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Charles Herbert
24. Jun 2007 at 00:59
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Charles Herbert

By Tom Weaver

With a giant robot, a human-fly, a fly-human, and 13 ghosts running around (or buzzing around, or levitating around) the sets of Charles Herbert’s films, who would have suspected that a grim scenario was also brewing behind the scenes? Herbert’s career as a kid actor was great while it lasted but, too typically for pint-sized performers, it was the recipe for trouble later in life. He survived encounters with the title characters in The Colossus of New York and The Fly (both 1958), William Castle’s 13 Ghosts (1960) and even with Blackbeard (in Bert I. Gordon’s The Boy and the Pirates, 1960), plus a pass through the Hollywood gristmill and now, with the hope that what ultimately happened to him won’t happen to others, he tells his tale . . .

CLASSIC IMAGES: According to the books, you were born in Culver City on December 23, 1948.

Charles Herbert: The books are accurate.

CI: Did you have any other family members in the movie-TV business?

Herbert [laughs]: Absolutely not! They didn’t know anything about the business at all. I just happened to be riding on a bus one day, and a gentleman who was a talent agent in Hollywood, named Cosmo Morgan, saw me talking with my mother, and must have thought I was cute or something. He gave me his card, which I immediately tried to give to the bus driver! I must have known something even then [laughs]. That’s basically how it started.

CI: What was the first job that you landed?

Herbert: I was four years old and I did Half Pint Panel, which was a TV show back in . . . probably 1952. The first movie I did was one that Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball did together, The Long, Long Trailer [1954]. I went in with like 40 kids and they picked me, and then they cut me out of the movie! That was my first experience! I should have known that this MEANT something! You can see that I’m taking a negative tone, but I’m just being honest.

CI: At what point does your memory of these things begin?

Herbert: In all honesty, I have a unique memory. I can tell you what clothes I was wearing 35 years ago, but I can’t tell you what I had for dinner last night. I guess it’s a semi-photographic memory. From the time that a person can HAVE a memory, I remember almost EVERYthing.

CI: Oh, fabulous.

Herbert: Not necessarily [laughs]! Not necessarily!

CI: Being a kid actor . . . it wasn’t all autographs and sunglasses, was it?

Herbert: No. And I have an obligation . . . [Pause] I know that you want to talk with me about my work in science fiction movies, and that’s just fine, but there’s an obligation I have to [‘50s kid actor] Paul Petersen and an issue that I must address. I won’t dominate the interview with this, but I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror if I didn’t at least address the issue of the child actor situation.

CI: I’ve got a dozen questions for you along those lines.

Herbert: I want you to understand something: It’s not about me. Whatever I “lost” as a child actor, I’ll never get back. But there are child actors working today that I need to speak my piece for. I understand that’s not why you’ve called, but I was hoping that you at least were familiar with that, because it’s an issue that is very significant.

CI: I’ve got six, eight, ten questions along those lines and I was hoping you would be willing to talk about it!

Herbert: It’s not something I want to do, because it’s not a pleasant situation for me. But it’s something I will have to do. Okay? Shoot.

CI: With all those TV shows, and all those movies, was there much room in your life for school and other activities?

Herbert: Education for the child actor is non-existent. The law states that you, the child actor, must do three hours of schoolwork [a day] while you’re working in the studio. They have a schoolteacher who comes in and you’re supposed to go to school for three hours. Now, in those days that schoolteacher was not even certified. The people they were using were retired schoolteachers who needed the job. You [the child actor] would sit there with the schoolteacher for a little while, say 20 minutes, but if they needed you out on the set, they would come in and say, “Look, we need Charlie.” The schoolteacher would say, “He’s got another half-hour to go, I can’t let him go.” And the schoolteacher would then be told, “Well, that’s fine. The person who replaces you will let him go.”

CI: And when you weren’t in a movie, I assume you went to school like every other kid.

Herbert: I went to PUBLIC schools. My parents made that mistake, without malice; they were not too familiar [with the problems that child actors face].

