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Eugene Maurice Orowitz was born
in
“ "When I was home, I was too busy taking care of them to wonder about myself. My sister, Victoria, who was several years older than me, wasn’t much help either. She seemed to be the favored one. Everything Vicki did was always right. I can hardly ever remember her being slapped or yelled at. Months would go by for me, too, without ever being punished. But one day I’d spill a glass of water at the dinner table and I’d get beaten up for all things I presumably did wrong for the past months. I could never quite understand my mother’s punishment methods. All I know is that when you do something wrong, you should be told that it’s wrong right then and there – not two months later. I could never figure out why I was getting slapped for just spilling a small glass of water. I think she took out all her hostilities on me then.” “My mother was a stabber, a kicker, and a wacko. She was totally off her rocker as far back as I can remember. She was very abusive. One time she came after me with a knife while I was in my jockey shorts. It was frightening because you never knew what you were going to be greeted with when you came home from school. She’d sit on the sofa in her nightgown – she always wore her nightgown when she was upset, when she was getting ready to try and kill herself – holding a Bible, asking God to kill me."
"One time when I was about
fifteen years old, I was standing in front of the Triangle drugstore,
talking with some guys and a couple of girls, when all of a sudden, a
cab pulled up and out came my mother, standing in the freezing cold with
just her nightgown on. She had a hanger in her hand and started whacking
the hell out of me. She was calling the girls tramps while she was
hitting me. I looked around and said to the astonished girls, ‘Well, I
gotta take my mother home now.’ And we went home. She’d take an ambulance to
buy a loaf of bread, and it would cost one hundred and seventy five
dollars. And she was always saying she was going to kill herself. It was
like, if it’s Tuesday it must be suicide day.
When “The damn thing made my
life a nightmare. Can you imagine what it’s like when you’re twelve
years old and still wet the bed? When you stare at yourself in the
mirror and see the world’s oldest baby? When you’re made to sleep
all curled up in a crib because your parents won’t buy you a longer
one? You don’t dare take a chance and go off to summer camp like other
kids. You’re afraid to accept an invitation to spend the night at a
friend’s house for fear of what might happen. I became the fastest kid
in school just from dashing home to bring in the sheets that were always
hung out to air. I couldn’t bear to have my schoolmates see them. I wet the bed until I was 12.
A lot of parents think their kid does it to spite them, and they punish
the kid. Mine did. Believe me, no one wants to do it! I remember I went
through all sorts of home remedies. One doctor put me on pickled
herring, saltines and no water before I went to bed. For five months
that was my bedtime diet and all I got was damned thirsty! I nearly
died. My parents refused to buy me a new bed until I stopped wetting, so
I had to sleep all cramped up in a youth bed that still had sides on it.
I wanted a big new bed so badly, I took my lunch money and bought an
extra pair of sheets, then every day I’d take the wet ones in my
athletic bag to the Laundromat, wash them and hide them in the top of
the closet so I could change my bed the next morning before my mother
checked. My parents never knew. They thought I’d stopped wetting so
they gave me the new bed.”
“I could stretch out and
sleep better. Maybe that had something to do with it. People laugh at the problem,
but believe me, it’s no laughing matter. Bedwetting nearly ruined my
childhood! Eventually a youngster outgrows bedwetting but he can’t
erase the memory.”
“In my family’s house,
there was an incredible situation where two months could go by during
which my mother and father would not speak directly to each other. It
was one of those dumb things that the kid always gets stuck in the
middle of. My mother would say, ‘Tell your father dinner’s ready,’
and Father was only five feet away. As a child my greatest pleasure was
to get out of that house as much as possible.” The unhappy boy used to act out characters in stories he made up. “As a kid, I’d spend my whole summer never seeing another kid. One of the great joys in my life was going fishing. I’d get up when it was still dark, take a little sandwich and an apple, and leave before anyone else was up. I had a little cave I had dug in a place called the North Woods. It was down at the end of Newall Creek, not far from where I lived. Anyway, I’d put little canned goods in my cave, and I’d stay in there and daydream about how the Germans had taken over Collingswood and how I was there, hiding out in the woods; about how I’d be the Green Lantern, a guy with a bow and arrow, swinging on vines over the riverbank, shooting Nazis, and saving this particular girl I happened to like. It was all fantasy but… I wanted to stay and live in that cave the rest of my life." "I pretended that someday I
was going to live down there to get away from the silence – or the
arguing. "I loved being somebody else.
I was extremely secure when I was somebody else. I was a very shy person
other wise.” Home life was miserable and school was no better for the boy who just wanted to feel like he belonged somewhere.
