Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment (6 page)

After the state takeover, Vincent continued working at Roosevelt Raceway as a ticket seller. But that also ended abruptly in 1942 when all American racetracks were shut down due to the war. In fact, the Santa Anita track, where the legendary Seabiscuit ran, was turned into an internment camp for Japanese Americans.

As a child, my grandfather took me to the Belmont track nearly every day. He taught me all about the racing business, and by the time I was ten years old I could handicap the horses. I also came to know my way around the racetrack. There was something about the grass, the horses, the jockeys, and then the excitement of the races that thrilled me even as a child.

At the time, I was unaware of the downside. I didn’t yet fully understand that if you spend enough time around a racetrack, you’re going to see some broken lives. Gambling can be an addiction as strong as any drug. There were times in my life when I felt that compulsion, and moments when it might have sent me, as it had so many others, spiraling downward into self-destruction.

When the tracks closed in 1942, Vincent retired. In his later years, he would head to Woodhaven Park every day to play pinochle with a group of old guys from the neighborhood. He looked forward to the games, although he had to walk five blocks up a steep hill from his house on Woodhaven Boulevard to the Park.

One day he didn’t make it. On December 13, 1959, Vincent, 78 years old, fell in the snow. It was freezing, and he couldn’t get up. I can’t imagine what his last thoughts were as he lay there dying on that terrible winter night. I’m told that people who freeze to death experience a warm, calm feeling just before dying. I hope that happened. Perhaps Vincent was thinking about his great Man o’ War or Dempsey knocking out Tunney, but I really hope and believe that in his final moments his mind turned to my grandmother, Rose, his wife for over fifty years, a truly wonderful woman who put up with more than her share of troubles from Vincent, but who loved him right to the end.

I was home in Bellerose with Pat and the kids when my Aunt Lucille called with the news. When I heard my grandfather was dead, it was one of the few times in my life that I’ve actually cried. I had to go over to the police precinct and then to the morgue to identify the body. At the morgue, they opened up a curtain, and there he was. There’s no way to prepare for that. This was my grandfather, my best man, my closest friend, and there he was just a body on a slab of steel. It’s a terrible shock to anyone when they open that curtain. It certainly was for me. I remember the cop asking me, “Is that your grandfather?” I said, “Yeah.” But that body wasn’t really Vincent Acerno. It was just a shell once occupied by a man full of life, who left his mark on me and everyone else he met.

The next day, I went to the park to hang a note on the bulletin board. I thought his friends should know he was gone. But a guy who worked at the park stopped me. “Take that down,” he barked. I guess it violated some park rule. It’s funny how some small things stick with you. I thought it was petty and mean-spirited, but I didn’t say anything. Still, it always bothered me that he wouldn’t let me notify the guys at the pinochle game that Vincent wouldn’t be back.

But back in the late 1930s, Vincent was still very much alive, and one thing he never missed was a chance to see his grandson perform on Broadway. I was already beginning to build a small reputation as a child actor, and when
The Eternal Road
closed in May of 1937, Mom was busy plotting our next move.

In the winter of 1937, Mom heard about an upcoming play requiring an extensive and challenging child role. She thought this was our big chance. We went to the Longacre Theater on West 48
^th
Street, and I auditioned for the role of a ten-year-old boy in a play called
On Borrowed Time
.

It wasn’t meant to be. Two other youngsters attracted the director’s attention, and it seemed to me that he had settled on these two fellows from the outset. Still, there was a smaller part for me, and a small part was better than none at all. Also, the director, a young man named Joshua Logan, was making his Broadway debut, and he had very much impressed my mother. Her instincts proved correct as Logan went on to become a legend in American theater and film, directing such Broadway classics as
South Pacific
,
Annie Get Your Gun
, and
Mister Roberts
, the latter a play where Joshua and I would again cross paths many years later.

