has never been trimmed, shades the front stoop, in August giving us an abundance of huge, lush, fruit, smell of the tree and its treasures filling the air. David reveals his remarkable green thumb for the first time—quite surprising, since he never once ventured into his dad’s miniature farm next to the house in Ohio. Everything David plants—grass, shrubbery, flowers—flourishes. “In California,” he says, “everything you put in the ground will grow, if you give it plenty of water.”

  January, 1958, a job with General Fire Extinguisher Corp. in Culver City as Sales Promotion Manager takes me across town each weekday in the convertible to their one story plant and offices just down the street from the world-famous Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. At our local, darkly lit “martinis-over-lunch” bistro, Ida Lupino and hubbie Howard Duff, currently filming “Mr. Adams and Eve” at MGM, the series directed by Lupino, arrive most every day without fuss in their blue Lincoln Continental, snuggling into a table tucked away in a dark corner.

  Ned Paine, VP and Sales Mgr of General Fire Extinguishers is a class act. Tall, thin, slightly balding, perpetual grin—in short, a real sexy guy who could bedevil the skin off a snake in the acutely competitive bidding wars for sales to public buildings, schools, new apartment complexes under construction. He gets away with stiffing his distributors and small hardware owners, holding out a large hand to them, remarking with a big smile lighting his face, “Now that you’ve taken that knife out of your back I stabbed you with, how about lunch?” luring his victims to three martini lunches where he will explain how he’s going “to make it up to them.”

  Sputnik flies . . . The sad eyes of a small, black mixed beagle, reach out to me from the nearby window of a pet store. I name him Toby and take him home to Effie Street. . .

  Unfortunately for me (or blessing in disguise) Ned doesn’t think much of “sales promotion.” It was against owner Huntsinger’s wish that Ned hire me in the first place. In the fall Ned calls me in and says, “If you want to promote our product, first you’ll have to learn to sell it,” sending me forth as salesman into a truly depressing world, sitting around with paunchy, dreary hardware store managers in dingy backrooms, killing off half-pints of whiskey. I look for another job.

  Enter Chester (Chet) Gilpin, circumspect tight bundle of muscle, short-cut graying hair, kindly devoted family man, everybody’s big daddy, befriender and defender of gay teachers threatened with losing their jobs, assistant to Executive Director of the California Teachers Association—virtually C.T.A.’s on-hands director.

  C.T.A. needs a new assistant director of special services. I get the job after a successful interview over lunch with Chet and current director of special services, Norm who’s about my age, early thirties, wisp of a man, soft-spoken, ex-body surfer, still dreaming of golden days of his youth on surfing Southern California beaches; married, but one wonders . . .

  January, 1959, I begin with C.T.A., We move from Effie Street into a new track home in Woodland Hills in the wild west of San Fernando Valley, forty miles from C.T.A.’s downtown L.A. headquarters, a large modern two-story building built in the Bunker Hill. The hills of that bygone era graced with grand Victorian houses have been flattened. Tunnels disappear—sadly, short North Broadway tunnel into downtown—a rite of passage through the early years through which we sallied forth from the northern reaches of Highland Park with Mother, to shop for clothes, get lost in movies and applaud magic vaudeville shows at the Million Dollar Theatre at Third and Broadway; first-run movies in other grand palaces built by major studios as distributors for their films—United Artists, Lowe’s (MGM) at Seventh and Broadway, Warner Brothers at Seventh and Hill, Paramount on Eighth Street with Fancho and Marko productions with Hollywood stars, the Meglin Kiddies. In high school, Saturday jobs at department stores. Downtown was the hub for all Angelinos until after the war when Wilshire Boulevard’s “Miracle Mile” developed west to Beverly Hills, and other suburbs sprawled across the land—most prolifically San Fernando Valley.

  C.T.A. Special Services is all about getting deals for teachers at participating appliance and car dealers, furniture stores—interior directors. The previous director’s lover-partner (they very much in the closet) was an interior director. They reside in a home on the beach in the Malibu colony. Current director, Norm Pearson, and I are frequent visitors.  (Norm, as it turned out, had more than just “visited” with them. David and I resisted.)

  As with the former director (who probably initiated it), I soon learn Norm is on the take—naïve me, so am I before long. David and I become happily ensconced  in our tract home. Tract house I may be, but homes differ in style and architecture from one another and have large backyards, front yards with enough space to plant a tree or two, and a rose garden.

  January 1960. After a year with C.T.A., fate intervenes. Equity Library Theatre West is formed, announcing its first production, Robert E. Sherwood’s “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” – “Devised and Directed by Edward Ludlum,” as the program will note. Ed Ludlum! Is this for real? He’s none other than the man who “introduced” me to David ten years earlier in 1950 when he cast me as a cop in New York’s ELT Library Theatre one-act. David then was Ed’s perennial stage manager, recently with a tour with Caribbean Calypso singers—“Brown skin girl, stay home and mind baby!” How often I’d here David singing calypso, in and out of the shower. Ed also had miraculously appeared in Columbus, Ohio in 1956 as director of the summer theatre, “Playhouse on the Green,” casting me in a small part in “Sabrina Fair.”

  He casts me in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” as the hot-blooded Billie Herndon, a choice role, heavy-drinking, alarmingly hysterical law partner of Lincoln. One future star of television, Ted Knight, will play Ninian Edwards; Richard Cromwell, whose career has been fading for many years, as Joshua Speed. Law partners of Lincoln, we have most of our scenes together and the three of us become backstage buddies.

  Cromwell, close to fifty now, is unrecognizable as “everybody’s boy next door” in Tol’able David in the 1930 remake of D.W. Griffith’s classic. I know and remember him well as young and appealing in two films from the 1930s, Henry Hathaway’s “Lives of the Bengal Lancers” as wide-eyed recruit, Lieutenant Stone, and as the idealistic Ted, Henry Fonda’s brother, in “Jezebel.”

  He serves up some amusing stories—his favorite, in “Lives of the Bengal Lancers,” problems cameramen had setting up close-in two shots with Cooper because of his six-foot plus height, solved by digging a hole in the sand for him to stand in. “Bengal Lancers” by the way, has one particularly erotic “male bonding” scene—Dick, a naked Lt. Stone, bathing in a copper as Cooper pours hot water over him; Franchot Tone in the other room taunting Cooper as he spins out “Mother McCrea” on a flute.