“When I was a kid back in There were only two Jewish
kids in the whole school and we were especially conspicuous because
every Wednesday all the other kids left school at noon and were taken to
their churches to participate in church socials, clubs and sports. A
girl named Barbara and I stayed behind at school and cleaned all the
blackboards. The teacher suggested we go along to one of the churches
too, it would be okay, she said, but when you’re young like that, we
were in junior high school, you’re afraid, somehow, that you’ll be
indoctrinated or something and I was pretty religious. I went to a very
strict synagogue, Friday night and Saturday mornings. If you didn’t
show up, they’d be a phone call. Once I was bar-mitzvahed, I was a
‘man’ and they needed ten men to have a service, a minion, they
called it. Anyway, Barbara and I stayed in school and when we finished
the blackboards, we went to the library and read.” “My mother was a Catholic and my father was Jewish; he wasn’t too thrilled with Catholics and she wasn’t too thrilled with Jews, and the two families were like separate camps.” Peggy ruined a day her son had been looking forward to with great anticipation. “The day I was Bar Mitzvahed
was a great day. I had finished the Bar Mitzvah and we were having a
small cake and a little party at home when, suddenly my mother called me
into another room. Now you have to understand, that I was thirteen years
old and had just gone through the whole bar mitzvah thing, learning the
chanting, the Hebrew, the whole megillah, riding my bicycle to
“Guys used to drive by me in their cars and shout, ‘Jew bastard! Jew bastard!’ Maybe they were yelling, ‘You bastard!’ But it sure sounded like ‘Jew bastard’ to me. Kids used to feel the front of my head to see if I had horns. I mean, I’m not kidding, they really believed that Jews had horns under their hair. And then, when I was in high school, I remember going to pick up a date and having her father come to the door and announce, ‘My daughter’s not going out with a Jew,’ before slamming the door in my face.”
“My acting debut, believe
it or not, was in a play called ‘The Bat’ in At that time, in Haddonfield
and So I read for it and I got
the part. And that was the first time I’d ever been onstage. It was
very exciting for me, because I was fourteen years old. I couldn’t let
the kids in my high school know about it – thank God it was in
Haddonfield, because they would have razzed me to death. But I was
fourteen years old and everyone else in the play, they were all adults.
So it was big time for me, getting to go out at night and rehearse and
all that stuff. It helped my self-confidence
a great deal. I found out that I was not shy when I was somebody else.
Otherwise I was a very shy guy. I would hide my shyness by being the
class clown and screwing around, but that was just a cover. I was very excited to be onstage. Too excited as it turned out. The opening line in the play is ‘Jujitsu pretty good stuff.’ That’s when I throw the leading man onto the stage in the beginning from the wings, and I broke his arm over the thing! I was so loaded with adrenaline. It was just terrible.”
An extremely good student at school, the lonely boy sought ways to fit in with his classmates. “I was an unhappy teenager
because I felt rejected. At home, Vicki always seemed to be the favorite
one. In grammar school I got A’s, but I was below average size and
ached to be better liked by the other kids. So I stopped being a student
and, when I reached high school, hated the confinement of classes. I was
as defiant as I dared to be, when I wasn’t shyly evasive. When told to
be like everyone else, I refused to conform. Inwardly, I learned what
loneliness meant. Up until the sixth grade you
might have called me a slight genius. Of course, I’m kidding, but I
did pull almost A’s from kindergarten through. I had nothing to worry
about or think about except school studies. None of the kids ever
bothered with me. I was pretty much a loner. They thought I was too
skinny, too short, just too everything. But
then one day, I sprouted wings, got a little taller, put on a little
weight and before I knew it, I was goofing in school. I kind of liked
pulling pranks, being funny. And the kids seemed to like it too. They
started laughing and playing along with me. Only I guess like all kids I
was too young to realize that they weren’t laughing with me, but at
me. Somehow, though, their laughter excited me. The crazier the things I
did, the more people I had around me. I wanted recognition so badly I
could taste it in my mouth. Somewhere between the age of 13 and 16 my
nerves were shot. The older you get the more the atmosphere around you
affects you. I loved both my parents, but it wears you thin when
you’re being torn apart by each parent for your love. I would have
been much happier if they had been living apart and happy than living
together for the sake of my sister and myself and being miserable. In
school I had gone from a scholastic genius to a complete screw up.
