The Importance of Being Ernie: (4 page)

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Authors: Barry Livingston

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McCarey’s voice yells out from behind the camera, “Cut! Let’s do it again. Barry, keep your eyes on the TV.”
I replied, “Huh? Uh ... okay.”
Take two: Newman enters, tries to get us to look at him. Once again, I am focused on the TV.
“Cut!”
screamed McCarey. “Barry, you’re not looking at the TV like I told you to do. Now let’s get it right this time!”
Take three: Newman enters and ...
“
Cuutt!
” We didn’t even get to the part where Newman says
Hi.
McCarey emerged from the darkness, his eyes bulging, jowls jiggling. He gets right in my face and snarls, “Barry, you keep looking away from the TV! Don’t do that! Do you understand? Keep your eyes on the TV!
Please!
” Then he retreated into the darkness behind the camera like a pissed-off ghost.
Take four: McCarey bellows, “
Action!
” ... “
Cut!
” McCarey reappears again, looking like he wants to slap me silly. By this time I am ready to slap myself silly. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong; I had never, before or since, looked at a TV as hard as I was doing it that day.
Before McCarey could throttle my neck, Newman intervened. The star said, “Leo, take it easy, he’s just a kid. Listen, I’ve got an idea: You’ve already got a master shot where you see me enter and come up behind him, right? All you really need is the boy’s close-up to show that’s he’s watching the TV and ignoring me. Let’s just shoot that now and let the kid rest. It’ll work out when you edit.” The star was already thinking like an award-winning director, which he later became.
Not wanting to waste more time and money, McCarey agreed to Newman’s suggestion.
We began my close-ups with high hopes. After one take, it was back to the same old nightmare with McCarey screaming, “Barry, you’re still not looking where you should be looking; your eyes are all over the place!”
Newman, ever the hero and cool dude, decided to crawl inside the empty TV cabinet off-camera and give me something interesting to focus on. To make his live presentation more entertaining, a prop master delivered a hand puppet to Newman so he could wave it at me.
While the whole hubbub was unfolding off-camera, I sat there thinking: There is Paul Newman, a major movie star, waving a hand puppet at me from inside an empty television cabinet. Weird.
A couple more aborted takes ensued. Finally, there was an eerie quiet from behind the camera. I heard urgent, unintelligible whispered words offstage and one of them sounded like
seizure
. I didn’t know what the word meant, but it didn’t sound good. Then McCarey, Newman, and my studio teacher approached me. The teacher felt my forehead and gently asked, “Barry, are you all right?”
“I feel fine,” I replied. And I did, too, except for the embarrassment of Newman’s puppet show.
The three adults hovered over me. Their expressions weren’t showing frustration anymore, only grave concern. I heard a voice in the darkness behind the camera whisper, “Call an ambulance.”
Moments later, my mother and I were being whisked away, sirens blaring, to the nearest hospital. In the ER, the doctors ruled out seizures as the cause for my wandering eyes. I seemed to be healthy as far as they could tell.
After that, the hospital’s ophthalmologist was called in to perform some tests. His diagnosis: astigmatism. That explained why my eyes were randomly darting back and forth, like a broken cuckoo clock. He prescribed glasses to remedy the problem.
After the eye doctor’s exam, I was led into another room where a big wooden box was set in front of me. A nurse carefully opened the lid, as if it contained something rare and valuable, like rubies or even kryptonite. Inside the box, on a bed of blue velvet, were ... eyeglasses. There were round wire-rimmed ones, massive steel rectangles, and stately tortoise shell designs. I was told to pick from the selection. This clearly was an important life decision; a whole new identity would be defined by this choice.
