Pieces of My Heart Read Online Free

five-six. On screen, he was six-three, so when people saw him they were always surprised, which made him insecure.
    Years later I did a magazine layout with Alan at his ranch in Hidden Valley and got to know him. Alan Ladd was an extremely kind man, and a good horseman who knew how to handle an animal. Unfortunately, he had a complicated series of disappointments involving his marriage to Sue Carol, smoked a lot of cigarettes, and got hooked on booze, which greatly affected his looks and his career choices. At the end, his family was watching him closely, but not closely enough.
    Throughout these years I never had any career goal other than acting, and I see no need to apologize for it. I thought then and I think now that making people smile and taking them out of their problems for an hour or two is a wonderful way to spend a life. I know that because that’s what the movies did for me. When I would come home from an afternoon at the movies, I would go to my bedroom and act out the best scenes from whatever I’d seen that day, and my problems with my father were forgotten. That era provided a profusion of wonderful actors and actresses to admire—and not always the ones remembered by posterity. Take Joel McCrea, for instance, a real cowboy and a good actor who could excel in westerns like Union Pacific or The Virginian, but who was also wonderful in comedies like The Palm Beach Story for Preston Sturges—and comedy is the hardest thing an actor can do.
    I was always trying to turn my passion from the theoretical into the practical. When I attended the Hollywood Military Academy, we did a production of The Courtship of Miles Standish, and I played a female character—Priscilla Alden! I also played Tiny Tim in a production of The Christmas Carol and kept up with the amateur theatricals, thankfully in male parts. I was coming up in the world!
    One of my close friends in school was named Noel Clarabitt. Helena, his mother, had a little tearoom, and I would work for her, polishing the antiques and crystal and busing the tables. I would be over at their house a great deal, and she became a big influence; she was Russian, and they drank wine and played classical music, which was a different environment than I was used to.
    Southern California was paradise in this period. For one thing, there weren’t that many people, which meant there weren’t that many cars, which meant there was no smog at all. The air was so clear that when the smudge pots were lit in preparation for a freeze in the orange groves, you could smell them all over town. There was a superb transit system in the Red Line, which went from downtown L.A. all the way to the ocean. One of the main routes was down San Vicente Boulevard; what’s now the large grassy divider in the middle of the road was the trolley track. In more congested areas, the Red Line took back routes, but when the cars got to Hollywood, there would still be stops at Highland and La Brea. People would take the Red Line all the way to the beach, where the car was turned around on a large turntable before it headed back downtown.
    You could stand on a mountaintop in Malibu or Santa Monica and see all the way to Catalina. Literally. On top of Sepulveda, you could look out into the San Fernando Valley and see nothing but chicken and avocado ranches. The primary industries were movies and aircraft, which had boomed during the war.
    The old Los Angeles I grew up with is all gone now, except for a couple of places that are entirely commercial. If you want, you can go to the Huntington or to Olvera Street, but those are museums, each in its own way. The Red Line disappeared because the rubber and fuel companies wanted the trolley cars out so they could make more money. But that’s the way of the world; when I was at Cal Prep, I used to fish for steelhead in the Ventura River up near Ojai, and now the Ventura River doesn’t even run there anymore.
    I finally began to get some serious traction when I