Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment

by Dick van Patten

  EVERY SO OFTEN!

  Not long after our wedding, while on break from Mama, I took a role in a summer stock production of Edward Chodorov’s psychological comedy, Oh Men, Oh Women. It was an interesting play that dealt in a humorous way with the lighter side of psychoanalysis. It was especially fun because my sister, Joyce, also had a part as Myra Hagerman, an attractive young woman engaged to the psychiatrist, who was played by Richard Kendrick. On the eve of their wedding, I show up, playing a troubled neurotic named Grant Cobble, who manages to make a mess of things.

  We opened at the Pocono Playhouse in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania on August 3, 1955. I only mention this performance because of a review written in a local paper, The Daily Record by Leonard Randolph, the paper’s theater critic. Every actor has their own way of dealing with the inevitable negative critiques that come crashing down on us throughout our careers. There are, of course, those once in a generation performers, like the Lunts, who routinely, and justifiably, are met with acclaim pretty much every time they perform. The rest of us take the good with the bad.

  But every so often we get lucky. Who knows why, but sometimes a particular performance just happens to strikes a certain critic just the right way at just the right time and that can make it all worthwhile. Well Leonard Randolph of East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, was that guy for me.

  Randolph’s review of Oh Men, Oh Women, had the auspicious title of “Superior Acting By Dick Van Patten Lifts Oh Men, Oh Women To Enjoyable Heights.” Randolph really wasn’t crazy about the play itself, which he described as “a rather weak-minded piece of writing.” Still, he thought it “quite funny and highly enjoyable.” Why? Mr. Randolph explains in a section with the preposterous subtitle of: “Superhuman Humor.” Randolph wrote: “The principal reason for this is Dick Van Patten’s side-splitting performance…. What Van Patten does with the part of Grant Cobble is uproarious caricature which is so far superior to the role itself that it becomes very nearly superhuman in stature.” Randolph continued: “using a constricted, high-pitched voice with amazing skill, the actor lifts the play by its heels and shakes it frantically for all the humor he can rattle from it.”

  Well, that one goes up on the wall! We actors are a thick-skinned lot—or at least we better be. Generally, we get critiqued a bit too harshly. But on occasion, it balances out when we get more than we deserve. And every so often, we just might have the perfect guy sitting out there in the crowd. I had him that night in the Poconos. While it’s been some fifty-three years, I still get a kick out of Leonard Randolph’s overly-generous review. And it reminds me of how fortunate I am to be in a profession where the greatest accomplishment is to help people forget their troubles and just have a good—even a “superhuman”—laugh.

  31

  SLIPPING AWAY

  Mama finally wound down in the summer of 1957, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t have a job. With a wife and three young kids to support, pretty much all the money we had was gone. Worse still, for the first time in my thirty years working in New York City, the phone stopped ringing.

  I thought maybe I had been typecast after eight years as Nels on Mama. Later we would hear about people getting typecast on television and it having terrible repercussions on their careers. George Reeves, who played Superman, was the most famous—although somewhat exaggerated. It has often been said that his role in From Here to Eternity, with my old friend Montgomery Clift, was reduced or removed from the film after people in the first viewing starting yelling out, “It’s Superman” in the theaters. The film’s writer and producer denied that there was any diminution of Reeves’s role. Still, Reeves’s typecasting was widely perceived, and many people believed that the depression preceding his final suicide was worsened by the fact that everyone saw him as Superman, and he couldn’t get other work.

  When I first took the role of Nels on television, I was astonished at the power of instant recognition. At first I thought it was great, a real sign of success. But at the same time, the public was getting used to me as that particular character. For eight years and 500 episodes, everyone who watched television thought of Dick Van Patten and Nels Hansen as one and the same. The show had ended, but not my association with Nels in the public eye. Suddenly I realized that being so well recognized had a downside.

  But there was more to my troubles than simply being typecast. The truth is that my enjoyment of the track had developed into a problem. By the fall of 1957, just months after the close of I Remember Mama, I was flat broke. What little money we had I was increasingly throwing away at the track in some crazy hope I could turn my bad luck around with one big win. That led to one of the most devastating mistakes of my life.

