How Life Lived Me

By tim cooney and Elizabeth Rache

Tim Cooney's life reads more like an adventure story than a biography. He worked on the most dangerous movie ever made where close to 100 people went to the hospital. How he went from homeless to being nominated for an Oscar which certainly is not the usual path. Along the way there was 8 more nominations for various awards, elephants and tigers, Hollywood, rock and roll royalty, real royalty, and a very unusual cast of characters in this mans story. A quick read you will certainly enjoy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iox
• Release date: Dec 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223041931

Book preview

HOW I LIVED MY LIFE LIVED ME

TIM COONEY WITH ELIZABETH RACHE

Copyright © 2023 Tim Cooney with Elizabeth Rache All rights reserved

No part of this book, including but not limited to text, design, layout, or illustrations, may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any

form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the authors.

Printed in the United States of America.

Published by: Fox Publishing Inc.

DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this book to everyone I have ever known in my entire life. Well except for my ex wives.....and that kid in eighth grade who punched me in the face and that moron director who fired me after I had been in the business for over 30 years and him around eight months and that doctor in the Philippines who refused to give me and MRI after I had a concussion for over 24 hours. You know what forget this damn dedication!

FOREWORD

TIM COONEY HAS LIVED MORE ADVENTURES THAN MOST HUMANS WOULD EXPIERENCE  IN SEVERAL LIFETIMES. HIS LIFE COULD BE WRITTEN IN SEVERAL EPISODES OF THE TWILLIGHT ZONE. IN THIS BOOK, YOU WILL EXPERIENCE JUST A FEW OF THESE.FROM YOUTH, TIM SEEMED TO ATTRACT MORE UNSUSAL CIRCUMSTANCES THAN SHOULD BE ALLOWED.

I HAVE KNOWN COONEY FOR MORE THAN 50 ODD YEARS. IN SPITE OF HIS SYNICAL PERSONA, HE IS ONE OF THE MOST KIND HEARTED, HELPFUL, CARING WERID0S I HAVE EVER KNOWN.

TIM ACTUALLY HAS SAVED PEOPLES LIVES WHILE RISKING HIS OWN AND BEEN THERE WHEN CALLED ON FOR HELP. HE HAS BEEN A TRUE FRIEND, WHICH IS HARD TO FIND IN THESE TIMES.  IN MY OPINION, HE ACTS MORE CHRISTIAN THAN THE MAJORITY OF CHRISTIANS WHO PROFESS TO DO SO. WHAT A LIFE THAT HAS LIVED HIM!! P.S. TIM WOULD TAKE UMBERANCE TO SOME 0F THE THINGS I HAVE WRITTEN IN THIS FORWARD!

RODNEY DILLARD, A FELLOW PROSPECTER

MINING FOR THE TRUTH.

Table of CONTENTS

Chapter 1 1

In the beginning God created......and then there was Tim

Chapter 2 6

All Shook Up

Chapter 3 20

Let’s get out of town! (What was I thinking?)

Chapter 4 32

So, you want to be in the movie business?

Chapter 5 42

Universal. My Alma Mater.

Chapter 6 55

There is always Karma

Chapter 7 79

Chasing Snow

Chapter 8 88

The Marrying Man

Chapter 9 105

A real cliffhanger

Chapter 10 117

I have friends I haven’t even used yet

Chapter 11 121

Probably an inside job!

Chapter 12 134

Mel and the gang

Chapter 13 144

Deep Blue Endings

Chapter 14 152

New Millenia/ Fun in the Philippines

Chapter 15 166

A Spectacle

Chapter 16 182

Chapter 17 187

I am a lucky Guy

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CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED.........AND THEN THERE WAS TIM

My name is Tim Cooney. I suppose you could say I am one of the luckiest people in the world. I’ve been a musician, a clown, an exotic animal train- er, and a film maker; none of which I’d planned or aspired to, life just put them in my path and that was the road I took. The problem is: I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up! You may ask yourself how this can be when my occupation list alone reads as if it were out of an adventure book. Well, this is how it happened.

I entered this crazy life on June 14th, 1951. I was born in California at a place called the Glendale Sanitarium. Although I am sure it was just a hos- pital, the name sanitarium conjures up all kinds of visions of crazy people running amok through the halls of some faded green and white building.

I have always felt I was a character out of the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It seemed everyone around me was crazy and I was the only sane one! Regardless if that is true or not, the word sanitarium set the tone for my unusual life.

My parents met at the local Young People’s Catholic Association in their early 20’s and were married a little over a year when they had me. I’ve been told my father left the sprinklers on at the house when he took my mother to the hospital. By the time he got home a day and a half later, the entire front yard was flooded with water running down the street in the neighborhood. I was told the first time he saw me he shook my little hand when I asked him about that years later he said what do you expect I just met you. When deciding on my name, my mom asked, what should we call it, my dad said let’s call it quits; they settled on Timothy Michael Cooney. Dad wanted to leave but stuck around for a few more years. I tell a joke onstage that goes something like this:

"My father hated children, so it was karma that he had twins. When he walked in the room and saw 2 babies, he told my mother to pick out the

one she liked and the other one was going into a sack and into the river... that’s how I learned to swim."

