Inventing Troy Donahue - The Making of a Movie Star

By Michael Gregg Michaud

In 1960, Troy Donahue won the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Male Newcomer. By 1962, he was a top box office star, received 7,000 fan letters a week, and won the Photoplay Magazine Award for the Most Popular Male Star. In 1971, he was penniless, drug-addicted, homeless and living in the bushes in Central Park.

This is the story of teen idol/actor Troy Donahue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BearManor Media
• Release date: Feb 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215595565

Book preview

Merle Johnson, Jr.

Chapter 1

I had a normal and happy childhood. I was never denied anything.

Merle Jr. age 2, Christmas 1937.

My dad was quite a fellow, Troy recalled. His name was Frederick Merle Johnson. He was the son of an English father and French mother. He was born in Quincy, Illinois, where my grandfather manufactured can openers and other household items. Because Dad was always interested in show business, however, he went from the University of Michigan to New York, where he was a protégé of the Barrymores for a while, then landed a job editing and writing copy for Paramount News.

Troy’s mother, Edith Frederickson, was Swedish. Her parents met and married in Sweden, then migrated to New York City. Edith’s nickname was Dede Too. She earned that moniker when she was a child for chasing after her older sisters saying Dede, too! Dede, too! We all called her Dede, Troy said.

My mother says the only reason I’m in show business is because she gave it up to have me! Troy joked. "In a sense, it’s true. Mother grew up in New York City, and went to work on the stage. She was the only non-Jewish member of the Yiddish Theater. She appeared in several plays and was offered a screen test by the time she applied to Dad for a job in an Off-Broadway play he was directing.

"She didn’t get the part, but she married the director instead. Then she gave up the stage in order to have a family. Dad and Mother combined their honeymoon with a Paramount News assignment in Paris. The return trip turned out to be memorable, too.

It was the maiden voyage of the Ile de France and the first few days out Mother thought she was suffering from sea-sickness. The ship doctor broke the news that she was expecting me. She was thrilled.

Dede recalled, I was so overjoyed that I felt wonderful for the rest of the way home!

Dede was nineteen years old when she gave birth to Troy at New York Hospital on January 27, 1936. He was a painful fortyeight-hour labor. I’m always late, Troy joked. His mother said that he looked like a Nordic cherub, chubby with pink cheeks, a crown of flaxen curls and blue, blue eyes. He was named Merle Johnson, Jr., after his father. At the time, Europe was on the brink of all-out war, and America was still struggling to recover from the Depression. But the Johnson family lived a privileged life, seemingly unaffected by most of the problems that plagued Americans then.

For the first six years of my life, Troy recalled, we lived in impressive, stone-faced apartments in the upper Fifties. Eventually, we moved to Central Park West overlooking the park. Later, Troy admitted taking his comfortable childhood for granted.

Troy was walking on his own when he was seven months old. I always had a shiner from bumping into things, he recalled. Dad used to say I looked as if Joe Louis had been working me over!

His father gave him a pair of roller skates for his first birthday. My picture of Troy at that age, his mother recalled, "was a pair of flying little white shoes – going away from me! Whenever he could, he ran from their apartment, down the hall, and sometimes onto the sidewalk before his mother could catch him.

The first time I ran away from home, Troy recalled, I was two. He packed a box of animal crackers, an apple, a few pennies, and took his roller skates. He thought he had snuck out of the house, but his mother was watching from a window. She said he kept looking around to see if anyone was coming after him. She let him walk just far enough away to think he’d managed an escape, before she chased him down.

Troy was a precocious child. He was willful, and mustered an impressive temper tantrum when it suited him. Rather than subjecting a babysitter to watch over him when they went out for an evening, Troy’s parents took him along. He refused to sit in a booster seat, and sat on cushions to eat in the best restaurants in Manhattan. They took him to see movies, which is how he adopted the nickname of the Boy. His mother took him to see a Tarzan feature film, and he was intrigued by Tarzan’s son, Boy. He liked the name. Since he and his father shared the same name, his parents referred to him as the Boy at home.

