Chapter 29 – Dad

We didn’t make it to Ayr this trip but instead we went to the cozy resort village of Pitlochry which is set in spectacular scenery and is located in the Perthshire Highlands around seventy-five miles north of Edinburgh. We visited the salmon hatcheries on the River Tummel and watched those resilient devils swim upstream in something called the salmon ladder.

While hiking through the brambles, heather and gorse I told Donna I felt like Jim Bowie blazing a trail through the wilderness. She asked me who in the world Jim Bowie was (she pronounced Bowie as if it rhymed with WOWIE or HOWIE). She has the cutest accent ever and it was one of the reasons that I asked her to marry me that day. We now were unofficially engaged and it all started in Pitlochry.

Back in Glenrothes at the Smollett home, Donna and I were preparing for our trip home. We didn’t tell anyone yet about our engagement but we knew that soon it would be known to all, maybe when we got back to America. I packed my Vox AC30 in the oversized suitcase and stuffed it with clothing and pillows. It must have weighed over seventy pounds. I prayed to the gods of amplifiers and baggage handlers that it would arrive in Los Angeles in one piece. At the airport, it was a tearful goodbye for Donna and her mum and dad and her sisters, Beverly and Heather. They told me to take care of her little girl and I promised that I would.

We arrived at LAX in a late June evening and my mother and father were there to pick us up in the Mercedes. When my dad tried to lift the suitcase with my amp he asked if I had a dead body packed inside. I noticed that my dad looked a little pale and I asked if he was feeling alright. He said he felt a little weak but chalked it up to being a little under the weather. Back at Canton Drive, we picked up Bridget and Ginger and headed home to our little apartment on Vine Street. The place looked even smaller than we remembered.

The next day Donna went back to work and I called a few of my customers from Universal Data Supply to see if they needed any more computer supplies. I had a lot of catching up to do but I found it difficult to concentrate after still being in vacation mode. My niece Emily (Robbie and Carol’s little girl) was now almost nine months old and she was the apple of her grandparent’s eye. Max was a great big brother to her and would spend hours with my dad and the three dogs, Danielle, Jean Claude and Oliver in the backyard gathering ,throwing and breaking sticks, his favorite pastime. I think it was around this time that Max began taking piano lessons and he was already playing Mozart. The kid was a prodigy and I have to admit that I was a little jealous. I wished that I had started music at that age.

By the end of the summer my dad’s health didn’t seem to be improving so he went to the doctor for tests. He seemed a bit weak and was struggling to breathe. We thought it might be some kind of walking pneumonia. You have to understand that my dad was a guy who never got sick; I can’t even remember a time when he had a cold or the flu. So this was a little disconcerting to see him in such a state. It was now the end of August and he was sent to a specialist, Dr. Decker, who had a sneaking suspicion that the diagnosis was a little more ominous that any of us had expected. My parents had a trip planned for Paris and the doctor told them not to cancel it. He would have the results waiting for him when they got back in early September.

When Donna and I went to the airport to pick my parents up it was a shock. My dad came off the plane in a wheelchair. What happened? Here was a man that seemed so vital and alive a few months ago and now he couldn’t even walk? We drove back to the house on Canton Drive and I helped my father out of the car. He struggled to make it through the front door and when he stood at the bottom of the stairs as white as a ghost, I saw that he couldn’t climb them. He went to the emergency room at Cedars and soon we found out that he had a sarcoma of the lungs. I was in denial at first when he was admitted to a smaller hospital called Brotman Memorial but after the first week there things started to progress quickly in the wrong direction. My sister, Susan was a wreck and my brother, Robbie seemed to internalize his feelings—too upset to even talk. If it wasn’t for his wife, Carol to help him through the disaster, he would have been comatose. Our father was dying but I refused to believe it. They released him from the Brotman and his and my mother’s bedroom was converted into a sick room with oxygen and medical equipment I couldn’t even begin to fathom. By the end of October he was readmitted to the emergency room at Cedars in the ICU where the doctors gave him a week or two to live. Now things were becoming real for me.

Just after my 37^th birthday on November 2, Susan called me and told me to hurry over to the hospital because he was going fast. Donna and I jumped into the Nissan 200SX, the car my dad used to drive, and I drove like a maniac from Vine Street weaving in and out of cars on Santa Monica Boulevard trying to make it down there before it was too late. He was holding on but we knew it wasn’t going to be long.