The reality was they got bored with me after eleven months, so they had my brother, Jeff. They had my sister, Kimberly, when I was four and divorced when I was about twelve. Family life was pretty much non- existent with my parents. We would do all the necessary holidays together at church, but it was for appearances only; my parents played the part of the good Catholic family, but the reality was something else entirely.

My father was an alcoholic lawyer who was known as the party guy. He was in the military and served in the army during World War II. During basic training, an exercise went wrong and he ended up with shrapnel in his leg. He received the Purple Heart, probably because he bled. While he drove around in his great big Cadillac that he was so proud of, he was never a saver of money and when he died, there was nothing left to pay for his burial. We had to borrow money from a friend of his to get him in the ground. My uncle on the other hand, clearly learned from my dad’s mistakes, because he’s a multimillionaire. My dad and uncle owned the law firm, Cooney and Cooney, and were very well respected. My dad was connected and knew a lot of different people, which lead to some interesting meetings in my younger years.

As a stay-at-home mother, you would think my mom would have had all the time in the world for my brother and me. Reality was that my mother was not interested in me at all and really devoted her time to my sister.

Mom was a piece of work. There was a period of time when I had moved to the Philippines and when I moved back to the U.S. (sometime in 2019- 20), I realized I hadn’t gotten residual checks for ten years. (Residuals are the financial compensation for work done on a project when it is rerun,

re-aired, etc. These are usually quarterly-ish groupings of checks.) When I called and asked about the money, I was told the checks had been mailed to my mother’s address and had been cashed. I quickly realized that my mother had signed the checks and stolen my money. This was not a one-off occurrence of deception, as my brother found out.

In his early years, Jeff had some pretty bad seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy. Although he was on Dilantin, the seizures caused a lot of damage and as a result, Jeff was left developmentally delayed when it came to learning. He would give anyone money without thinking twice. He lived with my mom or dad most of his life, even up to the end. When

Jeff was sixteen, he was working at Hollywood Bowl parking cars. Eventually, he was offered a full time position, which my dad talked him out of in order to keep Jeff as his own personal chauffeur to & from court as he’d lost his license. When our dad died, he left his house to us kids; our mom changed his will and took the house for herself. She told Jeff

to move into her old house and he could live there for free. Jeff had been

living in a rent-controlled apartment, so this was a pretty sweet deal.

Shortly after Jeff moved in, mom sold the house from under him and he had nowhere to live. Like I said, Jeff learned from mom, but so did my sister, who turned out to be just like her. Kimberly and I were never really close. When mom died, Jeff and I each got one-third of the house (dad’s house) and Kimberly got everything else under the condition our mom set that she take care of Jeff. Which she did for two months, then threw him out, right in the middle of COVID. We will get to the rest of this story in a minute. My aunt Madeline is the sweetest person you would ever want to meet. This is just another one of those stories. My mother introduced her brother Jerry (my godfather) to Madeline who she worked with.

Madeline lived in the house with her father at the time. Jerry was living in the house he was raised in with his mom my grandmother. So they started dating. We all were waiting for the announcement of their wedding plans but after 10 or fifteen years we gave up. The thing was there relationship was better than most marriages. Now my grandmother had had health issues and needed a live in caregiver so because the house was only two bedrooms Jerry had to move out. You following me so far? The house next to Madeline house as if it were ordained goes up for sale. Jerry buys that house and now lives next door to Madeline who he has been dating forever. They never get married and were together until the day Jerry died. I like to think of them like Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn kind of the same thing but without kids. So now I was told by my uncle Terrance that Kimberly my shrew of a sister threw Jeff out on the street and we are in the middle of covid. He says Madeline has let him stay in her house since he had nowhere to go. So I call and talk to Madelyn who is the best technically not related relative I have we talked to him about moving to Las Vegas since she had plans to sell her house. Although we had not talked in over twenty years, I scooped him up. I had a small house put on my property in Las Vegas where I live, and Jeff is now happy there.

My brother is mentally challenged, although he’s fully functional and takes care of himself. He drives his own car, at the moment he’s living behind me in that house. Years ago, my dad asked me to help him out. Well, what do you want me to do?

He says, Well, all he does is park cars at the Hollywood Bowl. "Yeah, I know. That’s what he’s happy doing.

Well, why don’t you, you know, try to set him up in something.

So I found out that you can make these little donuts orbit donuts. I went around to about a dozen of the am/pm markets with my sales pitch.

Look, if we bring in these bags of donuts every day, can we have a little stand by the register here. If people want to buy these little donuts, they’ll be able to buy them and they’ll be replaced every day.

I got about ten contracts to do this. So then, I bought all the equipment at around $10,000. At that time, $10,000 was a whole lot more than it is

today. All the equipment comes after my brother agreed to do this, and he says,

No, I’m not going to do that. I don’t want to do that.

