On one of these dead afternoons, Woody Wilson peed so loudly in the echoing bathroom that it broke us up and got embarrassed laughs from our conservative family audience. Fields, and a boozer, too, and the likable George Stuart, who, on Saturday nights, would entertain the crowd with a monologue that had them roaring: “You’re from Tucson? I spent a week there one night!” Four paying customers was officially an audience, so we often did shows to resonating silence. The theatre was run by Woody Wilson, a dead ringer for W. A forgotten line would hang in the air, searching for someone, anyone, to say it. Missed cues caused noisy pileups in the wings, or a missing prop left us hanging while we ad-libbed excuses to leave the stage and retrieve it. The Bird Cage was a normal theatrical nuthouse. The play was followed by a ten-minute “olio” segment involving two five-minute routines in which the actors did their specialties, usually songs or short comedy acts, and here I was able to work steadily on my fledgling comedy-magic act, five minutes at a time, four times a day (five on Sunday), for three years.
Fortunately, I ended up with the virtuous heroine, Angela Trueheart. I appeared in “The Bungling Burglar,” performing the role of Hamilton Brainwood, a detective who was attracted to the provocatively named soubrette, Dimples Reardon. The show consisted of a twenty-five-minute melodrama, in which the audience was encouraged to cheer the hero and boo the villain. Even in 1963, the rate was considered low. I was being paid two dollars a show, twenty-five shows a week. The actors swept the stage, raised and lowered the curtains, cleaned the house of trash, and went out on the grounds pitching the show to visitors strolling around the park. A painted cutout of a birdcage, worthy of a Sotheby’s folk-art auction, hung over center stage, and painted representations of drapes framed the proscenium.
GO UCLA HOLLYWOOD SIGN PRANK PATCH
Inside were two hundred folding chairs on risers, arranged around a thrust Masonite stage that sat behind a patch of fake grass. My first performances for a paying audience were at the Bird Cage, a wooden theatre with a canvas roof. Squawking peacocks roamed the grounds, and there was a little wooden chapel that played organ music while you stared at a picture of Jesus and watched his eyes magically open. A few years later, Cordelia opened her chicken-dinner restaurant, and Walter bought pieces of a ghost town and moved the Old West buildings to his burgeoning tourist destination. Knott’s Berry Farm began in the twenties, when Walter and Cordelia Knott set up a roadside berry stand. I worked there between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two as an actor in melodramas. Photograph by Mitzi Trumboĭuring the nineteen-sixties, the five-foot-high hand-painted placard in front of the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm read “World’s Greatest Entertaiment.” The missing “n” in “entertainment” was overlooked by staff, audience, and visitors for an entire decade. Martin in an ad for his act at the Ice House, a folk club in Pasadena, in 1967.
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