Was this the same man who was signing autographs in the driver’s seat of our 1962 Cadillac convertible when we moved from Jericho, New York to California so he could be a part of that newfangled idea called the situation comedy on television? The same man who took me with him to Wallingford, Connecticut where he played the part of Mr. Applegate in Damn Yankees. Not only did I get to hang out backstage with the showgirls who pinched my cheek and said, “he’s so cute Johnny, he’s going to be a real lady killer just like his old man,” I also played second base the next morning in a pickup game at the motel where the cast a crew were staying—it just happened to have a ball field in the back and all the male members of the cast had Spalding signature Whitey Ford baseball gloves since the show revolved around baseball and the unfortunate Washington Senators. I felt like the luckiest kid in the world and I will never forget that trip as long as I live.

Moving to Beverly Hills, on the suggestion of Carl Reiner who said, “whatever you do Johnny, you have to get your kids in the Beverly Hills school system, was a shock to my system. In New York my dad was considered something special—there weren’t too many thespians in Jericho. Now in the hills of Beverly I was just another progeny of another actor—a character actor at that, who didn’t even have a major role in a weekly television series. In my senior year I had to hitchhike to school from the corner of Olympic and Doheny and sometimes people like Tony Sales would fell sorry enough for me to give me a ride in his girlfriend, Nancy Allen’s Camaro. The happiest day for my dad was when he was hired by Woody Allen (no relation to Nancy) to play the part of the comic in Annie Hall. Woody is famous for using real life characters and situations in his films and this was no exception to that rule. Woody Allen used to write skits in the mid-fifties for my dad’s act with his partner Paul Seers in a place called Tamiment. I still have those skits on the original onion skin paper. He finally did get his own series, (even though he was a semi-regular on M*A*S*H playing the part of Supply Sergeant Zelmo Zale) called Madame’s Place. He was over the moon even though he had to play second fiddle to a puppet. My duo, Two Guys from Van Nuys, even did a guest spot and performed a song we wrote called, Make Way for Madame. It wasn’t an act of nepotism because we had to audition like everyone else who crossed the paths of directors, producers and casting agents.

My sister, brother and I stayed at my Grandma Betty’s apartment on Arnaz while my mom and dad rented a cheap room at some motel on Pico until moving to Oakhurst Drive, a half a block north of Whitworth. It was considered Baja Beverly Hills but it was good enough to get us into the suggested school system. Now looking at my father’s gray skin and faded brown eyes, all those memories came flooding back with the tears that I tried to stuff inside. I couldn’t keep them contained.

 My mom was being a real trooper and keeping a brave face but I knew it was all an act. She was trying to be strong for him and for us. They had just celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary in January of that year and my dad would turn seventy the following January 19^th. He wasn’t going to live to be a septuagenarian. He died on Saturday, November the eighteenth at three thirty in the morning.

We stayed at the hospital until the sun rose in the eastern sky, like it always does, but this particular sunrise would occur without my father. It was a gloriously beautiful morning without a cloud in the sky as I drove Mom, Susan and Donna in the Mercedes back to Canton Drive. My mom said that the beauty of the day was a dedication to the man she had spent three quarters of her life with. She was never going to be the same again after that and would spend the next twelve years in mourning with her health failing. They were a team and the team was no more. At least she had us and her two beautiful grandchildren (there would be three more on the way in the near future).

How was it possible that less than a year ago we were watching The World Series in Robbie and Carol’s house on Hesby Drive witnessing a half crippled Kirk Gibson hit that amazing home run to put the Dodgers ahead in game one? We couldn’t believe it was possible and when we saw Gibson’s feeble, one-handed swing loft the ball high over the right field wall, we jumped out of our seats cheering and screaming at the top of our voices. It was a day I will never forget and it will always remind me of my wonderful father.

Johnny Haymer, born Haymer Lionel Flieg in St. Louis, Missouri on January 19, 1920 had a wonderful career in show business and if you want to see his amazing accomplishments you can Google it or go to imdb.com. He did what he loved and loved what he did. He was lucky. But the most amazing thing he ever did was to marry Helyn Sylvia Graff, a twenty-one year old ingénue from Detroit by way of Brooklyn. He loved her more than life itself and, I am more than sure, he loved his three kids profoundly. This is something you didn’t see on the internet before, but now you will. My dad was a hero to me. I love him still; I always will.