How I came to name my celebrity autobiography, “Once A King, Now A Prince.” My story is more than just one you typically read in a celebrity autobiography. You may wonder whether I stem from some form of royalty, and thus the choice I made using the word ‘king’. Well, I came from a family, a highly dysfunctional family, that was below the poverty line, and only survived due to the generosity of my grandmother, Lena Derman, who helped to support my father, which included living rent-free in a bourgie neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, on Clarkson Avenue, just north of Flatbush Avenue.
This was a short walk to three of my favorite stops as a child. Prospect Park, with its greenery and the Zoo, Ebinger’s Bakery, a famous Brooklyn-based bakery that operated from 1898 until it went bankrupt in 1972. They, at that time, had the best, fresh lady fingers in the whole wide world. Last, but not least, was Sutter’s Bakery on Flatbush Avenue and Church Avenue, not far from the Loews theater and a few other great movie emporiums. Sutter’s had those old-world pastries, which I never was able to capture the taste again, until I moved into Manhattan, as an adult, and discovered Rumpelmayer’s. From 1930 until its closure in 1998, Rumpelmayer’s was a legendary ice cream parlor and café inside the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South.
The concept of myself as a king, which I use as the title of my celebrity autobiography, “Once A King, Now A Prince,” is explained in one of my early chapters, about life as a four-year-old, trying to both understand and survive the brutality of growing up in a crazy family. I had the habit in those oppressive times of looking into the mirror in my bedroom, which was a full-length one, where I could see the entire reflection of myself as I understood myself to be. One of my better moments was to see myself all dressed up in my Hopalong Cassidy outfit, six-shooter and all, where I could be the hero in my own nightmare of a life.
On one of those occasions, when I was scrutinizing my little four-year-old being in the mirror, hoping to learn a little bit of the truth about why my father hated and resented me so much, and my mother put up with it. It was only in adulthood, when my mentally ill uncle Fred Blacker, who at the time was on his seventh suicide attempt, informed me of the reality of my father’s disdain for both me and my mother. My father felt trapped. He felt trapped, without any understanding within his mindset of how to extricate himself from the shithole that he had dug, as he tried to secure his fortune, at the expense of my mother and grandmother. Uncle Fred’s telling of my father’s quest for the buck had him one day walking into Derman Furs on Flatbush and Clarkson and seeing the successful business that my grandmother Lena started in the Great Depression of the thirties, and turning it into a thriving business. Like any opportunist, he smelled the money and decided to “investigate his potential for opportunity.”
My mother, at that time, which was the late 1930s, was just extricated from her own indentured service to her mother, of raising her three brothers, as my grandfather had died an early death, at the tail end of the Great Depression. Not only did my father see this opportunity, which could allow him to escape poverty, in a job with perks, but my grandmother, who no longer required the services of my mother as chief cook, bottle washer, and babysitter. Therefore, as synchronicity would have it, she was happy to push my mother into the arms of my father, who was delighted to welcome the job Lena would provide, and the security of a new wife as part of this devil’s bargain. This was a marriage of convenience and personal gain. Love was not part of the equation.
So, how was my little undeveloped brain of a small child supposed to make heads or tails of my father’s disdain, rage, and the beatings freely given by him at the time? His rage left me so frightened at that time that the only place in my life that I had ever felt a semblance of safety and security was my bedroom, especially under the covers, no matter what was under the bed. What is most interesting and of note is that in reality, my feeling safer, though never truly secure, was that for some reason, my bedroom was like Kryptonite to my father, who would never venture into my room, except for one occasion when I was about 5 or 6, which ended in a severe beating of me by him. Other than that, my bedroom was off limits and probably so he would not have to face or deal with the child he did not want.
Obviously, at such a young age, my yet undeveloped 4-year-old brain was unable to seriously make sense of the horrors that I had endured, which included belittlement, blame, and all forms of verbal abuse that were part of my regimen. This, then, brings me back to the dressing mirror in my bedroom, as I seemed not just to utilize it to fantasize that I was Hoppy, but to scrutinize myself, as I, at that early age, was trying to figure out who I was and how I related to the nightmare of my father’s “reign of terror.” During my self-scrutiny, I happened to notice that my incisors were exceptionally long. In later life, with a more normal childhood, I may have grown up, having the good looks I was blessed with, thinking I looked “devilishly” rakish. This was not to be the case in the mind of a severely abused four-year-old. What I had seen in that mirror, as I studied myself, almost microscopically, while seeking answers to my environment, was that with those long “Dracula” like fangs, I looked like a devil. From there, it was easy to infer that I must be a devil. Yes, I was the devil, but a devil with a slight twist, as part of me was always, knowingly or unknowingly, seeking survival. Therefore, if I were a devil, I would be the KING of the devils.