  When Pat and I were married, we received a series of war bonds from my family. My grandfather gave us $2,000, and my mother and father also gave them to us. In total they would have been worth $5,000 when they matured. In October of 1957, with no money left, I started harassing Pat to cash in the bonds so I could bet them on a “sure thing” at the track. There was a marvelous horse that year named Gallant Man who had won all the big races and was now coming to Belmont Park. His jockey was none other than the great Willie Shoemaker, one of the legends of the sport.

  Pat refused. But I kept at it, harassing her every day to cash the bonds. It was the last bit of money we had in all the world. Also, to cash them in prematurely would be to take a tremendous loss as they were not even close to maturing. At the time, they were only worth $3,750.

  But by this point, I had pretty much lost touch with reality. A gambler always believes—and I mean believes—that he’s only one bet away from turning it all around. For me, that “one bet” was Gallant Man. That horse was going to be my salvation.

  I continued pressing Pat relentlessly. All week I kept after her. There was no way this horse could lose. I kept repeating it. It was a sure thing. All our problems will end, if only we put the wedding bonds on Gallant Man.

  She finally relented. I suppose a person can only take so much before it just doesn’t seem worth the fight. It’s a miracle she didn’t walk out on me, and I’ll always love her for not turning her back on me when I hit rock bottom. It’s easy to stand by someone when things are great; the test of real commitment is what you’re willing to endure when things are falling apart.

  On the day of the race, Pat turned over the bonds. I cashed them at the Bank of America and headed straight for the track.

  It was a beautiful afternoon. There had been several races on the card, but I resisted the temptation to play around and waited for Gallant Man. He was a three-year-old chestnut colt. It was a fast track, and that would suit him well. The odds were even money. At the $50 window, I had to place 74 tickets, which took forever and held up the line. I placed the entire $3,750, all the war bonds we received at our wedding, on Gallant Man.

  The gate opened, and they were off. I stood by myself at the head of the stretch. As they came out of the gate, Gallant Man was still far back in the pack. But I wasn’t concerned because that’s how he ran. He always came from behind. Then when he took the lead no one could catch him. He would later be voted Horse of the Year by Thoroughbred magazine.

  But on that day, the stars were not aligned. In an amazing turnaround, a horse named Dedicate came barreling out of the pack. They hit the stretch, and Dedicate and Gallant Man were neck and neck on the rail. When they crossed the finish line, I couldn’t tell who had won. It seemed from my angle to be a photo finish.

  It wasn’t. Dedicate had pulled ahead at the line by a full quarter length. The principal horse-racing magazine was—and still is—Blood Sport. In the November, 1957 issue, there’s a picture of Dedicate edging past Gallant Man for the biggest upset of the year. I stood there at the track for what seemed an eternity. All our money was gone.

  32

  FLITTING OFF

  Things had pretty much dried up in New York. The phones had stopped ringing, and I was dead broke after the Gallant Man fiasco. And so twelve years af
ter the Lunts warned me against “flitting off to Hollywood,” and twenty-three years after my Grandmother Florence and I stood outside Stan Laurel’s office, I finally decided to give California another try. With a family to feed and no prospects on the East Coast, I gathered up the brood and headed west.

  Miraculously, I landed a part in Rawhide with Clint Eastwood. Rawhide was a great western series that launched Clint’s career. He played the gritty young cowboy, Rowdy Yates. Eric Fleming was also excellent as the head cattle-driver, Gil Favor. Only a few years after Rawhide, Fleming became one of the few actors to actually die while working on a television set. It happened in Peru where he drowned while filming a scene for the series, High Jungle.

  The Rawhide story line involved Favor and Yates leading a team of cattle to a point where they needed to cross the land of a wealthy rancher, played by Brian Dunleavy. I was the rancher’s son, Matt Reston. At first, the old rancher seemed polite enough to Rowdy and Gil, but soon they found out about his mistreatment of his Indian workers, flogging them for minor infractions. And as a sub-plot, the rancher was ashamed of his son, who he believed to be weak-kneed and cowardly. He dreaded the idea that one day this boy would inherit his ranching empire.