"In
the 10th grade I was left back. I had almost all F’s on my
report card. I was known as the class clown. It was more important for
me to get laughs than to get good marks. On my second time around in the
10th grade, I was still an idiot, but something inside kept
telling me I couldn’t go on this way much longer. My parents were
convinced that I’d never be anything but a bum the rest of my life. I
was definitely no brain in the upstairs department. They were pretty
much fed up with me. I couldn’t even make them understand that I
wanted to improve and that I would. To them I had failed and there was
no hope for me. Besides, they were too unhappy themselves to really help
me. But I’d show them, anyway. While I was still the class idiot,
instead of taking four subjects that term, I took eight and while I
didn’t pass with straight A’s, I did make up enough credits to skip
half a term by the time the end of the year rolled around.” Instead of being proud that
their son wanted to improve his grades, “My father never
disciplined me. He just walked away from discipline. I think probably
because he’d been disappointed in so many things before me. The one
time he ever disciplined me was after I’d been left down and wanted to
go to summer school and try for a college scholarship. It sounded so far
out my poor mom flipped. She screamed at my dad, told him he ought to
take a firm hand, got him so worked up, he came storming into my room
and punched me. It was a sad scene. He was always so little, about
5’4”, and he was so frustrated. He didn’t knock me down or hurt
me, he just punched me and the little pinkie ring he wore made my mouth
bleed a little. He felt awful. He didn’t say a word. He just turned
and left the room and I felt so sorry for him.” But better things were on the
horizon for “I guess the great day for
the new change came right before the end of the term.” “Our gym class went out to
the school’s running track. The teacher was going to acquaint us all
with various track and field events. We were shown hurdles, the broad
jump, the pole vault. I stumbled weakly through them all. ‘Now we’ll
try the javelin,’ the teacher said. I watched as he picked up a
gleaming metal spear about six feet long and gave it a short toss.
Suddenly I was captivated and I didn’t know why. Something inside me
began saying, ‘Try it! Try it!’ I had to wait my turn, though,
because several others wanted a crack at the javelin too. Shy and
scared, I watched them, trying not to look too eager. Finally,
when everyone had had a chance to throw – the longest heave going
about 30 yards - I looked at the teacher. ‘Hey, Orowitz, you want to
try?’ he asked. Embarrassed,
I looked down, but managed to nod my head. ‘Well, come on then,’ he
said impatiently, and handed me the javelin. Behind me I could hear some
of my classmates chuckling. ‘Think you can life it, Ugy?’ one said.
‘Don’t stab yourself,’ another added, laughing. I grasped the
javelin in my hand, I was seized with a strange feeling – a new-found
excitement. Seeing myself as a Roman
warrior about to do battle, my fears vanished. For some crazy reason, I
was relaxed over what I was about to do, even though I’d never done it
before. I raised the javelin over my head, took six quick steps and let
the thing go. The same voice that had urged me into throwing it, now
told me it was a good throw. I watched as the spear took off. While
other students’ throws had wobbled or turned cockeyed in the air, to
my surprise, my throw was travelling straight and true. My heart
quickened as I saw it continue to sail, 30 yards out, then 40. As it
went past the 50-yard mark, it was still going when it went crashing
down beyond some empty bleachers. For a minute nothing was said. Then
someone whispered, ‘Holy cow!’ and others began cheering and
slapping me on the back. Nobody could believe what little Orowitz had
just done. Neither could I, really. And when I think back on it,
the whole scene must have resembled something out of a grade-B movie. I
ran to retrieve the javelin and when I found it, I saw the tip had been
broken off in landing. Expecting a real bawling out, I took the javelin
back to the gym teacher. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, still
shaking his head in wonder. ‘You keep the thing.’ That night I took
the javelin home with me, much to my parents’ astonishment, never let
it out of my sight. The very next day I began practicing with it, and
every day that summer – for six hours or more – I would throw it in
a nearby schoolyard. The joy of finding something I could do made me
determined to do as well as I could. In my senior year in high,
lots of colleges began approaching me because my javelin throw had
become the best in the state. While I didn’t win the Eli Orowitz was not a sporting man, he found nothing impressive about what his son had accomplished. “He only saw me throw once. I remember seeing him watching me on the field through a chain link fence, wearing this little hat he always had on. He looked shook his head, got in the car and drove away.”
**** The following
piece is from The Official International Michael Landon Fan Club
Yearbook 1965. MIKE LANDON: ALIAS
GENE OROWITZ
Today he is known as Michael Landon and Little Joe
Cartwright, but in the 1954 yearbook of Collingswood High School in
Collingswood, New Jersey, he was listed as “Oogie” and “EMO”.
His real name then was Eugene Orowitz, and he wasn’t even
listed in the “Most Likely” column of the yearbook.
