by Robert Evans
Abe, the eldest and richest, owned Krasdale Foods. He must have been one popular guy sitting in the backseat of his custom-built sixteen-cylinder, open-chauffeured Cadillac limousine, passing hundreds of people on most every corner waiting in breadlines.
His younger brothers, Izzy, Julius, Ben, and Sam, were in business together—competitors of Abe, owning Bernice Foods. All of them together weren’t as wealthy as Abe. They only had Packard limousines. Only two of the five could write anything but their name on a check.
The five brothers shared one thought: their beautiful sister, Florence, had married beneath her. How could she compromise, marrying a dentist—in Harlem, no less? One day, when I was fourteen, I found out.
Whenever my parents left town, I would sneak girls into the apartment. My parents were vacationing in Boca Raton, Florida. One night, after spending hours with a girl in my bedroom, she asked if she could borrow a comb, brush, and lipstick. She didn’t want to look like a tramp, which she was, walking past the doorman.
Quietly, I slipped past the maid’s room into my parents’ bedroom, opening my mother’s vanity. Gathering together a comb, brush, and lipstick, I spotted a hatbox I’d never noticed before. Curiously, I untied the ribbon and opened it. Inside were letters, all in my father’s handwriting.
The first thing next morning, I snuck back into the bedroom. The hatbox was filled with love letters, more than a hundred of them from Archie to Florence, starting after their first date. No wonder she’d fallen in love with him! My father was more than a dentist—he was a romantic. A poet. How could she not be swept off her feet?
My parents were the classic marriage of opposites. Mom was the personality of the two—quick to laugh, expressive with her feelings, friendly with strangers. When she was home, the phone never stopped ringing. When she took a weekend off with the girls, it never rang at all. Certainly not for Archie. Pop’s entire life was us—his wife and children. (Later, when I was twelve, another child was born, my baby sister, Alice.)
Pop lived a double life. To his social contemporaries, a nameless dentist. But once north of 110th Street, Pop was a king. Almost everyone knew of his full-floor dental clinic on the corner of 133rd Street and Lenox Avenue. Just below was the hottest club in Harlem, owned by Madam Queen of the numbers racket royalty.
Pop had the first fully integrated dental clinic in America. He had six dental rooms, staffed by four dentists and four nurses, split evenly between black and white. Not bad for the thirties, huh?
It was two bucks an extraction. Every patient was black, except for Charles and me. My mother’s family insisted she go to their dentist on Central Park West.
Ernest, the black superintendent of the building, was my father’s best pal. During the winter he made sure the clinic was fully heated. During the summer he kept an air-cooling system filled with blocks of ice. My father had the only air-conditioned offices in Harlem and his business thrived because of it. Ah, but Ernest sported the pearliest whites in Harlem—gratis from Archie. When he died, Pop paid for his best friend’s funeral.
At least one Sunday a month, I took the subway up to 135th Street and Seventh Avenue and walked the three blocks to his office. Sunday was usually a half day, but Pop and his staff stayed as long as it took to see every patient.
Locking up, he then opened the safe in the X-ray lab and took out the week’s earnings. There was nothing but cash—mostly two-dollar bills, some ones, a rare fiver. I helped him separate the bills into nine stacks and watched as he personally paid each nurse and dentist. Once I saw one of the nurses—she was a beauty, a black beauty—squeeze his hand and whisper something in his ear. His face beamed. It was my only glimpse into what could have been a secret life. The ninth stack of bills he put into his own pocket, which bulged like a softball—and off we were.
Lenox Avenue was his. Everyone knew him, from the cop on horseback to the vagrant on the stoop. “Hiya, Doc, how’s it goin’?” Or “Sorry I’m late, Doc, I’ll bring the two bucks in on Monday!”
We walked from Harlem to Riverside Drive. To this day, I treasure that time alone with him. How different the city was then! Here we were, a man and boy, white, walking through the Depression days of black Harlem, and never for a second did we feel threatened.
My imitations of Cagney, Bogart, Cooper, Gable, and Stewart made him laugh. Putting his forefinger down under my chin, he tilted my head up. Our eyes met.
