George Kennedy - Trust Me

Trust Me

All the world is a stage.

From curtain to curtain, yours is the starring role.

Copyright 2011 by George Kennedy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2011 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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Milwaukee, WI 53213

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Permissions can be found which constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

All photos are from the authors collection.

Book design by Mark Lerner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

www.applausebooks.com

Contents

Trust me.

These are memoirs of a kid born in New York City in 1925. His dad, George Senior, was a pianist, composer, and orchestra leader at Proctors Vaudeville Theatre, and his mother, Helen, played in a classic dance troupe. Hanky-panky ensued. They married, and I soon was the result.

By any standard, we were doing OK. An apartment on the Hudsons Riverside Drive in those days was well-to-do. Four-masted schooners, mostly out of service by then, were tied up in splendid symmetry about five hundred yards away. It was the Roaring Twenties.

I was four when Dads appendix ruptured during removal and he died on the operating table of peritonitis. They had no penicillin then to stop the infection. The year was 1929, and a dead-broke Americawith no way to fight the catastrophe of a Wall Street crashspent the next dozen or so years almost dying too. Vaudeville was history. Mom and I became part of the stockyard.

I write like I talk. A long time ago I tried making talking and telling the truth one and the same. That isnt just difficult; it means painfully reviewing things youve been led to believe since you were a child. Thats very hard to do. Like many, I have marched along adhering to conventions (sex, color, church, party, gang) without examination. Theres a wonderful, protective togetherness in that anonymity. You obey or are damned, less joined together than stuck together. You become an echo rather than a voice.

This book is about what happens when you stop fearingand think.

I like writing, but warmed-over BS is not on the menu. You are the most important thing in life. Every phrase in the bookawkward or notis how I think, and I question everything. I wrote every word as if we were sitting together. I want you to think too.

So, we begin, only in chronological order at the beginningnot pretty, but its true. This is a lot about people I loved, and a lot less about people I didnt. This is about Hollywood, of course. La-La Land in Calipornianot quite all make-believe. We give our hearts to screen idols through laughter and tears. Many times, rejoice, with damned good reason.

You are the most important person who ever lived. Youll see.

GK

It can happen at any stage in a career, but its more terrifying when youre first starting out. The phone rings. Its your agent. The agent says that such and such a producer doesnt know your work. Offhand, you dont know his name either. The agent says he talked the producer into meeting you. Its the remake of a classic, and they want someone new. He has no other info, but he has talked the guy into a reading the next morning, ten a.m. sharp, at his office. Your heart pumps.

It takes a while for you to calm down. A classic? A Tale of Two Cities? Anthony Adverse? You dont sleep much at all that night, while visions of The Three Musketeers dance in your head. You idly wonder if John Mills would take offense if you imitated his bravura performance in Great Expectations. Finally, its morning. You dont eat. Youre at the appointed place a half hour early, but pace up and down outside so you wont look too eager. You enter as casually as your nervous smile permits. Youre expected; have a seat. You wait, alone except for the secretary who admitted you, never looked at you, pointed to a chair, and drifted back to the Enquirer. About twenty minutes later, a buzz. Another pointed finger at a door. And youre in front of God.

Well, not exactly God. But you had to walk across a lot of floor to get to the only furniture in the room, his huge desk and chair. He looked like Tweety Pie behind it. He hadnt looked up yet, scribbling something on a paper. He suddenly stands, waves the paper for you to take, the voice not quite as deep as Tweety Pie. I changed some of it.top of page three. I need menace, but behind it a sense of childlike innocence.

You look at the page as he crosses back to his chair and holds up his two hands to frame a picture of you. You have a question, but he sucks something from his teeth. Anytime youre ready. Apparently youre in frame. You look back at the page. You take a breath and read,AARRGH.

Not bad, kid.not bad at all. Do it again. This time drag your left foot.

PLENTY OF NOTHIN

You will care. You are a human being, put on this earth without any say-so at all, who has been praised and damned from the instant you came out of the womb. Male or female, skin of any color, I am you. You have been told lies all your life, by parents and clergy, those you trusted above all others, and were not allowed skepticism. Lets question everything I can think of.

The decade called the Roaring Twenties was roughly from 1919 until 1929. World War I was over, and America began indulging itself in excesses. There was no such thing as too much wine, women, and song. At the beginning, vaudeville and its extravagant kin, the Ziegfeld Follies, were everything that the word entertainment could provide. If you were Will Rogers, you headlined for Ziggy.

If you were Helen Meade (my mother-to-be), you were part of a classical dance team called Le Ballet Classique, and you played at Proctors Theatre, where pianist and pit-orchestra leader George Kennedy held forth. They married, and I was born on February 18, 1925. I weighed twelve pounds, and when the nurse first hefted me up for my mother to see, she said, Geez, kid.get a job. Being that oversized provided me with an abnormally curved spine (see the baby picture? Scoliosis. Severe spinal curvature. Thats as straight as I got), and the doctors first sure prognostications were for an arthritic future.

When youre a little child, everything is in such a formative stage that you really dont file things in your mind the way you do later in life. They are there, all right, but you wouldnt know where to find them. In writing this book, Id look for one thing and find something quite different. It has to do with opening doors. Im eighty-six years old, and some doors have been rusted shut and out of reach all of my life. There were many surprises, considerable good and bad.