man ever comes close to his grandeur or ever will. Dad is not halfway around the world like he was when I was much younger, yet it feels that way most days, since I never see him.
In early 1968, Mom ends her marriage to Alexis, on good terms, after a separation. We continue to live in his Manhattan townhouse, and she and Alexis remain “good friends.” Occasionally, they catch dinner together when he is town.
Even without Alexis in the picture, my frustration with my mom and living in New York starts to boil over. In fifth grade, I become this hard-to-manage eight-going-on-nine-year-old kid with no real compass, no real direction, mad at my mom and the world for everything that is wrong in my life. Finally, I lose control. I act out in frustration to get attention. One day, my classmate Nick Cassini and I take some M-80s to school, slip them in the locker room below and . . . well, you know what happens when you light a cherry bomb on a school property. The principal expels us both.
Mom tries to smooth things over with the principal, but to no avail. After that, she transfers me to another private school, the Dalton School on New York City’s Upper East Side, for the remainder of my fifth-grade year. It’s hard for me to talk to my mom about my feelings, since I don’t think she will understand them anyway. So I simply bury them for the time being and stay out of trouble.
I finish out the school year, but for me, the summer of 1968 cannot come soon enough. I am so thrilled; I am spending my summer vacation with Dad! He invites me to join him on location in Almería, Spain, where he is filming 100 Rifles, a 20th Century Fox western costarring Raquel Welch and Burt Reynolds and directed by Tom Gries. Dad flies me from New York and picks me up at the airport in Barcelona. Esther is also there, and it is like a family reunion. We pick up right where we left off. Dad and I laugh and joke. Dad tells more tall tales, offers more words of wisdom, and I again nod. As always, Esther is like a soul mom to me. She really takes the time to understand me and talk to me. I feel right at home again.
Dad and Esther and the entire cast are staying at a beautiful resort hotel in the city, complete with a spectacular swimming pool. I have an absolute ball swimming every day with Gries’s kids, Jon and Cary. When on the set, we play games, including cowboys and Indians, because that is what the movie is about. One day, my black mustachioed father, in costume as General Verdugo, the career-minded military man he plays in the film, sees us playing and says, “Hey, amigo, why don’t you take your friends to the wardrobe trailer, get yourself some cowboy and Indian outfits, and we’ll put you in the scene.”
We walk over to wardrobe and I tell the wardrobe lady what my father said. Before we know it, we are dressed in authentic cowboy and Indian outfits. The wardrobe lady even fits me with a just-above-the-shoulder black wig for effect. Just as Dad says, I appear in the scene with him. It is not a speaking role; I am just an extra. And Dad is nothing but affirming with me.
“Hey, amigo, you make a pretty good Indian,” he says with a smile.
“Ah, Dad.” I’m self-conscious.
“But we have to do something about that wig!”
In the blink of an eye, it’s over. My first on-camera appearance as an uncredited Indian boy. Not a very promising start to a film career, even though becoming an actor like my father is the furthest thing from my mind at this point.
Burt Reynolds is not yet the number-one male box-office star; it’s still four years before his now-famous nude centerfold on a bearskin rug, no less, in Cosmopolitan magazine. On the set, Burt is always very nice to me and calls me “kid.” One afternoon during a break in filming, he teaches me how to throw a stage punch. We are fooling around and he says, “Hey, kid, come here.”
I walk over.
“Let me see you throw a punch,” he says. “I know your dad boxes, but can you throw a punch?”
Burt holds up his hand. I throw a punch as hard as I can. “That’s pretty good, kid. Throw another one.”
I throw another punch, harder than the first. Burt shakes his hand a little, blows on it, and smiles. Then he says, “Would you like to know how to throw a movie punch?”
“Sure,” I say.
I cannot believe it: Burt Reynolds is going to teach me how to throw a movie punch!
“Okay now, kid, instead of punching straight into my hand,” he says, “I want you to arc your punch like a windmill. Punch your punch, and come around wide.”
I do it a few times.
“Great, kid, great! Let me show you how this works.”
Burt demonstrates it for me, using me as the guy he’s going to punch. “You’re going to do that same thing. You’re going to bring your punch around and come within a foot in front of my face with that nice swing that you did.”
I do exactly what Burt tells me. Soon as I cross his face, he jerks his head back.
“Wow!” I shout. “That looked so real!”
“That’s right, kid. You just learned how to throw your first movie punch.”
Burt walks off with me. “You just might have a future in this business,” he says jokingly and slaps me on the back.
Fast-forward eight years: I am sitting in a movie theater, now as a nineteen-year-old, watching Burt in his latest feature, Smokey and the Bandit. There is a huge knock-down, drag-out movie fight scene with his costar Jerry Reed, where the two of them bust through one set after another while fighting off their adversaries. I become a ten-year-old kid again and think, “Wow, I learned from the master!”
On the set, Dad also pals around with costar Hans Gudegast (who later changes his name to Eric Braeden and becomes famous on the daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless). Hans and my father have many things in common and become very close. Hans is a great soccer player, and Dad loves the sport. So between setups on the set, they fool around with the soccer ball, passing it back and forth. At times they draw quite a crowd. Hans, an excellent boxer in school, and Dad, a former welterweight, love to chat about boxing. After Dad and Esther move to Beverly Hills, he often has Hans and his lovely wife, Dale, over for a home-cooked meal. Other times, Hans and Dad head off to the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles to catch the fights. They are just the best of buds.
It is such a blast being with Dad and Esther in Spain. Every night, we have dinner on the patio. What a life! Burt, Raquel, Hans, and other members of the cast often join us. They laugh and tell jokes. As a kid, I struggle to keep up with their intellect and humor. As the evenings grow late, I struggle to stay awake, but every night without fail, the candles on the table lull me to sleep. To this day, I cannot sit at a table and look at a candle for longer than five minutes before falling asleep.
Ever since she starred two years earlier in the British fantasy movie One Million Years B.C., there has been no hotter actress—or no hotter woman, for that matter—on the planet than Raquel Welch. And this ten-year-old immediately takes notice of her. I have a monster crush on her from the moment I meet her. Anytime I am around her, I cannot take my eyes off her. She is drop-dead gorgeous, and everybody on the set is taken by her. If I manage to stay awake through dinner, I make a point to walk up to her, say good night, and stand there. She always starts it off.
“Well, good night!” she says, brightly.
“Good night,” I say, softly.
Raquel, smiling,
