Elvis, Sherlock & Me

By Michael A. Hoey

Michael A. Hoey is the son of British actor Dennis Hoey, best remembered for his portrayal of Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard in the Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone. A combination memoir and history of the film business covering the decades from the 40's through the present. Here is an examination of classic Hollywood and such iconic studio bosses as Jack L. Warner, Darryl Zanuck and Walt Disney, plus memorable actors and directors, including John Ford, Fred Zinneman, George Cukor and Elvis Presley, Charlton Heston, Basil Rathbone, Angela Landsbury and Jane Wyman. Filled with the personal recollections of someone who lived it, it is also the story of a father and son, their careers and their turbulent relationship. Interwoven into these stories are numerous historical episodes about Hollywood, Broadway and Television.

"It's a look at Hollywood from the inside ... a fascinating glimpse at some of the industry's heavy hitters, as told by someone who was there in the trenches -- right from boyhood!" - Tom Weaver

• Language: English
• Publisher: BearManor Media
• Release date: Aug 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370058242

Book preview

Elvis, Sherlock and Me: How I Survived Growing Up in Hollywood

© 2012 Michael A. Hoey. All Rights Reserved.

BIG YELLOW TAXI Words and Music by Joni Mitchell © 1970 (Renewed) CRAZY CROW MUSIC All Rights Administered by SONY/ATV MUSIC PUBLISHING 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203 All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This version of the book may be slightly abridged from the print version.

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Fade In: Ext. — London — Establishing Shot — 1934

Ext. Montage — New York And Florida — 1940

Ext. Beverly Hills — Establishing Shot — 1940

Insert — Family Album — 1943

Establishing Shot — Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson — Day

Ext. Las Vegas — Vintage — 1947

Reverse Angle — Beverly Hills High School — Day

Angle on Speeding 1940 Black Ford Coupe — Night

Establishing Shot — Laguna Summer Theatre — 1951

Close Shot — Moviola — Day

Ext. Wedding Chapel — 1954 — Day

Two Shot — Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney — Day

Split Screen — Two Dennis Hoeys — Day

Various Angles — Warner Bros. Studios — Day

Insert Map (Medellin, Colombia) — Day

Int. Editing Room — Day

Extreme Close Up — Jack Warner — Day

Ext. Palm Springs — Panoramic View — 1963 — Day

Montage — Dark Days — Elvis #1 — Monstrous Trees

Establishing Shot — MGM Studios — Norman Taurog, Joe Pasternak, And Douglas Laurence — 1967 — Day

Group Shot — Katy Jurado — Elvis Presley — Rudy Vallee

Split Screen — Robert Blake — Burlesque Comics — Night

Musical Montage — Blood, Sweat & Tears — Bob Hope — Day

Traveling Shot — Tahiti to Toronto — Day

Various Angles — Ralph Edwards — Soupy Sales and the Possessed

Establishing Shot — Blinn/Thorpe Productions — 1977

Flashback — Silent Movies — Flash Forward — Fame

Establishing Shot — Pasadena Civic Auditorium — Emmy Awards — 1982

Series Of Shots — Producer’s Chair — Director’s Chair — Angela Lansbury — Day

Close Up — Jane Wyman

Ext. Writers Guild Building — Picket Signs — Day

Close Shot — Dancing Writers and Charlton Heston

Another Angle — London and Hollywood — Day

To Katie for her love and support

and

James Buchanan, a fellow writer whose

encouragement helped me to stay the course.

Fade In:

Ext. — London — Establishing Shot — 1934

I suppose you could say that I was born into show business; a tired old cliché I know, and I’ll try not to resort to any more of them if I can help it. However, the fact of the matter is, I am the son of an actor, grew up in the Hollywood of the forties, went to school with the sons and daughters of actors, directors and producers and even a few future movie stars themselves. I started out to become an actor myself, but quickly changed my mind when I realized that I would never be the boy next-door type that the casting directors were looking for. I managed to work my way up through the editing departments at several of the major studios and in due course, even before I officially became an editor, was promoted to producer. However, that’s a story for later. I eventually became a screenwriter in the sixties and worked on the screenplays for six Elvis Presley movies and several television series. I did eventually return to editing and even won some awards for my work, and finally, I achieved my original goal of becoming a director and found it to be just as exciting and challenging as I always knew it would be. I love the movies; for me it was always the movies and never the cinema and, as was the case for so many others, it was my primary source of excitement and escape. I’ve spent hour after wonderful hour in darkened theaters and screening rooms experiencing vicariously the adventures, emotions, and achievements of countless fascinating and remarkable individuals flashing across the screen at 24 frames per second, and I remain eternally grateful to all of the talented people who made those moments possible.

