"Grandpa" Al Lewis's Secret

It's hardly a surprise when actors and other performers lie about their age. Hollywood, and pretty much our culture in general, reveres youth over experience, so nobody wants to lose an edge, whether its an edge they come by naturally or manufacture for themselves. But not many actors add years to their age. That's what Al Lewis did.

Born in 1923, Lewis claimed 1910. It's not clear exactly when he started the lie, but it may have been when he was going up for the part of Grandpa on The Munsters. Yvonne DeCarlo, who played Grandpa's daughter Lily, was born in 1922, so according to this argument, Lewis didn't want to lose the part by being younger than his "daughter." I'm not sure why any of that really mattered, because they were playing characters who were ageless immortals, but there you go.

Dan Barry had a nice piece about all this in yesterday's New York Times. (But was it kept hidden behind the Times's subscription-only service? You bet it was. You can still read it courtesy of donkey o.d.) Once he had a few more years to fill, as Barry pointed out, Lewis made the most of them. Over the years, he's claimed to have been an aide in the defense of anarchists Sacco and Vanzeti (in 1927), a supporter of the Scottsboro Boys (in 1931), a merchant seaman who was twice forced to abandon a torpedoed ship, and a recipient of a doctorate in child psych from Columbia.

Lewis appears to have been thorough in his lie. The first obituaries listed him as 95 upon his death, and the top news organizations had to run corrections when Lewis's son provided the actual date. According to Barry, even Lewis's wife of more than twenty years thought he was born in 1910. At some point, he was getting more attention for being as spry as he was into his nineties than he ever would have gotten for being in his late seventies and early eighties. Maybe we all just need to figure out the point in our lives when we're better off adding years than shaving them off.