Frankly, I wasn’t too pleased about the whole scenario. I didn’t really want glasses. They were for the weirdos at school, the oddballs everybody called “four eyes.” Then something dawned on me: Superman wore glasses, when he was Clark Kent, anyway. I also remembered seeing Buddy Holly wearing big horn-rimmed spectacles, and the girls still seemed to think he was pretty neat. Even my dad wore glasses, and he was the smartest guy in the world. My anxiety eased.
I reached for the horn-rimmed glasses, put them on, and gazed in the mirror. I liked what I saw. I looked more intelligent than before. I already had a feeling that I was above average in intelligence, but this new prop really sold the idea.
Presto, chango!
Just like that, a new me was hatched. I now had horn-rimmed glasses to go along with my large buckteeth and my Moe Howard bowl cut. I believe this new persona was correctly identified decades later and given the proper label:
nerd.
Jim Carrey may have actually borrowed this look for his character in
Dumb and Dumber
. He either took it from me or from Jerry Lewis in
The Nutty Professor
. One way or the other, all three of us were nerdy dead ringers. I had the dubious distinction of being the first on the block with that particular look.
When I returned to the
Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!
set the next day, I was sporting my glasses, and the film’s producer wasn’t pleased. Apparently, it was already a stretch in his mind that Paul Newman’s son would have buckteeth and a cheap bowl haircut. Add on the horn-rimmed glasses, I suddenly looked like Mr. Moto, the bespectacled Japanese movie spy. That was a creepy image, far from the ideal 1950s American boy. Actually, my brother Stan was a great example of that prototype: blond hair, blue eyes, little freckles on the nose. He was a lovely little Aryan child, a real purebred. As for me, I was a mutt, lovable but not yet ready for prime time.
The producers told my mom that I would have to be let go. They tried to buffer the blow by saying that I could remain on the production as a “stand-in” for the child actor who was going to replace me. She rejected their offer and grandly announced, “My Barry is going to be a star, not a stand-in!”
I’m sure her bold declaration, done in my presence, was meant to bolster my hurt feelings. After that single outburst, she clammed up. She couldn’t afford to get overly indignant or Stan might get fired, too. We were just actors, after all, employees like everybody else. I was politely asked to leave ... now.
As our car passed through the “fort’s” main gates, I grumbled to my mom, “This is how Johnny Yuma from TV’s
The Rebel
must have felt.” It was one of my favorite Westerns, and during the show’s opening credits Johnny was stripped of his soldier’s stripes, tossed out through the gates of Fort Apache, and left to wander a desert wasteland. I was being ejected, too, for the unforgivable crime of looking too weird.
Once I was back home, I felt like Cinderella after the ball. The day before, I was a pampered rising star at 20th Century-Fox; now I was headed back to Vine Street Elementary and more “drop and cover” drills. I was certain my fiery demise would be coming soon. The only one who truly seemed happy about my return was that goddamn carpenter bee in the telephone pole. On my first walk home after school, he took after me with a vengeance, like he really missed me.
Even though another child actor replaced me in
Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!
I still consider this my film debut. That’s because I’m still in it. Remember the scene where Woodward was holding me in the air by my shoes and tapping my head on the floor? The producers decided to use it. I was upside down anyway and practically unrecognizable. For the following scenes in the movie, when the son is upright, it is the kid who replaced me. The producers figured nobody would notice. And nobody did ... except me.
CHAPTER 4
 