Even with an I.Q. close to genius and an outstanding record in
athletics, Gene managed to graduate at the bottom of his class.
As a high school student, he seemed to have been a very calm and
carefree young man. “Gene is fun-loving and temperamental”, says
Mike’s former track coach, Maurice L. Dickinson. “Sometimes he can
be very serious, too.” One of our fan club’s very active members, Joyce
Sandone, was kind enough to obtain for us an exclusive interview with
one of Mike’s (Gene’s) former teachers, Miss Hillman.
Miss Hillman was Mike’s high school study hall teacher.
She is now retired from Collingswood High School. Our special
thanks to Miss Hillman and Joyce for a very interesting and informative
interview on Michael Landon’s ‘alias’, Eugene Orowitz. Joyce: Miss Hillman, what was Mike’s attitude toward school? Miss Hillman:
Well, first of all, I can’t get used to his stage name,
Michael. He was always very restless and had a mind of his
own. He proved that he ruled his own mind quite a few times.
Eugene had a high I.Q. but didn’t use it to the best advantage. Joyce: How about his athletic abilities? Miss Hillman:
Unlike the Little Joe character Eugene plays on Bonanza,
he isn’t as small as he looks when he stands up with the other two
guys. They’re gigantic!
He is not the big, brawny football type either.
Eugene is very strong and masculine.
He has a lot of muscle. You need a lot of muscle to throw a
javelin. In 1954, Eugene
won the state championship with a make of 193 feet.
He broke the record by 4 inches.
He was also very active in discus competition. He won his
scholarship on his athletic capabilities. Joyce: Did Mike have a strong sense of
responsibility? Miss Hillman: I guess his athletic record proves he
had to be responsible to keep in shape and stay with strict training regulations. I guess when
it came to his school work, he wasn’t as responsible as in his
athletic work. Joyce: Has Mike ever come back to Collingswood? Miss Hillman:
He came back to the school about three years ago. [Michael also
attended his 25th high school reunion in 1979]
I was not in the school at the time, but some of the teachers
told me about it. He was doing a personal appearance in Philadelphia on a
Saturday night. On Friday
he came to the school and spoke to the students from the auditorium
stage. Eugene was wearing a black turtle neck sweater.
After he spoke to the kids, he went down to see the janitors.
This was so the halls wouldn’t be jammed and congested. The
janitors are friends with just about everyone in the school.
Well, after the boys saw him with that black turtle neck sweater,
by the following Tuesday over a dozen boys were wearing similar
sweaters. Joyce: Did you ever have any incidents with him in the classroom? Miss Hillman:
Well, when Eugene was transferred to my class, I received word
from his first study hall teacher.
So, there was only one empty seat in the classroom.
It was in the fourth row, which was right in front of my desk.
I had every one in the fourth row move back one seat so the first
seat would be empty. He
came strolling in like a big deal and looked at me.
Then he spotted the one empty seat and said to me, “Do you
expect me to sit in that seat?” I
said to him, “It’s plain to see that it’s the only vacant seat in
the room.” So, Eugene sat
down and just stared at me. He
kept on staring and staring. He looked at me like no one ever looked at
me before. Then, he turned
to the right and opened his mouth to talk to the boy next to him.
I jumped on him right away and explained what his place was in
the classroom. Then he started the staring all over again.
He glared at me with eyes that looked like they were going to
stab me. He turned to the
left to begin a conversation with the student sitting there, but I
jumped on him right away again. For
the rest of the time he was in my class, I kept him under strict
observation. I always
believed in order and good conduct in my classes.
Then one day he told me he was going to get a transfer in the
spring. And sure enough, he
did! He was in the class
across the hall from mine. I
saw him wandering around the halls occasionally. But now he was in a
class where he was able to do as he wanted, when he wanted.
That was what Eugene liked. Joyce: Was Mike ever in any kind of school play or show? Miss Hillman: Not that I can remember. Joyce: Did he do any singing or play a musical instrument? Miss Hillman:
He did sing in school. I
saw Eugene on Hullabaloo a few weeks ago.
His singing has improved a great deal. I enjoyed the program very
much. Joyce: What about his personality? Miss Hillman: He has one of the nicest and warmest
personalities a person could ever have.
Eugene also has the most beautiful and interesting eyes….the
kind that make you look inside a person and find goodness.
It shows up a lot when I watch him playing Little Joe. Joyce: Can you recall any other run-ins with Mike? Miss Hillman:
There is one other that I remember.
It was an amusing incident.
In 1954 the style was to wear a jumper and blouse and a nose gay.