So that was like taking $10,000 and flushing it down the toilet. I understand that he’s handicapped, but he should have just told me. All that equipment sat around for years and years and years. As a matter of fact, it sat around so long that eventually I got divorced. And I don’t even know what my ex-wife did with it. So I just decided, you know, I don’t need that kind of grief in my life. So we didn’t talk for years and years, probably close to twenty years.

My early life was typical for a kid of the 50’s. I did what every other kid does: go to school, come home, and hang out with your friends. Summer was the best you would leave the house after breakfast and not come back until it got dark. We would play in the street with our friends and

neighbors until the sun went down. Baseball, football, we would play war, riding our bikes looking for adventure; we were masters of our universe back then. We would go behind a building (that is now called a mall) and go dumpster diving. When you are a kid, finding a tool, a broken price gun, or an old sign that had a motor in it was great! You would take that little motor off of it and use it for various things or trade it to a buddy

for something else, like an old pair of roller skates; which you would immediately take apart and nail to a two-by-four. You see, it was my generation that invented the skateboard. There was not one guy I knew that had a sister that had two rollers skates, but they all had skateboards.

I remember riding my bike with my friend, Ed Quillan. Ed was in love with a girl named Laura, so we would pedal over to her house and just sit outside (he was too shy to knock on the door). After a while we would get bored and take off for some other destination, like the dam or movie theater. The adventures I would have in those young years stayed with me most of my life. Yes, that bike gave me independence, which was a good thing since my parents did not have the time for me anyway. Both my maternal and paternal grandmothers lived within blocks of my parents, so

I would go and visit them often. They seemed to understand me more than my parents did.

In order to stay away from the house, at the age of ten I talked a butcher into hiring me after school. The butcher was in a shopping center at the corner of Woodman Ave and Vanowen St in Van Nuys. Now I had a job working in a butcher shop. I would clean the equipment, sweep the floors, etc.; all at ten years old! It was funny because years later, when I applied for my social security, the lady could hardly believe me.

She said, This couldn’t be right. What year were you born? I said, 1951.

You mean to tell me you paid into the system and had a job in 1961?

I said, yes and told her about my job. I guess I was the first person she had ever met that paid in to the system so young. As it would turn out, I discovered after my divorces that social security was the best investment I made in my entire life.

––––––––

Now we start getting to what I consider some of the more interesting portions of my life, but I don’t know exactly where to start this part of my story. Should I talk about my music career (not very successful)? Or my career as a circus clown? Or my elephant training and performing? My movie career? Well, I guess I will just do it all in the order it happened. I used to say when I was playing music and had my elephants, I was living my life; when I got into the film business, my life was living me! With that being said - buckle up!

CHAPTER 2 ALL SHOOK UP

Music has always been a joy to me. Because of the way I was treated at home, I would lose myself in a song. If it was one that really struck home, I would learn how to play it. Around the time I was twelve, I picked up a guitar and started to learn. I didn’t get serious about it until I was fourteen. It was about the time I first started learning to play that I got to meet Elvis.

My father, who was still around when I was twelve, had a poker game at the house on Friday nights. It was an unusual group of guys- mostly

LAPD officers and Catholic priests. Once or twice there was a guy named Johnny Roselli (aka Handsome Johnny). He was a gangster sent by the Chicago mob to watch over the unions in the film business. (Johnny disappeared on July 28, 1976 and was later found in a fifty-gallon drum in Dumfoundling Bay, Florida, which I did not know until years later when

I read about him in some book. Anyway back to the story.) My father had a friend, John O’Grady, who was a retired LAPD sergeant turned private detective. One Friday they had a good night at the game and beat pretty much everybody there. As everybody was leaving I was just getting up (it was about six or seven in the morning).

O’Grady says to my father, Hey Matt, we did pretty good with this kind of luck; we should be in Vegas.

My dad says, Ok, let’s go.

John turns to me and says, Hey kid, you want to go to Las Vegas? As I ran out of the room saying yes I noticed my father giving John a very dirty look. It’s sad to say, but my father and I never did anything

together, just the two of us, in my entire life (before or after this moment) and here I was going to Las Vegas with him, just like I was one of the guys. So it was a big deal to get invited along when you’re twelve. I changed into my clothes in less than thirty seconds and was ready to go.

Back in those days, there was no speed limit and we shot across that desert at one hundred plus miles an hour, with me in the back seat of my dad’s Cadillac. We pulled into the old El Rancho hotel and casino, which the mafia burned down years later for the insurance money. We went into the

coffee shop and started reading the menu. We were there maybe fifteen minutes when two big security guards and a guy in a suit walks up to the table.

The suit asks, Which one of you is John O’Grady? John says I am, who’s asking?

The suit says, We will have to ask you and your party to leave the premises.

O’Grady says Why is that?

The suit says, Rita Moreno was walking through here and saw you and we understand you two have had some problems.

John says, I have had no problems with her, it was she that had the problem with me when I put her in jail for marijuana.

The suit says, I understand that, but Miss Moreno is headlining here, so we are asking you to leave.

Now my father had the quickest wit and brain of anybody I ever knew. When he was at the top of his game you could never outthink him. So my father immediately pipes up.

"Well John, I don’t know, I am down at least $700 and I wanted to win it back. How much did you