June Havoc--1980 TV Interview, "Gypsy"

[Music] so thank you thank you good evening uh if an actress started on stage at the age of two was a star of vaudeville broadway movies and television had her character represented and maybe misrepresented in a broadway musical uh was cited gypsy was the one was cited in the guinness book of world records and now owned her own rustic little town you would think she would have quite a story to tell and if that actress were june havoc of whom all those things are in fact true then she would be able to tell her story very well indeed since miss havoc has shown herself to be a crackling good writer of books and plays and her latest book is called more havoc which shows how well she talks about herself in in her life in print happily she is my guest tonight and otherwise this introduction would be pointless wouldn't it um and also tomorrow night so we're going to be treated to a demonstration of how well she talks about herself in person as well as in print so if you're welcome please the remarkable june havoc say we've got him in the palm of our hand oh i'm sorry the lady hasn't sat yet i'm used to that there you are after all freedom and all that sort of thing you can sit in my lap if you want to kiss perfectly all right later later all right is it bothering you that i'm wearing brown shoes with dark pants whenever anyone criticizes that i point out that fred astaire does it and that's all you need to say about it i would think if you were wearing no shoes it really wouldn't matter no you've seen everything no but isn't that it's that i just believe and live and let's live is it possible for a human being to dance before it can walk is that yes oh goodness yes physiologically dance before it talks it we're saying it isn't that yeah as if it were an object yes well in a way anyway it is quite possible as a matter of fact because the impulse to do well the first thing that we are encouraged by when we have a baby is the baby throws something doesn't grab something but throws something out of the high chair or what that's a great step forward but maybe in other societies it's not but but to actually dance before you walk seems to me like somebody got something reversed um i'm sorry to hear you say that dick it speaks poorly of your character and background but um they've been criticized before i'm used to it i think no no uh my impulse apparently although i don't quite remember the first time i got up on my toes but my first impulse was the sugar bowl i'm told it was up there center stage on the on on the table i thought that was the name of a dance you mean no not at least it was the bowl of sugar and apparently i couldn't reach it and uh so i i got up on my toes now some people's toes are not equipped for this kind of work sugar bowl work and they do not oblige but my toes were made for it they're all the same across well yes but you can see they're all the same sort of size there they come out like this which means that if you bend them over they give you good support yeah so i got up on my toes reached the sugar bowl that was just an inkling but then when i stayed up on my toes mother who said aha here is a passport to freedom somebody's going to want to buy that that's commercial she really had her eye out commercially right from the very beginning well it wasn't just mother it was all the women in that family they were a very special breed there were eight of them there was dottie great-grandmother big lady grandmother my mother rose her two sisters mina yes and belle and then mother had two daughters everybody had daughters people were unheard of having sons it just was not done and uh it's a good thing you wear chinese they wouldn't have liked that no well we weren't so he's not lucky it is more profitable to raise geese than girls is the old chinese saying oh i've never heard that i'm not sure i approve of that anyway sorry we had girls and they had girls and they didn't particularly care about the state of marriage yes you point out that they married frequently and as if it were something you could enter into quite easily and perhaps might cure all your problems yes but it didn't and men were like tissues they were disposable and it never seemed to solve a problem but it always looked as though maybe it would but it never did dig you see so they went on in this great disappointment one after the other and then when i grew up and became 12 and realized that voterville which had been my childhood my life my everything was gone i too decided that marriage was the passport to freedom so i took out a contract on a little boy in the act and uh contrary to the myth it is not the little boy my sister loved as a matter of fact my sister hated the little boys in the act she would never even talk to them so that aspect of gypsy is it's ridiculous but there are many aspects to the play that which is a fable it's billed as a fable and they're commercialized the the commercialized facts and uh some of the real facts i think oh we're dealing with people with so much talent jerry robbins and you know these people had so much to have so much talent and i just wish they could have stretched it one more inch further and done something with the truth which is totally fascinating uh it's often the last thing considered isn't it afraid so a lot of people could say easily about you knowing just that fact that you grew up in vaudeville uh what a poor little pitiful thing to have happened to you i mean poor child had that happen no lawn no dog no dog old many dogs well i drank that no no dog on the lawn uh you didn't have a house right yes yes well i had something i think that fed me and still feeds me so much more dick i had the audience i had something that i think any child in the world could envy you haven't grown blase to that oh how could you this was this was a rare perfect world i was fortunate unlike the fable once again there was no amateur contest it's you know the poor people who have to play that play and who believe that that probably is so well maybe it serves a purpose