Most kid actors went to schools for kid actors. I went to Melrose, Fairfax High, Bancroft, all regular public schools. That was a major mistake because after a while, with me being in all those movies and over 50 TV shows, I got to be very well-known. So it was very uncomfortable for me to be in that atmosphere. I made up the story that I had a twin brother—that it wasn’t me they were seeing in movies and on TV, it was my twin brother the actor. I TRIED to get away with that, anyway. And when I got an acting job and I had to ask my [public school] teachers to give homework to me, so I could bring it in to the studio teacher, they were very resistant. It was extra work that they had to do, and they resented that. Now, there were some great studio teachers, I’m not saying they all were bad—Lillian Barkley comes to mind. And I had some great teachers in my public schools. But I also had some who resented the fact that they had to put in extra time to give Charlie extra homework to take to the studio, and they wouldn’t do it.

CI: Did this bother you at the time?

Herbert: Actually, at the time it was no big deal for me because I was always under the impression, “I don’t need an education. I’m gonna be an actor for my whole life. Who needs an education?” Well, guess what? It didn’t work out that way. I needed an education, and I didn’t HAVE one.

CI: I’ve always figured that had to be one of the pitfalls of being a kid actor: You get your schooling in dribs and drabs, there are probably lots of distractions, and then when you’re older, everybody’s got a leg-up on you.

Herbert: Believe me, it’s like starting a mile run one lap behind everybody else. I want you to understand something: I have had a lot of dysfunctional areas in my life, and for a while I blamed it all on being a child actor. It took me a long time to realize that if, for example, you walk under a tree and you get hit on the head by a branch eight, nine times in a row, the tenth time you gotta take responsibility for walking under that same tree. I KNEW what the problems were after a while, and I didn’t correct ‘em. So now I don’t blame everything in my life on [the acting career], I don’t look at each of my problems and say, “Well, THIS is because I was a child actor, THAT is because I was a child actor.” I take my share of responsibility.

I was in a unique situation: My father was sick, he had a heart condition, so he never worked a day in his life. My mother had to take care of my father. And they were much older, they had me when they were 40. The parents [of a kid actor] have an obligation: One of them has to be at the studio eight hours a day with you, they have to help you read lines and study and stuff like that. But I was the only one getting a paycheck in my family, out of my father, my mother and myself. (My brother and sister were much older.) Mine was the only paycheck that ever came in. This is what upsets me, and is a good example of Hollywood’s indifference to child actors: They [the studio bosses] stood back and watched a family of an adult male, an adult female and a child for 15 years, and the only paycheck that ever came into that family was from the child.

There was a time when it was an adult male, an adult female and a FOUR-YEAR-OLD child, and the only paycheck was from the child. And no one said, “Hey . . . what’s goin’ on here?”

CI: Because they didn’t CARE what’s going on here.

Herbert: That’s exactly right. And, see, when you talk about what you lost, I lost a lot more than the financial things. Financial things are way down the list for me. The way that it’s set up in Hollywood is, I did 50 TV shows, the 20 movies, the commercials, ALL of that stuff . . . and when I turned 21, zero was put away in the bank for me. It was not that way for every [kid actor]: If you signed a long-term contract, like for instance if you did Lassie or The Donna Reed Show or something, they put away like five percent for you. But if you were not on a long-term contract, ALL of the money you earned for the movies, for ALL the TV things, went to your guardians, and your guardians could do with it whatever they saw fit.

What gets me is, Hollywood’s attitude is, “We got a child actor here, and he’s working three months on this movie. How much do we want to make sure that he has when he turns 21?” And the answer that they’ve come up with is ZERO. Now, am I saying I should have had one hundred percent? No. The parents deserve at least 50 percent, because it’s like a job for them too. SOMEbody had to be with me in the studio, plus they had to run lines with me at night. So they put in their time too. But it should NOT be 100 percent for the guardian and zero for the child. There was $1700 in my trust fund when I turned 21 and, believe me, I made well over $50,000, I’m sure. I don’t KNOW, because all I ever did was sign the checks. It’s just a good example of the abuse.