They also took him to see Broadway shows. He protested when they left the theater after the show, and insisted to his mother, I want to go up on the stage with the actors! When they got home, Dede placated him by playing show. After a performance we’d seen I would dress up at home in a makeshift costume and re-enact the part. I guess that’s where it all started, this acting bug, he said. My parents both loved show business and everything about it.

Dede worked hard to maintain a workable routine at home. Troy’s father often worked late into the night, and she was essentially a single parent. My parents weren’t regular church-goers, but I love the memory of my mother kneeling beside me when I said my prayers. She taught me a Swedish prayer, but I never knew what the words meant. I spoke to God every night then.

The Johnson’s lived a comfortable and cultured life. I just loved New York, Troy said. The buildings were so tall I couldn’t look high enough to see the tops. In their son, his parents created a pint-sized boy-about-town. He rode through Central Park in horse-drawn hansom cabs, went ice skating in the park and at the Rockefeller Center ice rink, and accompanied his mother on many shopping excursions to the smartest shops on Fifth Avenue. They lunched often, and Troy knew the captains at all the finest restaurants in town, and had a favorite waiter at his mother’s preferred Chinese restaurant, Ruby Foo’s. He accompanied Dede on her weekly Ladies Lunch at Tavern on the Green. I was the only fellow at the table, he joked.

I had a normal and happy childhood, Troy said. I was never denied anything. Within reason. And I don’t think I ever saw a real ‘juvenile delinquent.’ I never played in the streets, or joined a gang. I never saw a gang.

Many years later, in a reticent moment, Troy admitted that has childhood was anything but normal. I was spoiled, he said. He had the best pediatrician and dentist, and had the best food, clothes, and housing. He even had an enormous great Dane he named Koro. The dog was so big, he and his cat, Higgin, rode around the apartment on his back. I had the best of everything, Troy recalled. I couldn’t have asked for a better start.

For seven years, he was an only child. His parents hosted many dinners and cocktail parties in their sprawling apartment. I can remember always being exposed to Broadway and theater people, Troy said. "I was the only kid in the room. I remember sitting with Gertrude Lawrence while she read her reviews for The King and I."

There were few children for Troy to play with in the imposing apartment building where the family lived. The only kids I remember were a little French brother and sister, Troy explained, but they spoke French, and I didn’t. Sometimes my mother took me to play in Central Park. For a long time, I actually thought the park was my backyard. And we visited the zoo there. And I rode the carousel every chance I got. Dad was busy with work, but on summer weekends he drove us to Jones Beach for picnics. Mother sensed I needed friends and playmates, so she enrolled me in Mrs. Sherman’s Nursery School in Flushing. I was driven back and forth to the school in a station wagon.

Troy listened to soap operas on the radio with his mother, and they both shed tears when the storylines took sad turns. My mother read romance novels to me all the time, he said. She was dramatic and acted them out when she read. I think it affected me emotionally. I’ve been in love with someone ever since I can remember." He recalled flirting with the little society girls with fancy skirts and bonnets who walked through Central Park with their nannies, and with the girls he passed in the halls of his apartment building.

He first realized his jealous streak in nursery school. The prettiest girl was named Ruthie, and I came to regard her as my girl. I didn’t know anything about being possessive until she invited me to a birthday party at her house. I should have stayed home. I got jealous because Ruthie was bouncing a ball with another boy. I tried to get into the act, but in the confusion the ball rolled under the sofa in her living room. Ruthie crawled under after it, and I became furious when my rival followed after her. I grabbed him by the leg, pulled him out from under the sofa, and I bit him! And the fur flew fast and furious. Even then, I didn’t understand the feminine mind. I thought she would be pleased that I was trying to protect her. Instead, I was told to go home, and she didn’t speak to me at nursery school for days.

When Troy was barely six years old, he contracted pneumonia. He was confined to bed at home for six weeks. When I tried to get up, he recalled, I discovered I couldn’t walk. At first I was perplexed, then frightened and insecure. My bed was the only place I felt safe, and I refused to leave it. The doctor warned his parents that they needed to get him up and moving. The longer he didn’t use his legs, he warned, the weaker they’d become.

