Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

good director. I thought Hugh was a nice, nice man. I never had any run-ins with him.
Now, Jerry and Hugh were not the best of friends. Really, I think there was just a lot of difference in personality between the two. Water and oil. Jerry was young. Hugh was older. Hugh was sterner. And I don't think Jerry liked that. I believe Jerry didn't like somebody who was that strict.
When the script called for friction between father and son, they weren't exactly always acting.
I knew there was no long lost love there between them. But it wasn't open dislike or warfare, either. You didn't do things that way back then too often. It was more just beneath the surface.
But for me, I can honestly say that Hugh was always a good guy. We never sat down and told jokes a lot, but we would be sitting there and Hugh would go, "So Frank, what's goin' on today? How're you doing? School going OK?" Something like that.
We had nice little chats, if not long ones.
Hugh was always a perfect gentleman. He had been in the ministry and he was the perfect counterpart to Barbara on and off the screen. He never used coarse language. Never.
That was reserved for me and Kenny and Pat Curtis. Pat, as I said, was a stand-in for Tony and me. But this was hardly his claim to fame.
Not by a long shot.
Not by two long shots.
He was the guy who was married to Raquel Welch.
We thought he must be some kind of god if he had Raquel.
But basically, it turned out, he was just a good guy. Pat was our friend. When we went to lunch, Pat used to come with us. Pat was older than we

 

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were by, oh, maybe five years.
By now, we're all driving. I'm driving a Corvette, a cool, '58 custom-colored, metallic turquoise little number. Tony was driving the salmon T-Bird that his mom had always driven.
Jerry, of course, wasn't driving, though.
Kenny? Let's go to Kenny.
Do you remember what a Renault-Dauphine looked like? Kenny had a Renault-Dauphine with an antenna coming off the back bumper that stretched over, and he used to tie it down on the front bumper.
And he wore a crash helmet.
Now, if you ever in life could have known a more consummate nerd, it was Kenny.
We loved him. We used to tease him to no end.
Always. I mean, when we used to see him driving onto the lot, we couldn't understand how he could have figured a way to do anything nerdier.
Actually, there was no word, "nerd," at the time. We used to call him putz. Schmuck. Peckerhead. Whatever derogatory words we could.
But we all loved him. Kenny was a good guy. But Kenny could not figure out "cool." Kenny was great, because when Kenny did it, you didn't want to do it.
The crash helmet was hysterical. The Renault. The antenna. If someone had taken dork lessons and graduated at the head of the class, Kenny was it.
Even Jerry bagged on him and Jerry was a little punk kid. Jerry is five or six years younger. All the time we were on the show, Jerry was in grammar school a lot, while we were in high school.
Jerry was a neat kid. He never got a really big head. I think at least some of that had to do with Hugh, even if they didn't get along incredibly well.
But Jerry just naturally wasn't the kind to go ego-crazy.
And Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher. They never put anyone on a pedestal.
"Kids," they would say, "There's no horsing around on the set. If you're gonna play ball, you go outside and play ball. You don't throw the football on the sound stage."
Luckily, he did not say we couldn't go over to Stage 16 and yell, "Up yours" at Brando.
So we didn't disobey a direct order there.
But we had father figures up the ying-yang.
We were flush with father figures and basically we did not putz around too much at the studios.
We did all go out to lunch sometimes, and when we did it was mostly to hit Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake. Now, imagine, here we come into Bob's Big Boy, all of us at once. We didn't think anything of it, but the people at Bob's in Toluca Lake did.

 

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They'd see the whole cast come rumblin' in to order a