It’s not the MONEY— I never will look back and say, “Boy, if I had all that money . . .” because I would have probably lost it [blown it]. So that’s not an issue—there are a lot more important things that you lose. But that’s a good example. And I know . . . I KNOW that when I make that statement, when I tell a person that after all those years of working I had ZERO, I know that after I hang up the phone or I walk away from the person, they think, “Well, now, wait a minute. That’s not possible. It can’t be possible that he could work for three months on Houseboat [1958] and make $25,000, and when he turned 21 he got ZERO out of that.” THAT’S the number—zero.

CI: Well, 1700 in your trust fund.

Herbert: Okay, right. Only a kid who was on a long-term contract makes out, but even THEN it’s only like five percent. Paul Petersen is doing everything he can to try to alleviate these things. He’s just a marvelous person. [Petersen addresses these issues on his website, www.paulpetersen.com]

CI: The first sci-fi movie you made was The Colossus of New York.

Herbert: With Ross Martin. I’ve seen it on TV numerous times. They had a big, huge guy [Ed Wolff] who played the Colossus. I was scared a little bit, because the guy was like eight, nine feet tall. They had to take his helmet off so I could see there was a real person inside. Actually, they took his helmet off because I kicked him in the knee [laughs]!

CI: You did that when you were nine years old. Nine isn’t old enough to know not to be scared of a “robot” on a movie set?

Herbert: As soon as he took off his helmet and I could see that he was not a real giant, I wasn’t scared. But, yes, they had to familiarize me with the fact that this is not a real giant.

CI: Were you kidding me, or did you actually kick him?

Herbert: Yes, I was kidding, I did not kick him. Listen, I was cute but I wasn’t stupid—the guy was eight feet tall, I’m not gonna kick him. Or if I WAS, I was gonna kick him in between . . . you know . . . that area there [laughs]!

CI: Any memory of some of the people in the cast?

Herbert: Ross Martin, who played my father, was just a wonderful person. I don’t remember my “mother” in that, Mala Powers, very much, but Ross Martin was an extremely nice man. And anybody who is in that category [a well-known actor] who is nice to the children is a nice person. ‘Cause I worked with some who were not, like Doris Day. I worked with her for three months [on Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, 1960], she never said two words to us kids. Alan Ladd [The Man in the Net, 1959] never, never spoke. I think they were actually jealous . . . resentful . . . of children. If dogs could talk back, they wouldn’t have talked to a dog either. But then there were people like David Niven [also in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies], who was nice as could be. There were actors who would not allow children to get closeups in a scene—the closeups had to be on THEM.

People like Sophia Loren and Cary Grant [the stars of Houseboat], David Niven, they would rather the child got the closeup. That’s the kind of people they were.

CI: Did you like movies when you were growing up?

Herbert: I gotta be honest: I’m a big movie fan, I always have been, but I’ve never been a big science fiction fan. It’s the only category of movies I’m not a fan of. I know this is gonna make some of your readers unhappy, but I gotta tell the truth. I love comedies, I love dramas, action . . . but I’ve never been a huge sci-fi fan. For some reason, science fiction and horror movies have never been [appealing] to me. Maybe it’s because of all the work I did in it!

CI: With all your credits, after a while, did you even have to audition for movies any more?

Herbert: To answer that question, I gotta jump ahead to a movie I did called 13 Ghosts. I had just finished doing Houseboat, and William Castle, who I’m sure you’re aware of, called and wanted me to do 13 Ghosts. That was the movie where you had to wear glasses—like 3-D glasses—in order to see the ghosts.

Castle wanted me to do it, but I had an obligation to do something else. So Castle told my agent that if I would do the movie, he would give me star billing.

Star billing didn’t mean anything to me, I didn’t know any difference. And also in the movie, billed below me, were going to be Donald Woods, Martin Milner, Rosemary DeCamp, Margaret Hamilton who played in The Wizard of Oz [1939] — a number of well-known people. So I did the movie and I was the star of the movie. So I not only didn’t have to audition, but I got a bonus by just doing the movie.

CI: The star billing was your bonus.

Herbert: Yeah. As I’ve been saying, children and animals are not big favorites with movie stars. Certain people were not friendly on that 13 Ghosts set, and later on I realized that it was because I had the star billing. Like it was something I had any control over—I didn’t even KNOW, ‘til years later!

CI: The Fly—what memories of that one?