A Well-Rounded Performer
 
After being fired on my first movie, my mom began hustling me around the town for more auditions. Nothing much came my way, though. I had hit a lull. Our agent put it in my mom’s head that Stan and I needed to cultivate more skills in the performing arts if we were to increase our odds at booking jobs. I started hearing the phrase “well-rounded performer” a lot.
“The people who make it in show business aren’t just merely actors; they also dance, sing, and play musical instruments like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Those guys are really
well-rounded
performers!” my mom would exclaim.
This was an era when tap dancing was still thought to be the height of artistic expression ... along with playing an accordion. If you could do both, the next stop was
The Ed Sullivan Show.
Stan and I were soon enrolled in Madame Etienne’s Dance Academy on Hollywood Boulevard. We joined a chorus line of aspiring child stars, learning our tap “time steps,” sashaying to rumbas and slinking across the academy’s glossy hardwood floors with some pretty sexy jazz moves. When I saw myself gyrating in the floor-to-ceiling mirror, I definitely didn’t see suave Gene Kelly looking back. With my big glasses and buckteeth, I looked like Theodore from
Alvin and the Chipmunks
, and he sure as hell was a crappy dancer.
Stan and I sacrificed our Saturday morning cartoons every weekend for the next year to attend the academy. I worked hard to learn jazz, ballet, and tap. You had to. If you lagged behind, Madame Etienne would whack you on the butt with her cane. Long ago, perhaps the turn of the twentieth century, she danced with the Moscow Ballet Company. She was a diva from a foreign land and took no guff.
After dance class, my mom shuttled me to a different school to learn another kind of performing art: ice-skating. That was fun. Our classes were held at the Polar Palace, which burned down in the 1960s. (How an ice rink could catch fire was beyond me.) The Polar Palace held a huge oval ice arena that was as big as a football field. I learned to twirl, do a single-axel jump, and skate backward. According to my mother, you never knew when a job call might come along looking for the next Dick Button.
Now that I was on the road to becoming a well-rounded performer, I started to book more jobs. That was my mom’s rationale, anyway, which I realized was a clever ruse to keep me going to dance classes. I knew that my clumsy modern jazz skills had nothing to do with getting hired for a 1963 Western,
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
, starring a young Kurt Russell. I wasn’t required to flamenco dance on
The Dick Powell Theatre,
either. Moms just can’t be trusted sometimes.
The latter program was a dramatic anthology, and the episode I did was called “Somebody Is Waiting,” starring Mickey Rooney. He was one of the biggest child stars ever, a top box-office draw in the 1940s, and had become an acclaimed adult performer. In fact, he won an Emmy for his performance in this drama playing a lonely merchant marine sailor who is killed while on shore leave.
The director thought he’d be clever and get my “real” reaction to Mickey’s death scene. I heard him whisper to the cameraman, “roll film,” and then he told me to ride my bike down a studio alley where I found Rooney lying on the ground, blood oozing from his mouth.
Rooney gasped, “Little boy, help me ... help me!” I was a seasoned pro by now and instantly knew they were trying to trick me. I played along anyway. I gave out a yelp and a shudder, the one that I’d practiced the night before while learning my scene with my dad. The director loved it, assuming he outsmarted me. I just accepted the compliments, never mentioning that I was onto their scheme.
CHAPTER 5
 
