"The Broadway Brat"

I was born on Flag Day, June 1944 in New York City. World War II still had more than a year to go but, apart from a singular absence of young men, New York was mostly immune from wartime hardships and went on much as before.

My first home was an apartment on West 58th Street in Manhattan, across the street from the backside of the Essex House. (My parents thought it was very naughty when for a long time the neon sign on the roof read "SEX HOUSE".) I spent my first year or so in that apartment but have absolutely no memory of it.

My parents were both Broadway musical performers, my father a singer, my mother a dancer. They were both in the original Broadway cast of "Oklahoma!". They first met during the auditions for the show that became, until "My Fair Lady" the longest-running Broadway musical. Although I was not actually 'born in a trunk', it was the St. James Theater.

My father was a singer in the men's chorus and understudied Alfred Drake in the role of Curly. (Unfortunately, Alfred Drake was famous for rarely missing a performance so my father got few opportunities to shine.) My mother was a dancer in Agnes DeMilles 'corps de ballet'. (Something of a misnomer since these were not waif-like ballet dancers but Broadway hoofers who tended to thunder across the stage like a herd of buffalo.) Alfred Drake and Joan Roberts, the male and female leads in the show, became my godparents, but I'm still waiting for their spiritual advice.

My parents were already Broadway veterans. My mother, Pat Likely, had appeared with Ethel Merman in "Panama Hattie" and "Let's Face It" with Danny Kaye. (My mother used to say she'd nearly married Danny Kaye, but could not because he was Jewish. I never really believed it, but in my child's mind I thought that would have made me 'Ray Kaye'.) My father, Joe Cunneff, had just completed a successful run in "The Student Prince" after coming in second in a singing contest to some upstart named Mario Lanza.

I was the first baby to be born into the cast of "Oklahoma!". My mother somehow concealed her pregnancy, cinching herself in, and danced until days before I was born at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital (which I understand no longer exists). She only missed a couple of weeks afterward before she was back on stage. My birth weight was dangerously small for those days, not much more than four pounds.

I was cared for by an elderly woman I knew as 'Mom Newton', an aunt of my mother's. (She stayed with us for a few years until her health forced he to return home to Massachusetts.) I made my Broadway stage debut at the age of six months when I got out of my stroller parked in the wings and crawled out onto the stage during a Wednesday matinee. I understand I got a big hand from the audience (which may explain many things that happened later).

It wasn't long after that we moved to a larger apartment in a (then) middle-class neighborhood in Jackson Heights, Queens, a short ride on the 'elevated' from Manhattan. By the time I was two, I had it memorized, "eighty-nine-ten, Thirty-Fifth Avenue, Jackson Heights, New York". (Oddly enough, about twenty years later, I was stationed less than a mile away on Thirty-Fifth Avenue at the U.S. Army Pictorial Center.)

My earliest memories are of parties, some at our apartment in Queens, some at big fancy places in Manhattan. I was the precocious kid, some might say the performing monkey, who would sing and dance on tabletops at the slightest provocation. I would recite, or sing commercial jingles I'd heard on the radio ("I love Chicklets candy-coated gum") and they'd capture it on a 'wire recorder'. I remember Ethel Merman, Celeste Holm, Mary Martin and Alfred Drake quite clearly.

Everyone we knew was in theater, everyone was rather grand and flamboyant, everyone had shed whatever regional accents they grew up with and spoke in affected semi-British accents. Many were gay, and not just the dancers, although that seemed just as normal to me as anything did. But a new and younger crop of performers, returning GI's and female factory workers were starting to get the choice Broadway parts.

"Oklahoma!" had a very long run and my mother continued with it for another two years until she became pregnant with my sister Elizabeth. After the show finally closed, my father went on to a featured singing role in "Annie Get Your Gun" with Ethel Merman, but a second child meant my mother's Broadway career was over. She found herself in an apartment in Queens with two young children.

My mother made the best of it (at first) but she wasn't cut out for Queens. We would go into Manhattan frequently on the elevated train and sometimes our old friends would venture out into deepest, darkest Queens for parties. But by the late 1940's, my father's Broadway career was winding down as well. After "Annie Get Your Gun" the jobs began to get scarce.

For the first time in a decade, my father found himself an unemployed singer. He would ride the 'elevated' into Manhattan each day and prowl the casting calls and auditions with his pals, other out-of-work performers who, like Ed Begley, would become well-known later on, but these were their 'salad days'.

Then at the end of the day my father would ride the 'El' back to Queens and I would watch for him from our window on the fourth floor. I could tell from a block away what sort of day he'd had by how badly he was limping from his childhood polio. He was limping a lot. Then, as things were getting desperate, when we couldn't pay the rent, a surprise bit of luck.

He would often have lunch with his friends at the Lamb's Club*, a kind of theatrical men-only dorm. And it was there someone made him a fateful job suggestion.


* The 1904 Sanford White-designed Lamb's Club was gutted in 2007 and converted into a hotel. All that remains is the facade, which was declared a historical landmark.