but i've been a professional since i was two years old which means that i've been out center stage on some of the best boards there are there were people like jack benny willie weston mcginty bert wheeler and i was on those same boards and i headlined and i earned fifteen hundred dollars a week in those days 15. at the age of seven eight nine ten and eleven there were five gorgeous years playing those theaters those big wonderful theaters with no amplification [Laughter] it tickles me that always irritates you does it when you hear it you can go to broadway and hear what sounds like a record being played and people doing their acts these days to play backs oh yes well anyway get back that so consequently where was i during all that time i may not have gone to school i may not have ever seen the interior of an h-o-m-e until i was an adult but i had the acts on the bill i had the stagehands who taught me not to chew gum ladies don't chew gum spit that out i had the eggs on the bill were like well there was odiva and her seals oh dick it was a beautiful act she got in the tank with all these seals and she did that act and she looked like a mermaid and then down in the grotto below under the stage where they kept the seals i came upon her once i must have been maybe seven years old and you know what she was doing she had a baby seal in her arms in a blanket a baby blanket it had just been born and she was coming to the baby seal and i got to hold that baby seal well that's a great wonderful present but what did she do in the in the tank with them was this an act for the whole family oh well look waterville had to be an act for the whole family yeah vaudeville now here's another misrepresentation of audible you do not swing a baton in vaudeville and you do not do things that you can do in high school or school in vaudeville the boards were very demanding dick you had to really deliver in order to justify being on the boards odis act she would die she wore great long hair and a long pure silk black suit up to here and down around her feet so that when she was in the tank with the seals her hair was flying and they did a thing called their voice would come out and say and now ladies and gentlemen the maiden's prayer it was wonderful and she'd hold this the seal by the tail and go around a circle with him and then they'd all stop and the seal would hold his flippers up like this and she'd hold her hands up like that and that was the maiden spur it was beautiful no one found that nauseating family entertainment everybody loved your diabetes there were big signs backstage yes on the whole circuit and here's a misconception too these big signs read do not use the word damn hell do not mention the deity hip length silk stockings at all times keep your act clean but loud those were the rules where was this voterville oh you mean everybody in general yes all of vaudeville that was a very classy sort of family entertainment and the families were very demanding miss havoc can you can should i call you june please do uh can you confirm or deny a rumor that i've tried to run down for years with someone in your position which is my hometown was in lincoln nebraska and every time i've mentioned that to a vaudevillian they have groaned and they one of them i once asked one why and they said there was a sign backstage i think at the orpheum in omaha and it said if you think you're funny play lincoln is this possible i've played lincoln all my life off and on and you they managed to get ahead it was some disgruntled clown opera probably who didn't make it the other way and bound in lincoln of course it was sour grapes i'm afraid don't pay any attention to that okay omaha is a wonderful place do you know that megan terry has her magic theater out there omaha is still a theater tonight well you should be proud gave us henry fonda yes others of his kind yay omaha i would love to hear you talk about your mother although lord knows by this time you must have exorcised just about all the feelings you have in in in print but the television reaches so many more people um what word would you use to describe her now is neurotic too mild um oh you mean if i were using today's vocabulary yeah well let's get back to the myth dick the myth has mother is a big loud garish bizarre calliope now if you see something like that coming at you you duck isn't that true mother wasn't like that mother was little violet eyed curly haired she never wore lipstick or makeup or high heels or silk stockings in her life very simple little almost corny clothes and she was lethal yes you never knew when the axe was going to fall right and that's what makes people lethal now mother was innocent there wasn't anything vicious about mother it's just that she was in those days we were ignorant of analysis and problems and people who needed help today we would recognize this mother always felt that if she wanted something and it happened to be yours that didn't matter she took it mother did what she wanted to do she had a pipeline to god and didn't think that there was any threat from that direction and so it was a peculiar sort of a innocent uh murderous you know a whole different kind of killer and you had to understand that i understood it and in more havoc i keep going back to my sister and to my mother yes because i too am of the breed and although i hope i have overcome or passed some of the danger marks because i must have or i wouldn't be such a happy freak i there'd be something wrong but gee where's where is that some wood to knock on i've got that may not be it by the way it looks very phony but i'm ba but what i was saying is that uh it kind of uh in spite of everything i think if you live i believe that if you live and you see enough bad examples but you're going to learn from that and i feel that i was kind of lucky in as much as i saw an awful lot of bad examples and consequently i thought well gee that doesn't work does it that doesn't pay off and where i want to go and what i wish with all my heart to be and have since i was five when i played