“You’re some character, kid!” Through the eyes of a nine-year-old looking up, even though he was only five foot eight or nine, he looked like a giant. He was.
Putting hand in pocket, he pulled out a crisp two-dollar bill. Dropping it into the hat of a young soldier with no legs wheeling himself down Lenox Avenue. The soldier smiled up.
“Doc, without you I couldn’t smile.” Then taking out his upper and lower dentures, he started to laugh. “Couldn’t eat either.”
Then with the zest of a relay sprinter he went into high gear down Lenox Avenue, laughing like he hadn’t a worry in the world.
Many Sundays later, taking a walk down Lenox Avenue, I told Pop of my dream.
“What do you think about me becoming an actor?”
He laughed. “Sure, sure.” But he didn’t say no.
Back home, he’d take out his wad of cash.
“Bobby, break it down, count it, give me the total.” It felt better than stealing home plate. For a flash, I was a pit boss in a gambling casino, giving him the final total while he sat eating his canned salmon and saltines at the kitchen table.
One Sunday in December 1941, my brother and I picked Pop up in Harlem, splurged on a cab, and headed to the Polo Grounds. The Giants were playing the Dodgers. In those days, the Dodgers were not only a baseball team, but a football team as well. The stadium was packed. The favored Giants were upset by a score of 37-17. But the guys in uniform were not there to see the end.
In the cab home, we heard why: the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Imagine, they never even announced it during the game.
That night a family meeting was called at my Uncle Abe’s. I was always uncomfortable visiting my rich uncles, especially Abe. They were perfectly nice to us, but it is no high being looked down upon as a poor relative—which we were. The only one more uncomfortable than me was Pop. As soon as he entered the wood-paneled elevator to ascend to Abe’s eighteen-room penthouse overlooking Central Park, he began to shrink. He knew no one there was interested in hearing about the gold tooth he’d put in the mouth of some shvartzer that day, or about Rachmaninoff’s new prelude or one of his historical theories on the subject of religious genocide.
That night, all they were interested in was, first, how to keep their kids from going to war; second, how to expand their wealth; and third, how to protect it.
We were the first to leave. As we were going down in the elevator, I remember, Pop said in a voice barely above a whisper, “The wealthy will get wealthier and the young will die.”
Just as my father wanted to be everything his father was not, I wanted to be everything my father was not. My dreams would become realities no matter what.
Radio in those days was king. No matter how poor you were, everyone in America had a church-shaped Philco or Edison in their living room—it was the family hearth. Starting at nine in the morning, fifteen-minute soap operas filled the air with the latest installment of “Young Widder Brown,” “The Right to Happiness,” and so on. In the evening, the shows ran longer, from thirty-minute soaps like “Henry Aldrich” and “Gangbusters” to hour-long dramas like “Lux Radio Theatre.” Radio employed more actors than theater and films combined.
My only friend at Joan of Arc Junior High was Larry Frisch, another loner who wanted to be an actor. Larry’s dad was a radio executive, and from him we learned how to get our foot in the door.
“Make up a résumé,” he said, “a pack of lies—credits that can’t be checked.”
In the summer of 1942, my family rented a house on the ocean in Long Beach, Long Isla
nd. Instead of hanging around the beach clubs, I became a commuter with my copy of “Radio Registry,” which listed the week’s available parts, tucked under my arm.
From nine to five, June to September, I hit every audition room in New York, making up one story after another about my brilliant career to date. I got my foot in the door, but that was as far as it got.
Rejection breeds obsession. How could I break in? I had one talent, an ear for accents. I couldn’t speak German, French, Italian, or Spanish, but there was no one better at faking it than me.
When school started up, I went right on filling out audition blanks. Finally I got a part—a Nazi colonel in a concentration camp for “Radio Mystery Theater.”
Here I was, a twelve-year-old Jewish kid, within six months labeled the top Nazi in town—in radio that is. The trouble was I couldn’t stop playing it in life. From the age of twelve, until the day Pop died, I always called him the Führer. Whenever Pop came through the front door I’d click my heels, “Sieg heil mein Führer.”