Herbert: I have a lot. Like 13 Ghosts, which was recently remade, The Fly has also been remade, and they didn’t call me [laughs]! In The Fly I worked with Vincent Price, and I should have mentioned him in the same category with Sophia Loren and Cary Grant. One of the nicest people you could possibly imagine. Extremely.

CI: Can you give me an example of Vincent Price being nice?

Herbert: People like that, I can’t give you specific examples, but the impression they make on you stays with you forever. ‘Cause [working on a set] is intimidating for a child. I didn’t come from a wealthy family, or from a family that lived that type of lifestyle. When I walked in and saw people like that, it could be very intimidating. But some, like Price, went out of their way, they made sure you understood they were GLAD you were there. And I was good [acting-wise], I knew my lines, because I have that semi-photographic memory I told you about. They called me One-Take Charlie. And that was important. When you’re doing a scene and you make a mistake, it doesn’t matter whether it was a significant line or not, they have to do it over. So they appreciate having a child who’s not gonna make mistakes. I didn’t make many mistakes.

CI: That should have taken some of the pressure off you.

Herbert: It did. I was never, never intimidated. I had one 26-line speech in a Donna Reed Show, and I got it in one take. Incidentally, I’ll tell you one thing you don’t want to hear from a director. You could do a scene, and it could be great, everything could seem to go perfect, and the one thing you don’t want to hear from the director is, “Cut, that’s perfect, that’s ABSOLUTELY perfect”—‘cause it’s gonna be followed by, “Let’s do one more.” If he says, “Cut,” then that was IT, but if he says, “Great, perfect, wonderful!,” the next thing out of his mouth is going to be, “Let’s do another one.” [Laughs] I’ll always remember that! ....

  
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Re: Charles Herbert
Reply #1 - 24. Jun 2007 at 01:01
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(continued)

CI: In The Fly, David Hedison and Patricia Owens as your parents?

Herbert: Not David Hedison, AL Hedison . . . who later changed his name to David Hedison. I could never quite figure that out—he went from Al Hedison to DAVID Hedison. Is that better [laughs]? In those days, didn’t guys normally change their name to . . . you know . . . to Rock? Or Tab? But, no, he went from Al to Dave.

Go figure [laughs]! To answer your question, both he and Patricia Owens were very nice.

CI: And the director, Kurt Neumann?

Herbert: A very difficult person to get along with, because he was a European who was very demanding. I didn’t have a problem with him that I can remember, but he had that reputation. Remember, though, Vincent Price was in that movie, and he was such a wonderful person, everybody LOVED Vincent Price. So Kurt Neumann was probably less demanding on that movie than any place else, ‘cause there was no way you could do a movie and be around somebody like Vincent Price and be rude or anything like that. Vincent Price just rubbed off on you, he was so wonderful.

CI: The Fly was a biggie, box office-wise.

Herbert: The Fly at that time was a very big movie. I went to the Fairfax Theater to see it in the movies, and I very seldom ever went to see any of my own movies. But when The Fly came out, I went with some of the kids that knew that I was an actor. There’s a scene in there where my mom [Owens] and the housekeeper [Kathleen Freeman] and I are searching for the white-headed fly, and they kept shouting, “Where’d he go? Where’d he go?” And I, as a wiseguy kid in the back of the theater, got up and said, “He went out to get a ham sandwich” —not a good thing to say in a Jewish neighborhood! The usher came in and he was going to throw me out of the theater! My friends were all screamin’ at him, “You can’t throw him out. That’s him on the screen!” But he threw me out of the theater!

I’ve also got to tell ya, The Fly was a movie that I actually got scared at. When Patricia Owens pulled that cloth off of Al Hedison’s head and revealed that ugly fly head, I got scared—that really did scare me. And also the famous scene at the end where the fly with the Al Hedison head is in the spider web yelling, “Help me, help me, help meeee!” That’s stayed with me forever.

Back in those days, the very few people who did know I was an actor, when they were kidding me they’d go, “Help me, help me, help meeee!”

CI: This kid actor career, it turned into problems later in life needless to say, but at the time, when you were on the sets of these movies, were you enjoying yourself?

Herbert: The only time that I really felt comfortable was when I was working.