Father sat down on the bed beside me, Troy recalled. He asked me if I didn’t want to walk again. I said, yes. He put his hands under my arms and I took a few steps. As soon as he let go of me, I fell to the floor, and I sobbed. Dad put me on his lap. ‘I want to tell you something, son,’ he said. ‘Something to remember all through your life. Whatever you want to do badly enough, you can do. Never forget it. So long as you have faith in yourself, you can do anything.’ Before long, I was walking on my own. Dad was right. He gave me my first lesson in self-confidence.

Troy’s father became an advertising executive at General Motors. In a short time, he was promoted to Production Chief of the company’s promotional motion pictures. He and Dede decided it would be better to move out of the city for Troy’s recovery. They purchased a five-acre estate with a sprawling seventeen-room Georgian-style mansion on Middle Road in Bayport, Long Island. My father commuted sixty miles each way to work every day, Troy said.

Bayport is a hamlet in the southwest port of the Town of Islip on Long Island. There was a lot of open land at the time, and thick groves of oak, elm, and sycamore trees. The winters were frigid, windy and snowy. The little town had a filling station, a library, a dry cleaner, a pharmacy, a dentist, a delicatessen and a cluster of shops. It was a far cry from the glamour, culture and culinary delights of Manhattan.

Although Bayport is a small town, it is hardly a sleepy Long Island backwater. Sayville is less than two miles away. Departure point of the Fire Island ferry, thousands of tourists and New Yorkers overrun Sayville every summer. Marlon Brando spent a summer in the late 1940s working with the Sayville stock theater company. He returned to Sayville many times through the years. And later, James Dean spent time there and in Bayport.

My father wanted a farm, Troy said. Actually, I think he bought it with the idea of retiring there eventually. But the property was not a farm at all. It was a beautiful estate. Right away we acquired 300 chickens, five goats, a cow, pigeons, ducks and geese, and we planted a three-acre garden. My father was certain we would make a profit out of it. ‘And it’ll be fun, too,’ he said.

But Troy’s father knew nothing about a farm. And mother had no interest in being a farmer’s wife, Troy said. His maternal grandmother moved with them to Bayport. "She was supposed to help Mother with keeping up the house, watch over me, and help in the garden. But she had less interest in farming than my mother did!

I loved the house, Troy recalled, because it was so big. It was fascinating for a boy of six to explore its many rooms and the attic. And so much open land.

Troy’s father had little time to tend to a garden and barnyard animals. His work in Manhattan and at least two hours of daily commuting left him little time to even be home. I tried to do all the work, Troy explained. "For a small allowance I fed the chickens, looked after the pigeons, mowed the lawn, weeded the garden and tended a sunken garden on the west side of the house. Mother watched from the windows.

"The orchard I came to hate. Picking apples was an endless task. I could never see that I was getting anywhere! It wasn’t long before we discovered that we could never keep up with so many projects. Reluctantly, Dad brought in help and moved them into our gardener’s cottage.

"One big problem was that all the livestock soon became pets. We would collect the eggs and milk the cow and the goats, but that was all. We couldn’t bring ourselves to kill anything for the table. With one notable exception.

Dad had two prize geese that eventually produced several goslings. They were full grown by Thanksgiving and he decided one would grace our holiday table. It fell to Dad to kill one, but in the excitement of the chase, he caught his $400 prize gander. We didn’t discover the mistake until we sat down at the table. Of course, none of us would eat it – even though it was the most expensive dinner we ever heard of. Not long afterward, he sold all the livestock and kept just the pigeons.

Troy’s uptown wardrobe proved to be a problem for him at school in Bayport. Mother saw no reason to dress me any differently than she had in New York. The upshot was that while most of the kids wore levis and sneakers, I was dressed for a cotillion. Tailored jackets, starched white shirts, and imported neckties. They thought I was Little Lord Fauntleroy. Naturally, Troy wanted the other kids to like him. At first, they didn’t. Not only was he the new kid in school, he was different. When I got to the schoolyard, everyone was staring at me, he remembered. I knew something was wrong, and then I realized it was my new, tailored gray flannel suit mother had bought for my first school day. They stared at me when I walked into the school building, and all through class.