Call a spade a spade, but I was the only one south of 110th Street who looked up to him.
Being hailed as the Führer didn’t rest well with family or friends—all of whom, naturally, were Jewish.
“Archie, your kid. Is he a little off?”
“Let’s Pretend” was the show to be on; it was every radio actor’s goal. On Saturday mornings from eleven to twelve, every kid in America was glued to these adventure stories—a new, original fantasy every week. By the time I was fourteen I was a regular. Playing everything from a German baron to a Spanish buccaneer and a stuttering Italian waiter, I was the accent kid.
My father always resented not being called by his proper surname, “Shapera” rather than “Shapiro.” His sensitivity concerning a pronunciation mistake so slight seemed totally foreign to his persona. In fact, it had nothing to do with pronunciation. It was far more complicated. Call it thwarted revenge, harbored resentment toward a father who would go out to buy a newspaper and return home three weeks later—broke. A degenerate gambler who was always away, leaving his family on empty.
Late one evening, Pop walked into our bedroom, his face pained. “Boys, I need a favor. It’s about my mother. She’s got six months left, maybe a year. Her whole life’s been one big sacrifice. Never a luxury, a good year, a good month. All that mattered to her was her Archie. I suppose I filled the gap for a husband she never had.” What was he getting at?
“Her maiden name was Evan. That should be your calling card. Why carry his moniker? He was never there. I wanted to do it myself, but I couldn’t. I was afraid he’d hurt her. For me, it’s too late. But for you, life’s just starting. For Grandma, for me, let her know her Archie loves her”—his voice cracked—“before she passes on.”
Our name now started with an E. We kept the S, however. It became the last letter of our new moniker. Without it, again our last name could have been mispronounced as “even” and the one thing we didn’t want was to go through life with our surname mistaken for an adjective or adverb.
Here we were, a family divided, everyone with a different name. Divided in name only, though. If anything, it brought us closer. And me, I was now Robert Evans—“Nazi actor” for hire.
After junior high I wanted to go to Professional Children’s School. At PCS, classes ended at noon, which gave you the afternoon off to get on with your career. My mother wouldn’t hear of it. Her elder son, the conformist, had gone to Horace Mann, a college-prep school. Her younger son, though a bit peculiar, should at least get what’s considered a “normal” education.
My father’s attitude was a bit different. Outwardly, he didn’t approve of my acting ambitions, but at least I had a goal. And in some ways, inwardly, I think it was a new beginning for him, living out his thwarted dreams through his little Bobby’s adventures.
One night I joined him in the kitchen, where he was hunched over his usual salmon and saltines.
“I know why you waited up to talk to me,” he said. “It’s about school, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“If you want to go to PCS, you’re going to have to earn it.”
“Sure, that’s okay. How?”
He thought for a minute while he finished off the last of the salmon. “I want you to take an admissions test for Bronx High School of Science.”
“C’mon, Pop! It’s in the Bronx, and I’m not looking to be a scientist.”
“Hear me out, Bobby. First you have to get in. Only five percent make it. If you do, and get an A in every subject for one year, you can go pick any school you want.”
“What if I don’t get in?”
“If you don’t, you can’t get A’s.”
“Pop, that’s not fair . . . !”
“You’re right. If life were fair, I’d be playing Chopin at Carnegie Hall.”
I took the test. I got in. I hated it more than I thought. Not only did I have to travel an hour each day to the Bronx, not only was it academically the toughest school in the city, not only did I have nothing in common with one kid in the entire school, but I had zero interest in every course. Yet, to get the hell out, I had only one goal—the big A across the board.
Before the ink dried, my final report card was before my father’s eyes—the only letter on it was the big A. Though two had minuses next to them, he couldn’t deny there was no other letter on the card.
Did I resent it? Sure. Was Pop right? Sure! If I could get through that, nothing could stop me now.
Charles and I were walking down Broadway. Suddenly he pointed to a girl. “What a beauty.”
“Do you want her? She’s yours.”
Charlie looked at me, his kid brother, as if I were crazy. “Sure,” he’d laugh.