My father was what was known in the movie business as a character actor. Which meant that he was part of that extraordinary group of men and women whose faces you recognize, but whose names you seldom recall. You might however remember his name if you’ve ever found yourself surfing one of the movie channels late at night and happened to log onto one of those old black and white Sherlock Holmes’ mystery films. You know the ones with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce playing the intrepid detective and his bumbling friend, Dr. Watson? If you had, then you would have seen my father, Dennis Hoey. He played the slightly inept, but affable Scot land Yard Inspector Lestrade and appeared in six of the twelve Holmes’ films produced by Univer sal Pictures during the early to mid forties. This role has made him somewhat of a celebrity over the years, particularly since the entire collection has been released as DVD packages, and recently his name was even part of a Los Angeles Times’ crossword puzzle. My father originally intended to enter the teaching profession after he gradu ated from Brighton College, although he actually began a career as a stockbroker before discovering his singing talents performing for the troops during World War I. Soon he was appearing on the London stage in musicals and as a concert singer. He also appeared in a number of British films during the thirties, as well as on the Broadway stage and in many Hollywood films of the forties and fifties. All in all, he made seventy films in the United States and Britain.

I was born in September of 1934 in London, England. At Miss Moore’s Nursing Home, 53 Barrowgate Road to be precise, a lovely tree-lined street in the London suburb of Chiswick. Today, the building houses a children’s crèche or nursery school, and the street looks much the same, even though the busy M4 motorway now cuts through Chiswick on its way to Heathrow Airport. In 1934 however, things were much quieter since the only London airport was in Croydon. I could rapturously describe London at the time as enjoying a warm Indian summer with the trees bursting with golden boughs, but quite obviously I was too young to notice such things, and it was probably raining anyway. However, according to the baby book that my mother diligently kept, I should thank a Doctor Salmond and a Nurse Topham for a safe delivery. My father was a tall, moderately good-looking actor, the eldest son of a Jewish hotelkeeper on Brighton’s seashore. My mother, whose maiden name was Josephine Marta Ricca, but whom everyone called Jo, was a blue-eyed dark haired young woman of twenty-five, with an aquiline nose and a lovely smile.

In later years she would bleach her hair blond, which only made her more attractive. My mother was born in London in 1907, her Italian-Catholic family having emigrated from Italy’s Lake District, specifically a small village on the shores of Lake Orta, so that her father could become head chef at one of London’s swankier hotels. By the time of my arrival, Francesco Ricca, my maternal grandfather, was successfully running his own restaurant, Cavour, in Mayfair. My father, having been born in 1893, was 41 at the time of my birth, certainly not too young to be having his first child, but then he never was one to rush into things. I never really knew either of my grandfathers, who had both remained in England when we immigrated to the United States in 1937, but as I grew older, I sometimes felt that the man who lived in our house was more my grandfather than my father. By September of 1934, my father’s career on the London stage was well established. He had made his first stage appearance in 1919 at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in Shanghai and quickly followed that up by portraying Arif Bey in the musical Katinka at the Shaftsbury. He initiated the roll of Ali Ben Ali in the London production of The Desert Song, which ran for 432 performances at the Drury Lane in the late twenties, traveled to America to costar on Broadway in two more musical operettas, Hassan, in which he had the dubious distinction of appearing in blackface and, during the fall season of 1926, in Katja, in which he had a more prominent role and enjoyed a very respectful run of 112 performances at the 44th Street Theatre. He also toured in England, playing Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

He appeared in his only silent film called Tip Toes in 1927 for British filmmaker Herbert Wilcox that starred Dorothy Gish and Will Rogers. In 1933, he was signed to play the lead in a new film, McClusky the Sea Rover, and left for Tripoli to begin filming. At that time, the Italians controlled Tripoli, and a disagreement with the Italian authorities regarding the use of firearms being given to the Bedouin tribesmen who were to appear as extras forced the film’s cancellation. Within weeks of returning to England, he was signed for a featured role in Rex Ingram’s Baroud.