When the bell finally rang, and everyone was dismissed, all the kids filed out into the schoolyard. Suddenly, from behind, a several boys grabbed him. They pulled me to the side of the playground and tied me to a tree! They were shouting and laughing and dancing around me and singing ‘Look at the sissy. What a pretty suit. Look at the sissy.’ He realized he was very over-dressed. The boys wore jeans and white T-shirts. When they untied him, he swung at them in a rage. A fight broke out, and he knocked a couple of them to the ground, then ran home bloodied and in tears. I told Mother I would never wear that suit again. That afternoon she bought me some blue jeans.

I wore what the other boys wore to school, but that wasn’t enough. I dirtied up my shirt and jeans on the way to class. One day my teacher sent me home with a note for my mother. Dede went to visit the school principal, who politely wondered, considering the Johnson family resources, why she would send her boy to school looking like a tramp!

"Dressing down seemed to do the trick, but another strike against me was my name. Some of the fellows seemed to think Merle was a girl’s name and teased me with all sorts of variations, like Myrtle the turtle.

There was only one dentist in Bayport, and he developed a fixation about putting braces on children’s teeth. I was his first victim and took a lot of ribbing from the fellows. Myrtle the turtle became metal mouth.

Troy’s mother wanted to establish a good home, and made every attempt to become a welcomed addition to the community where they would live for the next decade. There were bake sales, and quilting bees, and normal things going on, Troy recalled. We even went to church once in a while. I think my mother wanted people to think we were not snotty Manhattan folks but a good God-fearing family. I was even confirmed at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Sayville.

A year after the family moved to Long Island, Troy’s sister Eve was born. The birth of a little girl changed the family dynamic profoundly. Troy was no longer an only child, pampered by his mother.

So that Troy wouldn’t be jealous of his new sibling, his parents told him that the baby was for him. "It’s going to be your baby, his mother assured him. Troy became enthusiastic until his mother began to suffer early labor pains, which confined her to bed. Troy told her, Don’t have the baby for me! Just call it off, please!"

Once Eve was born, she was given to Troy. My father laid the baby on my bed, put his arm around me and said, ‘Son, that’s your new sister. In a way, she’s your daughter, too. She’s the only little girl we may ever have. She’s our princess, and we’re going to take good care of her. Now, she’s your responsibility. You have to watch out for her.’ Troy took the trust placed in him very seriously. He hovered like a watchdog, and ran to her crib when she cried. Dede recalled, It was hard to say who was more upset, Troy or Eve.

Troy and his sister Eve.

Troy said, "I froze with fear at the thought of ever losing her. Eve was my most precious possession. It was never necessary to have a baby-sitter. I enjoyed staying with her. And all through school, we loved the same sort of things and exchanged confidences.

We were all dog lovers. We had a Dalmatian in Bayport, then Dad bought an Irish setter puppy for $25 for Eve. We called her Victoria. When Eve was still a baby, Victoria scoured the neighborhood for other kid’s toys that were left in their yards, and brought them home to place near Eve’s bed. I had to gather them up and return them every day. When the dog was three years old, she was killed by a delivery truck. It broke our hearts. We buried her behind the house with a funeral service that I conducted, insisting that all my friends and neighbors attend.

When the farm plan fizzled, Troy’s father developed another preoccupation. "My dad was my best friend. Once we moved to Bayport, we were always partners in some kind of project. Having our own cabanas and a dock on Great South Bay, Dad plunged into sailing, although he knew nothing about it.

"His excitement outweighed his knowledge, but he bought a mongrel craft 16-feet long with an eight-foot beam. It looked more like a scow than a sailing boat. Not knowing the first thing about seamanship, he read books and talked to old salts in the neighborhood. The first year we spent more time trying to tackle up the creek to the open water than we did sailing.

It was hard to discourage Dad in anything he wanted to do. If he thought he could do something and wanted to, no one could dissuade him. When our first craft hit a bulk heading, sprang leaks in seven places and sank, he promptly bought another. And another.