A nose gay was a pin with small flowers on it.
One day I came to class with a new jumper and a white blouse. I had on a nose gay that had red, pink, purple and white on
it. Eugene was sitting in
front of me and was looking at me kind of funny.
I looked back at him and asked what the problem was.
He asked how I “got away with it”.
I asked, “Get away with what?”
He said, “That pin you got on, with all the different colors.”
I told him it was an “elegance harmonius”.
He seemed to be satisfied with my answer. By
the way, an “elegance harmonius” is a color scheme-all the colors in
the same shade family. So the study hall was then over, and the students
went to their next class. Eugene
left the class with a kind of inquisitive look on his face.
The next period began, and he must have said something to that
teacher because at lunch time she came into my room and asked,
“Whatever are you wearing? Eugene
Orowitz just told me that you’re wearing some kind of French
creation.” I have remembered that little incident after all these years
because I thought it was so amusing and delightful. Joyce: I suppose you can’t help but feel a great deal of pride? Miss Hillman: You can’t answer that with a simple
“yes”. It means a lot
more to a teacher than words can ever say!
****
Michael had never learned to swim when he was a child and was afraid of water but he didn’t let that stand in the way of getting a job. “I had to improve my grades
for a semester somewhere else before U.S.C. would enrol me. An athletic
coach at the college in I needed the job. I told the
man who hired me – when he asked if I had my life-saving certificate
– that I had never bothered to get it. He believed me!
But every night I stayed in the pool by myself for three hours
after it closed, until I was swimming like Mark Spitz.” But things have a way of not
working out as they are planned and “I considered this facility
of mine to throw a javelin a gift, because by all rights I should not
have been able to do all that with my build. So I felt there was more to
it than just me. That’s when I convinced myself my hair had something
to do with it, so I never got a haircut. It was a real Samson bit, but I
believed it. I had very long hair when I
went to SC – they shaved my head, and I couldn’t throw the javelin.
Guys held me down and shaved my head because everybody had a crew cut
but me."
"The following day I
couldn’t throw. I was out there until the sun went
down…throwing…crying…throwing. I finally tore all the ligaments in
my elbow I was so upset. But I wouldn’t quit. The pain was so great, and
they kept shooting me up three times a week with cortisone and novocain.
And then they would embarrass you, you know, because you’re injured
and they figured you may not heal up, they’d just as soon you got
out of school because they only have so many scholarships. So
they humiliate you. They call you ‘chickenshit’ because you’re not
throwing and make you do very demeaning jobs. So I finally quit. But I
didn’t quit on the basis that I felt very sorry for myself. I quit on
the basis that I was going to build myself up. I wanted to get way stronger
than I was before and then enrol in UCLA and then just beat the shit out
of USC.”
But “I quit in the middle of that semester. I couldn’t even get a job. I had no money. I had absolutely nothing. I went for days sleeping behind old barns and grabbing a meal when I could.” “Finally I landed a job at
Newberry’s lifting freight. I thought the job would be good for my
arm. It would help bring the strength back. The guy I worked with had a
scene to do at Warner Brothers and wanted a partner. It was a very
emotional scene from ‘Home Of The Brave.’ In the movie ‘Home Of
The Brave,” the lead character in the play was actually a Jew. But
they changed it to a black man when they made the movie. He didn’t
want to take the emotional part, and he gave it to me. That was the
first time I’d had an emotional part to do. And I loved it.” “I’d pick up the
executives’ cars, wash them, clean them, and they’d tip me. I still
didn’t think I’d have a chance. I’d look at the tall, good-looking
guys in the class and know I’d never make it. Then one day Jack Warner
came up the stairs and said, ‘What’s going on up here?’ the
dramatic coach explained we were having a class. The next day Jack
Warner closed down the class. He’d never known it was there. Before
they dismissed us, an executive came up, lined us up, looked us over and
put a couple of guys under contract. One of the casting guys told me I
had a contract and I went right out and put five bucks down on a spots
coat. They still have my five bucks. Because when I went back on Monday,
I couldn’t get in the studio. The casting guy, who liked me, didn’t
have the heart to tell me I wasn’t wanted, I was too skinny.” But “If you want to be in this business, you really have to work out a plan for yourself that enables you to survive with a good healthy ego intact. I mean being told no, no, no, interview after interview, when you don’t get the parts – that’s very tough for a lot of people. A lot of people have a difficult time handling that because you begin to think those people are right who didn’t hire you, and early on I just took the attitude that if they didn’t hire me, they had no taste!”
“I picked the name And so, Michael Landon’s brilliant career had begun.......................................
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