Filmed on location in Morocco, with interiors at the Studios de la Victorine in Nice in the South of France, the same studio where Francois Truffaut would film Day for Night forty years later, Baroud was the famous silent film director’s only talkie and would unfortunately turn out to be his final film. Ingram wrote, directed and produced with his wife, the actress Alice Terry, and played a role in the film for the first time since he had given up acting to become a director in 1915. My father played Captain Sabry of the French Foreign Legion and, judging from a photograph taken of him astride a horse, he looked very dashing in his uniform. This was also the year that he married my mother, and another photograph, taken of the two of them on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, suggests that perhaps the two events coincided. The years 1930 to 1936 were known as the quota years in the British film industry, which meant that for every American film that played in movie theatres, British film exhibitors had to devote a certain percentage of screen time to British films. So American studios formed British subsidiaries and began producing their own Quota films in England. Pictures were being rushed out at such a breakneck pace that it was a boon time for British actors. By 1934 my father had appeared in fourteen British films along side such stars as Anna May Wong, in Chu Chin Chow, and John Gielgud, Jesse Mathews, Jack Hawkins and Edmond Gwenn in The Good Companions, which was Victor Saville’s film musical taken from J.B. Priestley’s hugely successful novel about a theatrical group touring the provinces. Other performers with whom he appeared were Cedric Hardwicke, Conrad Veidt, Stanley Holloway, the future Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Francis L. Sullivan and two of the cinema’s top horror icons, Tod Slaughter in The Murder in the Red Barn and Bela Lugosi in The Mystery of the Marie Celeste.

Four of his films were musical comedies produced and directed by the former British vaudevillian, Lupino Lane, who was famous in his day for his athletic ability and for being the master of the pratfall. Lupino Lane, who was also my godfather, was the cousin of actor, Stanley Lupino, who was in turn movie star Ida Lupino’s father.

In Facing the Music, another film starring Stanley Lupino, my father performed an aria from Gounod’s Faust. That September, as I was making my initial appearance, my father was starring at the Prince’s Theatre in a revival of Sir Edward German’s light opera, Merrie England. Because of his celebrity I even managed to have a small article in the London Times acknowledging my arrival, along with a two-column photograph of my proud father and mother.

My mother, I should add, was my father’s second wife, but not his last by a long shot. They make a handsome couple in the photograph, standing in front of Miss Moore’s Nursing Home. That’s me in the middle, the white bundle in their arms. You’ll notice that the caption mentions my father by name, as well as the play he was then appearing in, but my mother is forced to take second billing as his wife. This was something I had to learn to accept throughout my career; actors always were mentioned in the newspapers and the rest of us had to make do with anonymity. Which was fine except that in this case it wasn’t my father’s real name, it was his stage name. His real name was Samuel David Hyams, but in the London of the early thirties, as in New York and Hollywood, Jewish actors found it expedient to anglicize their names. Although Anti-Semitism was publicly decried, it was the time of the KKK, Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith and restricted restaurants and hotels in the United States, and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists Party with its 50,000 members marching in black shirts and shouting Anti Semitic slogans on London streets. Adolph Hitler had come to power in 1933 and decreed Anti-Semitism an official government policy for the German people, so there was a significant sense of self-preservation as well as commercialism in any decision to change one’s name. Although the name Hoey had a diverse pedigree, including a well-known Music Hall actress of the early 20th century named Iris Hoey and the controversial former Prime Minister of Ireland, who spelled his name in the original manner of Haughey and whose career was marked by accusations of corruption, it still pained me to hear the number of ways people could find to mispronounce it. Director Norman Taurog’s driver, Leon, insisted on calling me Mr. Holy until even Norman began to call me that in jest. The favorite variation was of course Hooey and to this day a printed reference to a lot of hooey still makes me cringe.

