The Importance of Being Ernie:

by Barry Livingston

  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.

  CHAPTER 37

  The Darkest Hours

  I returned to Los Angeles from Salt Lake City and faced two life-changing situations. The first involved my girlfriend, Dale. Our relationship, loving and supportive at first, had run its course. There was no acrimony or drama; we were merely drifting apart. I was leaving town to do theater, and she wanted a more permanent boyfriend. We separated as friends and still are to this day.

  The second matter involved my mother’s erratic behavior. I tried to keep my distance, but it was impossible to not get sucked in to her bizarre activities. One of the stranger missions: I was recruited to retrieve the discarded dance floor from the Queen Mary. Not the one from the venerable luxury cruise ship. I’m talking about The Queen Mary in Studio City, the infamous gay nightclub.

  My mother had noticed that the disco was undergoing a renovation, and the club’s old parquet floor was in the trash bins behind the club. According to her psychic cronies, the wood had very good vibes and would look great in her new town house. My parents had just sold our old home on Milbank Street.

  I agreed to the covert mission, mainly because my mom and dad were on the verge of getting back together. Kids can never accept their parents’ being apart, even if they are like oil and water. I was willing to do everything and anything to keep the peace, even if it meant Dumpster diving for old dance floors.

  The plan was for my brothers and I to rendezvous before dawn at the trash bins in the dank alley behind the club. If the coast was clear, we’d pluck the dance floor sections from the garbage and be on our way. Of course, there were risks. The alley behind the club was an infamous pick-up spot for hustlers, male and female. The cops cruised the area regularly, rounding up whomever they could. My fear was that it would be us.

  We arrived in the middle of the night, all of us dressed in black like cat burglars. Nothing suspicious about that. No cop cars or hustlers were in sight, so we began our excavation of the smelly, overflowing bins.

  I wore the thickest, most industrial rubber gloves I could find and tried hard not to imagine what other treasures of the night I might be touching. The whole stressful time, I could hear a TV newscaster’s voice breaking another sad child actor story: “Barry Livingston on Hard Times: Dumpster Diving Behind a Gay Nightclub.”

  My brothers and I selected the least scuffed and warped sections of dance floor, tossed them into my mom’s Nova hatchback, and fled from the scene of the crime. Luckily, we didn’t get caught.

  The dark truth behind Mom’s bizarre behavior and emotional turmoil soon revealed itself. She had recently had a momentary blackout while driving and sideswiped a car. This event was impossible to ignore, so she saw a doctor, something my mother rarely did. A week later, after undergoing a battery of tests, she came home after a follow-up meeting with the doctor. My mom stared at me, tears welling, and whispered, “I have cancer.”

  The initial diagnosis was lung cancer, no doubt from smoking two packs of unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes a day. More tests revealed that the lung cancer had metastasized to her brain, to her liver, to her kidneys, to just about everywhere in her body. The doctor gave her three months to live. She lasted six.

  In her last few months, she and my father made peace with each other. He was a devoted nurse, caring for her until the final days. Anyone who has offered home care in a dire medical situation will know how gut wrenching it can be. My dad rose to the challenge. There was a unique bond between these two flawed human beings. That love revealed itself in the end.

  For all my mother’s shortcomings, she was a charismatic woman with a bawdy sense of humor and tremendous generosity. She not only raised Stan and me, her biological kids, but she adopted three more children: Bill, Michelle, and Gene. She was also a surrogate mother to dozens of other young people, mainly my friends and those of my siblings. All were welcomed into our home for extended stays. It was her drive and vision that got me into show business, a mixed blessing to be sure. Her aim was true, though. At fifty-five years old, my mother passed away.

  I retreated, physically and emotionally, into the sanctuary of my newly purchased house. Dealing with the loss of a parent is always a kick in the gut, no matter how close or distant the relationship was during life
. I was very close to my mother, and her loss left a giant hole in my heart. This tragic event, combined with a bleak forecast in acting, led me into the most self-destructive period of my life.

  I had a moderate cocaine habit for a couple of years. It was a social thing, partying with friends and using it to impress the girls with the hopes of getting laid, which never happened often enough. Now, I started “freebasing” the drug, purifying the white powder and smoking it. This was the darkest period of my Lost Weekend.

  I spent many nights getting high until dawn with a drug-dealing buddy, Louie. There’s really not much to tell about these events. If you were a fly on the wall watching us, you couldn’t have found a duller duo. We’d talk, smoke, talk, cook up a new batch, smoke, talk, talk, talk ... boring, boring, boring. Eventually, the drug supply would be exhausted and I’d go home.

  Like most users who survive the drug, there comes a tipping point, a moment that screams out you are headed for an early grave. Mine occurred late one night while I was trying to score.

  It was midweek, about two in the morning, and I kept calling Louie to buy some cocaine. His phone just rang and rang, no answer. I wouldn’t give up, though. Anyone who’s ever been hooked knows about that crazy need. Finally, at about four in the morning, a raspy, exhausted voice answered the phone.

  “What?” Louie hissed.

  “Louie, it’s Barry. Can I come by?” I purposely left my query vague to throw off any wire-tapping cops. Louie knew the drill.

  “Sure, come over,” he said. Serious drug dealers run a 24/7 operation and are used to catering to late-night customers.

  Minutes later, I skidded to a stop outside Louie’s apartment in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles. It was eerily quiet, nearly dawn. I sprinted to the front door of the building, rang his bell, and waited for a voice on the intercom. I got no answer. I rang again, holding the button down longer than necessary, and waited. Again, nothing. “Shit,” I muttered. “He’s probably gone back to sleep.”