Troy’s favorite was a boat they called Falcon. He and his father mastered the sail boat, and spent many happy hours together sailing around the bay, and to Fire Island for picnics. Mr. Johnson loved family life, and was particularly close to his son. Like his dad, Troy had the same persistence in learning things that interested him. Soon he had his own small racer and won trophies at the Bayport Yacht Club. He became such a good sailor, that another one of his interests – writing – was indulged when he covered the waterfront in a column he wrote for the Bayport newspaper called Up the Creek.

Troy age 11, 1947.

What Troy liked, he tackled and licked. But what he disliked he effectively dodged. And nothing about school and studies interested him. He barely squeaked by, and often flunked his classes. His teachers agreed that he was intelligent, but he didn’t work on it. Troy said, If I didn’t see a future life in the things I was supposed to learn, then I didn’t care.

With his tall, good looks and teasing grin, the girls came running from every direction. Troy’s first steady girlfriend was a summer resident of Bayport named Sue. He said he was her devoted slave. Their romance ended the day of the Yacht Club regatta. A rich kid with a new speedboat raced against Troy who was poised to impress Sue. At the start, the speedboat sped off and Troy’s boat wouldn’t start. He begrudgingly watched the rich boy win the race. He took home the trophy and Troy’s girl, who walked away with the winner.

I was so bugged, I climbed the high mast of that sixty-fivefoot yawl where my parents were and threw myself dramatically off, Troy recalled. Of course, I was careful to miss the deck. When I went down in the bay I swam under the water and hid behind another boat. No one could find me for six hours. They thought I’d drowned.

When Troy got home later that night, his parents were relieved, but only for a moment. They bawled me out good, and I was grounded.

When Troy was twelve years old, he stole his father’s double-barreled shotgun from a glass cabinet in the den. He snuck out of the house to meet up with a friend to go on a hunting expedition. They slogged through a wetland near the Johnson home but could only find a few crows. That was good enough for the boys. Troy loaded the gun and blasted off a couple of shots, but missed the birds. He handed the shotgun to his friend who fired once. The crows got away, but Troy’s friend was thrown back into the mud from the recoil of the shot. Suddenly, the boys heard someone call out.

Wouldn’t it be funny if it’s a cop, Troy joked. His friend agreed.

It was a cop. He hauled the two boys into the tiny police station and booked them on six counts – hunting out of season, hunting without a license, hunting in a residential area, trespassing, walking around with a loaded gun, and carrying a gun while under age. Merle Johnson bailed his son out, and made him work off his fines.

Troy locked and loaded.

One day in the spring of 1947, Troy was wrestling with his dad on the front lawn. This was common horse-play for the two since Troy was quickly growing taller, and was steadily bulking up to play school sports. Dad would let me win in the end, Troy recalled. But on this day Troy easily pinned his father to the ground. He thought his father seemed weak, and thought something was wrong. Mr. Johnson slowly got up, and went into the house to lay down on his bed. Troy had also noticed that his father was often coming home early from work, complaining about being dead tired.

Chapter 2

My father’s death left me the man of the house.

Troy came home from school one day to find his mother and a doctor talking in the living room. He heard the doctor say, …it’s only a matter of time. Dede told her son that his father had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Doctors didn’t know a lot about it, except that it seemed to attack strong, physically fit men. It was the disease that killed Lou Gehrig. And it was named after him.

Dede took her husband to Columbia Medical Center in New York, and Johns Hopkins Hospital near Baltimore to consult with other doctors to no avail. There was no effective treatment, and no cure. Over time, the spinal cord deteriorates and the body’s nerves become progressively paralyzed. Where multiple sclerosis strikes fast, Dad’s ailment was even a faster one. And hopeless. I was stunned.

Dede told Troy that his father didn’t know how sick he was. And she warned him, We must never let him know. For the next two years, Troy’s father was barely able to work. He couldn’t handle the tiresome commute. Most of the time, he laid on his bed, always telling Troy that he’d be better in a few days.