Like most actors on the British stage, my father had learned his craft by appearing in many of the Bard’s plays. For several seasons, he was a member of Sydney W. Carroll’s Shakespearean troupe and in 1931, he had toured the provinces in Sir Godfrey Tearle’s production of Hamlet. During a special Command Performance at London’s Theater Royal in Haymarket, the actor portraying Hamlet became ill, forcing Tearle to take over the role, and my father to take Tearle’s place as Horatio. Earlier in the summer of 1934, my father had appeared in repertory at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park in several Shakespearian plays including Romeo and Juliet and The Comedy of Errors. Interestingly enough our namesake Iris Hoey was in the company, and I have often wondered how she might have reacted to my father’s purloining of her family’s name. At this point the family, now officially identified as Hoey, had settled into a roomy flat in Chiswick, at 83 Sutton Court Road, just around the corner from the Nursing Home where I was born, and Daddy went off to earn his living in the movies. In fact, a short time later, he went off to Queensland, Australia to make Uncivilised, a film that probably set back the Australian film industry forty years, even though Paul Hogan insists it was the inspiration for his Crocodile Dundee.

My father played Mara the White Chief — and the plot, well let me quote from an anonymous film buff who was kind enough to describe the plot on the Internet Movie Data Base: A white authoress, looking for a story in the outback, is kidnapped by an Afghan slaver, betrothed to a white jungle man, and menaced by a jealous half-caste rival, a hostile witch-doctor, his crazed son, and opium smugglers. What he or she forgot to mention was that in addition to all of the above, my father also sang a few original songs that were meant to be native mating calls or some such thing. It’s interesting to note that the writer, director, producer of Uncivilised was a man named Charles Chauvel who, with his wife, Elsa, had made an earlier film called In the Wake of the Bounty, which launched the career of a young Errol Flynn. Obviously, playing playing Fletcher Christian was a better career choice than Mara, the White Chief as this was in fact the last time my father would play a romantic lead in films. From that point on, with one notable exception, he would concentrate on creating some very memorable character roles on the Broadway and London stage and in Hollywood.

I have a few fragmented memories of England and a few old photographs that tell me of other moments which I don’t actually remember, but which I like to pretend that I do. Particularly a birthday party, mine I think, because I’m sitting on a marvelous hobbyhorse surrounded by the progeny of a lot of British movie stars and even some future stars themselves, including Sir Cedric Hardwicke’s son, Edward, who would also become an actor and many years later play Dr. Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes on British television. Also the future actress Sally Ann Howes, who would star opposite Dick Van Dyke in the film musical of Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and would also have her moment with Conan Doyle’s famous detective in an ABC television production of The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1972.

Judging from the broad smile on my face, I seem to be having a marvelous time; more thanks to the horse than my illustrious companions, I’m sure. In many of the other photos, I’m sitting next to or on the lap of a young woman in front of our flat on Sutton Court Road. Her name was Violet Miller, but I knew her as Nanny. She joined us a month after I was born and she became my constant companion throughout the years in London and New York and even in California, until shortly after my seventh birthday when my father correctly decided that I was too old to have a nursemaid taking care of me. I’d been of the same opinion for well over a year and had argued the point, along with a desperate plea to burn all of my short pants and seersucker blazers. From another of the old photos I can see that I had a rather snazzy baby carriage, or as they were known in those days, a pram. It even had white-walled tires and elaborate springs on the chassis. I’m sure I never felt the slightest bump in the road as we strolled along Sutton Park Road, which later had the unfortunate distinction of being the target for Hitler’s very first V2 Bomb in September of 1944. I do remember going to Brighton with Nanny and my mother and playing on the beach. There was no sand, only pebbles and rocks, which made it very uncomfortable for the feet. I’ve been told that that didn’t stop me from heading straight into the waves and practically drowning. What I do remember is an unfortunate incident involving some involuntary activity with my bowels, and crying as I was led up the beach with a rather full bathing suit. I was placed in a bathtub, hosed off rather unceremoniously, and put to bed without tea. As far as I know I never repeated that particular performance, but it most certainly didn’t affect my love of the ocean, which has continued to grow though the years.

