He was, by his own description, a child who was drawn outward rather than inward — toward the boardwalk, toward the movies, toward the company of people. He watched films at the local cinema with an attention that was already more than casual. He developed the social facility that would later serve him in a profession that required the ability to read a room, to modulate presence, to occupy space with practiced ease.
Neptune City did not produce many people who went on to become one of the most recognizable actors in the history of Hollywood. What it produced, in his case, was a set of instincts and a set of unanswered questions that would follow him west.
When he left for California in 1954, he was seventeen years old. He had a high school diploma and a recommendation from his sister — as he believed her to be — June, who had preceded him to Los Angeles. The move was significant not only as a career decision but as a biographical rupture: it placed an entire continent between him and the household whose composition he did not yet understand.
The California he arrived in was not yet the California of Easy Rider, of New Hollywood, of the counterculture that would eventually provide the context in which his particular kind of stardom made sense. It was still the California of the studio system’s final years, of television’s expanding reach, of an industry that was beginning to feel the pressure of demographic change without yet understanding how to respond to it.