Maybe it was his laugh that gave me the adrenaline to go up to the girl, sheepishly saying, “Someone dared me to try to meet you.”
Was I from another planet? She’d walk a little faster. I’d keep up with her—a step, a block, two blocks, whatever it took. If nothing else worked, I’d go into one of my imitations—Cagney, Gable, Grant, Cooper. When I got a smile out of her I’d say, “I do this for a living. Ever hear of ‘Let’s Pretend’?”
If she said, “Sure,” or anything sounding like it, she was a goner.
“I’m on it every Saturday. I’m a radio actor. How’d you like to watch the next show? Bring a couple of friends.” If she opened her mouth yes, like a fish, she was hooked. “I’ll send you the tickets. Come backstage if you’d like. Where can I call you?”
Once I got her number, I said a quick good-bye. Though I was only fourteen, my batting average was better than Ted Williams’s.
Instinct cannot be taught, bought, or acquired. Either you have it or you don’t; it does not come with age. Till this day, I can’t switch from TV to cable. Yet before I could shave, I was as instinctive to a woman’s thoughts as I am today.
Danger was my turn-on. The thrill of sneaking a girl into my parents’ apartment was greater than getting her into bed. That ended at one o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Eve of 1944. My parents were away for the weekend, Charles was in the army, and the girl next to me in bed was Patty Wheeler, daughter of Bert Wheeler, the great comedian. Only eighteen but already the toast of Broadway, she thought I was seventeen.
Suddenly, a knock on the door. It was Daisy Diggs, our nosy housekeeper. “You in there with some tramp, Bobby?” Quickly, I put my hand over Patty’s mouth. “Shhh.”
“You hear me? You get outta there with that white trash. Your daddy’s gonna give you some whippin’ in the mornin’.”
Patty gave me a double take. “How old are you?”
I cringed. “Fourteen.”
At noon on New Year’s Day, I was greeted with a smack across the face by Pop, the only time he ever hit me.
“Don’t ever be disrespectful in our home again, ever!”
I wasn’t. I found a more dangerous turf—the banquet room on the top floor of the St. Moritz Hotel. It was my cousin’s w
edding. Others were congratulating the bride and groom. I was checking out my new digs.
Not bad. Great view, terrace, lounges, privacy, no upkeep. When we left, I checked the elevators, staircases, entrances, and exits. “Can’t beat the price,” danger told me.
Like a second-story man, the next afternoon, and for a week to come, I checked the place out, doing a dry run from the hotel entrance to the thirty-first floor, passing the doorman, to the elevator, getting off two floors from the top, a quick left to the back staircase and up two flights by foot, find the one keyless door, which I did, and there it was—my home away from home.
Dangerous? Sure. That was the turn-on.
“Go up the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor, turn left and open the back stairwell,” I’d whisper to my love of the night.
“It shouldn’t take longer than seven minutes. Wait, count to a hundred. I’ll be there. Got it?”
Did she get it!
Whether it be a debutante or a showgirl, my M.O. was the same. I used the place so often I could have done it blindfolded. Ah, but whoever the lady of the night might be, she thought we were sharing something together for the very first time.
During the week, I’d zero in on showgirls, and for good reason—they only had two hours off. It’s what’s called “between shows.” To me a triple blitz. Danger, dropping my pants, and home in time to finish my homework. My sumptuous terrace suite at the St. Moritz remained my private paradise for almost two years.
One night in the middle of a rather intimate embrace, four hands grabbed me from the back. It was the manager with two guards behind him. Embarrassing? The girl I was with just happened to be on the cover of Life that week: THE DEBUTANTE OF THE YEAR.
My new best pal, Dickie Van Patten, was the top juvenile actor in town. At eighteen, he had appeared in more than twenty Broadway plays, and had six or seven running parts on radio soaps. We made a great team: me, dark-haired and swarthy; Dickie, blond and fair-skinned. We were the same size and constantly exchanged each other’s clothes to make people think we had twice the wardrobe we really had. Dickie was almost two years older than me, but we shared the same addictions: gambling, girls, and danger.