Returning from his sojourn in the Outback, my father was quickly signed to appear in another musical, this time a revival of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, opposite Isabel Jeans, an attractive British actress who would develop into an elegant character actress in Hollywood films, and would best be remembered as Gigi’s Aunt Alicia in the enchanting film musical by Learner and Lowe directed by Vincente Minnelli. My parents gifted me with a large car on my second birthday to replace my pram and hobbyhorse and according to my mother’s entry in the baby book, I was terribly thrilled with it, even though my feet couldn’t yet reach the pedals. The following month my father was signed to appear in a new play to be produced by J.J. and Lee Schubert on Broadway. He sailed off to America with high expectations for his first appearance on Broadway since 1926. Meanwhile, I managed to go into hospital to have my tonsils removed and develop an intense hatred of chocolate ice cream. I couldn’t have been more than two years old, but still I have this vivid memory of a white walled room, an enameled cot with railings high enough to keep me safely caged, and being constantly fed chocolate ice cream from a paper cup for days on end. It was intended to ease my anguished throat, but it took me years to get over my distaste for that particular flavor. Unfortunately the play that my father had traveled to America to appear in, Green Waters, opened and closed in five days. It almost closed the theater as well, but the Theatre Masque, as it was called at the time, had one more production to present before it permanently darkened. Interestingly enough, the final play was titled, The Holmes’s of Baker Street, which managed to scratch out a run of fifty-three performances before the Depression bankrupt the Chanin Brothers, who owned the theater. Having been signed by a theatrical agent, who promised he could get him plenty of work on radio, my father decided to remain in New York and see what this new agent could do for him. Almost immediately, he was rushing from studio to studio, doing a soap opera in the morning and dramatic shows such as the U.S. Steel Hour in the evenings. Radio soaps were growing more and more popular in the United States, serving as an escape for housewives from the distress of the Depression. Pretty Kitty Kelly was not quite as popular as One Man’s Family or Our Gal Sunday, but like the other fifteen minute radio shows, it held its female audience enthralled every weekday morning from 10:00 to 10:15 AM, EST as they listened to the adventures of the young lass recently arrived from Ireland and living with her uncle and aunt in New York City. My father played the role of Mr. Welby, Kitty’s uncle. He also frequently appeared on the dramatic anthology series, Colombia Workshop, and had a reoccurring role on the original radio production of Adventures of Ellery Queen, starring Hugh Marlowe, who would later play the recalcitrant B17 pilot opposite Gregory Peck in Twelve O’Clock High, as well as Lloyd Richards, the naïve playwright and Celeste Holm’s wandering husband in the classic All About Eve. Marlowe would eventually return to the Ellery Queen character in an early television series in 1954. My father had a cousin, Barry Hyams, who was living in New York City at the time. Barry’s wife was the daughter of the famous operatic impresario Sol Hurok, whose life would be made into a forgettable movie entitled, Tonight We Sing, with Anne Bancroft and David Wayne. They were the parents of director Peter Hyams and producer, Nessa Hyams, and Barry was instrumental in my father meeting Herb Meadow, who would become his best friend. Herb, who had grown up in Brooklyn, once told me it was his love of the theater that saved him from ending up in prison like many of the other kids in his neighborhood. He’d begun his professional career as a radio announcer at WMIL in Brooklyn and while performing there sold his first literary effort, three one-act playlets to the Paine Publishing Company. Herb was working as a writer for the WJZ Radio Guild when he and my father decided to share expenses and a flat in Soho. My father and Herb had a tempestuous relationship. As Herb would later describe it, their relationship was one part affection and one part aggravation. Both highly opinionated men with strong tempers, they could never begin a discussion without it ending up in a shouting match. One of them would make a comment that the other would instantly attack, accusing his opponent of faulty logic, an indefensible opinion, or sometimes merely the manner in which he had phrased his statement. In spite of this, they remained close friends until the day my father died, and over the years, Herb became like a second father to me.