It was always fun when there were other kids in a play. Once we came offstage, we were all equals. And we always found ways to enjoy ourselves in this adult world into which we’d been placed. The two boys, Peter Minor and Peter Holden, were each about a year younger than me. I like to think they got the part because I was too old. That’s what my mother told me. In truth, they were both excellent. Peter Minor had opened the play on the road in New Haven, but when we arrived on Broadway, he became ill, and Peter Holden took it over and never let it go.

I’m not aware of either boy moving on to other roles or having careers in entertainment, but they certainly had the talent, and, at least for a time in 1938, Peter Holden dazzled New York City and the Broadway critics. Brooks Atkinson of the
New York Times
affirmed that Peter had, indeed, “won the hearts of the audience.”

On Borrowed Time
was a play about death—or more to the point—a play about what would happen in a world without death. Even as a child, I thought it was an interesting idea. Set in the post-World War I years, it opened with the sudden demise of a young boy’s parents in a car crash. Their death leaves him in the care of his grandparents, who love him deeply. But the boy’s aunt wants to adopt him. Her motives, however, are suspect. She knows his parents left a large sum of money that she could only get her hands on if the boy, named Pud, was in her custody.

Pud’s grandfather sees through the designs of the aunt and determines that she should never get custody. But, it’s not so easy. Soon, Granny dies, and then death comes for Gramps. Taking a human form, “Death”—who is dressed in a business suit and refers to himself as “Mr. Brinks”—tells Gramps it’s time to go.

But Gramps has a card up his sleeve, which involves a special power he learned about at the expense of another young boy who keeps going into Gramps’s tree and stealing his apples. That was my role. At first he can’t catch me, but then Gramps, who has a birthday wish coming, blurts out in anger at me: “I wish you would stay up in that tree.” With that, I became magically stuck. My repeated attempts to jump down were to no avail.

Eventually I did manage to loosen my clothes and drop from the tree. But, Gramps’s now turned his new powers on Mr. Brinks, wishing him into the tree. It’s never fully explained how I managed to get down, but Mr. Brinks couldn’t. Still, it established the plays principal conflict: what would happen to the world if Death were caught in a tree and was unable to get on with his daily work?

Death on holiday sounds great—at least at first. And in my eightieth year it seems even more appealing than before. But as the old adage goes—be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.

With Mr. Brinks in the tree, the play confronts the unforeseen consequences of a world without death. Those who should die naturally, linger on. They endure great and pointless suffering. One of Gramps’s friends, a doctor, discovers that death has been suspended. He recognizes the problems of life without death and tries to talk Gramps into letting Mr. Brinks out of the tree.

Things offstage were getting as dicey as they were onstage. Shortly before taking the part, I had switched from public school to Holy Child, a Catholic school run by the Saint Joseph’s nuns. One of the very first things the nuns drummed into our impressionable heads was that cursing of any kind was a serious sin.

The lesson must have stuck. Although I’ve certainly had my share of vices, I never really felt comfortable around a lot of cursing, and I seldom do it myself. It just rarely seems appropriate to me. I’ve heard about people who learn to curse while serving as soldiers, and I imagine that living under that kind of stress one might be more inclined to let out some colorful language. In any event, my reticence to curse was never more pronounced than during the days when the Sisters of Saint Joseph hammered into me the dire consequences in store for anyone with a foul mouth.

That brings us to the crisis of
On Borrowed Time
. Back in 1938, Gramps was originally played by Richard Bennett, a giant on the American stage for half a century who had made his Broadway debut as far back as the 1890s. Bennett was Joshua Logan’s absolute first choice for the part. In his memoirs, Logan confirms that “[O]ne actor and one actor alone seemed perfect: Richard Bennett.” When it turned out Bennett was available and interested, Logan was sure he had a winner. But, again, be wary what you ask for!

It wasn’t long before we all realized that Bennett, now sixty-eight years old, was having serious difficulty with the role. Throughout rehearsals, he mumbled his lines almost incoherently. Logan later claimed he was not at first concerned because in the theater world there are actors who “save” their best performance for the live audience. But no one on the set was buying that. It was perfectly clear that something more was going on here—this was not just an actor keeping his powder dry for the big night. Even all of us kids could see that Bennett wasn’t just mumbling. On the contrary, he just couldn’t remember his lines.