  When Henry Fonda in “Jezebel” gets out of the carriage introducing his new bride, Margaret Lindsay (Buck Cantrell–George Brent–has predicted Fonda will only bring back a new-fangled watch from the north, a “stem-winder”), Dick’s one-liner in the scene is “Hey, Buck, there’s your stem-winder!” He tells us, trace of his wide-eyed crossing his countenance, “It took one whole day’s shooting to satisfy Willy Wyler before he got it right!”

  We knew little about Cromwell’s troubled life and career at the time, but David and I did learn more than he’d offered backstage in a visit to his home above Sunset Boulevard, a smaller version of Norma Desmond’s home in “Sunset Boulevard”— tasseled lamps, a dark, tiled pool off the heavily shrubbed patio, reminding one of James Whale’s pool in “Gods and Monsters.” (Cromwell had played a challenging lead role in Whale’s failed “The Road Back” in 1937). He’d had a successful and varied career as film and stage actor and artist, until after the war, where he served in the coastguard, His days as young, appealing wide-eyes youth, were over, he said. He became an alcoholic, now recovered, designing pottery, echoing back to his career as an artist, proudly showing us a large baking kiln. He said nothing about his brief, two month marriage to the young Angela Lansbury in 1945. He was a gentle person, and would die later the same year—in October, 1960. I like to  think our visit, David and I, to his home was a welcome relief to him, coming out of the closet in a brief moment of time.

  Ted Knight’s off-the-wall humor foreshadowed a career yet to evolve, most notably as Ted Baxter on Mary Tyler Moore in 1970—two supporting Emmy trophies, and in his own television series, Too Close for Comfort, later titled, The Ted Knight Show.

  Chet Gilpin is not happy I’ve strayed into this exotic world. “Is this the way you want to go?” he asks. I assure him it’s not, but not sure I’ve convinced him, or myself, surviving one more year. The long slide out of C.T.A. begins when Norm Pearson resigns and I take over as Director of Special Services and foolishly hire one smooth operator, James Whitby.

  Whitby’s a con-artist, clever, with a hidden motive to get rid of me. Good-looking lad, curly dark hair and eyes, pretty face, hefty, young. I should’ve been forewarned when he claimed to have originated the idea for the hit sci-fi movie, “The Fly.” This he tells me in the steam room of the Beverly Hills Gym on LaCienega near Wilshire —an exclusive club frequented by celebrities—Pat O’Brien, Warner Brothers star of the 1930s; Lawrence Harvey, English actor who wears a shower cap, even in the sauna.

  Most notably Robert Wagner who appears once a week on schedule with his personal trainer in a small workout room (never appearing in the shower), and whose every other word is fuck—“fuck this and fuck that, and fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that.” I suspect he’s attempting to overstate his masculinity, but he’s a friendly guy, not a trace of arrogance or inflated ego.

  Most disasters in my life have been blessings in disguise (perhaps all of them, I’ve lost count)—a kick in the ass prodding me to get back to the original intent—the Theatre. Whitby at last manages to entrap me into accepting a forty dollar check, gratuity from a seedy, close-to-gangster car dealer with buggy eyes. Whitby informs Chet who easily confirms by securing a picture of the check from my bank.

  With grace and fatherly kindness, he says simply, “Turn in your keys.” I assure him Whitby too is very much on the take. He knows this and will do his best to find him out. Whitby lasts just one more year before getting the boot. (Two years later, Chet Gilpin sends a glowing reference when I’m interviewing for an Executive Director position in December, 1963 in New York—one of the most satisfying, interesting, and exciting jobs in my entire non-acting career.)

  David is desperate and there’s nothing I can do for him. Our long friendship is disintegrating, starting to unravel when he realizes I’m determined to seek an acting career. He joins the semi-professional Actors Workshop in Woodland Hills. We lose the Ford pickup in a middle of the night repossession—David needs it for gardening jobs and no longer can he take it into west valley wilds to paint landscapes. We manage to keep the small English Ford Consul.

  Our house goes on the market, and in summer, 1961, I snag the roll in the “Pilgrimage Play” of the disciple who must have blue eyes to match his blue robes—at last, John the Beloved, with an Actors Equity “Summer Theatre” contract, as it was in 1950. This allows me an open door to collecting unemployment in the fall, exclusively and legitimately as an actor—no more temporary typing jobs! I’ve already got an agent from the Billy Herndon performance in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” in 1960. Harry Raybould, Lincoln, has snagged the role of Jesus of Nazareth.

  Director of that year’s “Pilgrimage Play,” Leonard Penn appears in a brief scene as a director in “A Star is Born,” Judy Garland’s waving her hand out a train window. “Just the Hand! Esther! Just the Hand! All I want to see is the hand!” He is equally Penn strident and shrill in directing us.

  Several Jewish actors complain the play is anti-Semitic. Michael Levin, from “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” is one of them, a dark-eyed, wiry guy, playing John’s brother, James—the role I had played in 1948-1949-1950, and in the film made in 1949 (blue eyes, not required). Mike is dedicated, intensely (and intentionally) professional and is appalled how the Pharisees are portrayed; not that Mike was Orthodox and his childhood in Wisconsin as a Jewish boy, less than perfect.

  “After school I wanted to play baseball with the others boys,” he tells me, “but my dad sent me off to Hebrew School—made me feel so different. This play is bringing it all back to me.”

  Joseph Mell, one of the Pharisees, also complains about the play’s anti-Semitic overtones. He will be responsible for turning my life around the following December, introducing me to Frank Dunand. He is “front office” assistant at 4-A Mishkin Agency, so a real plus if you can work your way into his inner circle, dining at the Tick Tock on Vine Street after rehearsals. (I was to learn Joe operates within several inner circles—make that “cliques.”) His screen and TV credits are too numerous to mention, spanning more than twenty years, including roles in every major TV series from 1952-1972, “Star Wars” to “I Love Lucy,” “Gunsmoke” . . . Dr. Hugh Wagner in “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” with Michael Landon; appearing in “A Star is Born” behind the pay window, announcing to Judy that her name is no longer Esther Blodgett, but Vicky Lester.

  Mike Levin questions our motivation for the arm-flailing exit when Jesus ask us, James and John, “Sons of Zebedee,” to “go into the village yonder wherein you will find a colt tied—loose him and bring hit hither.” Penn tells us to hurry off up the hill, “Waving your arms—chattering—show excitement!”

