Richard Chamberlain - Shattered Love: A Memoir

I was born in Los Angeles during the Great Depression and was quickly whisked off to Beverly Hills. Alas, it was to the normal, pre-90210 part of that glittering town, the wrong side of Wilshire Boulevardand, even worse, the wrong side of Beverly Drive. In short, the wrong side of the now-vanished streetcar tracks.

My folks took out a thirty-five-year mortgage and bought a three-bedroom, one-and-a-quarter-bathroom house for a hefty seven thousand dollars. There were five of us: Chuck and Elsa, my father and mother; Bill, my brother; and soon Nonnie, my wonderful maternal grandmother.

There were no freeways, no tall buildings in L.A., no jet planes, no zip codes, no smog, no TVand consequently no video games, no computers or cell phones, no drugs or guns at school. Some of our neighbors still had iceboxes instead of the newfangled fridges, so the ice truck trundled down our street every other day, delivering big blocks of ice. We kids used to clamor after the truck, begging for chunks to lick on hot summer days. The Good Humor man drove by too, ringing real bells. An ice cream bar cost five cents.

Who needed TV? We had the movies, at ten cents a double bill. And it was the golden age of radiosoap operas and music, dramas and news, on weekdays, and an extravaganza of comedy and variety shows on the weekends: Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Fred Allen, Red Skelton.

I loved listening to radio dramas and fairy tales and mysteries. Television scenes are limited by the varying skills of the actors, and especially by limited production budgetsyou get only what the producers can afford. But my imagination had unlimited funds to spend on the images my radio evoked. And the picture tube in my head was wide-screen, full color, and a hundred feet high.

There were vacant lots galore with tall grass to play in. We used to hide in the grass, pulling up clumps with dirt clods at the end and then lofting these missiles over where we thought our friends were hiding. When you got hit with one it didnt usually hurt that much. The neighborhood was full of kids, and even at preschool age we were free to roam and play and invent adventure. No kidnappers, no molesters, and no drug dealershouse and car doors left unlockedwe felt safe; we took safety for granted.

I was seven years old on that Day of Infamy when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and savaged the U.S. Navy, awakening the Sleeping Giant and drawing us into mortal combat with the rampaging fascist forces of Germany, Japan, and Italy. Children pick up on just about everything, and my parents initial shock at suddenly being at war scared my brother and me. Seeing this, they changed their tune and explained to us that the fighting was very, very far away, and that our brave and righteous military would keep us as safe and sound as wed always been. Still believing that moms and dads speak only the truth, I bought this, and the war became in my juvenile imagination a distant high adventure, a rough-and-ready sporting event that we good guys were bound to win.