in the bill with the star from the legitimate theater who was taking a flyer in vaudeville they used to do that you know yeah they took a flyer and boat bill well she sounded different from the rest of us and she smelled so good and she was oh there was something about her and that was a world that i hadn't been introduced to yet so i hung around her and when i got to know that she came from what was called the legitimate theater i set my five-year-old mind going toward that direction and the fact that i did get there speaks for the fact that it doesn't matter about your environment you're going to do what you're going to do well when did you realize that your mother was not like everyone else's i mean there are there early memories that a psychiatrist would begin with yes i think quite a few in fact they're endless they go on and on but mother was mother was incapable of understanding for instance which comes out rather funny if you use it that way that uh when you took something you should pay for it the mother at one time i remember later said ah isn't it wonderful you know that so-and-so has charge accounts you know that means don't you that means she never has to pay a bill she believed that you thought that was literally true well she thought that if you handled it right the only crime was getting caught do not get caught with your sleeves i was great at it i used to fill my sleeves at the 10 cent stores i was very quick and very i was an expert and around six years old i suddenly said what am i doing with my sleeves full of stolen stuff and i don't even want this stuff but the game was such fun is that why you're wearing short sleeves now to inhibit this this down i reformed i had reformed long ago then the business of cheating at hotel bills going out the back way in the middle of the night i found suddenly that grabbing my dog and my stuff and sliding down there it wasn't yeah i didn't like it i didn't want to live that way i want to go out the lobby and i do well when you honest i do dick almost always but in in those very earliest days well were you embarrassed it's hard to tell the incident in the book how how you felt about the um incident with was it pavlova palova pablo well i remembered it as two but i was afraid to say that but it was it was the very beginning paulova was doing one of her farewell tours and she came to seattle where i happened to be at the time and uh mother i was booked i was the child protege you know of seattle oh they were so proud that this little thing could stand up on its toes so i was rushed to the theater where she and there were other people doing concert people and what have you and i was under her tutu apparently because i looked up and all i saw were ruffles i didn't see a face or anything but i heard a voice whether it was she who spoke or someone who spoke for her i do not know but mother's voice said can you tell me madam my little girl my baby walks on her toes like this and i call out ring the step and she turns and i call out such a step and she does that is it possible that she is a born ballerina there was a only a second's pause and this voice said at two get her off her toes her feet will be deformed the rest of her life no too early to tell you will ruin her and do not have a chance wait until she's old enough and has some bones and then there was a silence the two two moved away mother went right around the corner bought me ten more pair of toe shoes and i worked from that one so the advice didn't work and has anything about you deformed or ruined by that at all well i don't like to admit it but actually the feet were the first things to go but it could have been the dance marathons it could have been all all the other things yes you know and your mother said that woman i didn't understand i hadn't understood a word she said oh that accent mother said i couldn't understand that foreigner mother used to call the acts on the bill who did tumbling arabs whether they were or not oh yeah everybody was an arab [Music] we'd go into a restaurant with a whole everybody on the bill and mother would always be in the forefront and she'd take one look at the restaurant and she'd say if she didn't like it she'd say ah greeks and they'd leave mother was covered any restaurant anything she didn't like because she didn't know greeks she didn't know arabs she didn't know those people and therefore they were all a threat did you ever dare criticize her did you ever um at what point stand up at that early age yes i did yeah i was very unpopular i used to say no i i don't like that i won't do that and it didn't do any good it didn't matter there was no saying anything like that to mother she was a very uh singularly a straight minded person one thought and went for that thought and you either went along or you just dropped off you know and went your way which i eventually did what have you decided she was compensating for in her daughters if they don't feel particular i don't feel that's necessary i think there we go again doing that again i think she was what she was and she was a product of her breed and my sister and i used to constantly say when we became adults and we were together finally at last gypsy and i'd say ah do you know what you just said oh don't do that we'll be like them if we don't look out because we didn't want to be like them be like them meaning all the other women oh oh breed who had had all of the disappointments the constant failures one drive died a a drug addict another died of alcoholism they were unhappy people mother died alone and most painfully and horribly it's a gothic horror and i i managed to write that in more havoc and that that was hard to write but i think if you're going i believe in the truth i believe the truth i like the truth can you possibly tell that unforgettable deathbed scene i i had trouble enough writing that scene i don't think i could tell it and that's why my my uh publishers at harper rowe i've got a brilliant editor and i'm very lucky and that that scene troubled us terribly it was too strong for a lot of