Modern Screen (Jan-Dec 1960)

know. But it had been enough time for his teammates to circle around him and stare at him with grim faces as he lay sprawled on the ground. Now a doctor pushed his way through the ring of players. He took one look at the youth's arm and, with a professional sight, said, "You are not only out of the game, lad, you are out of the season." Suddenly a surge of vicious, excruciating pain shot up the boy's arm like a bolt of lightning. He gasped, groaned inaudibly and gritted his teeth. A broken wing "Go ahead and holler, son," the doctor said lifting the arm gently, "not even a man should keep your kind of agony inside." The seventeen-year-old boy looked up at the faces of his team and knew it was the one thing he could not do, no matter how much he wanted to. So instead of screaming, he fainted. Only vaguely did he hear the wild young voices from the bleachers shouting, in unison, "Yay! Barry! . . . Yay! Barry!" When he came to he was in the locker room on a table. The doctor was in the midst of wrapping his throbbing arm in a splint. "We're taking you to the hospital," the doctor said, "where we'll put on a cast." The physician looked at the boy, half in sympathy, half in admiration. "You're all right," he said, with a faint smile. "I've seen tougher men than you wail their heads off with broken arms like yours." Gene closed his eyes. If only the pain would go away. "By the way," continued the doctor, "as we carried you off the field you mumbled something about a violin. Isn't that strange talk for a young man just hurt in a football game?" Oh, God, thought Gene, the violin! My arm! What if — ? He swallowed hard and slowly turned his head. "Doctor, I play the violin. Will I be able to after--?" "Oh sure," the doctor replied lightly, "you'll play. Good hobby, too. Relaxing, music. 'Course if you'd been planning to be a concert violinist you'd never — " The doctor needed only to see the look on Barry's face to realize what he had said. "I'm sorry, Gene, I didn't know it was that serious with you. But you might as well know now. Your arm will heal, but it will never stand seven hours' practice every day. Believe me, Gene, don't hope." Ten years of learning. The ragging he had taken from the kids, as only Brooklyn kids can rag! Gene thought bitterly of all the money his parents had hoarded for the lessons and the best violin they could buy for him. Their dreams and his, cracked into eternity by a hard-charging left tackle on a teen-age football team. A shattered dream "Don't hope," Gene repeated to himself bitterly. But what do you do instead? Gene's depression over his broken arm and his lost dream of being a concert violinist, however, lasted only as long as it took for him to get well. His parents, familiar with the uncertainties of life, were disappointed, but the unfortunate incident was dismissed by Gene's dad with, "As long as young men play football, young men will break their arms." Gene soon discovered that he had a hangover from his hard study of music. And: "One morning while exhaling," says Gene, "my breath got caught in my larynx. The whole family looked at me in surprise. I was singing! I asked a teacher if she thought I had enough mellow vibrato to think about a singing career. She thought I might make it with study. Well, I was off to out-Caruso Caruso." By the end of his senior year Gene was good enough to win a scholarship at the Chatham Square School of Music in New York City. But it was Gene himself who soon realized that although he was surprisingly good as a pop and operetta vocalist, he didn't want a career as a singer of serious music. Still, his appealing voice got him a weekly radio show, followed by a short go as a band vocalist in nightclubs. And then, prophetically perhaps, he auditioned and was chosen to play The Bat in a Broadway musical Rosalinda. The show ran two years. By then Gene knew he wanted to be an actor. But the best he could get was a character part in a White Way production of The Merry Widow. "I was sittin' pretty," Gene remembers. "I wasn't shooting to stardom, but I was working and getting good pay, getting better parts. I played around a lot, dated the prettiest girls I could find, learned what made women happy and what made them angry. "And then one night I went out with Mae West! "Not a date exactly. I was in her show and the cast decided to have an evening at the Copacabana after the performance. Some of the guys brought dates. I didn't. Mae was the hostess, and I was her unofficial escort. "It was pretty crowded at the Copa and we bunched up around two tables. Suddenly I found myself squeezed in between Mae and a girl I'd never seen before. I learned later she was another guy's date. 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