Today's Blind Items - The Naturists - A Dancing Boy Story

That isn't the title either, but it's also not dissimilar. You see: I was made to perform naked before I could even dress myself - I was three years old.

My mother had retired me more than a year earlier - after a production assistant had tried to soothe my teething self by rubbing cocaine on my gums during the filming of a diaper ad - but what I didn't say before was that at age 2 she had left me unattended on the second floor landing, and that I'd fallen through the railing and broken my arm; I very easily could have been killed. The ER doc was prepared to call CPS, but my father talked him out of it.

For him it was...an opportunity. By then we were living in the Bay Area (not yet So Cal), and he was working at the hq of a certain network-owned retailer (think: Ron the stereo salesman). And of course much of what he thought about with respect to me was getting me back into the game. Here was his chance to guilt his way there.

And so, at age 3, I appeared on the beloved regional version of the longstanding children's show - the one with actual children. My father led them to believe I was a literary prodigy - that I could read and write at this age, and that I would do so on air. What I really possessed was just a precocious ability to memorize, which I did. Apparently the adults were impressed. I remember only drinking Hawaiian Punch in the green room. 

But that wasn't the end of it.

One of the hippies who worked with my dad moonlighted as a producer - I think they were mostly adult films. But of course even in the nudie/porny 70s if you wanted to film unclothed children you needed some kind of plausible deniability, which is to say I was made to appear in a documentary about "nudist families." (I only place the subject matter in quotes because those people were not my family - some of the others may have been. But I remember that the overwhelming number of people in the scenes I was in were children, mostly boys.)

This person was a sometime guest of the unit head (who had founded the company before it was bought) on his weekly yacht parties in the bay. But unlike that person, who surrounded himself with busty young women, this person always had a cadre of young boys in swim briefs around him. I became one of them.

And you can guess what almost happened. (It was actually my mother and another one of the wives who walked in on him abusing another boy in one of the cabins.) Said person was literally thrown overboard and fired by the unit head several hundred feet from shore.

But that wasn't the end of the movies. 

What happened was that my mother - obviously furious about the near abuse - wanted my father to call New York about it. Instead my father got...a concession, which is to say I then appeared in an ad for the chain, dancing in a living room set with headphones on. This is the first time I was made to dance in my underpants. (If you lived in a place one of the stores was at the time, you probably saw it.)

At three, you have little concept of modesty - at four, not so much.

By now my father really had called New York at my mother's behest. (The final straw was the holiday party getting kicked out of the top of the Transamerica Pyramid because nearly everyone other than my parents was coked up and on acid, and having sex with each other.) The unit head fired my father, and he was promptly rehired by the chairman and promoted to executive - that's why we moved to LA. (My mother was furious - she blamed my father for having this secret plot for us to move to LA so that he could try to get me in Hollywood. Obviously, it was her doing.)

The party life continued for my parents and the people they knew at the network and in the business - including this one producer, whose "family" parties we often went to. (I have only a vague recollection of this, but let's just say the child-friendly looking sweets and punch were not, including at officially sanctioned events - the network doctor was called when the kids consumed some, not unlike a mob doc. On at least one occasion that kid was me.) 

And guess what this producer wanted to make a sequel to?

This time I had to be bribed into doing it: I got to see Star Wars at the Chinese Theater. There was a trip to Disney, and another one to the San Diego Zoo. (It first occurred to me as a teen - after so much else had happened - that literally thousands of adults may have j***** o** to my unclothed, four year old self. I nearly threw up.)

But I wouldn't do the third - that was when I quit acting, and modeling. My father punished me in a way you'll see described in the first production - it involved that same state of undress.

And yes: less than a year later I was sent to acting class after staging a candy run in kindergarten. (I was also btw diagnosed with "hyperkinetic reaction of childhood" - a diagnosis I could never remember or pronounce - and put on meds; this is what they'd eventually call ADHD. And by the middle of grade school it was the school nurse who dispensed them - I'd taken to stealing extra ones for stage fright, so I wasn't trusted with them at home.)

It all began...again.