Working with Legends
 
My brother started a new acting job that would eventually play a major role in my budding career, too. Stan became a recurring character on
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
playing a neighbor boy, Stanley.
The long-running series was in its latter years and Ozzie’s real-life sons, Rick and David (characters on the show), were too old to hang out with their Pop all the time. Ozzie cast Stan to inject a little youthful energy into his show, somebody he could pal around with and go to the malt shop with, without looking like a pedophile. The show epitomized a 1950s
Pleasantville
reality. Ozzie never went to work and always had tons of free time to goof off. Nice life, if you can get it.
Ozzie’s character was famous for his stuttering, stammering speech pattern. That wasn’t by choice. He spoke that way because he didn’t have time to remember his lines. He was too busy writing, directing, and producing practically every episode during the show’s sixteen-year run. When it came time to film his scenes, he’d read his lines off a teleprompter and fumble his way through the action with the other actors. The result was a lovable, bumbling, befuddled TV dad. In reality, though, he was a creative dynamo, perhaps television’s first
auteur
.
On the days that my brother worked on
Ozzie and Harriet,
my mom would haul me down to the set, too. It wasn’t because we couldn’t afford a babysitter; my mother wanted to let Ozzie know that I was available, too. Sure enough, her crafty little plan worked. Eventually, Ozzie asked if I would like to do an episode. She was always thinking ahead.
Ozzie wanted to use me in a school classroom scene. I was supposed to stand at a blackboard and write out a complicated math problem, much to his character’s befuddlement. I reported to the studio on my designated day of filming and, to my surprise, another crisis unfolded.
It turned out that I was too short to do the scene. I couldn’t reach high enough on the blackboard to write out the math formula so the camera could see it over the heads of the students. If the camera can’t see it, you’re screwed. Ozzie pondered the dilemma and decided that he had no choice but to go with the quickest, easiest solution: get a taller kid.
Holy crap. I couldn’t believe it. I was getting canned again. The last time I was too weird looking; this time I was too damn small. It felt like there was an insidious plan afoot to destroy my morale and dignity. Thank God, Ozzie was no maniacal screamer like the first director who fired me. He assured me that I’d get another role soon. True to his word, Ozzie hired me a few weeks later.
On my next episode, we were shooting a scene in the Nelsons’ TV kitchen, where there were no height requirements. I was asked to do something that I was very capable of: eat chocolate ice cream. In fact, I got so absorbed in my delicious task that I forgot to say my lines in the first take. Ozzie understood kids, though, and was amused by my mistake. He gently reminded me that I should eat my ice cream
and
say my lines. If I did a good job, I could have all the ice cream I wanted. Now that’s the kind of director I liked working with.
When the episode finally aired, my performance was pretty amusing. I had chocolate ice cream smeared all around my mouth. Whenever I had a line of dialogue, I’d barely lift my face out of the bowl to speak. The second I finished talking, I dove back into the scrumptious dessert. The scene was funny because it was honest, exactly the kind of behavior a real kid would do in such a moment. Ozzie was a master at recognizing those “little truths” and using them. I just wanted to eat as much ice cream as I could.
I became a member of Ozzie Nelson’s repertory of recurring characters, and I was treated like family. Whenever I worked on the show, Ozzie invited me to have lunch with him in his personal screening room. We would watch the “dailies” (rough footage of scenes shot the day before). After finishing our main courses, an assistant would deliver our favorite dessert: chocolate ice cream. I think he liked the stuff as much as I did.
Ozzie was my first acting teacher, too. He imparted two basic and important lessons: Number one,
relax
. Relaxation is key to every good performance. Lesson number two: Look at the other actors when they’re talking, listen to what they’re saying, and when it’s your turn to speak, answer them with your scripted lines. It is simple advice but profoundly true to the art of fine acting. Ask any good actor and they’ll agree.
Now that I was appearing regularly on the Nelsons’ hit show, my agent started receiving requests for my services. That was a big step up from the “cattle call” auditions. I became a known commodity, a “Barry Livingston type,” which amazed everyone in our family.
A couple of interesting roles were offered to me that involved working with two comedy icons. The first job was with that other seminal nerd, Jerry Lewis, who was a god to most kids of my age. I was the envy of all my young pals when I told them that I was going to be in his next film,
The Errand Boy.
In the movie, Lewis plays a lowly movie studio employee, an errand boy. My character, a child actor, comes into the studio’s candy store where Lewis is working. I repeatedly ask him to fetch different-colored jelly beans from jars high atop some shelves. Lewis is forced to climb the store’s tall, rolling ladder so many times that he snaps. His broad reaction, a frustration that slowly builds to an explosion, is hysterical. It’s a classic routine that has become known as the “Jelly Bean” scene to many of his fans. I’m honored to have been a small part of it.
Lewis wrote and directed the movie as well as starred in it, so I got to watch him work in multiple roles. He displayed more nervous energy than most hyperactive kids at my elementary school. One day, Lewis was so manic and out of control that he darted in front of a moving camera dolly and got clobbered. The dolly hit him so hard in the head that it drew blood and knocked him right on his ass.
After working with Lewis, I was cast in a small part in a movie with another comedy giant, my
Honeymooners
hero, Jackie Gleason. The film was
Papa’s Delicate Condition
, and the “Great One” was larger than life. Nothing seemed to rattle his jovial mood, not even smashing his “Rolls Royce” golf cart into the back of somebody’s shiny new Cadillac. Gleason was another comedy giant with a thirst for life ... and alcohol.

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