Screenland Plus TV-Land (Jul 1959 - May 1960)

The Conquest Of Hollywood continued from page 27 would have — and have — discouraged lesser dreamers, and he finally ended up in the promised land of stardom as one of the personable male triumvirate headlined in "77 Sunset Strip" — the other two dreamboats being Efrem Zhnbalist, Jr., and Roger Smith. The first thing Byrnes learned, once he made up his mind to be a movie star, was to rise above the skepticism of his peers. Once he learned this, disappointments and rejections that stopped others dead in their tracks bounced off him like bullets pop off Superman's sweater. And nowhere did he encounter more skepticism than in his own home. "My family was not too happy about the idea," he says. "My mother wanted me to go to college to become a doctor. I guess because my father's father was a doctor. The idea of my acting seemed crazy to them. They had never known anyone who'd been an actor. They thought it was impossible, ridiculous, that I was reaching for the moon." His mother may not have shared his boyish optimism, but she unwittingly furnished him with the credo that was to keep firing his courage when the going got roughest. Upon Edd's graduation from Haaren High, his mother inscribed in his year book the following: "Don't wait for your ship to come in. Row out and meet it." Edd chose the brave words over the maternal misgivings. And before long his ambition was being taken more seriously. "Eventually," he recalls, "after I got a few bit parts on TV, and the neighbors came in and made a fuss about it, my family kind of enjoyed this, and began to think maybe I wasn't crazy after all." Even when he hired out as an apprentice with the Litchfield Summer Theatre in Connecticut, his sights were set on Hollywood. Instead of waiting for his first acting break in Litchfield, he waited until he saved enough money to head for the land of minks and Thunderbirds. "If that's what you really want, son," his still uncertain mother bade him tearful farewell, "I wish you luck." Edd was impatient to go out and meet his ship. It didn't seem practical to attempt the voyage in a rowboat, so he set forth in his vintage Oldsmobile convertible. He was in such haste that he made the trans-continental trip in four days. "My wardrobe consisted of a couple of sports jackets and a suit or two," he recounts with a grin. "To keep expenses down, I slept and ate in the car. I'd buy a quart of milk, some cold cuts and a loaf of bread, and make sandwiches in the car. I'd pick up a hitchhiker once in a while so I wouldn't get too lonely." There was no one waiting for Edd with open arms when he sputtered into Hollywood. He had no letters of recommendation, no telephone numbers, no addresses, just $100 and an inexhaustible supply of youthful audacity. "Every actor has it rough on the way up." He is unperturbed about it. "I often thought how nice it must be when an actor doesn't have to struggle, but it probably makes him a much better actor in the end." To be sure, Edd found no shortage of struggles. Agents kept dropping him as if he were contaminated. He ran out of strategy. He ran out of money. He ran out of gas. In fact, he ran out of everything but hope — and DDT. "T SHARED a $50 a month apartment •1 with Jim Brady, a New York actor I met out here." He suffers no pain when he describes those lean but dauntless days. "We shared expenses, did our cooking at home, and we'd crash a lot of parties and free load. I remember crashing Zsa Zsa Gabor's party for Porfirio Rubirosa at her home in Bel Air. Everyone there was dressed in tuxedos, we came in blue suits and ties. Zsa Zsa spotted us and asked who'd invited us." Edd's charming audacity won again. "No one really," he smiled with disarming candor. "We crashed." "How sveet!" Zsa Zsa chirped. "Well, come on dollinks, I'll introduce you to ze other guests." Byrnes remembers the incident fondly. "She was very sweet," he says warmly. "We had a terrific time." He had a less terrific time trying to crash the studios. He sweet-talked a succession of agents into handling him, but he couldn't sweet-talk them out of dropping him. Even to get them to represent him in the first place he had to call on the very same resourcefulness that he had displayed in order to meet Kirk Douglas. "I wrote a lot of phony credits on the back of my pictures," he confesses with a Huckleberry Finn twinkle. "I put down that I'd acted in New York on 'Studio One,' 'The Robert Montgomery Theatre,' and I told 'em I was in a number of Broadway shows." But one agent after another gave him up as a hopeless case, and tried to make him realize he was spending himself on an impossible quest. "They told me I wasn't contract material," he recalls the rebuffs with no discernible gloating, "that things were rough, that there were thousands of guys like me in town, and that the smartest thing I , could do was to forget I ever wanted to act." Discouraged Byrnes was, but defeated he was not. "You'll be sorry," was his cheerful rejoinder. "You just wait. You're making a great mistake." He had worked his charm on a number of other agents, and for every hundred steps backward he'd manage to take a step forward. He'd come up with a small part in a TV film or a bit in a movie this way — his first was as Tony Perkins' buddy in "Fear Strikes Out" — but these parts were too occasional, and his agents kept shopping for more promising meal tickets. Byrnes, meanwhile, was as undaunted as he was unwanted. "I figured," he says blandly, "they didn't know me and what I could do, so why should I take their word. This only made me madder and more determined." His $100 lasted him a month. But on the theory that he wanted to be home to answer the door when opportunity knocked, he did not consider taking nonacting jobs. "I was most discouraged when I didn't have any money," he ponders his unrecontinued on page 60 IN NO hurry to marry, Edd feels he has a long way to go before he gives up bachelorhood. 59