places in the book and it was in the book in the beginning and one night i went to bed knowing that he was not happy with that scene being in there i woke up in the morning and i i said yes it is 1954 when mother died at 56. so the book ends at 1946 what i did was put a prologue and an epilogue onto the book and it works that way dick yeah it fits it's astonishing it would be wonderful in a movie with the right actors well of course the right actress is playing well i think there's so much untold about us you know all my adult life i have been a victim of what i call preconceived itis people think they know all about my sister gypsy my mother rose me they don't know anything about us because all we've done is be commercialized all we've done is be fabalized the truth has never been told my sister was terrified of the truth and she thought it was much safer she felt that the audience could only accept a very funny haha glossy make them laugh make them laugh constantly version of what we were and what we are consequently that's what she did and she did it magnificently no one did it better but gypsy's whole endings were such conclusive proof to me that that does not work and the fact that i'm the only survivor here i am everyone is gone i feel more than ever aware that pretending to be something you aren't isn't going to work in the long run and oh i would love to think i'm in for a long run well let's hope so you uh you talk about her as someone who came to dislike the uh whatever you would call it the persona that she invented for herself i guess and yet there she was stuck in it like the the mind and the who can't get the comic mask off yes exactly true exactly true and i run into so many people who who really love that image so much and who say oh she was so funny and laughing and it was very painful for her really because gypsy always felt that what she had created was a step toward what she really was going to have which was a more legitimate position in the world it never materialized because if she didn't take off the gloves and make a little semi sly joke the people didn't want that all everything had to be based on the character that she had so perfectly built and she could not break away from it in another way marilyn monroe died of the same sad heartache yeah i would never think of her and gypsy rosalie in the same oh you must breath but i see what you mean yes because gypsy uh while gypsies was more intellectual and uh it was still comic and maryland's was sex symbol and although maryland had finally went and learned and was a brilliant actress before she died really brilliant but wasn't permitted to ever be taken seriously and the last cry was please listen to me and no one did you knew her where at the actor's studio when you were fox at 20th century fox and then i knew her yes at the actor's studio oh yes i knew her from the what the 50s on and it's a very strange parallel because and they're not the only ones there were there was the gene harlow image yeah you know the unhappy ending to an image that the public believes is the end all of glamour and wonder and how wonderful and how i envy that and how i'd love to have that i should have her problems uh-huh i should have her problems but her problems created acids but these late studies show us dick eat you from within and they can they can make you die from within outward and at 56 my sister died my mother was 56 also both of cancer yes but a complicated cancer not just cancer first it was other things other things gypsy had an ulcer inside an ulcer uh a kind a form of colitis that was oh well it's it's uh it's painful but i can imagine that it's too hard for you to tell that deathbed scene there's just one aspect of it though we only have a minute left in which in a sense your mother delivered a curse on on your sister more really than on you well mother's concept of fame and the world of glory was taking a ride in a paddy wagon with the sirens all screaming because gypsy was arrested for indecent exposure and mother thought that was stardom that was at the top that was as far as you could get for great and so i was not spectacular i have never been spectacular mine has been a very quiet little member of a very quiet little groupie you know the legitimate theater isn't noisy and and so i didn't figure it i didn't i didn't rate a curse so mother turned to the member of the family who did rate it my sister and they were always closer anyway and said i will you know she said you're always going to know i'm there and don't forget it and when i asked my sister why why only you why not me my sister said well you didn't rate it you just weren't spectacular how many rides in the paddy wagon did you give her yeah so gee what a complicated psyche was involved in yes i say it was a complicated thing and not to be so condemned as pitied because it can't happen now if we're aware june i will see you in the same place tomorrow night we'll continue i look forward to it great you can have it see you tomorrow night [Applause] that fine actress colorful lady gifted writer june havoc has a book of memoirs out now called more havoc and if you watched my show with her last night you know that that's what it made us want uh more havoc and that's exactly what we're going to get tonight she is back for a second show and a few years back dorothy parker no less called miss havoc's first book a genuine and remarkable slice of americana and i think that's what miss havoc is too in the most complimentary possible way i mean that feel welcome again please june havoc thank you thank you yeah you know with uh dorothy parker saying that about early havoc which was my first book early havoc is in every americana collection in the world i'm very proud of that because she used that word about it no it's a it's a sort of a reference book on that time of our country and hardly anyone apparently had had documented it i used it not as background but as foreground in that in that book yes and uh you've had a lot of praise as a writer i know charlotte curtis in the time said