Most of the time I was glad to be there, it was enjoyable. I’m a big sports fan so I got along with the grip guys and the crew, and I always brought my [baseball] glove to work. So, yeah, I enjoyed being there. And because I was good with my lines, I never was scared. I did five Playhouse 90s [and other live broadcasts], and I did The Reluctant Dragon, which was live theater. I also did a Jell-O commercial with Johnny Carson, and I’ve got to tell you what kind of person he was. We were doing this and it was live, he was doing his lines, I was doing my lines, and I made a mistake! I said a line about three, four lines ahead of where I shoulda said it. When I realized what I’d done, I looked him straight in the eye and I was panicked —“Oh my God, what did I just do?” He looked back at me, and I had a feeling that with that look, he was telling me, “Don’t worry, just follow what I do. It’s gonna be out of order but it’s gonna be okay.” He got all that across with a look.

It was live so they didn’t yell cut; we had to continue on. He said another line . . . I said another line . . . him . . . me . . . and, somehow, he got me through it. And if you saw the commercial, you could not tell anything had gone wrong.

When it was over, he pulled me aside and he said, “You did a great job. Did you know what I was tryin’ to tell you?” I said, “Yes, Mr. Carson, I did.” So he was also a very wonderful person.

CI: You played the son of William Lundigan on his TV series Men Into Space.

Herbert: I was supposed to work three, four days, something like that, and they were going to pay me $750 for the week. But we got it all done in one day, so I ended up getting $750 for one DAY. And that’s the only thing I remember about Men Into Space [laughs]!

CI: You also got top billing in Bert I. Gordon’s The Boy and the Pirates.

Herbert: I have wonderful memories of that too. We did that for a number of weeks, it took a long time. I was in practically every scene, playing a modern Massachusetts kid who’s interested in the history of pirates, and then gets transported back in time by a genie to pirate days. I don’t know how successful it was, but it was very enjoyable, a lot of fun to do. Boy and the Pirates wasn’t a Houseboat, but it was great.

CI: Why? Because of the kind of part you played?

Herbert: That, and the fact that I worked with people I liked. Susan Gordon and I were very close friends, and Bert Gordon was a terrific person. Murvyn Vye played Blackbeard, and Timothy Carey played Morgan the Pirate. Do you know who Timothy Carey is? He, on that movie, probably scared me more than the Colossus of New York [laughs]! But he was a nice man, and he always tried to make you feel, “I’m not really crazy,” and you would say, “Okay.” And then he would walk away and you’d go, “He’s CRAZY!” He was a scary man.

CI: For-instance?

Herbert: It was just his eyes—those eyes! He’d look at me and I would run behind my mother. And I had to catch up to her, because she was tryin’ to find somebody else to hide behind [laughs]! His eyes, and the way he talked—all the time, he just seemed ANGRY, and out of control. But after a while, it didn’t bother me. He wasn’t somebody who was different off-screen—he was crazy on- AND off-screen.

CI: And you liked Susan Gordon?

Herbert: She and I were real close friends. I went to Fairfax and she went to Hamilton, but we socialized, and we did a lot of work together. We went on publicity tours, a lot of different things, and she’s just a great person. I’m looking forward to seeing her again at Monster Bash in June.

CI: When Bert I. Gordon first announced Boy and the Pirates, he said it was budgeted at over a million dollars.

Herbert: You keep saying Bert I. Gordon—is it necessary to always say I?

CI: He always used the middle initial in the screen credits. Maybe he liked to be called Mr. B.I.G.

Herbert: Well, there you go! He let ME call him Bert.

CI: Well, you let me call you Charlie.

Herbert: So FAR [laughs]! I don’t know if he really planned to spend a million dollars on it—you have to talk to Mr. B.I.G. about that. The pirate ship stuff was shot on a set, and the beach was . . . the beach was . . . [Pause] Oh, I remember where it was—it was near the ocean [laughs]. That’s the best I can do! Near the water!

CI: And, finally, 13 Ghosts.

