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Authors: Barry Livingston

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CHAPTER 34

Love at Long Last

While waiting patiently for the next job that wasn’t coming, my love life finally improved. I had dated a number of girls since high school, but I never had a relationship that felt anything like love. Women inspired more lust than trust. I was still bruised from the kick in the heart delivered by Tina, the Sunset Strip groupie. I had some psychic healing to do with the help of the right woman. Where do you find such a girl in the Hollywood jungle? Anywhere, everywhere, nowhere. Might as well start in a bar and hope to get lucky.

I was out drinking with my high school buddy Jeff Eget on a Saturday night. We wound up at Cyranos on the Sunset Strip, and I saw a girl walk in I recognized. It was Dale, the Ingrid Bergman look-alike from Ned Mandarino’s acting class. I was too shy to let her know about my infatuation back then, but I wasn’t going to make that mistake tonight.

We reunited over drinks and laughs. I got the feeling she was pretty happy to see me, too. Things were going great until a big glitch arose: her fiancé, Richard, joined us. She neglected to tell me about him.

Richard latched on to Dale’s hand, said they had dinner reservations at a nearby bistro, and quickly led her out the door. In an instant, Dale reentered my life and was gone just as abruptly.

My heart sank as I looked out the bar’s window and saw Richard escorting Dale into a cozy little French restaurant across the street. Then, something possessed me: a swirling brew of ardor, booze, and insanity. This infernal love potion forced me to my feet, and I dashed out of the bar.
Damn the torpedoes!

I weaved through the speeding cross-traffic on the Sunset Strip, ignoring the cacophony of honking horns, cursing drivers, and screeching tires. I was on a mission: to be with Dale or die. The latter option was closer than I’d realized.

Inside the bistro, I searched every nook and cranny until I found the couple at a cozy little table. Richard’s jaw dropped. Dale smiled broadly, and that was as good an invitation as any for me to sit down.

To his credit, Richard kept his cool and at first seemed entertained by my drunken, foolish audacity. By the time the soup de jour arrived, Richard’s amusement began to fade; he realized the fool wasn’t leaving anytime soon. Not only that, I was eating his leftover appetizers.

Richard’s face was growing redder, angrier. He tried to get me to leave with sarcastic put-downs about my rude manners and my child-acting career. The insults bounced off my ears like Ping-Pong balls. All I had to do was glance at Dale’s amazed grin and I could withstand any verbal dagger Richard threw at me.

The party took a grimmer turn when my drunken pal, Jeff, tracked us down and sat at our table. One lovesick fool was barely tolerable; now his sidekick was here.

Trying to lighten things up, I proposed a toast to their pending marriage. Unfortunately, I clinked my wineglass against Richard’s glass with too much gusto and it broke, splashing him with wine. The table went silent, and Dale’s fiancé did a slow burn that would have made Jackie Gleason proud. My eyes were fixed on him, waiting for his next move.

Richard rose to his feet slowly, as if he were being inflated on the inside with hot air. He hovered over me, glowering, almost snarling. He fought the urge to tear my head off, angrily grabbed Dale’s hand, and marched away from the table with her.

Of course, I had the unbelievably stupid instinct to give chase, again, but Jeff wisely held me in my seat. My pal convinced me that Dale’s fiancé would surely knock out my front teeth if I pursued her.

Right on cue, Richard and Dale’s fish dinners arrived. The waiter’s grand presentation of the meals, to the wrong dinner guests, triggered gales of laughter. There was nothing to do now but chow down. In the end, I got stuck with a pretty hefty bill, which was cause for another crazy laugh. Served me right.

A few weeks later, my phone rang. It was Dale. The engagement was off and she was free to date. No risk, no gain.

Dale and I started dating, and the relationship quickly became romantic. She was the first woman who became my friend as much as a lover. This was a big emotional step for me. I finally started feeling like a man, not a boy anymore.

My new mature relationship triggered thoughts about marriage, kids, and a future without show business. If I didn’t have an acting career, how would I make a living? Thank God for the
Sons
residuals that were paying my bills. Sooner or later, though, they were going to run out and I’d have to make a hard choice: abandon my acting aspirations and get a real job or starve.

For the moment, I was still in blissful denial, enthralled in a wonderful, new kind of romance.