you told your success as better than anyone has or as well as anyone ever has or something like that better was it better she said i was out of my mind then then of course my publishers were so enormously impressed because that's a very important lady and not easy to please apparently so you did double did all right i was very thrilled i'm drunk you at all i'm glad you added that yes i had to uh for our older viewers uh the uh the dance marathons oh yeah that's something that i can never quite get my mind around or believe that they actually took place the way we've seen them both in your play well they weren't outlawed until 1947. they were outlawed for state by state county by county eventually outlawed because early on when they first began which is before i was ever in them and they weren't very perfected by the time i was in them in the in the mid 30s they had become much more you know they were really into it but early on uh people would dance for a thousand hours and then if they fell down and were disqualified from the show they put them to sleep and sometimes they slept right on into eternity yeah and out so they had to stop doing that because it was very bad for business any idea how many fatalities there were from there were three or four early on and so they learned how to do this without killing everybody who was in the contests by the time i got there the rules and regulations were very very much in effect you danced for 45 minutes you had two minutes to get to the rest quarters the bell rang yeah then you had 11 minutes off your feet straight up like this preferably then the siren rang it was a siren because after about 500 hours you never heard the belt so it had to be a siren and so then you sort of were thrown to your feet and pushed toward the dance floor and you got out there for another 45 minutes that was 24 hours a day in the beginning that was about maybe a thousand dollars a thousand hours yes and if you could sing or dance a little bit people threw money to you and at first i was too proud to pick it up but you know you get desperate when you're hungry enough and you got 12 meals every 24 hours for staying on your feet they brought in a great big board and put it on a couple of saw horses and brought in this big army grub and you had to keep moving your feet while you ate but you know i was so hungry when i first entered my first dance marathon that i figured that that was a very good deal and as i think no if you're hungry enough it's still a good deal it comes to something like 1400 meals or something so someone figured see four days and nights is about uh a hundred hours and so so the one time so you can see that a thousand is quite a lot how many days is it i don't i don't remember exactly i always had to chart it but the one that i won finally the seventh one in more havoc i talk about i used to go back to the marathon when i got good and hungry after standing in chorus lines and i was never chosen nobody couldn't get a job so i'd go back to the dance marathon and the seventh one i looked around and i realized how punchy people were getting and i said geez you gotta get out of this and get so i quit and i said i better win one so i'll have more than what five dollars to get back to new york with and i danced for 3 600 hours and i was in the guinness book of records for a while over that one that's about four and a half months danced for four and a half months oh yes well that was that was par for the course you realize please but a city like chicago new york any big city used to have as many as 10 dance marathons running simultaneously dick during the depression it was the entertainment people would come with picnic baskets and blankets and stay for hours and scream for you to keep on your feet don't fall down and i came to the conclusion that what they were doing because we were in such a mess in this country they were screaming really for their own survival you represented your feet don't fall down yes don't give up don't quit and of course the country didn't quit did it dick look at us we we came up out of that morass and i hope we don't ever sink into it again if only never to have to go through dance marathons well we can't at least they've been outlawed god knows what they'll invent for this one you may be ought to start thinking yes it's hard to believe that you and your sister who is who became gypsy rose lee uh were never really rivals uh well there was nothing in common for your mother's affection if there was any uh you have to admit their mother's affection did she have such a thing as affection for you or in her way which was not what people but then we're not mother wasn't the girl next door i'm not the girl next door and my certainly my breed of family are far from any door but mother had passion enormous passion and mother loved gypsy because gypsy was beautiful and was always gypsy won a baby beauty contest did you know that yes when she was an infant in fact i think i've seen a picture yes there she was on that rug first prize and then of course when i started to dance and started to act and i was in the movies the first time when i was three mother took me to hollywood and stood me in a line with 500 other kids and she has pinched my cheeks so i'd look pinky and pretty and the director came down the aisle and he looked at all the kids and he poked everybody and finally looked at me and he said uh-huh let's see and he put his cap over my curls and he said yeah she'll do we want a beaten hungry starved little waif for this part that's the one well mother was furious but we got the job i was in the movie mary astor played my mother and we went on from there and then i was in the vaudeville i was with the duffy players at the age of four which was a very respectable stock company in san francisco and then in vaudeville and then after the act got established and set contrary to the myth then we sent for my sister and mother tried to work her into the act but gypsy didn't sing didn't she never sang or danced or acted and didn't want to i used to come off the