Troy visited his father every day when he came home from school. He told his dad about his ball games, and track meets. He lied when asked about his grades, and said he was doing great with his classes. Dad would say, ‘Keep the boat in good shape – we’ll go sailing before long.’ I assured him we would. Troy cried himself to sleep many nights, and could hear his mother quietly sobbing from behind her door. He was thankful that Eve was too young to understand what was happening. Troy said the greatest heartbreak of his life was watching his father slowly fade away. Eventually, he could barely move, and he lost his ability to speak.

Troy’s mother was not able to restrain or discipline her son as her husband once could. With his family life beginning to upend, he wanted more than ever to fit in with his classmates. His perceived pedigree and his family’s obvious wealth often elicited jealous rather than welcoming hands. I just wanted to be one of the guys, he said, and I would do anything it took. His approach often was counter to what his mother wanted. Their relationship became more and more strained. Looking back, he said, the tremendous responsibility my mother took on when Dad become incapacitated was so much for her. And my behavior didn’t’ help.

He became more and more resentful of his mother’s concern, and felt the need to establish some independence. After ball games at school, his friends snuck off to a little beer joint in town. They were too young to be in a bar, but the owner, who was a football fan, served them anyway. Dede forbade Troy to go there, and was suspicious of his circle of friends. One day, a neighbor spotted Troy and his buddies in the bar, and told Dede. When the guys drove him home later, she was waiting at the door and bawled him out in front of his friends. He was very embarrassed, and the scolding backfired.

Actually, I started drinking in the seventh grade, Troy admitted. I was feeling a lot of pressure. I was struggling with school exams, and I had to keep a certain grade level to keep playing on the school teams. I didn’t have to go out to drink, there was plenty of alcohol in the house.

He began to sneak out at night after his mother had fallen asleep, and would later crawl through his bedroom window when he got home. One night he snuck out to go a dance. Troy drank until he got sick. He was driven home at three o’clock in the morning by a friend. He crawled up the porch steps but fell over a chair which made a racket. Lights in the house suddenly were turned on. I can still see my mother come running out of the house, he recalled, shouting that if I could stay out this late, I might as well stay out a little longer, and slammed the door in my face. It was ten o’clock the next morning when I woke up – just in time to see people stop on their way to church. I’ll never forget those expressions as they saw me on the front lawn, still dressed in a tuxedo, obviously sleeping off a hangover.

Living with his father’s impending death, being unable to do anything about it, and unable to talk to anyone about it except his mother was a heavy burden for a young teenager. At first I refused to believe it myself, Troy said. To make it worse, I was plagued by a feeling of guilt whenever I visited him. I did things which weren’t right, yet mother never told him. On the contrary, she assured him how wonderfully behaved I was, which made me feel all the worse. I wished the things she told him about me were true – yet it seemed the more glowing terms she used, the stronger my reaction to do the opposite – the worse I felt about it. It was an uncontrollable vicious circle. Father would have never allowed me to drink. The guilt made me drink even more.

Mr. Johnson spent the last eight months of his life in St. Alban’s Hospital in New York City. He was so weak, Troy explained, he couldn’t even blink his eyes. If he knew he was dying, he never let on. But he always kept his gold watch on the nightstand where he could see it, and on one visit his eyes swept back and forth from the watch to me. I heard him whisper to me, ‘take it.’ I think then he knew. When he gave it to me, I knew he’d lost hope.

Frederick Merle Johnson died on December 5, 1950. Troy was sitting in the ice cream parlor when the family maid ran in. She shrieked come home right away, he recalled. She broke into tears, and I knew it was Dad. Troy went home to help his mother make funeral arrangements.

My immediate feeling was one of relief that his suffering was over, Troy said. It took me months to find out what I had really lost when he passed away.

The Johnson house was consumed by a heavy cloud of deep, stoic grief. My mother said we were going to have a big Christmas as always. That’s the way he’d want it. But Troy was not ready to celebrate any holiday. He was not prepared to move on. Everyone has their own way of dealing with grief. My mother was a strong woman. I was stunned by his death. I felt he had abandoned us, which is what a kid would think.

He took on a dual role in his sister’s life – the father-brother role. And I didn’t really know what I was doing, he said.