CHAPTER 35

Big Changes for One and All

While I was basking in new love, my parents’ stormy relationship finally came unglued: they separated. It was twenty years in the making, but it happened. My mom stayed at the family home in Studio City, and Dad was exiled to the Oak Wood Apartments, a sterile cluster of buildings overlooking Warner Bros. in Burbank. This sprawling hillside complex was a station for young actors looking for their big break, sex-hungry singles, and the severely depressed: the divorced and separated. Everyone wanted to be somewhere else, including my dad. He longed to be back home. That wasn’t going to happen, because my mom was going solo, heading for a new planet.

Mother had hit fifty years of age and was in the throes of a full-fledged midlife crisis. She got a face-lift, bought hip-hugging spandex clothing, and made a new friend, a professional psychic named Dorothy Schwartz.

Schwartz was a chain-smoking Jewish yenta in her mid-sixties, about as tall as a hobbit and quite popular on the celebrity circuit for her predictions and advice. Her cigarette smoke–damaged voice rattled with phlegm, much like Andy Devine, the old Western movie star. She’d pop in for a daily visit with my mom flanked by Benny, her dim-witted forty-year-old son and Ida, her balding, orange-haired sister, another homunculus psychic. Bringing up the rear to this odd entourage was her driver, Doctor Gomez. His curly Mexifro hairdo and bushy mustache made him look like the Frito Bandito (or perhaps Gene Shalit, the
Today
show critic). He was once a successful plastic surgeon in Tijuana but currently was barred from practicing medicine for some unmentionable mishap. The cast of a Fellini film suddenly populated my old home.

Schwartz’s psychic specialty was interpreting tarot cards. “Angel!” Schwartz would rumble with a frown while studying the cards. Angel was the new nickname Schwartz gave my mom. Her old nickname, Maryland, no longer fit. “Don’t go back to Hilliard, Angel! He doesn’t appreciate you. He doesn’t see that you’re an angel!”

I’d sit there, biting my tongue. My mom was pretty cool, but an angel? Okay. Whatever.

My mother absorbed Schwartz’s every word as gospel. She seemed to be under her spell. Soon strange things started happening to the paintings that hung on the walls of the Milbank house. The names of the original artists had been painted over and the name Angel replaced them. It was clearly my mom’s handiwork. I couldn’t believe what she was doing. It wasn’t that I cared about defaming our cheap works of art. Her state of mind is what concerned me most. When I confronted her about the changes, she insisted she had actually painted these masterpieces long ago, under pseudonyms. At Schwartz’s urging, she decided it was time to put her real name, Angel, on the artwork.

I had lived with my mother for nearly two decades and never once saw her lift a paintbrush, let alone produce a Renaissance portrait or an abstract cubist painting like Picasso. I challenged her claim, but she insisted it was her hand behind every brushstroke. She was offended that I doubted her honesty and her skills. I’d learned over the years you didn’t want to be on the receiving end of her wrath, so I backed off.

It’s unsettling to catch your parents in a lie. They are your pillars of strength and integrity, the people you can count on for honesty. When they fib, it’s a disappointment to find out they are only human, vulnerable to life’s pressure like everyone else.

My mom was certainly under stress at this time. Putting the name Angel on the paintings seemed like a twisted way of justifying the turgid praise coming from her new cronies. The scary part was that she believed her own lie.

Her confusion inadvertently resonated in my world, too. Granted, there’s a big difference between a young man floundering in his twenties and a middle-age woman lost in menopause. Nonetheless, I saw troubling similarities. Her drug of choice was Valium; I chose pot and coke. Neither of us had fulfilling careers. I started to come around the Milbank house less frequently; it was just too painful.

Gene was still living at home and filled me in on Mom’s exploits: dancing the Twist in her spandex hot pants at 3 a.m. on Ventura Boulevard, twenty-four-hour trips with Doctor Gomez to Tijuana to buy cheap prescription drugs, all-night tarot card readings. What a circus.

The person who helped me cope the most during this period was Stan. Having played Chip on
MTS
, Stan was in the unique position of sharing the exact same experiences, in our careers and at home. It was a real blessing to have somebody to commiserate with, and he definitely helped preserve my sanity.

Without steady acting work, I had to do something to keep my creative juices flowing or go crazy. I went back to studying my craft with Jack Garfein. Most of my days were spent rehearsing scenes for his weekly master class. Strindberg, Chekhov, Mamet, Molière, and Arthur Miller were playwrights whose work I loved.

