Free Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life by Frank Bank, Gibu Twyman Page A

Sabbath.
So I couldn't plant Leonard until Sunday.
But it was worth the wait, I think.
If you were a famous Jew, you were buried in Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles. It's right near the airport, right off the San Diego Freeway, not five miles from LAX.
My dad always said, "Son, all I ask is that you just make sure I'm next to Jolie."
It took some doing, but if you were to go visit my dad, you will see that he currently resides on a certain hillside.
Leonard is not 20 feet from Jolson,
And so is Sylvia.
Both of them are there together, Leonard and Sylvia.
Like I said, I was so lucky to be together with them all the time I got to.

 

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I was lucky, the gifts they passed on to me, of inquisitiveness and persistence and an undying interest in people.
But one thing knowing them and reading my way through the entire encyclopedia had taught me.
I had experienced the most beautiful, full, rich, incredible life with them.
But I had experienced nothing.
I was missing something.
There was more out there for me to see and do and be.

 

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Chapter Three
Beach Days and Knights
Cool.
You hear me say it all the time, as if you haven't noticed.
But it's more than a saying with me, more than just a word.
It is a belief.
It is a core tenet of my existence.
The pillar on which my psyche stands.
It is both a journey and a destination. A motivation and an accomplishment.
It is a grail as palpable and reachable as any goblet in some faraway shrine.
To me, it became almost holy.
Cool is in my bones and in my fibers, in my heart and in my soul. It flicks at my eyes and licks at my lips. I see cool coming and going.
Cool should be on the periodic table as an essential element of life. Like both oxygen and carbon, I breathe cool in and I breathe cool out.
It has permeated my life since my early teens.
I guess cool always will.
Becoming a movie star, or becoming famous, was never a goal.
The first goal I ever had was, I wanted to be popular.
I decided I was going to be cool. And to be cool, I had to be nice, I had to be thoughtful, I had to be caring, I had to be remembered.
But it wasn't always so.
If there was such a thing as the antithesis of cool in school, that was me.
I was a dweeb long before there were dweebs.
Before anybody knew what a geek was, I knew.
I was a poster child for dork.
Take every lame-o you ever saw in teenage-angst movies, roll them into one, and you've got me in early high school.

 

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Dial 1-800-IMANERD and you'd get Frank Bank on the other end of line.
Part of the trouble, if I may say so, was that I was just too friggin' smart.
I know it's immodest to mention it, but here's the deal. I was the smartest kid at Hamilton High School. Out of 3,000 kids I had the highest IQ in school.
My IQ was 203.
Yes. It sounds absurdly high. I didn't even realize it was up there for a long time. But I can document it by the fact that I also was a screw-up.
What happened was, my junior year, my counselor calls me in. My grades had slipped from A's to C's. Obviously, up 'til then, schoolwork had been a slam-dunk for me. English, history, I breezed through all that. I knew the history of the world, Part I and II. I loved it. I really dug in. Politics. Geography. All that. The only thing I hated was science. I had to study some, but still skated through most of it.
But now my counselor calls me in, this guy named Leonard Rudolph, and he says to me, ''What is the matter with you? You just took the IQ test and you dropped 25 points?"
And he showed me my IQ was 178.
I said, "Well, to be honest with you, I really wasn't thinking about taking the test that morning."
I didn't add: I was thinking of girls, which was all I thought about by now, morning, noon and night and all the hours in between.
"Would you like me to retake the test?" I asked.
He goes, "No. There's nothing wrong with what you scored, but I'm curious as to why you could have dropped that much."
The words "copping out" didn't exist as far as I knew at the time.