  Thus, my character started out as a kind of hapless guy, whose father was ashamed of him. The father’s shame was evident one day as he watched Matt trying to tame a wild bronc—repeatedly getting thrown from the unruly horse. Rowdy offered to help, but stubbornly, Matt declined and kept looking foolish as his father watched him with disgust.

  Interestingly, all those western fellows, including Clint, naturally assumed a guy from New York with a career on the Broadway stage wouldn’t know a thing about horses. But, for better or worse, I’d been around horses every day of my life—and not just to gamble. I’d learned to ride when I was seven years old, and my earliest dreams were of being a jockey. The truth is I could handle horses far better than any of them.

  So when the time came to fall off the horse, I did it myself—over and over again, just as it was called for in the script. Later that day a fellow came up to me and asked for a word. I didn’t realize at the time that this guy was a prominent Hollywood stuntman. He told me that I shouldn’t have done those stunts myself. He explained that every time an actor did his own stunt, a stunt man loses work. Suddenly I felt terrible about it, and since then I’ve always been conscious, not only of the stuntmen, but of the many, many people on a movie or television set who are working hard to make a living. Often their ability to earn money depends on the rest of us. Every so often, we still see some prima donna star bullying people on the crew. I cringe each time I hear about it. When it happens, it creates justified public anger at our profession. We are all lucky to be part of this business, and every star on every show, movie or play should be thankful to the hundreds of people who work so hard just to make them look good.

  I still remember the wonderful final scene in which I did finally stand up to my father. Just as he was about to hang an innocent Indian, I came to the rescue, and in doing so, grew into my own as a man. In the last shot, I was up on the horse, and Rowdy and Gil asked if I wanted to ride with them. I remember my response, because it kind of summed up where I was in my own personal life at the time. I looked down at Eastwood and Fleming and said: “No Thanks, Mr. Favor. I’d rather be on my own for a while.” I then turned the horse and rode off. It was a turning point for me—a time when I would also head off for a while. I packed up my family, and we moved back to New York. It would be another decade before making one last try in Hollywood.

  But, before we left, we had a terrible scare—one that seemed to sum up the entire trip. My mother had suggested I contact Burt Lancaster. After all, he and I had shared an apartment back in New York, and now he was a big movie star. Since the days on 55th Street, Burt had moved up quickly, playing memorable roles in From Here to Eternity and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, with Kirk Douglas. The following year he would win the Academy Award for his performance in Elmer Gantry.

  So I called him on the phone, and he invited us to his big house up in the hills in Bel Air. He told us to bring swim clothes as they had a beautiful pool in the yard.

  When we arrived, his wife, Norma, met us and brought us to their pool. We talked about New York as we waited for Burt to come outside and join us. Suddenly, right in the middle of our conversation, Norma screamed: “Oh My God!” Before I knew what was happening, she jumped up from her chair and dove into the pool. Norma, like Burt, had been an acrobat in the circus, and she was in the water before I could even react. Then I saw Nels, who was five years old, under the water, drowning. I rushed to the poolside, where Norma had already pulled Nels up and was giving him mouth to mouth resuscitation. Pat and I were terrified as we watched her work on Nels, who, at first, was unresponsive. His face had turned a deep blue. Those few seconds seemed like hours. Suddenly Nels coughed, and water came bursting out of his mouth as he literally came back to life.

  Norma had saved my son’s life. Pat and I are forever grateful for her amazing reaction and calm in what was a moment of life or death. We gathered the kids and called it a day, never even seeing Burt. No doubt, he learned about it later from Norma, but as it turned out we left town shortly afterwards, and I never saw them again. It was time for us to go.

  33

  CRASH

  After five months in Los Angeles in 1958, we headed back to the Big Apple. Had I been a young man it might have been different. After all, in my short time in L.A. I did land a guest spot on Rawhide. Perhaps with a little persistence, I might have made a go of it.

