4-23-10 You’re Breaking Your Dad’s Heart Of Hollywood
I was about nineteen and started to take acting classes in Hollywood after my days at work in my father’s linen shop in Beverly Hills. I was also taking some singing lessons and going to the Villa Capri on Friday nights and singing with the piano player in the bar.
One day my cousin Leon from Brooklyn, who was visiting us at the time, came up to me and told me “I was breaking my father’s heart.”
I stopped the acting and singing stuff and switched to girls instead after putting myself in prison all day long in that little shop on Beverly Drive.
It wasn’t my father’s heart I was breaking, it was mine. I was doing what he wanted me to do with my life not what I wanted to do with it.
When I got a job in the Public Relations business at Rogers & Cowan, I was twenty two. My father still loved me but our conversations were short, sweet and to the point. It wasn’t until Art Seidenbaum, a great writer at the L A Times, did a piece on me and my partner, Mickey Freeman, that ran in the Sunday Calendar Section, it was in August of 1965, that my father read about what I did to make a living. All of a sudden, I wasn’t the “boy who broke his heart,” I was the son of a very proud father whose son was making it big in Hollywood handling so many “big stars.”
Live your dream boys and girls, it’s your life and at the end of it, the only one that matters if you made yourself happy or not will be you.
Tags: live your dream
