The Importance of Being Ernie: (10 page)

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Authors: Barry Livingston

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CHAPTER 17
 
Making a Best Friend, Losing a Best Friend
 
When I returned to public school, the radical cultural changes (civil rights, Vietnam, hippies) unfolding in America were obvious. More than ever I felt like the poster boy for the dreaded “establishment.” I went from being a regular celebrity to an
uncool
celebrity, like Richard Nixon or Lawrence Welk. Mockery was shifting to outright scorn. That really hurt. There was no bucking the power of TV to reinforce an image, be it true or false. I felt pretty isolated.
One of my problems making friends at school stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t on campus long enough to connect with other kids. My work schedule kept me at the studio for a good part of the year.
I’d also become more comfortable hanging out with adults than my peer group. Kids could be unpredictable if not downright mean. That kind of social disconnect is pretty common among most child stars and, no doubt, accounts for some dysfunctional behavior as they reach adulthood. It’s pretty clear to see that now, with the benefit of time and a lot of psychoanalysis. When I was a teenager, though, it felt like a whole lot of inexplicable, hostile rejection.
It was no surprise that my social life was pretty dull. I’d even outgrown my one good neighborhood pal and “army” buddy, Jack McCalla. War games weren’t as fun now that gory images from the Vietnam War appeared on the TV news every night. Occasionally, I’d tag along with my brother Stan and his gang to cruise Sunset Strip for chicks. We’d usually wind up for breakfast at the International House of Pancakes at two in the morning alongside such burgeoning rock-and-rollers as Neil Young, Jim Morrison, and David Crosby having their after-the-gig meals. It was great hanging out with the older guys, but I always felt like I was a junior member of the pack and could be expelled at any moment.
I did have one great, reliable friend to keep me company when I was alone: the Los Angeles Dodgers. I’d lock myself in a bathroom at our house and listen to the games on my transistor radio. I was like Superman in his Fortress of Solitude, making notes on the players’ stats, hanging on Vin Scully’s words as he’d describe the play-by-play action. Dodger games were my holy hours. I was not to be disturbed, particularly if my hero, Sandy Koufax, was pitching the game. I was alone but never lonely when the game was on.
It wasn’t until I graduated from Millikan Middle School and entered North Hollywood High that I connected with a few kindred spirits. The first great friend I made was Gene King. He was initially a buddy of my brother Stan, who met him while they were attending North Hollywood High.
Gene was a fifteen-year-old speed-talker, a raconteur and a dead ringer for Gene Clark, the lead singer of the Byrds. His parents were alcoholics and abusive, and he sought refuge at our house on the weekends. Very quickly, Gene and my mother bonded over pots of Yuban coffee and unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes.
Over the summer of 1968, Gene went from a kid who occasionally slept over to a full-time member of our family. My parents had a rocky husband-wife relationship, but they were in total sync when it came to sheltering kids in need. They’d already adopted two children at birth, my brother Bill and my sister Michelle. Now Gene joined our brood. It was one big happy family on Milbank Street until Stan unleashed a bombshell: he was getting married and would be moving out of the house.
Stan was seventeen years old when he told my parents that he had met his future bride on a late-night outing at the Pancake House. Enter Sandy Goble. She was four years older than Stan and was working as a “cage dancer” at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go nightclub. Naturally, my flustered parents disapproved and counseled my love-struck brother to wait. They tried to point out the risks of getting married so young, particularly to an older woman who was a
go-go-dancer
at the Whiskey.
My parents’ warning fell on skeptical ears, though. Stan reminded my mom that she ran away from her home in Beaver Falls at sixteen and worked as a “fan dancer.” That pretty much destroyed their arguments to dissuade my brother.
I wasn’t keen about Stan’s marriage, because it meant losing my brother and best friend. From the beginning, Stan’s future bride tried to pry him away from his family. To her defense, Sandy was not exactly welcomed with open arms by my mom and dad. I resented her greatly, much like Paul McCartney must have felt about losing John Lennon to Yoko Ono.
My parents obviously had another concern about Stan’s impending marriage: the impact it would have on his career. Wholesome teenage Chip Douglas marrying a go-go-dancer from the Whiskey? What would CBS think? What would the American public think? What would
Fred MacMurray
think?
The series had been on for eight years, and certainly by now our relationship with MacMurray was established: it was all business.
My Three Sons
was just a workplace for the star, and we were his junior colleagues. When it came to personal issues, he stiffened and steered clear ... unless your issue impacted the show. I was damned curious about MacMurray’s reaction to Chip’s real-life bride.
Stan introduced Sandy to MacMurray at a publicity function, and she was sporting her go-go-dancer look: short miniskirt, boots, long black wig that buried her face in hair, and thick black eyelashes. I think she was shooting for Priscilla Presley but looked more like Morticia of the Addams Family. It was impossible to miss MacMurray’s shock and disapproval. He was a very conservative man, easily rattled by anything that smacked of counterculture or weird. The awkward handshake that ensued looked about as heartfelt as a family patriarch welcoming Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, into the family.
Soon after that meeting, MacMurray broke from his rule of avoiding personal issues and took Stan aside to voice his concerns. Stan responded with the “true love” speech, and MacMurray quickly retreated, sensing that he’d crossed his own line of ethics with his “boys.” MacMurray said nothing more about Sandy and accepted the inevitable, like we all did.
The wedding took place at the Little Brown Church in Studio City, a chapel famous for quickie unions. Of the show’s cast, only the “sons” attended the ceremony. Fortunately, the tabloid press, which today loves to shred celebrities for their missteps, was still in its infancy. Stan’s teen marriage was pretty much overlooked by the press.
Seven years after it began, the marriage ended. Their union did produce something wonderful, though: a daughter named Samantha Livingston. She has grown up to be a beautiful woman who loves her dad unconditionally.
Now that Stan was out of our Milbank house, Gene and I became best friends. Gene was three years older than me but only a grade ahead in school, which was North Hollywood High. It wasn’t that he was dumb; he just enjoyed the social whirl on campus. We made quite a pair. I was very serious about getting good grades and never cut classes. Gene, on the other hand, was dubbed the “phantom of the hallways” by the school’s vice principal for his truancy reputation.
In tenth grade, I worked in the attendance office, and my job was to deliver messages to students during classes. More often than not, while I was walking about the campus delivering a summons, I’d encounter Gene bursting out of a boy’s bathroom followed by a cloud of cigarette smoke. The “phantom,” on the run as usual, would accompany me on my errand and then vanish into the next available bathroom hideout.
North Hollywood High had the dubious distinction of being the only campus in Los Angeles that didn’t enforce a dress code or make you cut your hair. The place became a magnet for every teenage rock-and-roller and hippie freak in Southern California.
I showed my allegiance to the brave new world by letting my hair grow really long and dressing like a hippie, complete with love beads and leather-fringed vest. After years of feeling like I was walking around at school with a big scarlet letter, “E” for Ernie, on my forehead, I finally felt like I was fitting in.
Maybe I was just maturing and wasn’t as sensitive to being made fun of. Maybe my peers were growing up, too, and weren’t as eager to rub my squeaky-clean TV image in my face. More likely, everybody was just too stoned to care anymore. This was the late 1960s, after all.
CHAPTER 18
 