In December of 1936, the Theatre Guild signed my father to the role of Edward Rochester opposite Katherine Hepburn’s Jane Eyre. Hepburn, whose film career was on the skids after having been named Box Office Poison by the American movie exhibitors, was recovering from a disastrous love affair with John Ford and had retreated to her home in Connecticut. She supposedly planned to tour with Jane Eyre until she had built up her confidence enough to bring the play back to Broadway. The idea of starring on Broadway opposite Hepburn was a tremendous inducement for my father to give up his lucrative career in radio and spend the next few months appearing in theaters all over the country.

My mother joined him for a period, while Nanny and I remained in London with my mother’s parents, and it was during their stay in Chicago that they saw a new suitor arrive on the scene. A tall, taciturn man, who favored wearing a Stetson pulled down over his eyes, Howard Hughes had flown his own plane east to continue wooing Miss Hepburn. My mother said that she often saw them huddled together in a quiet corner of some restaurant after the performance. As it turned out, Hepburn never intended to bring Jane Eyre to New York. She was merely buying time while her friend Philip Barry finished his play, The Philadelphia Story. Ironically, as my father’s hopes of starring as Rochester on Broadway faded away, Katherine Hepburn’s performance as Tracy Lord won her plaudits and would bring her back to Hollywood in a blaze of glory. Particularly after Hughes purchased the rights to The Philadelphia Story, giving them to Hepburn so that she could negotiate her own deal with MGM. Jane Eyre did finally make it to Broadway many years later, not once but twice. The first was an unsuccessful production in 1958, with a script adapted from Charlotte Bronte’s novel by the producer, A&P grocery heir, Huntington Hartford. The second was a far more successful endeavor, a musical version with a book by John Caird and music and lyrics by Paul Gordon, both of whom were nominated for Tony awards, as was the play for Best Musical of 2001. Wouldn’t my father have loved to have played Rochester in that production?

By the summer of 1937, my father had decided to make the move to America permanent. I don’t think this was a prescient choice on his part; the threat of war was still low on the horizon, but simply his feeling that opportunities were better for him in the United States. Whatever the reason it would safely remove us, two years before the firing would actually begin, from the peril that was soon to overwhelm all of Europe. Therefore, we were summoned to cross the pond and join him and on July 3rd, Nanny, my mother, and I took the boat train to the Liverpool docks to board the Cunard liner RMS Scythia. With the exception of the Queens, Mary and Elizabeth, all of the Cunard ships were given names that ended in …ia. In 1934, Cunard and White Star merged forming Cunard-White Star Limited, with a combined total of some twenty ships. Unfortunately, the advent of airplane travel ended the transatlantic liners and today Cunard has only three ships on the line, the QE2 and the Caronia, and the new Queen Mary II, which was launched in early 2004. The Scythia, was built by Vickers Ltd, and launched on March 23rd 1920. At 19,730 gross tons, and a length of 624ft, with one funnel, two masts, twin screw and a speed of 16 knots, she was one of Cunard-White Star’s smaller ships. Even so, there were still accommodations for 350-1st, 350-2nd and 1,500-3rd class passengers. During the war, she would be converted to a troopship and used on trooping duties until 1948 when she resumed commercial voyages. Mother, Nanny, and I shared one of the first class cabins and I had the run of the decks. They had brought my car on board and I would ride it at top speed around the Promenade Deck, much to the consternation of our fellow passengers. I was grounded however, when I almost managed to slip under the guardrail and into the ocean. My wheels were taken away and I had to content myself with running up and down the main staircase as fast as I could. I’m sure most of the other passengers wished I had succeeded in going under the railing. We were having breakfast when the ship docked in New York. I remember that the dining room suddenly became very dark as the sun was blocked out by the pilings of the pier. We rushed on deck to have our first view of America and New York Harbor and it was a thrilling sight, even if we were a bit late to get the full impact. Years later my second wife, Katie and I would stand on the deck of the QE2, feeling a sense of pride as we sailed past the Statue of Liberty, but on the day of my arrival in my new country we had missed all of this drama in favor of eggs and kippers, or whatever it was that was on the menu that morning. My father was there to gather us up and take us to our new home at 175 East 71st Street. Situated between Lexington and Third Avenues on the north side of the street, the three story, brownstone apartment was only a few short blocks from Central Park, and it was there that I would come to enjoy many an afternoon in the park near 74th street, sailing my model sailboat in the pond under the shadow of Hans Christian Anderson’s statue and visiting the animals in the Central Park Zoo. During the winter months I could take my sled over to the park and attack some of the hills. We, my father, mother and I, even had our pictures taken for a Sunday Rotogravure section of the New York Times one cold winter’s day.