I considered going back to New York to pursue work onstage. Making a permanent move didn’t seem like the right thing to do, though. My entire family was in turmoil. The emotional chaos started at the top, with my parents’ marital woes, and that filtered down to my younger siblings who were caught in their cross fire. I felt like a rat jumping off a sinking ship, so I stayed put and looked for other acting work. I found it on the dinner theater circuit.

CHAPTER 36

The Poison Donut

Dinner theaters are all but extinct now, but in the 1970s they were popular in cities all around the country. This type of theater wasn’t high art. Dinner theater was a venue where plain folks came to gorge on mediocre buffets and see their favorite TV stars perform live in lowbrow comedies like
Natalie Needs a Nightie
and
See How They Run
(two of my starring vehicles). Hollywood considered such theaters to be the last refuge of has-been stars trying to make an easy buck. I hated to think of it that way, but it was true.

I was offered the lead in Neil Simon’s
Star Spangled Girl
at Tiffany’s Attic in Salt Lake City. This was about as far from the Great White Way as you could get.

My actor friends counseled me not to do it, fearing I’d damage my sagging reputation. Not likely. I knew my industry standing was already in the toilet, so I accepted the offer to do the play for two months at a thousand dollars per week. It was far better than watching TV and getting high with friends, eating at Taco Bell at 3 a.m., and letting Schwartz read my tarot cards for the umpteenth time. I’d be performing before an audience again. It didn’t matter to me if the spectators were socialites from Manhattan or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. When an audience’s laughter washes over, it’s a rush. I may have been a has-been, but I wasn’t a snob.

Tiffany’s Attic in Salt Lake City was a beautiful multitiered dinner theater that seated six hundred people. It was the perfect place for Average Joe America and his wife to eat a meal, down a few drinks, and hopefully have a few laughs. I gave them some unexpected guffaws on opening night when I came very close to dying onstage, literally.

I was playing Norman (another nerd) in the Simon play. In the first act, Norman meets Sophie, a young girl who just moved into his apartment building. It’s love at first sight when Sophie introduces herself and gives Norman a cake she just baked. The second she leaves, Norman blabbers to his roommate about Sophie’s beauty and her scrumptious cake.

All through rehearsals, things went according to plan: Sophie would enter, say
hi,
hand me a round coffee cake, leave the stage, and then I’d blab.

On opening night, though, the actress playing Sophie entered carrying a different kind of pastry. She handed me a long, shiny glazed donut wrapped in tin foil. It wasn’t the round coffee cake in a can that we’d been rehearsing with.

I looked at the strange new pastry in my hand and thought, This is new, I wonder why? Despite the change in props, the show must go on, so I took a bite of the donut and began extolling her wonderful baking skills.

Immediately, I noticed an unmistakable bitterness in my mouth that tasted like a metallic chemical. An alarmed voice went off in my head:
Poison!
A second warning bell sounded:
Spit it out!
Too late.

In my haste to get through my lines, a lump of toxic dough managed to slip past my tongue and enter my esophagus. I started to gag.

My brain issued a new urgent directive:
Get it out of your throat, dummy, before you choke!
Too late, again. The hunk of donut was already lodged in my windpipe, somewhere between my tonsils and my Adam’s apple.

Suddenly, the play came to a halt as I stared at my roommate. I was wordless and gasping. He stared back, wondering why I was not praising Sophie’s great baking skills anymore. He also had no idea that I couldn’t breathe.

Full-blown panic was welling up inside me. I felt light-headed as my air supply dwindled. I pounded on my back with a clenched fist, trying to dislodge the obstruction, and stumbled around the stage like a dizzy-eyed drunk.

My roommate gaped at my odd behavior, and the audience started to laugh like baboons. Seconds before, I was raving about Sophie’s wonderful cake, and now I was gagging on it like it was made of dog shit. It was a brilliant piece of comedy acting ... had I planned it.

I’d endured about thirty seconds without air and was beginning to see stars. I figured I had two options: run offstage for help or keel over into somebody’s plate of mashed potatoes and gravy in the front row. I didn’t like either choice. Then another option hit me: use my throat muscles to force the lump downward into my stomach and clear my windpipe.

I attacked the dough ball with my best swallowing effort. My face reddened and my eyes bulged and the crowd thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. They screamed like banshees. With one big grunt, the dough ball finally worked its way around my Adam’s apple and slipped down the hatch.