The Times They Are A-Changin’
 
Going back to work on
MTS
for its eleventh season was tough for a couple of reasons. First, I was actually enjoying public school, and second, Fred De Cordova announced that he was leaving at the end of the upcoming season. My good pal was asked by Johnny Carson to produce his late-night TV program,
The Tonight Show
. With his showbiz and society connections, De Cordova was the perfect choice. My loss was certainly Carson’s gain.
Work plodded along under a cloud. De Cordova was on his way out, and the show’s episodes felt more dated and out of sync with the times than ever before. The real world was in turmoil with wars, social upheavals, and political scandals, yet we were still locked into stories about Ernie’s lost dog or Chip’s big science project.
The performances by the actors, adults, and kids alike began to feel rote, too. Even the addition of new characters such as Robbie and Katie’s triplets, Steve Douglas’s new wife, Barbara, and her daughter, Dodie, didn’t add enough spark. No offense to the fine actors (Beverly Garland, Ronnie Troup, and Dawn Lyn) who came onto the show. It’s just that these injections of life felt like booster shots being given to a terminal patient. The unique concept of the show, a single parent raising three boys in an all-male household, was long gone.
As shooting continued that year, more problems began to surface. Don Grady announced that he wouldn’t be returning next season, assuming we’d be renewed. Grady had worked on the show for more than a decade and was ready to pursue his musical ambitions full-time. The veracity of the show’s title,
My Three Sons,
was up in the air again.
William Demarest, now pushing eighty years old, was in fairly good health but having memory problems, forcing the writers to limit his dialogue.
MacMurray, too, was in his mid-sixties and showing impatience with his new TV daughter, Dodie. Dawn Lynn, the feisty little actress who played Dodie, occasionally liked to reach out and pull on Fred’s toupee. That was a big no-no.
As for my character, I was the only “son” left in the house. Chip married Polly (Ronnie Troup) and was gone. Robbie, Katie, and the triplets had their own place, and Mike, well, nobody knew what the hell happened to him. The lack of children at home really undermined one of the show’s basic charms: MacMurray’s relationship with his boys. Dad had all that folksy wisdom and nobody to counsel anymore. The empty nest only exacerbated the dearth of creative storylines.
Around this time, a new television program exploded into the public eye:
All in the Family.
That cutting-edge, incendiary show was a dagger into the heart of our benign sitcom reality.
All in the Family
tackled topical issues such as the Vietnam War, unwanted pregnancies, and racial bigotry in a way that was as honest as it was funny. The cultural revolution that was taking place out on the streets had finally reached TV entertainment. The CBS censors really had their hands full now.
Despite the game-changing success of
All in the Family, MTS
stuck to its wholesome, nonthreatening format. The younger actors on
MTS
lobbied hard for more challenging, topical episodes, but the producers held steadfast to the original tone of the show. In retrospect, this was a wise decision.
It would have been a disaster for
MTS
to mimic Norman Lear’s new shows with their controversial storylines. If we had done so, Steve Douglas might have recommended to Katie that she should get an abortion rather than have the triplets. Uncle Charley would have come “out of the closet” and revealed he was gay. Ernie, depressed over his lost dog, might have overdosed on Barbara’s Valiums.
Drastic changes in the
MTS
format wouldn’t have worked in a million years. You can put ballet shoes on an elephant and call it a dancer, but it’s still a plodding pachyderm any way you look at it. It was best to be true to what we were: sitcom dinosaurs from another era. Our fate was to keep on marching until we keeled over, extinct from exhaustion.
Fred De Cordova’s last day of shooting arrived, and it was time to say good-bye. Everyone in the cast liked him, or at least respected him, but I loved him. I watched him speed away in his red golf cart, Mr. D’s Dragon, and actually cried. I had the urge to give him one last farewell hug, and I ran after him, sobbing the whole way. I arrived at his office, but he wasn’t there. In fact, the place was already empty. I couldn’t believe how fast his private suite was cleared out. Then it really sunk in: my great friend, a guy I adored and emulated to a fault, was gone. He was off to New York and most likely never to be heard from again. That’s showbiz.
I felt terrible and very lonely as I headed back to North Hollywood High for another semester. The future seemed so bleak. Then, things unexpectedly took a turn for the better. I met a girl.

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