Herbert: That was a very interesting movie to do, because it was the first movie, and you can correct me if I’m wrong . . . No, DON’T correct me if I’m wrong [ laughs]. 13 Ghosts was the first movie where they gave out glasses that enabled you to see certain things on the screen. In other words, you couldn’t see the ghosts without these glasses. That was a big thing. I never realized ‘til later on that those glasses were very collectible, and valuable. I sold two to a guy at an autograph show for two dollars apiece, and found out from another guy that he was getting FIFTY dollars for ‘em!

In that one, I worked for William Castle, one of the biggest horror producers of all time—The Tingler and House on Haunted Hill and so on. I didn’t have an awful lot of contact with him—which can be a positive thing, because there were different types of directors. There were a lot of directors, some very successful, who basically just rolled the camera and let the actors act. They didn’t do a lot of demanding. He seemed to be that type. And a very gracious person, a nice person.

CI: The cast?

Herbert: Donald Woods and Rosemary DeCamp were really nice people. And Jo Morrow—I guess you could say, if I had any crushes, then I had a crush on her, because she was such a pretty woman. Such a wonderful person, and so pretty.

There WERE [actresses] like that, who were not pretentious. Donna Reed. She was a beautiful woman . . . but you could talk to her. She was a nice person. Jo Morrow was like that too.

Martin Milner was someone I thought might have resented the fact that I had star billing, but I don’t know this for a fact so maybe I shouldn’t even have said it. But THIS child, on 13 Ghosts, was doing what he was TOLD. I had nobody ask me, “Do you want to be the star?,” nobody asked me if I wanted to do a movie, nobody asked me ANYthing. I did what I was told to do, like all child actors do. To resent the child for ANYthing is absurd.

CI: What a bastardly thing to do, to give a hard time to a kid who’s already under a lot of pressure.

Herbert: That’s right, exactly. I’m not gonna mention names, but there was a very, very successful child actor who at the time could not read or write. He had the kind of memory where they would tell him his lines and he would remember them. But he could barely read or write. You’d say, “Well, how is that possible if you have teachers there who are supposed to be educating this child?”

Well, very simple: They were not there to educate him, they were there to get a paycheck. He never WENT to public school, because he did a series and he was constantly at the studio school, which was the only education that he had.

He’s doing great NOW, by the way.

CI: 13 Ghosts—scary when you saw it?

Herbert: I did go see 13 Ghosts and we had the glasses. It was very scary, ‘cause you couldn’t see the ghosts without the glasses. But The Fly was the scary one, the one that I will always remember, when she took off the cloth over his head. That was one ugly person.

CI: The acting . . . did it ever start to “get old,” or could you have stuck with it longer if the offers had kept coming in?

Herbert: The hardest transition is to go from being a child actor, to an adult actor. Because as a child, in all honesty, you don’t have to act. You’re cued, you remember lines. But for an adult, it’s different.

CI: Are you saying that you couldn’t do it?

Herbert: No, I’m not saying that. But I’d been working for 15 years and now they wanted me to study acting. “What do you mean, ‘study acting’? I’ve been DOIN’ it for 15 years!” I didn’t realize, yes, you have to study acting if you want to be a successful adult actor. Because as a child, I sometimes just read my lines on the way to the studio, and I could remember ‘em. I had some dramatic scenes—like when I played a blind boy on a Science Fiction Theatre, for instance. Basically, though, I was just being a kid, being natural. That was the key word, NATURAL. But as an adult actor, yes you have to be natural, but you also have to know how to act.

Once I got out of acting, once I reached the point where they didn’t call me any more, I was happy. I didn’t want to do it. “Great. You don’t want me, I don’t want YOU. Now I can do whatever I want to do.” Unfortunately, I then turned around and realized, “Let’s see. I don’t have an education. I don’t have any money. I have no skills. . . What the hell AM I gonna do?” Years later I tried to get back into acting, and I found something out. The one thing you need as an actor, to be successful, is: You have to have an identity. In other words, you have to be able to look in the mirror and see somebody, you have to be able to see a PERSON. I kept looking in the mirror and all I saw was a mustache and hair . . . I had no IDENTITY. And that’s the biggest thing that I’d lost, because my identity was one week I was David in Donna Reed, one week I was Roberto in Houseboat . . . THAT was my identity. Charles had no identity. If you have no identity when they ask you to act . . . you can’t act. Because you need an identity to become a character. You can’t just slip yourself into a role and say, “Okay, I’m this guy or that guy,” you have to have somebody to slip in there. I had no one. I did try to get back in after a while, and it was worthless, absolutely worthless. I didn’t realize ‘til later on in my life, when some things happened, when I established an identity, that I did have the ability to do it back then. That I had a natural talent that never goes away. It was something I was born with, so I don’t pat myself on the back for having it. I was born with an ability to do certain things, like an athlete. But, see, as an athlete, you can just go on the field, and maybe sometimes you don’t produce as much as you should, but you’ll be able to produce. The abilities and gifts that I had, you have to have an identity to perform those, and it took me many, many years, ‘til I was out of the business for years, to realize I had that.