stage you know after dancing and she used to say i can't understand that's very vulgar why does anybody ever want to work themselves to that degree she meant it yeah so the idea of you two were singing dancing as little tikes together was invented yes invented once again an invention we've never appeared on the same stage together ever in our lives even later even at a benefit or anything no never we all we had a very separate identity i was way over there rather quiet in fact so quiet that many people hardly knew i was there but i was very happy where i was i loved that part of my world you were made to feel that she was the beautiful so she was dick she was breathtakingly beautiful as ever you're no dog yourself oh you're very kind i'm sure you just did i i there's no check involved with this giving you money or anything was she vain about those supposedly superior looks i don't think she knew that how beautiful she was she was yes toward she didn't want to age that was kind of sad she she didn't want to age and it's you know in in so many poetic ways in a lyrical poetic way a gypsy rose lee or a marilyn monroe or lillian russell i guess should never grow old and of course she didn't but she didn't like the beginnings of it at all where i kind of love this aging business i'm enjoying every minute of it but she panicked at the first wrinkle yes yes and there's so much uh you know there's so much to aging if if you run the show in a way that you're proud of and you get what you what makes you happy inside and you're kind of proud of what you have then aging becomes a very natural sort of um follow-up to what you did and what you had and what you were then now you're this and then you can look forward to being that and i i hope that i keep my marbles because i love everything and i don't want to miss a minute of it you could lose a marble or two and still have a nice start so sometimes it might even be better they never tell you how many marbles make a complete set a wonderful day she and your mother only communicated through attorneys for a long time the myth again they didn't they parted because mother became a terrible threat to my sister of mother's um concept of justice uh she wanted to be there in the light always with gypsy and when gypsy's light transcended the the rides in the paddy wagons and gypsy went on to uh writing and being funny she used mother a great deal uh as her funny character and the mother resented being a funny character terribly and one of the things that stuck in mother's crawl was being a funny character and so she i remember she wrote something i we never saw it because it probably was so terrible but she wrote something and sent it off to a newspaper which was current then called the journal american and it said there's more where this came from just make a deal you know and i'll sell you this and it was apparently scarless things about gypsy that was so bad that they couldn't print it even and they were sort of a sheet that might have but they didn't and they sent it to my sister instead we were living together at the time and gypsy said wow you should read this no on second thought you shouldn't i don't want anybody to read it and she burned it and she hadn't seen mother for all for years except through an attorney what um what attitude toward men did your mother give you well mother didn't believe in men in any sense of the word men were not even useful toward the end they were obstacles because they expected to be looked at and probably cared for and mother didn't have any pleasure in caring for them and if you had money a lot of something to give that was different then you could be tolerated [Laughter] but you were kind of weighed you know for your value but if you didn't have lots to give you were not even to be looked at and the one thing in more havoc that i tell about mother's interest in walter you know the boy that she befriended because he was very good at forging checks and therefore he was valuable and everyone who can do that no and he apparently was good because he took mother again everybody we were filled with presents and flowers and things that he had purchased for us and then the police came and that was a rough moment uh apprehension had arrived and so mother stole the police and said please can you wait it's like my own son i just you know wait so the men said of course and they waited outside mother went into walter and said walter what did you do wrong and he said well i don't know she said you've got to know that's the whole point i have to know what you did that was wrong because you see mother planned to do this but she never found out what he did wrong and so walter gummed up the whole thing and so she had to let the police come in and take walter away and it was very bad because walter had failed her and she gave up her plans to be the world's second best that's right mother did forge many a birth certificate but that was uh different your own child uh kim uh well would you tell about that it involves a taxi at least one that's kind of my belief in the world i guess when i was staggering out into the night when i knew i was going to have the baby and with my little suitcase the doctor said get to the hospital and i had the pains were coming rather consistently and he told me that i would have them and they knocked me right off my feet they were so bad and i got in one taxi cab and i got one of them and wow i fell down the bottom and i said hurry please we get me to the hospital i'm having a baby and he said oh not in my taxi you ain't out so he got me out of the taxi and he said i don't want no mess in the middle of my night he said i got trouble enough as it is so i was out in the middle of the night saying to myself darn him that's a rotten thing the lamp post and i had this is what so the lamppost and i had the next pain and i began to walk because i thought i've got to get to the hospital and the taxi overtook me and i said we and i got in and i'm trying to hide the pains now for fear of being thrown out again and suddenly i realized that