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3 Chapter One GRANDMA’S BOY When Lew Ayres burst onto the Hollywood scene, his image was that of a child of privilege and education. Perhaps it was the name Ayres—it sounded elegant and lofty and vaguely pretentious, and carried with it assumptions about how he must have been raised. Or perhaps it was how he carried himself. He was quiet, intellectual, a gentleman even as a young man. For the rest of his life, Lewis Frederick Ayres would be known as Lew Ayres, a man destined to be the next big Hollywood star by the age of twenty. According to the story his studio told, Lew had been a pre-med university student who left school in search of the American Dream of becoming rich and famous, first in music and then in the movies. In reality, he didn’t even finish high school and only completed his sophomore year.1 Lew was the only child from a marriage that lasted just five years. He was born in the Linden Hill District of Minneapolis, Minnesota, just south of Lake Calhoun and west of Lake Harriet. The area in which he was raised was considered upper middle class, but his family was not. From an early age, the difference was apparent to Lew. Lew’s parents, Irma and Louis Ayres, had never planned or hoped to have children. Louis had been circumcised in his infancy, but a surgical mistake had caused permanent damage that the couple had been told left Louis impotent and unable to bare children. When the surprise baby Lew was born, Irma insisted that he would not suffer the same fate as her husband.2 Lew grew up hearing this story of his unexpected conception , an awareness that renders Louis’s later comments about the lack of physical resemblance between him and his son especially cruel. In one particular demonstration of poor taste, Louis joked to the press in 1940 about his famous son: “They tell me he looks like me, but I don’t see it.”3 Even before four-year-old Lew’s parents divorced, Lew spent most of his days with his maternal grandmother, who had a tendency to indulge her only grandchild to a fault. She would let Lew get away with terrible grAndmA’s Boy 4 acts of defiance without inflicting any punishment on the boy. Lew recalled how around the age of four or five, he found a pair of sewing scissors and cut through the middle of his grandmother’s living room rug. Upon seeing the crime, she did nothing but ask why he had done it. Even after his unapologetic response of “Because I could,” she attempted to hide his crimes from his mother, who undoubtedly would have punished the little boy.4 Lew remembered that it was this act, or one of similar severity, that led to his being put in the cellar for a short time as a form of punishment, which would be today’s equivalent of “time out.” Being alone never had, or would, bother him and as he sat on the stairs in the dark, his mother could overhear him saying, “Come little rats, you may eat my toes.”5 As a toddler, Lew was stubborn, and generally disobeyed the rules and rebelled against authority. Once, in a show of willful defiance against his mother’s request that he not cut her tape measure, he snipped it in half with her sewing scissors. Angry, Irma put the child to bed without supper and declared that he would not eat until he apologized. After a standoff, his parents finally broke and gave him food. He apologized and ate, then burst into tears and recanted, saying that he was not truly sorry.6 Lew was close to his mother, a seamstress who fully suffered from the stigma of being a divorced mother at the time. Lew remembered that they never had enough money. He believed he was one of the poorest children in school and had a distinct memory of his keeping careful eye on a jar of money that sat on a shelf in full view and was filled mostly with coins. His mother was stricken with constant worry that there wouldn’t be enough in the jar at week’s end to pay the bills.7 Irma was a loving mother, who like her own mother, found it hard to inflict punishment on her child. Instead, she praised Lew as being a remarkably...

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