CI: Do you ever watch your movies nowadays?

Herbert: I watch Houseboat if it’s on, because it has such great memories. Working on Houseboat with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren was the most special thing in my whole career. Otherwise . . . not really, no.

CI: Do you have a family of your own now?

Herbert: No, I don’t, I’ve never been married.

CI: If you had to show one of your movies to somebody, which would it be?

Herbert: Houseboat.

CI: How readily do you admit to having been an actor, when you’re with people who start talking about TV and movies?

Herbert: Never. Well, very seldom. If I tell anybody about it, then it’s someone I like a lot, someone I feel close to. One of the reasons is—as you can see, obviously—if I’m going to talk about it, it takes a long time [laughs]!

Thank God I’m not on the clock! It’s an injustice to just hit-and-run when I talk about that subject, because there’s an obligation that I have, because of what I went through, and because of what kids are still going through. The laws haven’t changed. [Hollywood] is still abusing children now.

What’s the worst thing you can lose in your entire life? There are health issues, I understand that, but the worst thing a person can lose is your identity. You form WHO YOU ARE as a child. When you’re growing up, Tom Weaver is becoming who Tom Weaver will be as an adult. If you don’t have an identity ‘til you’re 17 or 18 years old, you’re 18 years behind everybody else. And I think the identity is the most important thing a human being has, because it’s who he or she IS. If you can’t sit in a group of people and feel that you’re a person, if you can’t feel that Charlie is there with Tom and Bill and Frank and Doug, if you just look at other people, and you look at yourself and you say, “Well, I’m just here . . .” then . . . [trails off].

It’s hard to explain, I understand that. But an identity is what you form as a child, and if your identity keeps changing every week, if one week you’re Roberto on the screen and the next week you’re Fred and the next week you’re Tom Sawyer, it’s hard to know WHO CHARLIE IS. It’s okay as a child because people look at the screen and say, “Okay, he’s Fred” or “Okay, he’s Tom Sawyer.” But when you’re an adult, people don’t know who the hell you are—you don’t walk around with your credits. They want to know who Charlie is. And I didn’t know.

CI: Wow. I never heard it put that way before.

Herbert: Again, I’m not trying to get on a soapbox. I made mistakes in my life, I had a very difficult life. Things are wonderful for me now. But to look back and say, “I blame EVERYthing on the child acting days . . .” [Pause] Well, I can blame a LOT on that; the thing is, I knew after a while that that was the problem, and if I didn’t make the adjustment, then it’s my fault.

CI: What has made your life wonderful again in recent years?

Herbert: I’m now in a situation where I’ve got a wonderful job, and . . . uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . I’m . . . uh . . . [Pause] Well, okay: After 39 years of spending my life on drugs, I’m clean. I’m clean for 14 months now [October 2005].

CI: Congratulations.

Herbert: Well, it’s not a “congratulations” thing . . . I appreciate that, but the thing is, I spent 39 years consistently doing drugs, and I try to explain to people when I talk about it that there’s a difference between quitting doing drugs and STOPPING doing drugs. I was 55 years old when I stopped. I didn’t quit, I STOPPED. In other words, I couldn’t do it any more. I didn’t have the satisfaction of “I made a decision to quit”—the decision was made FOR me. I’m grateful that I don’t do it any more, but there’s a difference, and that’s why I tell people that you want to QUIT doing drugs, you don’t want to just STOP...

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