{"id":123,"date":"2018-11-30T23:09:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-30T23:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericagavin.com\/wp\/?p=123"},"modified":"2024-11-27T08:54:55","modified_gmt":"2024-11-27T08:54:55","slug":"growing-up-in-silver-lake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericagavin.com\/wp\/growing-up-in-silver-lake\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing Up in Silver Lake"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Erica\u2019s father, Fred Graff, was a Bronx, New York-born actor who studied at the New School of Social Research and the New Theater School in Manhattan. He did extensive work with the Actors\u2019 Lab in Hollywood, and was signed to a movie contract by Columbia Pictures.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

BY STEVE SULLIVAN<\/strong>
EXCERPTED FROM <\/strong>GLAMOUR GIRLS<\/em> #16  SPRING 2002<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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Graff appeared in at least twelve films from 1944 to 1951. His two most notable roles were among his last: The 1950 William Holden drama Union Station in a pivotal role as the leader of child kidnappers whom Holden seeks to foil (as the railway detective) and the Tony Curtis adventure The Prince Who Was A Thief (1951), playing the royal right-hand man to the star.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was in Hollywood that Graff met the woman who would become his wife, Madeleine Rosenteil. \u201cMy mom was in the business too, but not to the extent of my dad. She was beautiful, and did some modeling.\u201d She also did some acting, and they met at the Actors\u2019 Lab in Hollywood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Erica was born Donna Graff in Hollywood on July 22, 1947. (We will generally refer to her as Donna until she changed her name upon entering show business.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 When she was born, the family lived at the corner of Western and Third Street in Los Angeles. \u201cMy first childhood memory is of sleeping in a drawer, because sometimes that\u2019s how my parents would transport me as a small child\u2014they\u2019d take out one of the drawers from a chest and drive me in the car.\u201d Not much more than year after her birth, the Graffs moved to Silver Lake. Located mere blocks east of Hollywood, near Sunset Boulevard, she describes it as \u201cthe other side of the tracks\u201d across from posh Beverly Hills.<\/p>\n\n\n

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We lived in what was called \u201cThe Project\u201d\u2014one row of five connected houses on hill, then another row of five. Each person owned their owned their own house, but they\u2019d have project meetings, sort of like a condominium.\u201d<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

She describes the social environment as \u201cprogressive, maybe what some would consider left-wing.\u201d As Cold War tensions heightened by the end of the 1940s and Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950 began rabble-rousing about alleged Communists in high places, her father carefully instructed young Donna that if anyone came to the door asking questions, she was to say that she wasn\u2019t allowed to talk to them, and that she didn\u2019t know anything. \u201cI later realized that was because the FBI was snooping around to find out who was a Communist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy dad was blacklisted, like a lot of people who didn\u2019t do anything wrong. He went to these project meetings, and he was politically outspoken. He also spoke his mind at parties and on movie sets. He went to meetings through the Actors\u2019 Lab that some would consider liberal. When the blacklist came down, someone at the studio who testified [before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs] was told they could get out of trouble if they named someone else who had participated in certain meetings, and this person named my dad. He was no Communist, of course, but when they asked him to name names, he wouldn\u2019t. By then, Columbia had already dropped his contract.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her dad\u2019s movie career ended just as it was on the rise. \u201cHe, Jeff Corey, Robert Conrad, and others with the Actors\u2019 Lab would still get together for classes and workshops. Most of them weren\u2019t working because of the blacklist.\u201d With one chapter of his life over, Fred Graff provided for his family by selling televisions and home furnishings. He later became an interior designer and would take occasional jobs, even in semi-retirement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Donna was four years old, her mother contracted polio, and became pregnant before the disease had been diagnosed. Polio was perhaps the most terrifying of all diseases in America during this era. 1952 was the peak of America\u2019s polio epidemic, attacking some 58,000 children that year and killing about 1,400; a year later the introduction of the Salk vaccine began the gradual near eradication of the crippling disease. \u201cMy mother was taken to the hospital, and was there for about seven months. I had no idea what was happening.\u201d Her sister Lisa was born prematurely in an iron lung while her mom was temporarily paralyzed\u2014as reported in the L. A. Times, the first ever child born in this device, designed to help her breathe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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