I was too young to appreciate the holidays in London, but Christmas season in New York was a magical time, beginning with the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade down Central Park West to 34th Street, ending in Herald Square in front of Macy’s itself, with its magnificent windows filled with animated Christmas displays of electric trains and sugar plumb fairies. The helium filled balloons flying high above the marching bands was an unbelievable sight for a young child recently arrived in this great metropolis. And then there was that jolly little old elf himself, Santa Claus, riding on his reindeer drawn sleigh high atop a massive float. Even at a distance he didn’t quite look like an elf to me, which is probably why on our first face to face meeting I wasn’t too anxious to sit on his lap. However, once I learned that he was there to receive my Christmas gift requests our relationship improved significantly. Unfortunately, today the parade has been turned into one long NBC commercial for its television programs, filled with cast members promoting their shows and only brief glimpses of the balloons and the bands. Another delight for me in those days was to be taken to Rockefeller Center to see the massive Christmas tree and the skaters waltzing to amplified Christmas Carols on the outdoor rink in front of the reclining golden Prometheus statue.

On September 2, 1937, shortly after our arrival in Manhattan and just before my third birthday, my father opened on Broadway in the musical, Virginia. As a special birthday treat I was taken to the theater to see a matinee. Although the book was by Laurence Stallings, who had written What Price Glory? and Owen Davis who had Jezebel and Whoopee to his credit, and the music was by Arthur Schwartz of The Band Wagon fame, I’m afraid that the play enjoyed only a short run of eight weeks. All I can remember is the marvelous set where a square-rigged sailing vessel appeared in all its glory for the second act finale. My father played Sir Guy Carleton, one of the wealthy landowners in the Virginia Colony. Another member of the cast, portraying The Governor of the Colony, was Nigel Bruce, an old friend of my father’s who had already appeared with him in several British films and would of course go on to portray the wonderfully dithery Doctor Watson in the Sherlock Holmes’ films in Hollywood. I was told that I grew very excited when my father first appeared on the stage and announced to the entire audience that there stood my Daddy. The poor actors had to wait for the laughter to die down before they could continue with the performance. I’m sure my father secretly enjoyed being singled out of what was a huge cast, although, on second thought, he might not have appreciated my upstaging him. It was probably the only time in my life that I ever did. My father, having been born in the nineteenth century, was a true Victorian at heart. Spare the rod and spoil the child and all of that good old Dickensian stuff. He heartily believed that a child should be seen and not heard, but preferably not seen at all, particularly when he and my mother gave one of their frequent cocktail parties. Not that I ever expected to be a part of those wonderful gatherings they hosted at our brownstone in New York, or later at our home in Beverly Hills, but I did wish they weren’t quite so lively. I would lie in bed, listening to the clinking of their glasses, and try to imagine what all those glamorous people were discussing, and what would make them laugh so uproariously. In the morning I would sneak into the living room and examine the evidence, which mostly consisted of half-eaten canapés, half full glasses of whiskey and ashtrays full to overflowing with cigarette butts; many, as that old ballad described, with lipstick traces. To this day I can still conjure up in my memory the aroma of old cigarettes and whiskey that inhabited those rooms and it still fills me with a nostalgic yearning for that glamorous past.