Air! Sweet, sweet oxygen! I could breathe again, but just barely.

I tried to resume expressing my love for Sophie’s wonderful baking, but my windpipe collapsed after every other word. Once the larynx has been traumatized, it wants a rest. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that luxury; six hundred people were hanging on my every grunt.

I’d eke out a few words of dialogue, then gag, and the audience would convulse with laughter. That was how the scene proceeded until it reached a point where I could exit the stage, which I did to a thundering ovation.

Backstage, I collared the stage manager, Jeff. He was a twenty-year-old drama major from a local college, entrusted to run our production. Jeff’s duties included building sets, operating the show’s lights and sound, and taking care of props. Normally, these jobs would be divided among a few workers. Tiffany’s Attic was on a budget that allowed for only one stagehand. Welcome to the wonderful world of dinner theater.

“What happened to the coffee cake? And what was on that donut?” I gasped, my throat still closing after every word.

Jeff gulped and said, “Just before Sophie was about to go onstage, she went to the prop table to get the cake, but it wasn’t there. She had to give you some kind of pastry in the scene, so I gave her the donut from the third act.”

“It tasted horrible, and I choked on it. What was on it?”

He held up a large, yellow spray can of 3M preservative. “The donut wasn’t supposed to be eaten. I sprayed it with this, hoping it might last the run of the play.”

I grabbed the can and read the warning label:
CAN BE FATAL IF SWALLOWED
.
SEEK HELP IMMEDIATELY IF INGESTED
.

Beads of perspiration instantly formed on my forehead. I felt dizzy, and my mind was a blank. Then I heard my roommate’s dialogue onstage signaling my cue to reenter. I had no choice but to run back out and continue the play.

Now, back under the glare of the stage lights, I started feeling nauseous. Strange rumblings were going on in my digestive tract, a chemical reaction between my stomach acids and the potent toxins cooked up by the geniuses at 3M. I felt a balloon was inflating my abdomen. I was either going to explode onstage, like an alien in a science fiction film, or exhale a toxic cloud that would exterminate the first few rows of the audience.

The moment of truth was upon me, and I ran to a window in the apartment set, stuck my head through it, and cut loose with a rolling, thunderous belch. Thank God my expulsion was nothing more than a loud and oddly fragrant burp; it smelled like licorice. Weird.

Once I was certain I wasn’t going to project vomit, I pulled my head back through the window and faced my roommate. His face was the picture of befuddlement. My acting partner still had no idea what I was doing or why. His character never goes offstage in the first act, so he never got a chance to ask me or anyone else what was happening.

Toward the end of the act, I heard sirens approaching outside; the 3M warning raced through my mind: “
Can be fatal if swallowed.
” What a lovely headline my demise will make for the tabloids:
CHILD ACTOR’S TRAGIC END
:
POISONED AT A DINNER THEATER
. Mercifully, the curtain came down before I keeled over into the audience.

Backstage at intermission, a squad of paramedics greeted me. I thought they’d give me a shot, some kind of antidote, or perhaps put me on pure oxygen. Nope. They gave me a glass of milk.

“Shouldn’t I stick my fingers down my throat to induce vomiting and get that poison dough ball out of me?” I asked.

The head paramedic replied, “No! You might get it stuck in your throat. More people die from asphyxiation than from being poisoned.”

I understood that completely.

The paramedics huddled, quietly conferring and eyeing me from a distance. After a minute, the head guy came up to me.

“You’ll probably be fine,” he said. “If you feel any worse later on, go to a hospital.” With that sage bit of advice, they packed their gear and left.

I sat there thinking, That’s it? They could have told me that on the phone. Why even bother coming?

I finished the play that night without any more belching. There didn’t seem to be any ill effects later on, either. From that night on, though, I made it part of my pre-show routine to check the prop table to confirm there were no poisonous pastries.

A newspaper critic who saw the show’s opening performance gave us a very favorable review. He singled me out saying: “Barry Livingston has a wonderful control of a variety of expressions and mannerisms.” I got a chuckle out of that. In fact, I actually incorporated the choking bit into the rest of my performances. It never approached the crisis level of opening night, but my gagging on Sophie’s cake, coupled with my praise for her baking skills, always got a big laugh.

After nearly dying in front of an audience, I’ve never feared anything going wrong onstage again that I couldn’t handle.

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