Crane (5 page)

I was made to apologize to my victim, who was drenched and a little slimy. Ironically, his father’s company was called Celebrity Pools.

My façade had cracked. My cuteness, cockiness, and self-absorption were coming to an end. I had to straighten up and be just an ordinary schoolkid, studying to someday receive a high school diploma, as my parents had, and maybe go off to college. At seven years old, the only thing I knew about college was that USC football games were on KNX radio.

After the splash heard ’round Tarzana, I made fewer and fewer appearances on my dad’s radio show. The shine was off my apple. The cute phase was over. My dad recognized my transition from cuteness to pain in the ass and pulled the plug. Short career, but I was too young to know what
bitter
meant. More important, small-town radio was a few years ago. This was Hollywood, baby, and so it was from that point onward my dad’s show would serve a higher purpose for me—an intimate venue where I could meet my heroes, stars of stage and screen like George Maharis of
Route 66
and Vic Morrow of
Combat!
I continued to visit the show during summer and school holidays. I didn’t want to miss school because of the increasingly important social aspect of it—that is to say, girls. We were not an academic family, so my parents were pleased that I enjoyed going to school, even if I liked it just so I could see my friends.

I felt I was king of the roost for the first eight years of my life, but in 1959 my mom became pregnant with my sister Debbie. This tolled the end of my monarchy. Decades later I found out that I could have had a sibling closer in age to me, back when we lived in Bridgeport. One day
when I was four, I sensed there was something physically wrong with my mom. She sent me to get the neighbor, a nice but extremely loud Italian woman who rushed over to our apartment and helped my mom, who had just suffered a miscarriage. My dad didn’t find out until later that day.

With our family about to expand, my parents found a Richard Neutraesque three-bedroom with a pool, a big yard, and lots of driveway on Vanalden Avenue just a block over from our Donna Avenue house. Nan, who was still living in Stamford, sold her home for $18,000, packed up, and moved west to be with her younger daughter. My aunt Bunny remained with her husband and two kids in Noroton Heights, Connecticut.

My parents paid $50,000 for the modern home, complete with multiple levels, high ceilings, and severe exterior angles. When I heard the amount they paid, it seemed like a million bucks to me. Our small-town Connecticut family was morphing in many ways: my dad’s salary was more than his father could ever have imagined earning; the small, two-story apartment in Bridgeport was a distant memory; the Oldsmobile and Volkswagen were gone, replaced by an ultra-finned Cadillac and a Lincoln Continental with suicide doors. I got a go-cart for Christmas and raced it for hours along the lengthy driveway, which was really the site of the Tarzana Grand Prix, complete with hairpin around the palm trees, much to the neighbors’ consternation.

Although my parents always remained devoutly un-Hollywood, meaning no maids, no chauffeurs, no assistants, and, mostly, no pretenses, the family was blossoming. The obvious material advancement of a new home and new cars brought an uneasiness that was almost an embarrassment to me. I didn’t want my dad’s ballooning bank balance and the things that could be acquired with it to make me conspicuous among my friends. On the other hand, my dad’s increasing financial success brought a level of comfort to my parents’ lives that they had worked hard for and, at least in my considered opinion, really deserved.

In the ’50s and ’60s it seemed the average American family had three kids. In 1960 we joined that standard with the addition of Karen, my youngest sister, born eighteen months after Debbie. My dad related a blow-by-blow description of the birth on his radio show, much to my mom’s chagrin.

More important, at least to me, 1960 spawned the Pool League, created by my dad and me. I was nine. The way it worked was I would stand in the shallow end of our pool when I was at bat, and my dad stood mid-
pool as the pitcher. We used a rubber ball and a short wooden bat. My teams were the Dodgers, Pirates, Braves, and Cubs. My dad represented the Giants, Reds, Cardinals, and Phillies. Those eight teams constituted the entire National League in 1960. My dad, as the Reds, won the pennant that year and played the Yankees, who were always designated as the American League champs. As the Yanks in that first Tarzana Pool League World Series, I was able to win four games to two. We kept a blue binder for box scores and standings, and my dad wrote a column reporting on and analyzing the ball clubs in his interesting combination of printing and handwriting. Innumerable summer weekends were spent playing the Pool League. At one point during the season, the bottoms of my toes bled because my skin was rubbed raw on the gunite bottom of the pool, but there was no going on the disabled list. My dad and I were the boys of summer. Those hundreds of hours of yelling, cheering, and laughing were among the best times of my life.

I was also in the Tarzana Little League, but I rarely played because I wasn’t very good, though I still got to wear the Tigers uniform and pretend I was a baseball player. All the fathers took turns being the PA announcer for an audience of fifty bored parents, siblings, and friends. My dad took his turn at one of our games, comfortable behind the microphone doing funny ad-libs but completely lacking when it came to the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. I shriveled in the dugout, but I consoled myself with the fact that at least he was there. He tried, and all I wanted was to belong. I wanted to be a member of the team. I wanted to be like everyone else.

