The Importance of Being Ernie: Read Online Free PDF Page B

with a vengeance, like he really missed me.
    Even though another child actor replaced me in Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! I still consider this my film debut. That’s because I’m still in it. Remember the scene where Woodward was holding me in the air by my shoes and tapping my head on the floor? The producers decided to use it. I was upside down anyway and practically unrecognizable. For the following scenes in the movie, when the son is upright, it is the kid who replaced me. The producers figured nobody would notice. And nobody did ... except me.

CHAPTER 4
     
    A Well-Rounded Performer
     
    After being fired on my first movie, my mom began hustling me around the town for more auditions. Nothing much came my way, though. I had hit a lull. Our agent put it in my mom’s head that Stan and I needed to cultivate more skills in the performing arts if we were to increase our odds at booking jobs. I started hearing the phrase “well-rounded performer” a lot.
    “The people who make it in show business aren’t just merely actors; they also dance, sing, and play musical instruments like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Those guys are really well-rounded performers!” my mom would exclaim.
    This was an era when tap dancing was still thought to be the height of artistic expression ... along with playing an accordion. If you could do both, the next stop was The Ed Sullivan Show.
    Stan and I were soon enrolled in Madame Etienne’s Dance Academy on Hollywood Boulevard. We joined a chorus line of aspiring child stars, learning our tap “time steps,” sashaying to rumbas and slinking across the academy’s glossy hardwood floors with some pretty sexy jazz moves. When I saw myself gyrating in the floor-to-ceiling mirror, I definitely didn’t see suave Gene Kelly looking back. With my big glasses and buckteeth, I looked like Theodore from Alvin and the Chipmunks , and he sure as hell was a crappy dancer.
    Stan and I sacrificed our Saturday morning cartoons every weekend for the next year to attend the academy. I worked hard to learn jazz, ballet, and tap. You had to. If you lagged behind, Madame Etienne would whack you on the butt with her cane. Long ago, perhaps the turn of the twentieth century, she danced with the Moscow Ballet Company. She was a diva from a foreign land and took no guff.
    After dance class, my mom shuttled me to a different school to learn another kind of performing art: ice-skating. That was fun. Our classes were held at the Polar Palace, which burned down in the 1960s. (How an ice rink could catch fire was beyond me.) The Polar Palace held a huge oval ice arena that was as big as a football field. I learned to twirl, do a single-axel jump, and skate backward. According to my mother, you never knew when a job call might come along looking for the next Dick Button.
    Now that I was on the road to becoming a well-rounded performer, I started to book more jobs. That was my mom’s rationale, anyway, which I realized was a clever ruse to keep me going to dance classes. I knew that my clumsy modern jazz skills had nothing to do with getting hired for a 1963 Western, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters , starring a young Kurt Russell. I wasn’t required to flamenco dance on The Dick Powell Theatre, either. Moms just can’t be trusted sometimes.
    The latter program was a dramatic anthology, and the episode I did was called “Somebody Is Waiting,” starring Mickey Rooney. He was one of the biggest child stars ever, a top box-office draw in the 1940s, and had become an acclaimed adult performer. In fact, he won an Emmy for his performance in this drama playing a lonely merchant marine sailor who is killed while on shore leave.
    The director thought he’d be clever and get my “real” reaction to Mickey’s death scene. I heard him whisper to the cameraman, “roll film,” and then he told me to ride my bike down a studio alley where I found Rooney lying on the ground, blood oozing from his mouth.
    Rooney gasped,