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

But what I said was tantamount to, "I've just been copping out. I just wasn't thinking about tests."
So he tells me, "Well, I'm very upset because you've had the highest IQ in the school at 203. And how come the guy with the highest IQ is getting C's while everyone else is getting A's?"
I couldn't really tell him what was going on inside me.
But it was simple. In the eighth grade I was a real toad. I was socially backward. I was shy. I kept to myself. The guys I hung with were like the science club. We used to play chess, for God's sake.
In fact, if I may add an immodest footnote, I had beat the California chess champion when I was in the sixth grade. He was a coach at Shenandoah Grammar School. The guy was 40 years old and his name was John Keckhut. We'd turn a couple of trash cans over and set some carom boards across them, and play chess on top of these at school.
True story.

 

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So I was still doing this kind of thing in high school.
I did all the things you expect a nerd to do.
And then it hit me.
Like the Elvis movie, I went Girl Crazy.
I discovered girls-girls-girls-girls-girls around age 12. My first real love was a girl named Joyce, who lived around the corner from me. Man, I was madly in love with Joyce.
I never had sex with Joyce or anything. You don't always nail the first girl you love, but Joyce just got me thinking about it.
Everything took a backseat to girls. I'm still doing the movies and television. But the movies and television took second place to my new-found ambition:
Getting laid.
And suddenly, I saw the way to getting what I wanted.
I would become the most popular guy in school.
I would become . . . cool.
My libido was pointing the way. But I also decided to train my mind on the whole matter of becoming cool.
That's when I decided to become a people person.
I realized as a kid I'd spent all this time listening to race results, reading the encyclopedia, doing all these mano a mano projects.
But gregariousness was a much better project and I honestly did love being with people. This was a natural part of me I'd inherited from Leonard and Sylvia, who never knew a stranger. I'd just never thrown the switch in that part of my brain or heart.
I loved being with people.
The cool thing was that I wasn't phony about it. Because I really did abhor phonies. I liked being genuine. And I genuinely liked everybody. I genuinely wanted to do good. I was a do-gooder.
Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties was cool. He was. That was another thing that goes back to my father. My father said to me, "I always want you to be the guy in the white hat, not the guy in the black hat. It's much better to be good than bad."
Everything was black and white to my dad. Black stood for evil, white stood for good. Well, I gotta tell you something. He was right. Leonard was really cool in his own funny kinda way.
And so my heroes were all good guys. I had so many heroes when I was a kid, it was terrible. I mean, more than the average guy.
Remember I am left-handed? I go to buy my first baseball glove and I'm all upset because my buddies are all righties and I can't borrow one of their mitts because I'm a lefty.
But my dad pointed out to me, "Hey, son, here's a lefty. His name was

 

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Babe Ruth."
And I went, "Really? Wow! Hey, cool. Babe Ruth is a lefty." I was so excited, I can't begin to tell you. I was thrilled.
Where do you think my love for Sandy Koufax comes from? It wasn't just the fact that he's Jewish and a lefty, was it? C'mon. Get real. Let's go for it. Sandy Koufax. The greatest pitcher in the history of baseball is a lefty?
Sandy was my man.
But it wasn't just sports guys.
Albert Einstein. Lefty all the way. I loved Einstein. Einstein was cool. He was great.
And I loved Jonas Salk, another lefty. I so admired guys who I thought were good guys and who were smart enough to figure things out and help other people.
I saw that if you weren't smart, you were going to get trampled on. You either had to be strong