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PART II
A PHOTOPLAY BOOK-LENGTH LIFE STORY
7
52
loves'
laughed
If Dick Chamberlain’s desire to become a star burned deeper than .most kid’s it was also more carefully hidden. Hypersensitive, he didn’t want to w get laughed at, either by the kids or _ at home. Today, Dick is different. He v© likes to laugh and to be laughed
at — and even considers himself some^ thing of a comedian,
di But at that time ... it wasn’t giving anything away to head for the movies every Saturday. That was as natural to a Beverly Hills kid as it is for a country boy to head for the nearest creek. And so he kept his secret. He joined the bike brigade at the movie theater up the street, with his pals from South Elm, by himself, or even with a girl, because Dickie Chamberlain always liked the girls and the girls liked him. He wooed them one at a time — as he does today — and he had his first "date" at six. He can't remember her name but after her came Arden, the baby doll. Next Arlene, a brown haired pal girl who liked to play games, took over; in seventh grade it was June, who was a cute tease; and finally in eighth, Ann, more on the sweet side but of bittersweet memory to Dick. “I bought her a heart-shaped box of candy for Valentine's Day,” he remembers. “But when I got up nerve enough to ring her door bell there was another boy already there — with a bigger box. He stayed. I crept home in humiliation and dismay. All that money wasted!"
Whether he sat with a sweetie or just by himself Dick Chamberlain never counted the fifteen cents he spent at the Saturday movies wasted. The kid shows were bargains. He could stare all day long as western after western reeled off, dipping back to the antique days of Ken Maynard and Tom Mix. Sometimes, he went in for cliff-hanging serials and horror epics. “There was one where a maniac went around blowing up buildings and murdering people en masse,” recalls Dick. “That was for me.” If the film got dull the kids took over. Squirt guns were unlimbered and the air was filled with popcorn boxes, tinfoil balls and paper gliders.
Dick knew that if he were up there on the screen such bored protests would never break loose, and he promised himself that in some comfortably remote future that's exactly what would come about. Flushed with this anticipated triumph he entered a Hallowe’en costume (Continued on page 85)