When the play opened at the Shubert Theater in New Haven Connecticut, Bennett literally froze onstage. Fortunately Peter Minor, who knew the entire play by heart, managed to walk inconspicuously across the stage and whisper his lines to him. As good as Peter was, it was still obvious to the audience. In fact, Bennett, calling upon his considerable stage instincts, said to Peter: “Thank you, son. That’s real thoughtful of you.” The audience laughed, no doubt wanting to give some support to this elderly man who was clearly struggling. Had it stopped then, everything would have been fine. But it didn’t.

Throughout the entire run, Bennett was irascible. He took criticism hard, which made it doubly difficult for Joshua Logan. Still, Logan was not about to see his upcoming Broadway debut fall apart, and so he kept after Bennett to remember his lines. He also tried to help him by placing extra prompters offstage.

Notwithstanding Logan’s best efforts, the situation deteriorated, and the fighting between Bennett and Logan escalated to a point where these two Broadway giants were cursing up a storm at every rehearsal and before and after each performance. It was the first time I had seen real battles backstage between a director and actor, and it wasn’t pretty.

And it still would all have been just boring adult stuff to me, except that I had been taught so well by the nuns to bow my head and bless myself each time I heard a curse word. So for several weeks during the road show of
On Borrowed Time
, my most prominent memory is dropping my head like a bobbing-head doll while repeating every two seconds, “Bless me, Bless me” as Logan and Bennett raised the roof with streams of obscenities that rang out in theaters from Hartford to Boston.

In his book, Josh Logan is generous to Bennett. He omits the knock-down, drag-out sessions that gave this poor Catholic kid a sore neck every night. Logan largely blamed the producers who were concerned that the show’s investors would pull out if something wasn’t done. The truth is that even we kids realized that something had to be done, and as we approached Broadway, it was obvious there needed to be a change. Logan finally fired Bennett and pulled in a wonderful character actor, Dudley Diggs, who memorized his role in a weekend. On opening night on February 3, 1938, at Broadway’s Longacre Theater, he and Peter Holden gave stunning performances and won over both the crowd and the critics.

A year later,
On Borrowed Time
was made into a movie, with the great Lionel Barrymore playing Gramps. The film was a hit, and any other year it may have gone home with some Oscars. But that was 1939, the magical year of American film with
Gone with the Wind
,
The Wizard of Oz
,
The Third Man
,
Wuthering Heights
, and
Mutiny on The Bounty
. Still,
On Borrowed Time
has its place as a charming fantasy—one that raised serious questions about the way we confront our own mortality. It did so, moreover, at just the right time, as the country was not yet fully consumed with the horrors of the war that waited just around the corner.

*  *  *

I was nine years old during the run of
On Borrowed Time
in 1938, and it was time for another life lesson. This time it had to do with the loss of things we hold dear. During the run, we moved a short distance from Kew Gardens to Richmond Hill. It’s always sad for a child to leave an old neighborhood and old friends, but in this case it wasn’t such a shock because my new home was just a few blocks away. What really did bother me, however, was leaving our old Victorian house, which had been the home of my menagerie. Although I did, like Noah, transport all of my reptiles and other friends to the basement of our new brick Tudor home, it was a traumatic experience.

After we left the house, the owners sold it to developers who were about to turn the lot into an apartment building. One day I rode over on my bicycle. The men were working, and I watched while they literally tore the house down. I saw that big iron ball crashing right into my bedroom. It was terrible. The feeling of loss cut deeply as they thoroughly destroyed the place that held all my most precious memories. I’ve always valued my home and family as a shelter against the vagaries of life. Our early experiences, of course, help shape our future behavior. I think the image of that wrecking ball laying waste to my very first home in Kew Gardens accounts for my lifelong desire for stability and permanence at home.