#MeToo, 1950's

My mother is 87. She has her own #MeToo story. In the early '50's, she was in the theater department at the university. I won't go into it, but a fellow actor in a play (I'll call him "X") touched her inappropriately on stage but hidden from view. She hit his hand away. She said she was disgusted. That was in the early '50's.

X went to Hollywood and wasn't wildly successful, but he more or less earned a living as an actor. He was six feet six inches tall and had a very deep voice. A little too deep for my taste. It sounded fake, too actorly. He should have made it a little nasal to make himself sound like a regular guy.

Because of his height, they tended to put him in oddball roles, playing zombies, beatniks and so forth. He was considered for the role of Lurch on The Adams Family.



In 1955, my mother went to attend a workshop at Pasadena Playhouse. She hung around with then-future celebrity Marty Engels and a guy she knew from college took them to see their actor friend X and his wife in their seedy apartment. All she remembers is him talking about his deep voice, how a director had compared it to some great actor's voice. And she remembers him openly looking down her shirt.

The guy's been dead for almost forty years. No point shaming him now. I won't name him, but there he is above being tested for The Adams Family.

I was going through channels on the TV and stopped on a movie that looked pretty good. A 1950's western. It looked interesting, more adult than most of them. Like most, it was low budget, but the low budget worked in this case. Gave it kind of a documentary realism that didn't make sense.

I thought I recognized an actor in it so I googled it. Sure enough, it was him. I told my mother her old nemesis was on TV. She came and watched.

Unfortunately, about the time she came in, the movie got really dull and they started abusing the horses.

"We'll just watch until they kill him," I said.

They killed him, but we didn't realize it. We just started noticing that he wasn't there anymore. But we watched to the end.

A rancher offers to show a band of outlaws an alternate route out of town so they can evade the cavalry and so they won't rape the town's women. Instead, the rancher leads them into the mountains where they start murdering each other and the ones who are left freeze to death.