Nineteen fifty to 1963, the years historian Kevin Starr called California’s golden age, were golden, all right. But they contained a lot of iron pyrite. I’m an actor’s son. When I was born, he was starring in radio’s The Adventures of Philip Marlowe—one hundred nineteen episodes to be exact. I’m also the stepson of a businessman who helped introduce the Bank Americard (now known as Visa) to the world.
More than one person encouraged me to write about my life during those years, and finally, after retiring from the bench, I did it. In mid-February, Koehler will publish my memoir Every Other Weekend—Coming of Age With Two Different Dads.
My father performed in some 500 radio plays, including The Whistler and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.
He was a regular on Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre Company, Lux Radio Theater, Hallmark Playhouse, and forgotten series like Nero Wolfe, Front Page Drama, and Dr. Christian. They called him “The Iron Duke” because he never missed a line. Radio and Television Life Magazine named my father “Best Male Actor on Radio.” He was famous enough that the most famous columnist in town, Hedda Hopper, announced my birth.
Then came television and the need to adapt to a cool new medium. It wasn’t easy for my father, but for me, a magic world opened up. I visited sound stages. I rode with him in Christmas parades and attended parties “for the children of the stars.” I appeared on Half Pint Panel, a live TV show featuring six-year-olds.
And yet, and yet…
My father almost always played the villain. I watched him die some fifty times. During one matinee of The Duel at Silver Creek, the entire theater cheered after the hero shot my father. That was tough to endure at age five. I was too young to separate fact from fantasy, and Los Angeles was—still is—not the best place to try.
Then my father landed a television series. In Sweden, where he fell for the script supervisor. He divorced my mother and married her, a shocking move in the fifties. It almost killed his career. A few months later, my mother married Stan, a businessman who, conservative, serious, was the polar opposite of my father. But the Southern California fantasy got to him, too. Stan grew close with film industry types, and unlike my father’s starving actor pals, his won Oscars and headed the Writers Guild West. One wrote Stan into the dialogue of a hit Broadway play.
My life toggled between these two households; Stan on the way up, my father on the way down. School became the stable center of my world—as in Beverly Hills High School, which in the early 1960s abounded with children whose parents were celebrities.
To reconstruct these years took research—reading old copies of Variety, rummaging through photos, and talking with whoever from that era was still alive. Sometimes listening to a hit song awoke a memory. Watching my father’s movies, like The Angry Red Planet, evoked memories of sitting next to him in a theater, looking at him, then watching him on the screen, then looking at him again. As for Stan, one box I found contained a trove of credit cards, all blank, no names or numbers on them, like clocks without their hands.
Every Other Weekend is finished now and available for pre-orders.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/every-other-weekend-anthony-j-mohr/1142845163?ean=9781646639007
https://www.amazon.com/Every-Other-Weekend-Anthony-Mohr/dp/1646639022/ref=sr_1_6crid=3J0JM0XYHZFHT&keywords=anthony+j.+mohr&qid=1671227369&sprefix=%2Caps%2C132&sr=8-6
Family History is also always Cultural History
Interesting!