I’ll share a secret with you. When you lose your father at age 9 you spend the rest of your life — I mean every day, month and year of it — searching for someone to take his place.
And I’m here this year, a nonagenarian father with two girls lucky enough to have one, and to skip the dreaded search.
1964: I was 32 years old and looked all of 20 when my first daughter, Dawn Marie, was born. I was just “breaking out” in Hollywood that year, and standing in a hospital where Clark Gable had died, holding a gorgeous, healthy daughter with my hair and her mother’s smile.
It was hard then for an actor of 30 to find work, especially when I looked 18. So I went on playing street kids and young three-line parts like new doctors on “The Fugitive,” suspects on “The FBI” and a string of others, at minimum SAG wages.
When Dawn was cast as my child, I was gobsmacked. I had no idea how to play the part of “Daddy.”
She, my co-star wife, who, of course, as a woman, took to her role as “Mama” flawlessly and had inherited her role and “blocking” from a long line of classic French women.
But having to share parental duties, I had to get some “acting classes” from the experts.
So I found a class for new daddies that was held in a storefront in West Hollywood, where I sat next to, and became friends with new daddy Wesley Lau, who at the time was playing Lt. Anderson on “Perry Mason” with Raymond Burr.
We were “new actors” in the “Daddy” movie.
There we were: me, with one line on Kraft Mystery Theatre, and Wesley, helping Perry Mason capture bad guys.
We were given life-size dolls, and taught to how to bathe them and apply diapers correctly. Sure.
Wesley and I struggled with the process, with safety pins in our mouths and diapers over our shoulders.
We completed the course and celebrated with a beer on Hollywood Boulevard.
Fast-forward 18 months to when, OMG, Jillana Joly Devine was cast in our West Hollywood world.
J.P. Devine’s daughters, Dawn, at right, and Jillana, are seen in their youth. Photo courtesy of J.P. Devine
That first night with a constantly crying Jillana, I had to, at 1 a.m., take a load of diapers to a laundromat on Hollywood Boulevard, and learn how to operate the machines with the help of another young father, Valentin de Vargas, who was playing a villain in Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.”
Such was the opening act of “fatherhood” in Hollywood.
From the first segments, I didn’t know “thing one” about playing the role, but with She, who thank God was blessed with the natural talents that women are born with, and the side role of school teacher, I grew in the role.
Two girls. How lucky I was. How would I, who had flopped at all things “guy,” learn how to throw a ball to a son and teach him how to catch it.
Blessedly, She got the girls into Marlborough School for girls, where both daughters excelled for six years, and went on to college, law school and successful careers.
I am thrilled to say on this Father’s Day that I have managed to get through 50-something years of fatherhood without having to explaining sex to two boys. Happy Father’s Day to the old man.
And may I close with Lerner and Loewe’s famous lyrics?
“Thank Heaven for Little Girls.”
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