this that driver was was going through lights and was just honking his horn and just going like mad for that and he got there and he threw up in the door and he picked me up and he he carried me up all those stairs and halfway up i said i i i'm too fat i wait he said fat nothing you're just pleasingly pregnant he said i've done this six times for my wife and i'm looking forward to the seventh so i kind of felt that that's a balance and that's how the world is you know there's one found that for every laos there's a good person yes or maybe two or maybe more but i think we're better than we are i do yeah you never had to get out of that first cab you know i mean you could have just said you're gonna have a bigger mess than the one you're thinking about if you don't take me i didn't know that you know at that age what do you know oh that's true i didn't know there's such things she was nine at the time i didn't know that we don't want to tell the whole book no not the whole book that isn't true of course it's interesting how you um got your your first big break and it was really overnight success wasn't it in it in one sense you'd had plenty of experience but it was the overnight success i've worked all my lives in success yes and it always seems like then that the person came out of nowhere isn't it true instead of spent a lifetime trying to get but then you see it's like the public today all the people who think they know you and unless they see you doing a commercial every day or they see you actually see you they think you're either dead or over there or who cares they for you know they don't forget you that's what's so strange because i pick up the phone now even now i pick up the phone and i try to place a call and an operator will say hey wait wait oh gee i know that voice now you know that's beautiful that's what you live for it wears off for some people i mean i don't know don't get the fun out of it anymore they say oh applause doesn't mean anything anymore who says that well in myths of showbiz maybe myths in the in the untrue sense but well maybe for some people the actor who says i envy you you're young and you still enjoy it but i'm stuck with it oh wow i can't fancy that you know where i live now where where i am well now i don't know whether to believe it or not i i know so few people who own a town that isn't a town it's a village [Laughter] but it's a little funny village and people will come after i've done this show people will come and they come from all over and they come to the village and they come to see me many times and it you know it's just like when i was a little tiny kid there's the audience again i'm so glad to see them they don't have to be boards under your feet for the kind of the new boards under the feet it's a little place where i can share the one can i show you a picture of you yes i've been meaning to ask about those but then well i just you know maybe they were left over from an old show or something well cannon crossing is a tiny little 200 at least 200 years old now it may be more but that's part of cannon crossing there were eight farm buildings did you explain why it's called cannon crossing well there was a family at one point of its history who whose name was cannon and there's a cannon out on route 7 you know that the family put out there 100 or someone years ago whether they're named after it or vice versa and then the whole little town was called cannondale and that's the railroad station this is the railroad station it's a victorian station called cannondale we sort of discovered this didn't you as a oh yes as a town for sale or something i didn't know there was something well i used to go over and have my peanut butter sandwich along the river here because it's so beautiful with great ancient trees and oh golly it's beautiful dick and then one day about three years ago somebody said the whole village is for sale well i hopped everything i owned and i bought it i really hocked everything yes i had auctions i don't have a fur i don't have a decent painting or a piece of silver or a diamond left and you know what i look around and i don't miss them because i have cannon crossing which is the end of the world wonderful this is uh what you can see this is where the rail this is the other side of the railroad tracks which is cannon crossing which is on that we're now looking the opposite side of the depot the little the railroad came through in 1840 and the depot is just a beautiful hysterical building hysterically gorgeous building those are old gas pumps yes and they say uh oh dear they say 23 cents a gallon that's nice scary well that's what they say fiction well old this is my latest there was the school house 1872 that when that when cannon crossing became a place it looked like it was going to be a town and so they built a little schoolhouse and it was up on route 7. now route 7 as anybody knows is the wildest trafficked place they're eight million cars they have to enlarge it it's so wild when this picture was taken there are two goats standing on a dirt road which was route 7. this is the little school house that i have moved on the cannon crossing just lately isn't that an enchanting thing the goats of course have gone but the schoolhouse is there now in 1990 you're saying goats or ghosts goats or goats there were goats on the dirt road that was ruthless i thought two ghosts were standing on the road not yet now but the traffic i read in going back to find out the history of a place the traffic on route 7 at the time was considered very bad and it says in the scrolly handwriting in the legends it says we have to do something about the schoolhouse the traffic is getting dangerous there are 10 carriages a day that pass there never 1925 it said something has to be done about the schoolhouse because there are terrible traffic problems there are 20 cars a day go by there you're not surely not old enough to remember when people were saying the human body will not survive speeds as high as 35 miles an hour i thought i was old enough to remember everything