There were plenty of actor dads and actress moms sitting in the stands rooting on their sons, but I didn’t want to be part of that. I didn’t feel comfortable being a show business kid. When my dad botched the Pledge of Allegiance, it got a laugh, of course, and that instant response made him feel good. I think I was the only one in the audience who felt discomfort, though at the same moment pride mingled with my uneasiness. I wanted my family to be perfect, and I was worried my teammates would think my dad was an idiot, and therefore, so was I. But on the flip side, how did my dad feel watching his kid whiff on three forty-mile-per-hour fastballs? I’ll never know. My dad never said, “Good game, Bobby, nice effort. You’ll get ’em next time,” or any of the other verbal back-pats that dads are supposed to dispense to sons who can’t hit worth a damn.

In 1962 a TV series about a military school called
McKeever and the Colonel
was on NBC on Sunday nights. Unbeknownst to me at the time, they were looking for kids to be on the show, and my dad, who had met the producer or one of the writers, arranged an interview for me. But he neglected to tell me why we were going to Four Star Productions in Studio City. I was supposed to be energetic and bombastic, funny and
cute—and I just sat there like a lump because I thought my dad was meeting with these people for something to do with him.

When Dad told me why we had been there after we left the studio, I was really upset. I have the feeling now, on reflection, that my dad acted as he did because he was thinking, “Well, Bobby, I got you in the door. The rest is up to you.” His parents knew nothing about show business
and had never helped him in his career—he made his own breaks and created his own opportunities. So getting me into that interview was more help than he had ever had, but still, he could’ve given me a clue about what was going on. I could have displayed my vast arsenal of charm, talent, and wit instead of sitting there like a ventriloquist’s dummy. It also strikes me now as almost cruel, a passive-aggressive behavior that was setting
me up for failure. Maybe I should’ve asked what we were doing there in the first place. Maybe I should just forget about it.

Before there was home video, there were eight-millimeter, Super 8, and sixteen-millimeter films. In one of our other homegrown activities at Camp Crane, my dad wrote, directed, photographed, and edited eight-millimeter movies with added post-production soundtracks. One summer we shot a film called
I Was a Teenager for the FBI.
I, aged eleven, played a very tough FBI agent. I wore a suit, and I had my own office. My secretary was played by my cousin Sandra. The villain was Dangerous Dan, played by my dad, and another cousin, Jack, played his hostage. I managed to save the hostage, but my secretary ran off with Dangerous Dan.

We shot at my dad’s KNX office at night, and we used the streets of Hollywood for our exterior scenes. When we finished filming, which we did over a few weekends, we added all the sound, the dialogue, the music, and special effects like a credit roll even though the viewer could see the actual roller drum rotating. We were able to shoot the credits over existing footage because we could wind back the camera and create double images. It was pretty wild and imaginative stuff considering early ’60s technology. The experience was great fun, and my dad had some memorably telling lines as Dangerous Dan, foreshadowing his yet-to-come lifestyle.*

At the end of the nine-minute film, there were coming attractions for a war film and a comedy starring the rest of our family members. Viewing the coming attractions now, the title that resonates most is
Get Me out of This House,
starring Anne Crane. There was a kind of subliminal message in that, a communication that the rest of us didn’t see or understand at the time.

The hub of our productions was a ten-by-twelve room at the northeast corner of our Vanalden house that was known as the back room. It was the original man cave. Standing in the doorway and panning left to right, you would see one large speaker, a Ludwig drum set, two turntables, cassette and reel-to-reel audio tape machines, a vinyl mastering machine, three-quarter-inch and half-inch videotape machines, and then another large speaker in the far corner. There was a cobweb of wiring connecting the units in that room to speakers in the den and patio. The
southern wall consisted of shelving that contained thousands of record albums. On the walls above all the gear were eight-by-ten glossies of my dad and some of his radio show guests: Rock Hudson, Ed Begley, and Johnny Mathis. There was also a large photograph and showcard from his first appearance on film in
Return to Peyton Place.

The back room was used initially as an editing suite for my dad when he cut quarter-inch reel-to-reel audiotape containing celebrity interviews for his “Best of” radio show, which aired on Saturdays. I used to perch on a stool next to him and silently watch as he physically cut miles of tape, fascinated by how he could take a forty-minute conversation with Angie Dickinson, shorten it, and capture the essence of her in the limited amount of time he had to replay it. He took the week’s interviews and boiled them down to eight- or ten-minute segments. So Tuesday’s fifty-minute interview with Lawrence Welk and Bob Barker became an eight-minute piece for Saturday’s show. The editing choices were all important. The inclusion of one funny or revealing answer and the exclusion of another depended on diverse factors such as length and flow. My dad could take a line from early in the interview and edit it next to an answer to a question thirty-five minutes later and make it sound like a continuously flowing conversation between the host and his guest.