Everybody talks about Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but my favorite animated feature was Gulliver’s Travels. Max Fleischer, who was much better remembered as the creator of Betty Boop and Popeye, produced this highly imaginative musical in glorious Technicolor. My mother took me to Radio City Music Hall to see Gulliver’s Travels when it first came out and I fell instantly in love with the Lilliputians and their blustery King Little. I was given a copy of the soundtrack album and I memorized my favorite song, It’s a Hap-Hap-Happy Day, Toodle-Oodle-Oodle-Oodle-Oodle Aye, singing it relentlessly until my parents, never ones to stifle my vocal ambitions, were ready to break the record over my head. To this day the song will suddenly come floating back into my consciousness and I’ll find myself humming a phrase or two. I probably didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, but this was my first exposure to the breathtaking magic of film; projecting its story telling through a lens and throwing its tangible forms of lights and shadows onto a silver screen.

On my fifth birthday I entered Christine Smith’s School on Manhattan’s East side. I apparently skipped Kindergarten and started right off in the first grade, which was fine with me as it didn’t seem terribly challenging. The greatest challenge for me was to lose my British accent as quickly as possible. My new classmates were teasing me unmercifully and since I apparently had a talent for mimicry, I hastily adopted the ‘Neew Yawk" intonations of my fellow schoolmates. Within a few weeks, much to my parents’ dismay, I was sounding like Leo Gorcey of the Dead End Kids. What I remember most favorably about that class was a giant sand table in which we constructed various historical and biblical scenes. My favorite was at Christmas when we constructed the stable with Joseph and Mary and the manger with the little Christ child and all of the animals. We also staged a Christmas Tableau in which I played one of the Three Wise Men in their search for the Magi, replete with crepe beard and flowing robes. Right then and there, I knew that show business was for me! As it turned out, I actually went on a few interviews during the following year. I had been entered in classes at The Professional Children’s School; a school founded in 1914 and specifically designed to accommodate the various interruptions which a life on the stage demands. Its distinguished alumni ran the gamut from Milton Berle and Ruby Keeler to Christopher Walkin and Uma Thurman. I would attend classes from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM at the school, located on three floors of a commercial building on Broadway and 61st street, and then go off to my meetings. One was to a photography studio, where I was interviewed and photographed from various angles and told to make funny expressions. My mind wasn’t really on my work, inasmuch as the studio was across the street from a riding stable that rented out horses to people who wanted to ride in Central Park’s bridal trails, and all I wanted to do was to go over there and look at the horses. The people from the ad agency kept asking me to give them more expressions and the photographer kept shooting, even though I was sure that I was repeating myself. I finally escaped and made my way to the stables, where I was allowed to give a carrot to one of the horses. Come to think of it, the horse got more out of it than I did. I was later told that my image was used as one of the models for the boy and girl cartoon twins in the Birdseye Foods’ new frozen vegetables ad campaign. What the heck if, as that farfetched legend has it, Humphrey Bogart could be the model for the Gerber baby, why not Birdseye and me? However, generally speaking the acting in the family was left to my father.

The summer of 1939 saw the opening of the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows and my father took me to see it. Long before Disneyland and Disney World and even Epcot Center, the World’s Fair was truly a Magical Kingdom. From the moment you laid eyes on its gleaming Perisphere and Trilon landmarks, to the final moment when you left, exhausted but filled with wonder, the sights and sounds were mind-boggling. I’ll never forget the

H. J. Heinz Building with its gleaming aluminum kettles filled with samples of all 57 varieties of soups and other foods. Or the General Motors Futurama Exhibit, displaying Norman Geddes’ prophetic design for the highways and cities of the future. My absolute favorite was the huge outdoor arena where they staged the Railroads of Progress Pageant, which was a dramatization of the history of the railroad in America with music, a huge cast of actors and all types of moving railroad stock from every period in railroad’s history. It began with covered wagons, then the DeWitt Clinton, an early steam engine, followed by two of the barrel stacked wood burners of the 1800’s and finishing with two giant modern locomotives approaching from opposite sides of the arena and meeting in the center for a grand finale. It was a memorable experience. Television made its live debut at the World’s Fair when NBC’s David Sarnoff set up a camera in front of the RCA Pavilion and broadcast interviews with visitors to the Fair over W2XBS. Later that same year my father starred in a live television production of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever over