Paul Newman in the Locker Room: Growing Up in Beverly Hills

In the mid-1950s I had a summer job working evenings at a Foster's Freeze at the then-minimum wage of $1 an hour. I had attended grammar school in Beverly Hills and was going to Beverly Hills High School.

Although Beverly Hills was and is well known for its celebrities and fabulous homes, I lived in a part with modest single-family homes and nondescript apartment buildings. The celebrities and the wealthy lived north of Santa Monica Boulevard and the really big names and wealthy lived north of Sunset Boulevard.

I lived south where Beverly Hills almost ends. There were four grammar schools—two in the wealthier areas and two in the middle-class type areas—but all students went to Beverly Hills High School, which was like a private school.

That summer a club I believe called the Executive Men's Club of Beverly Hills was offering an incredibly reduced price (like $10 a month) for teenagers who lived in Beverly Hills. For that modest price one could use the facilities (gym, swimming pool, sauna, etc.) from 9 in the morning until 4 or so. So, I joined and went there, on my little motorcycle, almost daily.

On one of my first visits, in the early morning, I went to use the gym and there were two people already working out: Paul Newman and Sal Mineo. They both nodded, "good morning."

Newman was using weights—doing curls, with a cigarette in his mouth. (I mean, how cool was that? At least in those days.) The pool was just outside the windowed gym and Newman, who was a very good swimmer, went outside and was diving and swimming. He finished, dried off and wrapped a towel around himself and reentered the gym.

He managed to have a cigarette in his mouth again and got on the scale to weigh himself (weight is important to film stars). Apparently, his weight was a little too high, so he tossed the cigarette aside.

Still too high, he tossed the towel.  I seem to remember he was nude at that point. (If Sal Mineo was still alive he would probably remember. Mineo was murdered several years later.) 

After working out, I usually went out to the pool and listened to my transistor radio or read. One day Fabian (okay, think Frankie Avalon, but it wasn't him) came out to the pool and sat nearby and asked to borrow my suntan lotion.

Another day, at the far end of the pool were two older guys (those were the days when people were older than me). One of them shouted across to me; "Hey, kid, turn that down (some rock and roll station, undoubtedly). Don't you know who this is?" pointing to the other guy.

I didn't, but found out later that the guy shouting was Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA, the power house agency and who was called by Variety, "Hollywood's ultimate mover and shaker." The man sitting next to him was Jule Styne, who won an Oscar and a Tony and wrote over 1,500 songs.

Despite being a full-paying temporary member and earning $1 an hour, I was also a polite kid and did turn the radio down.

At Beverly High, Lew's Wasserman's daughter was driving one of those wonderful two-seater Thunderbird convertibles. She was dating someone I knew and gave him, as a "token of affection," a gold key to the car (just a key, not the car).

Pandro S. Berman, producer of Blackboard Jungle, also had a daughter at Beverly High, and she told us that she had brought a record of Rock Around the Clock to one of the early shootings of the film and her father, having never heard the song, decided to make it the introductory song track. 

Also in attendance was Dean Martin's son, Craig, and Tony Curtis's brother, Robert Schwartz. (Tony's real name was Bernard Schwartz.) But one student is forever in my memory: Cheryl Crane, the daughter of Lana Turner.

Cheryl stabbed to death her mother's lover, the gangster Johnny Stompanato, to protect her mother from physical harm. Cheryl (went by Cherie) attended Beverly High after the stabbing.

People just kind of kept their distance from her, as I recall.