but i've forgotten that one i've heard that they used to say that about really that's when the automobile came in i said human body cannot travel at that speed it's been scientifically proven they should see the men going up to the moon yeah yes golly but cannon crossing has now we're opening on july 4th we're opening the schoolhouse cafe and riverside gardens it's not to die it's a restaurant another opening another opening another night and it's going to be so beautiful because there's the norwalk river and here are these great groves of gorgeous ancient trees and it's a real honest-to-peat restored schoolhouse an outdoor production of our town or something you could there so easily but they're antique shops and there's a weaver and a potter and there's a tin smith so it's a staple time machine if you were right back to when things were much more tranquil friends of mine come out now actor friends show people friends who are pretty frenzied you know they come out and they say oh boy something just went snap in the back of my neck and i don't have to worry anymore it has a sense of tranquility that is just unbelievable so i'm happy with that i think you would be i love it can i ask you about an anecdote i know you think it doesn't tell well but it's from your book and it has to do with um it involves chinese dragons on the carpet and uh oh my golly i i wonder if i could tell it i'll try okay and sometimes you know you write something and and then you look at it and you think gee i'll never be able to tell it but when i was really really hungry before i didn't during the dance marathons one of the trips was an agent who grabbed me by the hand because i was standing out in his hallway doing i think a hungry cat for the bunch of kid actors too and he said you come with me and tell this to the guy i'm going to introduce you to and he took me up to fifth avenue up an elevator a beautiful old old building thrust me inside the japanese servant came to the door and it was all tapestries oriental urns and carpets and dragons and it looked like a classy high-class chinese restaurant to me of course because that's my idea of class and it was a 10 room 12 room 16 room apartment probably and i was to meet the great man now when i was a little teeny kid you said i could say this word sometimes i don't know which one i well the one i said we went over a list of your obscenities backstage you could say that word well i'm going to try because this story is no good without it there was a whenever you had to try something new and you had to go out and face your audience and you were terrified and nervous about it you had to work up confidence enough to do it justice and so an old character actor told me once he said now you get the wings right here he said the audience is right there and he said you mutter this to yourself and you say to yourself to the audience you you lucky sons of you're going to get to see me then get out there fast while it's still working well you're just convinced yourself well you're convinced that the audience is going to get lucky to see you believe it or give up so i said oh boy and i looked around at all the dragons and the burns and the carpets and everything and i thought i'll try it and i got close to a portia and i said to myself you are you lucky and i got no further than that and i've always said the rest of it for me and the curtain part of them there was a little old man in a shawl and carpet slippers and i said gee you know that he said no but he said of course i you'll come on in come on in here i went in and he had cocoa and he had pastries boy i was hungry and he gave me a few and i gulped down a hot chocolate and then he said give me your shoes and i said well i he said give me your shoes so he took my shoes and he said give me that newspaper over there so i gave him the newspaper and he folded it just so and then he took out the newspaper that i had put in soles of my shoes and he said you did it all wrong he said it doesn't last that way i'll show you how to make it last and he put them in and by golly he was right they were almost as good as souls and then he said you're you're vaudeville aren't you and i'd been told not to admit it because it was a bad mark on you and he said listen don't tell them they're snobs never tell them you're vaudeville he says they don't recognize you for what you're really worth but he said i do and while he was talking he fell asleep and i didn't know what to do i sat there for a while thinking i ought to and then i finished the cocoa and the rest of the pastries and knocked off everything was there and i said to myself do you ought to leave a note because he obviously meant well whoever he was and he was kind and old and sweet so i took a piece of paper from his desk and i wrote thank you for the food and the nice time and up in the corner of it his name said george m cohen and it was george m cohen and i got that little tiny brief glimpse of what that man really was and a lot of people never really knew him that way dick i guess not was he well past it then was there any uh yes i think that was it yeah what is the trick to folding newspaper in your shoes well you have to be very careful and you can't let the ridges go under they have to go up i'll show you when we get through with this show then you'll never have to worry i think everyone in show business ought to know how to make and a few people out of it well obviously the dance marathons and your strange mother and all the various things that have happened to you in your life have given you some survival instinct and uh capacity to enjoy life that's just wonderful i'm just a happy freak that's all yes well keep it up thank you dick june havoc it's been a pleasure having to hear this i've enjoyed it see you next time good night [Music] [Applause] [Music] um [Music] foreign

Channel: Alan Eichler

Views: 14,716

Rating: 4.9212599 out of 5

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Id: 89guqoSMzl8

Length: 56min 14sec (3374 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021