I was just fourteen, but I actually became years older overnight. He was a sophomore at Bayport High when his father died. Weighing in at 182 pounds and standing over six feet tall, he appeared to be much older than he was. I was a good athlete in school, he said. He played forward on the basketball team, halfback on the football squad, center half at soccer, and a star jumper in track where he held a Suffolk County record. He was affable and had become popular in high school, and was vice-president of his class. He could shoot a gun, sail a boat, drive a car and was a good horseman. He had a way with the girls. And he knew Manhattan inside and out. Troy looked like a man, but he was still a boy.

The discipline of school was always anathema for Troy. "School I tolerated, but never liked. The classes at Bayport were combined on one campus where I went from the first grade through the eighth, then high school. My marks were only average. I particularly hated the cut-and-dried subjects like math, and sometimes I played hooky to avoid them. When Great South Bay was frozen over in winter I would skip school to go ice skating. In warm weather, it was to go swimming. English and languages I liked. And all sports. But the sport I loved most was outside of school – sailing.

"For a while, music whetted my curiosity. Playing in the high school band, I went through the clarinet, French horn, tuba, drums and cymbals. But the girls at school were more interested in an athlete than a tuba player.

My father’s death left me the man of the house, he said, "but I wasn’t up to the responsibility. I was impatient to be grown up, and it just made me wild. I needed a strong hand to smack me down, but he wasn’t there any longer.

I resented Dad’s death, and what had fallen into my hands, he said. Troy’s unruly and rebellious behavior continued. He was set to get his driver’s license when he turned sixteen. He went out with a group of friends, one of whom let Troy take the wheel. He blew through a red light, and the boys were stopped by the police. The red light violation was bad enough, but driving without a license was a serious infraction. The police took him into the station, and called his mother. Dede was furious. If only he had waited two days until he got his license, his mother told him she had intended to buy him a car. Now, she told him he would have to wait a year before he could have a car of his own. But her attempts at controlling him always backfired. Troy paid little attention to her threats.

A short time later, one night he snuck out of the house. He was an athletic young man, and with all his strength he rolled the family Cadillac convertible out of the garage, and down the driveway. Then he drove off to pick up a girlfriend.

A little later, his mother decided to visit a friend. The garage door was open, and the garage was empty. She thought that Troy was in his room. She presumed the car had been stolen, and she called the police. A policeman easily spotted the Cadillac parked in front of the drugstore. He strode in and demanded to know who was driving the car. Troy was having a soda with his date and another couple. He admitted he was the driver. The policeman handcuffed him in front of his friends and told him he was under arrest for grand theft auto. He was taken to the police station, and in the process of booking, Troy’s mother was notified. He was released when she arrived an hour later. The punishment began when I got home, he recalled.

Troy’s sister Eve said, As I look back on it, some of the kids there were a real wild bunch.

He struggled with his feelings of loss, but never shirked his duty to watch over his little sister. We used to go everywhere together, she said. And I liked to dress like he did, in blue jeans and an old T-shirt. She was a tom-boy and learned to run fast to keep up with Troy and his friends. Sometimes his buddies complained about her tagging along, but he said if they could bring their dogs then he could bring his sister. And he never allowed anyone to poke fun at her or complain about her to him.

He taught her how to play tennis, and she became as good a player as any of the boys. But he still liked to tease her, and play games. When Eve was seven years old, he told her that he wanted to share a special secret with her, and told her she couldn’t tell anyone else – especially their mother. He told her that he was actually Samson, the Strong Man. And you can be my personal servant. He sent her on errands for him, and if she hesitated, he’d glare at her and say, Samson commands you! Eve kept the secret for a couple of years until she figured out that he was pranking her, and she told their mother.

"Eve and I would go down to the docks in Bayport and sit for hours in the sun, waiting for a fish to bite. We used to sit on the docks, with nobody else around, and it seemed as though our thoughts could be heard for miles around. Eve was my sounding board. She was only a little girl at the time, but she was very bright. I could talk to her about almost anything. Sometimes she thought I was crazy when I told her I wanted to be an actor. But, at times, she could get excited by the prospect of my living in Hollywood and her coming out to visit me when I would be