  “It’s because of the prophecy,” I explain, “Jesus will ride into Jerusalem on the back of an ass.” Jesus can hardly say “on the back of an ass,” although Harry Raybould is full of surprises. His performance begs changing the name of the play from “Pilgrimage Play” to “Passion Play,” as in the crucifixion scene. This is the first time there’s even been a crucifixion scene “on the hill.”

  Friend Mary Adams as Mother of Jesus stands next to me below the cross with me as comforting John the Beloved, and Mary is a devout Christian Scientist. Her religion refutes the significance of the physical crucifixion. You’ll never find a cross atop a Christian Scientist church. And here is Harry, writhing and moaning, sounds of the wooden cross thumping and rocking in its stage moorings caused by Harry’s trembling death.

  Finally one night, Mary can take it no longer and whispers to me, “What’s he doing, for Christ’s sake!” (Also note Christian Scientists do not take the name of Lord in vain—Mary, the apparent exception.)  I have to stifle a laugh.  Ah! delightful Mary Adams.

  Although uncompromising to herself in her religion, she never proselytizes, and this is not the first time she will “take the Lord’s name in vain.” She’s on the board of Equity Library West, and will soon get me elected to the board. Richard Vath, who plays Judas Iscariot, a rather pompous, pontificating actor who fancies himself a John Barrymore. In an E.L.T. board meeting the following year as we plan productions for the season, Vath suddenly proclaims, “Well of  course, many of us will be up on the hill next summer,” to which Mary replies with a whimsical smile, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  Our endearing and enduring friendship will flourish over the years. She’s had an active career in films—her credits are many—“The Blood of Dracula,” “Executive Suite.” In the fall I will, as out-of-work actor, tend the garden on her property on Gordon Street once a week. Gordon Street is in Hollywood, just south of Sunset Boulevard—then a quiet, residential area, old frame houses—hers, with front porch and stone pillars, shaded by purple blooming jacaranda trees. She rents out the front house, living in back in a smaller, cozy one-bedroom bungalow.

  And now the story of the “Alvarado Stray.” Mary driving her tiny VW “bug” down the heavily trafficked Alvarado Boulevard, close to downtown L.A., spots a boxer crossing and re-crossing frantically. Without a moment to lose, she crunches gears, pulls over and wrestles the boxer into the VW and brings him home.

  First day, leaving him alone in the bungalow, she returns to find the living room in shambles. Telling the story, Mary laughs, as if a stray dog wrecking her house were the most normal thing in the world.. She gets in touch with a service for finding homes for strays. A week later, the boxer, nose in the air, drives off in the back seat of a limo on his way to his new home in Palm Springs.

  Wednesday night, February 6, 1962, Socko Sixties launched in full Technicolor. “West Side Story” at Director’s Guild on Sunset Boulevard for members of the Academy, floor-to-ceiling wide screen.

ABOVE MANHATTAN – SWEEP OVER HELL’S KITCHEN – PLAYGROUND

When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way. . .

  Frank’s been away from New York only a year, ten years for me. Two nights later in pouring rain, hiding our tears, we run to the car from a second-run movie house on Sunset Boulevard . . . “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” upper East Side, Holly Go Lightly finds “Cat.” FADE OUT on drenched “Cat” squeezed between the arms of Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. Oh the yearning to be there with them in that pouring rain! Another year will pass before we make the journey.

  He was born Françoise Gaspard Dunand on the day of Epiphany, January 6, 1933, at nine-thirty in the morning in the small town of Banes, Oriente Province, about two miles from the Atlantic Ocean at Punta de Mulas. His father, Françoise, Sr. (we called him “Pancho”) was born in the fiercely independent German-French province of Alsace-Lorraine in northwestern France; his mother was German. Pancho moved with his mother to Cuba in the early 1900s where he eventually managed a small movie house in Banes. When Frank was a child, they had to get permission from United Fruit Company to pass through their sugar cane fields to get to the beach close by. Frank’s mother, Maria Calás, thirty years younger than Pancho, was full-blooded Spanish-Cuban born in Santiago de Cuba on the southern shore, the other side of the island from Banes. Frank had no brothers or sisters, although he told me about a dark-colored boy wandering into the dirt backyard of their home in Banes one day, asking Frank if he could see his father.

    Frank was eleven when Pancho moved his family first to Miami, then by rail up the east coast to Washington Heights in New York City, surviving en route on white bread smeared with peanut butter. Every time I reached for a jar of peanut butter in the supermarket, Frank cringed.

  December, 1961 – I’m rehearsing the role of Yank in “The Hasty Heart” in a small “Equity Waiver” theatre on Highland Avenue. Another Frank—Bolger, a scruffy, not too tall, rough faced guy with wild black hair, plays the Scott, “Lachie” MacLachlan (Richard Todd in the movie). Bolger is producing the play to showcase himself to agents and casting directors. Patricia Lavin (she prefers “Pat” to emphasize her masculine nature) directs, taking over from—again?—Ed Ludlum. Bolger isn’t too happy with Ed’s coming on to him, so fires him. Pat Lavin is a close friend of Carol Burnett whom we both had known at U.C.L.A. in 1954.

  One night after rehearsal, Bolger takes me to a gay frequented after-hours coffee house in Santa Monica frequented by gay agents and other Hollywood lesser lights. “There’s Joe Mel,” he says.

  “Who’s that with him—he’s cute.”

  “Frank Dunand. He’s always with Joe. They hang out with the Ret Turner crowd. Ret’s a costume designer at NBC. They probably just came down from the Topanga Canyon Club—the all-gay dance club.”

  “I’d better say hello to Joe.”

  “You know him?”

  “We were in the Pil Play last summer.”

  Rising from the table, I affect a casual saunter. As I approach, Frank averts his eyes into his coffee cup.

  “Hi,” Joe says.”

  “Frank Bolger and I just came from a late rehearsal—the Hasty Heart.”

  “I heard about it,“ Joe looking up at me with not too welcoming eyes. “You know Frank Dunand, don’t you?” Hollywood intro for wily, noncommittal agents, knowing full well Frank and I have never met, reluctant to introduce us.

  “Hello,” Frank says. I attempt a happy smile, but Frank’s looking into his coffee cup again. Attempt to  hide my frustration—and hooked—I retreat.

  Back with Bolger again, reporting the encounter. Bolger says, “He hates actors. I tried to make out with him, but he would have none of me. He’s very picky.”

  Frank Dunand’s connection with Joe Mell, I will learn, reads like a lurid gossip column. Joe Mell is in love with Ret Turner (the affair never publicly admitted—why I’ll never know). Ret, costume designer at NBC since 1950 and would have a long, distinguished career—Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, designer for 2007 Academy Awards, among many others.

  Joe Mell in turn is a friend of CBS-TV casting director Paul Levitt, a handsome married man, who’s having a fling with Jerry Katz who earlier that year drove out from New York with Frank and his two poodles, Lollipop and Daiquiri, in Frank’s ’57 Plymouth. I would learn that Jerry Katz is inordinately in love with Frank and yearns to get him into the sack, but Frank has kept him at arm’s length. Jerry, the poodles and Frank, rented a small house on Hilldale Avenue in West Hollywood, and soon after Jerry started the clandestine affair with Paul Levitt.

  The Joe Mell-Ret Turner crowd, which included well-known costume designer Ray Aghayan (Emmy Award with Bob Mackie in 1967—Alice Through the Looking Glass), all gathering at Ret Turner’s house on Dicks Street in a section of West Hollywood a few blocks west of Frank and Jerry’s rented house on Hilldale. Ret’s quasi-elegant cottage, restored, as most houses in the area, once occupied by railroad workers when the red streetcar line ran down Santa Monica Boulevard through West Hollywood. Most of the cottages displayed miniature carriage lamps for porch lights, and false fronts. Ret still lived there in 1993—I passed by walking the dog Bhikshu—but he didn’t remember me or Frank—or didn’t want to.

  From Ret’s house, the entourage sallied forth on Saturdays during beach season in Ret’s vintage white Jaguar with leather seats, to breakfast at House of Pancakes in West Los Angeles on their way to the gay section of Will Rogers State Beach in Santa Monica on scattered blankets playing scrabble and gossiping—young, hunky actors, quick to hover above, stopping long enough to make connection with the Mishkin Agency, by way of Joe Mell.

  Saturday mornings, before beach season (April to August), breakfasts of fried mush, eggs and bacon (Ret was from Atlanta—his family owned a large department store there), followed usually by shopping flea markets and antique dealers on LaCienega—one of their sometimes “buddies” on these excursions, Nancy Culp from “Beverly Hillbillies.”

  But it was Sunday evening’s ritual at Ret’s to which I would in two months invite myself, making a fateful entrance, after dinner settling in the living room in front of Ret’s large color TV to drool over Michael Landon’s bulge in tight, butternut jeans, the main attraction.

  Frank soon got fed up with Jerry’s protestations of love in close quarters, invalidated by Jerry’s madcap life, tricking with almost everybody who was nobody—taking in construction workers sweating in the streets over power drills, telephone repairmen—you name it. Frank himself admitted to a few adventures of his own—inviting in a much too young paper boy. He departed Hilldale and “Boys Town” moving to Hollywood at the foot of the hills above Franklin Avenue. The apartment was on the first floor of a huge castle-like building—“Mrs. Storm’s”—with kitchen and bath, and roomy walk-in closet serving as bedroom with, fortunately, a window high above to let in the sun—for us, location of a celebrated twenty-four hour “honeymoon.”

  Entrance to the apartment required a journey through a large tunnel accessed from below leading to a stairway up to the kitchen.

  David Woehrle and I—well, our many years together is coming to an end. The house in Woodland Hills is sold. We move across the mountains into Laurel Canyon, to a rambling one-story white frame house nestled in a deep gully on Woodrow Wilson Drive. We are now “Laurel Canyon people.”

  Two ELT-West board members live in the canyon—Lita dal Porto, a tall, frenetic woman. (Later, Frank Dunand will call her “Paula Prentiss” the troubled actress, equally frenetic). Libby, then President of ELT-West lives above us on Woodrow Wilson Drive in a large house perched on a hill, once belonging to the dance team, Marge and Gower Champion. Libby is married to Logan Field, a handsome, in the closet guy, struggling-to-get-better-roles-in-TV-films actor. I suppose enough years have passed that I can reveal Logan was gay, and later the marriage would be dissolved. Libby’s father, Edward Fielding, tall, distinguished Englishman, is a recognizable character actor—most notably in “Rebecca” as the long-time De Winter family major domo, Frith.

  My reconnection with Ed Ludlum casting me in “The Hasty Heart” adds to David’s frustration. He hates the canyon, and I’m always running off to rehearsals or ELT board meetings. He gets a job as security investigator at the May Company department stores, and on one windy afternoon, without warning, he piles all his belongings into a newly bought Ford coupe, and off he goes to an apartment somewhere in Los Angeles.

  Sun, Moon, and planets now conspire. February 3, 1962, Saturday night, only a few hours away from the gathering of five planets in Aquarius—heralding the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. I call Joe Mell and invite myself to his house on Albert Street in West Hollywood. He says he’s entertaining, but I can come after dinner, and apparently my ticket to barging in on their evening, driving them to the Topanga Canyon Club. Off I go in my small, English made Ford Consul convertible.

  Frank Dunand is one of his guests—my appearance, as it turns out, for him is a blessing in disguise. Dinner from his point of view has been a disaster—cheap screw-top red wine and a salad loaded with vegetable and artichoke hearts, which Frank detests. Matters worse, Joe has bonded him with a cute little guy who’s getting drunker by the minute—Ramón. He may speak Spanish (probably Joe’s reason for setting up the date), but Ramón is no Prince Charming.

  As I saunter into the dining room from Joe’s back door, actor or not, it would seem I’ve presented hope to Frank for a less than dull evening.

  Another after-dinner guest arrives—Hal Hamilton, rumored “into leather” but not tonight, member of Joe Mell’s “Intimate Bridge Foursome” group. Off to the Topanga Canyon Club we go, jammed into the Consul, “bonnet” closed. Joe in front with me, Hal and Frank in back, Frank’s blind date nestled in his lap.

  Somewhere between Doheny and Santa Monica Boulevard, Frank and I bend small talk to New York days and I can’t for the life of me recall how Frank’s love affair in the early 1950s with an Irish boy, Jack Conway, got into the mix—with startling revelations! David Woehrle and Jack Conway were lovers just before I met David in 1950! Jack worked for the United Nations, traveling to hot spots all over the world—Israel, Korea. While in Korea, he wrote David, “If only I had heard from you, we might have made a go  of it. . .” The affair ended, but not David’s love for him. . . Nor Frank’s. This was not the last of Jack Conway in my life. He had reappeared when David and I were living in Yonkers in 1952, and there he would be in 1963 at Maria and Poncho’s, sitting in the living room as Frank and I waltzed in.

  The Topanga Canyon Club, shrouded among California wild oaks high up in the hills, is at the dead-end of a dirt road. A private club—members only—men slow-dancing with men! The club is a refuge for gay actors, talent agents and their assistants, casting directors and producers. Charlie Sorensen, assistant to producer, Jerry Wald, serves well as charming stand-in for Frank. At first, Frank’s date is sober enough to weave his way to the dance floor, but is getting increasingly unstable.

  Charlie and I have run around together for a time after I left the Pil Play—the most notable encounter when he took me to a Golden Globes showing of “Victim.” Dirk Bogarde as Melville Farr, prominent barrister who seeks to expose a blackmailer targeting homosexuals. The showing is, quixotically, at Disney Studios. The audience sits in stunned silence as Farr’s love of Boy Barrett is revealed, and the word “homosexual” trembles out from the screen. The film was made before the Brits passed recommendations of the Wolfenden Report to end criminalization of homosexuality in 1967. In the men’s room—eyes fixed straight ahead at the urinals, not daring to check out the guy standing next to, only stoned silence.

  On the dance floor, Charlie says, “I’m surprised you’ve never been here before,” and I reply, “Nobody ever asked me.”

  Ramón’s getting sloshed, so Frank more than once is in my arms,  smooth brown locks snuggling into my chest, silky, gray sweater, like hugging a bunny rabbit, dreams of childhood. . . anticipation.

  It’s as close as we get that night. As I was to learn, Frank demands draconian adherence to obligation and responsibility—for himself and others. No matter how drunk Ramón, he has an obligation to sleep with him, and I drop them off at Mrs. Storm’s castle watching them disappear into the tunnel beneath the mansion rising among the palm trees in this dark-of-the-moon night, the boy learning heavily on Frank’s arm.

  Sunday. Only a few hours before New Moon in Aquarius at 4:10 pm. After rehearsal of “The Hasty Heart,” Frank Bolger comes to my house in the gully. It doesn’t take long for me to spill out my desire to see Frank Dunand again.

  “He’s a loner,” Bolger says. “I couldn’t get to first base with him, and he hates actors.” Suddenly he grabs my address book on the phone desk, flips it open to “T” and in black ink (I can see it now) scrawls Ret’s number and address. “Frank hangs out there every Sunday. They watch Bonanza on Ret’s color TV—Michael Landon’s bulging basket. Ret’s a costume designer for NBC. You want to see Frank, get yourself invited.”

  As soon as Bolger’s out the door, taking a deep breath, I dial. Ret answers. I introduce myself as Joe’s friend, and he says, “Sure, c’mon over after dinner. We’re watching Bonanza.”

  Ret’s white Jaguar hovers in the driveway like a giant toad. I’m in time for Bonanza—Hal Hamilton is there, Joe Mell, Ray Aghayan—and Frank Dunand. I’m wearing a bright orange pull-over shirt and tight black Levi’s—but it’s no competition for Michael Landon, I think. But Frank’s gaze more than once settles on me, and he’s smiling. Casual Hollywood chit-chat—no gossip allowed—especially as to anyone’s sexual proclivities, if you want to be invited again.

  In the kitchen I help Frank washing up. Outside, we move two large garbage cans to the curb for tomorrow’s pickup. A pause in dark-of-the-moon. “May I call you?” I ask.

  “Sure,” Frank says. Back inside he scribbles his phone number and address. “I’ve been there before—when I drove you home.” “Oh yes,” he says.

  “I’ll call you later this week.”

  But, Fuck it! I take the bull by the horns, calling him the next day from a phone booth at Vic Tanney’s gym on Wilshire Boulevard.

  “C’mon over,” he says.

  The night has been warm, oppressive, smoggy—typical weather in February before the break of a Pacific storm.

  He meets me at the entrance to the tunnel, guides me through a long,  dimly lit passageway, up stairs into a small kitchen, into a large living room with glassed french doors opening onto a walk surrounded by sloping lawn. Two gray “English breed” Poodles (larger than toys, smaller than standards) rush to greet us, the male barking at me until the female turns over on her back, legs in the air—Lollipop signaling her welcome which subdues her brother Daiquiri, now that he senses his sister is safe.

  We spend the next twenty-four hours literally bound together in the walk-in closet, releasing briefly, each to the other, for quick snack, short walks on the terrace for Daiquiri and Lollipop, then back to bed.

  Tuesday night, February 5, still hazy and hot. Joe Mell calls. He has two tickets to a Directors Guild showing of “West Side Story.” He’s at Hal Hamilton’s house in West Hollywood—bridge game in progress. When he sees us together, he barely covers a frown—What this? Member of my old Pil Play group fraternizing. . .?

  Next day, the storm breaks—a few days later, mud-slides in canyons oozing down Beachwood Drive from the hills only two blocks from Mrs. Storm’s. In Laurel Canyon, brown gooey layers seep into the house below Woodrow Wilson Drive, covering the floor fortunately not reaching stereo or bookshelves.

  I’m on the phone with Joe Mell, checking in, telling him my sad tale. “I’ve got to move.”

  He answers, “Frank Dunand’s on the other line. Maybe you can move in with him. Hold on, I’ll ask him.” Pause. “Frank says yes. It must be love.”

  “If music be the food of love, play on—give me excess of it,” laments Duke Orsino in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”

  Music in excess, and wondrously so, is the food of love, fueling our life from the moment I move in with him. Sifting through my LP collection, he holds up an RCA Toscanini recording of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony—the 41^st, which I’m quick to praise.

  “Toscanini is a charlatan,” he scoffs, “forcing himself on the music—mushing the music, no attention to detail.”

  Letting go of the recording as if it’s infected, he goes to his own collection stacked on the floor, lined on book shelves, sliding out a recording of Bruno Walter conducting the Jupiter with the CBS Symphony Orchestra. Listening, I’m astonished—violins, horns, winds—each segment of the orchestra, distinctly defined. “So much for Toscanini,” he says.

  Opera’s grand offerings are not available in Los Angeles at the time, and I have little to contribute to Frank’s love of it—except for Claudia Muzio recordings.

  “Callas’s idol,” Frank says and I—would you believe?—have never heard of Maria Callas! We must wait another year before discovering our second home in New York—the old Metropolitan Opera House, there to applaud breathtaking tenors and divas, ballets, standing ovations, Carnegie Hall’s luminous concerts of visiting orchestras—William Steinberg, Eric Leinsdorf, New York Philharmonic concerts at Lincoln Center, and Boston Symphony on their home turf at Symphony Hall, with its superior acoustics. “Built with wood and plaster,” Franks says, “all that’s needed for good sound.”

  In 1962, our musical adventures begin traveling downtown to the Baptist Temple for a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert—Frank bristling when the concert master (first violin) takes a bow to loud applause, before the conductor has made his entrance.

  He draws me eagerly into his world. Intermittent sunny days our rainy first week together, in search of a Puerto Rican grocer to buy chorizos—fat, hot pepper sausages—not Cuban, but close. No Cuban stores in the neighborhood. Buying exotic foods and eating, welcome change from his apparently one culinary specialty—boneless chicken breasts cooked in tomato sauce layered with slices of cheddar cheese. Real Cuban delights await us in New York, dinners at Maria Dunand’s in Washington Heights, and eventually, fabulous meals in four-star restaurants.

  Our first venture to the L.A. Philharmonic begins with dinner at Norm’s restaurant at Sunset and Vermont, part of a chain of glorified coffee shops. That doesn’t stop Frank from ordering the most expensive thing on the menu—steak dinner for $3.50 suggesting I order the same. He’s paying. Unlike this unemployed actor, he’s got a job.

  “It always pays to go first class,” he says. “I learned that from Ret.”

  Before hooking up with me, Frank had determined to get back to New York, telling me he would lie in the sun on the lawn in front of Mrs. Storm’s, asking himself, “What the hell am I doing here?” feeling he’d lost his passion for being alive, disconnected, alone on an alien planet.

  He certainly had tried to get into the languid rhythms of Southern California and connect with the natives. His smooth, olive hued skin was the only hint of Spanish origins, although he never tried to hide that he was Cuban. During his first few months in California, he was annoyed with Mexicans he ran across—waiters and sinewy boys who served up burritos and tacos from lunch wagons. They would ignore his, “Ola, qué tal,” offering a blank stare, or “Okay, how about you?” if they said anything at all.

  Learning English in a public school in New York at age eleven, he quickly developed a Bronx accent, so at high school age his parents sent him off to a prep school in Pennsylvania, resulting in speech flavored with a certain lilt and softness, suggesting his German and French ancestry, flavored with elegant soft “r’s” affected by “Up-the-Hudson” New Yorkers.

  He learned French from his father and German from his grandmother (who died before they left Cuba), Italian from frequent forays to the Metropolitan Opera with his parents, and more recently. All his parents’ close friends were Cuban,  so Spanish was spoken in their  home. In his teens and twenties, most of his friends, however, were native New Yorkers with varying ancestries. I was to learn the only thing he hated in people was ignorance—racial prejudices simply did not exist.

  Now and then Frank would reveal that English was indeed his second language. In Hollywood, attempting to describe a hot, young mechanic working on his Plymouth who had a hare lip, he said, “You know, the guy with the rabbit lip.”

  Unhappily for him, I was in a frenzy to get work as an actor, and he reluctantly agreed; reluctantly, he’d hang on for awhile, and a good thing it was. In that year, he would  begin his long career as photographer, eventually in New York photographing operas in performance, including the return of Maria Callas in 1965 in “Tosca,” building an archive of hundreds of slides, and a portrait of Birgit Nielson on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

  My need of portfolio gets him started with his small, 35mm, rapid-exposure camera snapping at me. When Joe Mell sees the results, it doesn’t stir much interest for me at Mishkin Agency, but Joe introduces Frank to other agencies.

  “The Hasty Heart” closes. Attention turns to Equity Library Theatre West productions at the recreation center in Beverly Hills. Frank meets Mary Adams—an instant friendship develops, lasting well into the 1970s. Like Mary, most members of ELT-W’s board are working actors—Whit Bissell, who plays right-wing Senator in “Seven Days in May,” Howard Caine, actor from New York where he appeared as reluctant senator from New York in “1976” in both musical and film. Our productions launch or renew film and television careers for several actors: Greg Morris in our production of “Lost in the Stars,”  Harold Gould in “Mad Woman of Chaillot,” Howard Caine in “Charley’s Aunt,” and “Hamlet.”

  “First Lady” begins the season. Mary Adams suggest Frank photograph the production in performance. He sells 8 x 10 glossies to Ann Doran who stars as “First Lady.” Ann is a Hollywood institution—one-time president of Screen Actors Guild with endless screen credits—in Capra films., “You Can’t Take it With You,” “Meet John Doe,” and James Dean’s mother in “Rebel without a Cause.”

  So, a new found lover is participating fully in my life! Quickly acquainting himself with many of the soon-to-become famous actors in our E.L.T.-West productions.

  Charles “Chuck” Gerhardt comes to town as recording engineer for RCA’s original Broadway cast recording of “Oliver.” Gerhardt is Frank’s New York friend, first “met” as collectors of old Mengelberg-at-Concertgebouw recordings, connecting through an add in Saturday Review. Chuck is about to give my own music education a boost. He and Frank exchange their passions, it seems for hours—their friend Bob Benson in Baltimore who spins the not too popular Anton Bruckner symphonies on his late-night FM program, . . . music from films—one of Chuck’s greatest passions.

  Chuck is heavy-set—Germanic look—and high roller, loves eating at expensive restaurants, taking us to dinner at the Mediterranea on LaCienega Boulevard’s restaurant row. I knew little about Gerhardt at the time—except for his recent recordings for RCA and the Reader’s Digest series, a mere splash in an amazing career. I remember him most for his shared passion (with Frank and me) arranging and recording great scores from films with an orchestra in London—Chuck was an inveterate Anglophile.

  Several years later in New York, his friendship with Frank disintegrated. When I last saw him there in 1974, he lived with a tall, willowy  English “house mate” (Chuck never came out of the closet). Frank and Chuck had come close to blows, verbally, once too often, and hadn’t Chuck lived with Toscanini whose performances Frank more than once denigrated? Chuck worshiped him. Further, when the new Metropolitan Opera House opened in Lincoln Center in 1966, Chuck insisted the acoustics worked only because they used microphones—not at all true. Frank praised the new Met’s acoustics—“wood and plaster” he said (just the same as their beloved Concertgebouw), and he was right—the ceiling was poured plaster, a golden swirl high above, wood paneling on the walls.

  When we arrived in New York in 1963, Chuck became outright jealous of my friendship with Frank. How then did I end up playing bridge with him and his new English “house mate” in New York in 1972? That’s another story.

  Financially, I’m not doing so well, succeeding to a bankruptcy. Frank buys me a new pair of shoes. Mrs. Storm doesn’t approve of “roommates” so we move to an apartment on Normandy Avenue near Echo Park in what might be described as “east” Hollywood. Our post-war, undistinguished building is on a street graced mostly with old-style wood-framed, gabled houses with shaded front porches. With Lollipop and Daiquiri in Frank’s 1957 Plymouth, we begin touring the southland—the mission at San Juan Capistrano, hills luxuriously green after the heavy rains, orange and avocado groves  nestle in the valleys,  rows of eucalyptus trees protecting them from the devil winds

  Venturing north we visit Hearst’s Castle at San Simeon with side trips to Solvang, a quaint Dutch town, and nearby Santa Inez Mission, and the mission at Santa Barbara.

  At Hearst’s Castle, “get-to-the-truth of it” Frank bluntly asks the Forestry service tour guide as we stand in front of one of cottages, “Is this the cottage Hearst built for  Marion Davies?” (Hearst’s actress in-the-closet mistress). No response from the shocked tour guide. He  must tolerate us for the rest of the tour, but he avoids answering.

  Joe Mell spirits us off to Las Vegas in his new Thunderbird. He loves to gamble. It’s a one-day trip, off early in the morning, back late. I don’t like Las Vegas, all those people with eyes staring into slot machines, mechanically pulling the levers, or tense faces at the tables. At the Tropicana I join the immigrants by cranking slot machines, and win thirty dollars—quitting at once, I’m happy to report.

  My not-so-well connected agent who wants me to go to Italy to make “Italian Western and so I should build up my abs and send me a picture with bare chest,” gets me cast as Jody the Cop in an episode of “My Three Sons.”

  Early make-up call at Desilu Studios on Gower (formerly RKO studios where Citizen Kane was filmed), part of the of the Paramount complex running for several blocks along Melrose Avenue. I’m told scenes with series star, Fred MacMurray, and his sidekick, William Frawley, are filmed at the beginning of the season, so not to expect to see either one of them. No matter, we’re filming this day on location alongside a reservoir in Benedict Canyon.

  The episode is directed  by Richard Whorf, and actor I’d seen on stage at the Biltmore Theatre, when in high school, in a touring company of “There Shall be No Night.” He calls our attention to an impressive mansion on a hillside above. “That’s the house that Ben Hur built,” he says. (Owner, Charlton Heston.)

  The story line for this episode: one of the “three sons” dreams up a hoax with his fraternity brothers after a heavy rain in the canyons, to take the hippopotamus foot used as umbrella rack in the fraternity house to the reservoir and make tracks around it leading back into the water. I’ve got one line to deliver, approaching the investigating sergeant, played by a rough looking actor newly in town from New York, I speak:

  “I’ve been all  around the reservoir, Sergeant. It may have gone in, but it never came out!”

  One take—no close up. A few weeks later, watching it with Frank, sitting in his arms in front our miniscule black and white TV, my heart is thumping. Might as well have been looking at me on a postage stamp. Some thirty years later, the episode shows up on Nick-at-Night on my 31 inch color TV—and there I am, clear, present and accountable without need of close-up, a bit stiff in the jaw, delivering my historic one line. A few weeks later after seeing this on Nick-at-Night, I get a residual check for $40.

  Undaunted, my agent gets me a gig on ABC television which leads to membership in American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), so now I’m covered for the big three, AFTRA, Actors Equity, and Screen Actors Guild.

  “A Day in Court.” Troubled husband with pregnant wife. Husband’s sister has tried to burn down their house. It’s one of the  most frightening experiences ever known to date in theatre, or film. Scripts are handed out a week ahead of time so I have a chance to memorize my lines, which turns out to be an exercise in futility.

  It’s an afternoon show, taped at the ABC TV studios at Talmadge in the Los Feliz area prior to broadcast. The call is early morning. Around the rehearsal table, we’re joined by a genuine (woman) social worker as advisor who will appear on the show. The woman who plays my wife is really pregnant. We read through the memorized script. The director and producer (both male) look furtively at the social  worker.

  “Well of course,” she says, “it wouldn’t be like this at all,” proceeding to rewrite the script before our wide eyes and open mouths, and  my thumping heart. Expecting we’ll have another read-through, we’re in for a shock. Abruptly the producer says, “We’ll break for lunch. Be back for makeup in an hour and we’ll tape the show.” (Well, at least it’s taped. If we goof we can do it again, can’t we? Some comfort.)

  And suddenly, here I am, red light in my face for close up—this is not a rehearsal! Setting is not in a court, but around a conference table. I  take a deep breath, telling myself it’s just a first night on stage before making an entrance—curtain has risen, or lights up—the red eye of the camera like a monster right on my face!

  We sail  through the show without a single flub, break to watch the tape, and the director says, “Perfect, we’ll go with it.” What a relief. (Taking deep breaths has won the day.)

  We move again, from Normandy Avenue to DeLongpre, just off Hyperion in Silver Lake, into the bottom floor of a comfortable frame house which Jerry Katz and his now more or less steady lover from Chile have bought to refurbish. DeLongpre is a narrow street steeply rising at the corner of Hyperion into the hills. The backyard of the house is ours exclusively. A young couple lives above us, the wife tricking with gas repair men and any other service delivery man she can entice into the nest. We can hear them humping through our ceiling. Her husband is a mailman, and we assume totally in the dark about his wife’s daytime escapades.

