Not yet a Jew, Pop had received a gift of a mezuzah from Eddie Cantor. Pop used it not as a traditional blessing over a door, but wore it around his neck like a good luck charm. The only time Pop did not wear it out, was that night of the car crash.
Dad reached around his neck for the mezuzah, but it wasn’t there. He couldn’t recall taking it off at the Frontier, but with the frenzy of packing and the chorus chick frolicking about, it must have slipped off his neck. He thought about returning to retrieve it, but Charley was already twenty minutes away. It was late and they had a long drive ahead of them to Los Angeles. Dad opened his backseat window, and let the stars and clear desert breeze lull him to sleep.
The car crashed in San Bernardino, California, at a fork in US Highway 66 at Cajon Boulevard and Kendall Drive. A woman driving ahead on the highway got off at an exit, only to realize that it was the wrong exit. Dad had taken over in the driver’s seat by this time. The lady backed up from the exit ramp onto the highway, and that’s when the collision happened. Dad slammed his eye on the pointed cone in the middle of his steering wheel. The last thing he remembered was reaching for his left eye that was dangling out of its socket.
Dad woke up in the Community Hospital of San Bernardino, in total darkness, bandaged up like an Egyptian mummy. The impact fractured the bones of his face. His mind raced. He heard the random cacophony of hospital staff rushing in and out of his room. He felt the warm breeze of an open window; it felt like day, but it was pitch black. What time was it? He felt iron bars under his hands and realized he was strapped like a prisoner to the hospital bed. Was he paralyzed? His heart beat violently, throbbing with terror and fear. He moved his legs under the bed sheets, relieved to find he had working legs and feet.
But why was it so dark? Where was the sunlight? Was he blind? Would he live like a madman in the dark for the rest of his life? More terrible still was his imagination that plunged him into a deeper abyss of uncertainty: Would he ever perform again? Was God punishing him for becoming a star? Had he lost his way along the path to stardom, forsaken some moral, some principle, some holy commandment that forced God to take his sight from him? What was happening here? He yelled out, “Help me!”
A nurse rushed into the room and removed his hand restraints, telling Pop not to touch the bandages over his eyes. She told him that he was in a nearly fatal car accident, but he was going to be fine.
Fine? Dad felt his head. He felt no skin, just ominous bandages. His head hurt as he lay in the dark. He was not fine. My father pleaded with the nurse to tell him if he was going to be blind. He would rather die at that very moment than live blind. The nurse simply replied that he was not going to be blind, and that he needed to rest. Pop knew the nurse would not be the one to break it to him; he would have to wait for the doctor, so he demanded the nurse page the doctor.
January 1955: In rehearsals for his return to performing at Ciro’s in Hollywood after losing an eye in a car accident. Will Mastin is behind him.
Dad’s first public performance, at Ciro’s, after his car accident. You can see Dick Powell and June Allyson at a front table in this photo.
Within minutes, my father heard the heavy footsteps of a man entering his room. He introduced himself as Dr. Hull. In a solemn and gentle tone, the surgeon announced that he operated on my father the night before and was forced to remove his left eye.
What? Just like that, so matter of fact, he removed his left eye? My father touched his bandages, thinking perhaps he hadn’t heard the doctor correctly. Pop grabbed for the bars on his hospital bed, steadying himself from the nausea of what he just heard. The horror of it all scared him beyond comprehension—it was an insidious and brutal entrapment.
Dad shot a myriad of questions at the surgeon. Dr. Hull explained that he was a vision specialist called in to advise the doctors on duty struggling to save his eye after the crash. There was, at best, 10 percent vision possible for the left eye. However, as an expert in his field, he felt the strain on the healthy right eye would weaken both and result in “sympathetic blindness,” that over a few years would result in total blindness. There was no choice but to remove his left eye, and once healed, replace it with an artificial eye that he would have to wear for life.
Questions flooded my father’s mind: Was this man serious? An artificial eye? Jeopardize his new stardom? Would he dance again? What about his balance on the stage? Who would do the show at the Frontier while he was recovering in the hospital? All his dreams came to a halt as he scrambled to make sense of it all in the dark. His cry for answers was primal. He demanded the right to dignity, to work—nothing else, nothing more—just to work.