(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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