Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life by Frank Bank, Gibu Twyman Read Free Book Online Page A

society todayespecially homes where there are less than two parents, or are dysfunctionalthey tend to glum onto the TV and say, "This is the perfect life. If only my life had been like this."
The thing is, there's no family in America that has the "Leave It to Beaver" life. There's always things that go wrong that can't be fixed in 23 minutes. A lot of them go over a lifetime and what people have to learn to do is take those things that are wrong with their family and in some ways cope with them and rise above them.
And that's part of living.
Would he have changed being The Beav?
The way I always tell people is this: knowing what I know now, if when I went on the interview for "Leave It to Beaver," would I still go on it and still accept the job? Very definitely. As an actors, we're part of the golden age of television. We're part of one of the great shows. We'll go down as part of television history.
I got very lucky to be picked as The Beaver and be part of that phenomenon.

Well, we all got very lucky. Jerry, Kenny, Tony and I.
No question about that.
I can't imagine any of us would change the chance we had to be part of the Cleaver family. No way.
And, in fact, I don't think I could have put any of this any better than my

 

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buddies, Kenny and Jerry.
Especially the part about my being such a brilliant actor.
Just kidding.
But the "wholesome" thing?
Well, maybe for everyone else, that's the way their lives went off-camera.
Mine?
I can't honestly say it was squeaky clean.
In fact, some of it was as far away from your average "Beaver" episode as the other side of the moon.
I probably was fortunate I was in the public limelight when the tabloids were a lot less active.
I told you I was always lucky. Right place. Right time.
Because it's probably for the best that all of my life wasn't known during my acting days.
Behind the Lumpy and Beaver and innocent Mayfield facade was a wild child inside me about to get out.
And the more I passed from being a child, the wilder he got.

 

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Chapter Two
Leonard, Sylvia and Scarface
We should have known something unusual was happening because my poor mother was trying to make it to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.
I was on the way with her, trying to wait to be born.
And not doing a very good job of it, I might add.
Sylviathat's my momis doing her best to wait for my dad, Leonard. But that also is proving a difficult thing to do.
Remember the movie, "1941," Spielberg's big bomb?
Honest to God, they really did have air-raid warnings in Los Angeles back in the early '40s. Because my old man was an air-raid warden. We're in the middle of World War II and Leonard and Sylvia live in Huntington Park at the time. Huntington Park is down in the southern part of Los Angeles, not far from Long Beach.
So Leonard is the air-raid warden for our block and Sylvia is so pregnant she's about to burst. And it takes awhile for Leonard to get home from air-raid-wardening and all like that. And things are moving right along for Sylvia by now, and there's no Hollywood Freeway. There's no Harbor Freeway. And to get to Cedars from Huntington must have taken an hour.
It's 15 minutes by freeway now. But it was an hour or more back then.
Anyhow, we're all on the way to Cedars, even if I don't exactly know it so far, and I start showing up.
So Leonard takes a sharp turn into Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital instead of Cedars and it turns out to be a pretty darn brilliant maneuver by pop.
I am born in the ambulance entrance of Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital.
I mean, I came sliding into first base before they could get me into the hospital, I was born in the wrong hospital.
Right then and there, I was mucking things up.
I popped right out and went, "I'm outta here. What's happenin'?"

 

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I can just imagine the ride before we all got there. Hollywood Presbyterian is only maybe a mile, mile-and-a-half from Cedars, but the five miles before they stopped at Hollywood, I'm sure my mom is going, "Len.