  She can also hear us humping, so possibly believing we’ve got the goods on her cheating, will try to check mate us. (Needless to say we never would’ve squealed on her.) She calls the vice squad, two plainclothes men arriving when we’re not at home, reported to us by our friendly neighbors who have lost a son in the war. They have become quite fond of us. Quizzed by the vice squad, they gives us A-plus – “They’re very nice boys—but we’re not so sure of the woman upstairs.”

  Our brief and happy stay on DeLongpre – we love Silver Lake! – is not spoiled, however. The slut upstairs makes her report only a few days before we’re off to New York.

  Close to us, Casita del Campo has opened, March 17, 1962. Marta, our favored waitress will work there for the next twenty-five years, retiring in 1987 and I will be there with a new lover to celebrate it with Gloria who has replaced her.

  We believe the name of the restaurant, translated, is “Little House in the Country,” but learn that it’s the owner, Rudy del Campo’s last name. He’s a dancer who has appeared in the chorus of the move “Westside Story.”

  Lollipop is pregnant! Frank breeds her at a small kennel on Sepulveda Boulevard in West Los Angeles, run by a large, frayed, dusty woman, herself looking like a poodle. Meanwhile, sister Alice, CPA and office manager at Touche, Ross, Bailey and Smart in the “Miracle Mile” district on Wilshire Boulevard, has hired Frank and me as temporary proof readers. On the big day, expecting Lollipop to give birth at any moment, Frank stays home and calls around noon, breathless.

  “She’s had her first puppy and I wasn’t in time—she lost it! Here comes another one—gotta go!” Arriving home too late for  the big event, I find Lollipop snug in her nest feeding six tiny, curly, black-haired pups, informed by Frank that all poodles are born with black curly hair looking like lambs wool. As they grow, the pups transform into a variety of colors from apricot to gray, to brown, or mixed—called “party” poodles.

  A few weeks later—Mary Adams comes to the rescue! Recently Frank has created a portfolio for her to help with her search for work in commercials. She takes charge, finding homes for five of Lollipop’s brood—we give the last of the litter to June, my brother’s wife.

  The Cuban Missile Crisis settles it for Frank—he  must return to New York, if for nothing else, to be with his parents. I will go with him. Relative to this, Joyce Simmons from “The Hasty Heart” has introduced me to Wally Matthews, a not-so-tall, dark fellow from New York, who lives in an old, Hollywood style white stucco on Beachwood Drive, not quite in the Hollywood hills. He’s formed a Shakespeare study class which I join. Wally doesn’t think much of my talent. Frank says, “To hell with Wally Matthews, I’ll coach you! You’ve got to develop your voice and depend on it just as Callas does. I’ll show you.”

  And so he does, in three soliloquies, Hamlet’s “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” Marc Anthony’s “Cry Havoc” over Caesar’s bloodied body, and “Oh, that this too solid flesh would melt.” The upshot of this is, when the decision is made to return to New York, I call Joseph Papp’s “Shakespeare in the Park” and get an audition!

  I’m voted President of Equity Library Theatre West. We have nailed non-profit corporation status. Meetings are stormy, arguing about plays we will or will  not produce. Egos collide, but we succeed. The season is varied, and memorable.

  In what would seem a prelude to our return to New York, E.L.T.-West produces the musical “Lost in the Stars,” music by Kurt Weil, a bold venture with an all-black cast; bold, and a bit daring since we performed at the Beverly Hills Recreation center—more than once some cast members would complain they’d been harassed traveling into this white domain from the ghettos of Watts and South Central L.A.

  I’m cast as Arthur, the young South African, Arthur Jarvis, opposed to apartheid. Standing on the railroad platform in Johannesburg, I shake hands with an old friend, Reverend Kumalo. My father berates me for making such a display in public with a black man, and I reply, “These are my friends . . .” I almost lost it, every one of the seven performances, choking up, as I do now, recalling that moment which lingers in my heart and mind to this day. (I recalled the moment for my friend Cody who is married to a black woman from Comoros, at lunch recently, and couldn’t speak the  line.)

  Also in the play I have the distinction of being accidentally killed by Greg Morris, Absalom, one of Kumalo’s sons, in an aborted robbery which sets the tragedy in  motion. The cast also includes Brock Peters, appearing later in many films including “Star Trek IV, the Voyage Home.”

  Frank is thrilled by Ketty Lester’s voice. In 1962, Ketty is known for her hit single, “Love Letters.” “She has a miraculous way of changing gears,” Frank says, “like Maria Callas.” He tells her so. In New York we will dine with Ketty and her Italian husband. At the time she’s appearing in an off-Broadway production of “Cabin in the Sky” for which she will receive the 1964 Theatre World Award—and go on to make her mark in music with top of the chart recordings.

  My last hurrah in Hollywood is celebrated with fellow actors and the venerable Ralph Bellamy, now President of Actors Equity Association, an actor whose career began in the 1930s, followed by a long, distinguished career in theatre and film. He chairs all A.E.A. meetings in New York, as well as “out-of town”—this one at a hall close to Hollywood and Highland. I’m in rehearsal for a religious TV special at NBC’s Burbank Studios—a starring role, but who’s going to watch it at three o’clock on a hot “good  beach day” on Sunday afternoon?

  Bellamy says from the podium, “Dana, our President of Equity Library Theatre West, will make his report at this time, earlier than in the agenda, so he can get to a rehearsal at NBC.”

  So, I exit from “the business” in Hollywood in good company, and great PR, right? Wrong, but remembered with a smile.

  Four a.m., March 31, 1963. Clear, dark morning in Silver Lake. A blue, somewhat bedraggled 1957 Plymouth pulls out onto Hyperion, turns south on its way to the Hollywood Freeway, loaded with clothes, books, recordings, reel-to-reel tape recorder, bedding, two poodles named Lollipop and Daiquiri, with their two “Daddys,” the Plymouth’s muffler almost scraping pavement because of its heavy burden. I’m in the driver’s seat.

  Mary Adams has provided apples, dried fruit, dates, bread and cheese, but of course we are prepared to make stops every four hundred miles or so to find good motels with good restaurants along the way. Several hours later as the sun rises over the California desert, we’re munching on dried figs, making our way through black cinder cones and barren crags along Route 66 toward Needles and points east.

  Frank is reminded of a quote out of the book, “The Natives are Restless!” “Goodbye, California, and your goddamned geraniums!”

Next – New York! New York!