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| Burt Lancaster, itinerant circus hero of the Depression era. |
Broke when his equipment broke in 1940, acrobat Burt
Lancaster was in trouble until he was offered a loan for the then-stupendous
sum of $1,000 from a married bandleader and his singer-wife. Their names were
Ozzie and Harriet Nelson.
College-educated, at least for a while, through an athletic
scholarship to New York University that lifted him beyond his working-class childhood
in the East Harlem, Lancaster had developed a personal code in which loyalty
and honor were paramount. Therefore, and in spite of Lancaster’s hand-to-mouth
existence, the Nelsons would receive envelopes containing various sums of money
in the mail over the next several years.
One night in a restaurant, Lancaster appeared and slapped
$25 on the Nelsons’ table. “That pays me off,” he declared, asking Ozzie to
sign his account book.
After resorting to posing nearly nude in “physique”
magazines, an injured Lancaster decided to finally abandon the free-spirited
but financially ruinous circus acrobatics he loved.
Heading to Chicago right after Pearl Harbor, he snagged a $25-a-week
job in Marshall Field as a floor walker in the women’s lingerie department. The
store found the handsome Lancaster could cut down on returned merchandise. “I
learned how to con those dames along,” he said.
Lancaster thought he’d do better with the 5 percent
commission earned by salesmen in men’s furnishings, but he wasn’t as popular in
that department. The customers didn’t notice him.
What to do? Acrobatic handstands on the counter and
cartwheels in the aisle, as it turned out.
No longer ignored, he was soon earning the comfortable sum
of $80 a week. If you want to sell something, Lancaster later advised, “sell
yourself first.” Other jobs followed — a bloody cold one in Chicago’s
meat-packing plants, a strange one as a singing waiter in Jersey City and one
he couldn’t refuse when his draft papers arrived in 1942.
“I never let it get up to my conscious mind that all the time I was trying to be an actor,” Lancaster recalled. “There was the pattern for me to read, spread out before me. But I wouldn’t. Nobody — but nobody — can make a good life for himself if he keeps on denying his own pattern, his own drive, his real self.”
“I never let it get up to my conscious mind that all the time I was trying to be an actor,” Lancaster recalled. “There was the pattern for me to read, spread out before me. But I wouldn’t. Nobody — but nobody — can make a good life for himself if he keeps on denying his own pattern, his own drive, his real self.”
Source: “Burt Lancaster: An American Life” by Kate Buford
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