  But I was also feeling my age. It was a hard fact that I was now thirty years old with a wife and three young kids to support. This was not the time to try to jumpstart a career that may have required a long time knocking on doors. Of course, there wasn’t much for us back in New York either, but at least it was home.

  As we packed for the trip, we were dead broke. All of us piled into my Olds convertible, and we took off on the long trip back. As always, the journey was, itself, an adventure, especially as our money literally dipped to zero. I tried to get some help from family members, but they thought I would just gamble anything they sent. The truth is we didn’t even have enough to pay for the gas.

  That’s when I got creative. We pulled into Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I went into a small store to buy something. All I had was a Diner’s Club credit card. Crazy as it sounds, at the time there was some kind of law against selling alcohol to Native Americans. I remember there was a Native American fellow outside the store. He actually offered to give me a few bucks if I would buy him some booze. So I put a $2 pint bottle of whiskey on the Diner’s card, and he gave me $5 in cash. After he paid me, I noticed there was a whole crowd of his friends gathered outside the store, and they all wanted whiskey and offered the same deal. So I kept going in and out of the store, making a few bucks each time. The store owner knew what I was doing, but he sold it to me anyway. I kept putting the purchases on my Diner’s Club card, and after about a half hour I had accumulated enough cash to pay for the trip home.

  After the failure of Hollywood and the difficult trip home, we arrived back in New York just in time for another blow to strike. On December 13, 1959, my grandfather, Vincent, died. I’ve already described his terrible death from exposure after falling in the snow. His loss could not have come at a worse time. My mother was devastated. We were all worried about how she would handle it, and our worst fears were realized. The viewing was held at a funeral home in Rego Park, on Woodhaven Boulevard. Afterwards, we went to the cemetery on Queens Boulevard. All along I was concerned about Mom’s emotional state. Together with her children, Vincent was the closest person in the world to her. They had always shared a special bond. He was immensely proud of her, and especially proud of what she had accomplished with her children’s careers. While my father eventually stepped away from it all, Vincent embraced it. He never missed an opening night, and he was deeply involved in her life—eve
n more so in the fifteen years since my father left.

  Just when we thought we were going to make it through the whole process without incident, Mom broke down uncontrollably. As Vincent’s body was being lowered into the ground, she literally ran toward the grave and tried to jump in. My Aunt Katherine and I rushed to grab her right at the edge of the grave before she could fall. Aunt Katherine actually slapped her several times across the face to bring her back to her senses. It worked. Mom regained her composure, and the body was buried. It was a terrible ordeal.

  * * *

  I continued looking for work, but it was slow in coming. I was grateful to Larry Hagman, not yet famous as Barbara Eden’s husband in I Dream of Jeannie, for giving me a part in a 1961 summer tour with David Wayne of The Golden Fleecing. But that ended shortly, and without money coming in, we made the difficult decision that Pat should look for work. After all, she was one of the best dancers in New York City. She immediately landed a job on a show playing at the Jones Beach Theater called Hit the Deck, with music by Guy Lombardo. She did so well that in August of 1960, there was a photo in the New York Daily News of Pat and a group of naval recruits at the Jones Beach Marine Theater. One of the highlights for Pat was meeting a terrific young actor on the rise named Elliot Gould, who was her dance partner in the chorus.

  In 1961, I did manage to score a recurring role on a popular soap opera, Young Doctor Malone. I played Larry Renfrew, the sinister brother-in-law of Doctor David Malone, who was married to Gig Houseman, played by Diana Hyland, who would later be my wife in the initial episodes of Eight Is Enough. Interestingly, my character Larry shared my own biggest vice, horse betting. But, in fairness, Larry was far worse than me since he played the horses with stolen insurance money. Eventually, Larry falls—or is pushed—off a building and dies, thus ending my soap opera career. I did have some forewarning. Before his demise, producer Dick Holland invited me for a drink in a nearby tavern. At the bar, he broke the news: “Dick, I feel awful about it, but I’m just going to have to kill Larry Renfrew. He’s so heavy. We can’t do anything more with him.”