CHANGING CHANNELS

Whitey and Beaver Lived in a Black and White World. but Beyond
Mayfield, Life Plays Out in Every Shade of Gray.

Street people called him "Whitey," after the character he supposedly
played on "Leave It to Beaver." No one knew where he lived, and no one
in the theater scene had heard of him. So the rumors were written off
as typical of the ramblings that routinely circulated among Old Town's
prostitutes, drug addicts and con men.

He was a shell of a man, they said. A heroin addict, a cocaine dealer
on the run from the law. Rummies said they'd seen Whitey drunk,
begging along the bus mall. No, it was over at St. Francis Park in
Southeast Portland where homeless men waited for a free meal. No, he'd
died. No, just a couple of overdoses. He'd almost died.

Street lore had it that Whitey's real name was Stanley. And an
Internet search revealed that the kid who played Whitey in the Beav's
idyllic 1950s town of Mayfield was named Stanley Fafara. A little
digging turned up a telephone number with a Portland prefix. The phone
rang three times.

"Yes, this is Stanley Fafara," said the voice. Then there was a long
pause, as if he was debating whether to hang up. "Yeah," he finally
said, "I'm Whitey."

The squat single-room-occupancy building sat on West Burnside Street,
in the heart of Portland's Skid Road. To move in, the tenants must
prove they've been straight for at least a month. Dealers peddle
heroin just a block away, but door buzzers and locks keep the addicts
out. Visitors must sign in and meet their hosts in the lobby.

"I'll be down," said the voice on the intercom, and the door leading
to the lobby buzzed open. Inside, two men sat on battered sofas and
shared a day-old paper scattered on an end table. Outside the window a
bum pushed a shopping cart loaded with bottles down the sidewalk, and
a woman nursing a black eye wobbled out of the Park Blocks.

The elevator door clanked open. A lone passenger wearing a rumpled
black sweatshirt, jeans and tennis shoes ambled into the lobby. Short
and stocky, he rocked with the swagger of the street. He wore his gray
hair slicked back, carried hard knocks in his weathered face and had a
scar that traced a small line along the outside of his left eye.

He extended his right hand. "Stanley," he said.

His bright blue eyes flitted between the street and the lobby. "My
room?" he asked, repeating the question. "It's a mess." He nodded
toward the sofa. "We can talk here." He looked at the two residents on
the sofa. "Lobby lizards," he muttered. "Come on."

With a gentle bounce, the elevator stopped at the fourth floor. He
walked down a narrow hallway, past a community kitchen and one of four
shared bathrooms. A faint odor of cigarettes hung in the air. Next to
his door, inside a metal frame, was a piece of paper with a short
phrase: "Last Chance."

"I put that there" he explained. "I want to see it every time I leave
here and lock the door. I've been to all kinds of clean-and-sober
houses. Twenty years and they just never took. This is my last chance.
If I fail, I'll have to set up shop in the street."

The room was about 12 by 12, and at one time the walls might have been
called white. He snapped on two lamps that hardly dented the dark. It
felt like a place where a man sits alone with dreams that have died
hard.

The lone window looked out onto a parking garage. A small color
television sat on a metal dresser painted to look as if it were made
of wood. The single bed was standard issue. Two hand-me-down chairs
and a worn carpet filled out the space.

The Beav's old pal pulled a chair from a desk, shoved a book titled
"God's Promise" aside and found a partially filled ashtray. He fumbled
with the pack and pulled out a cigarette. He lit it, took a long drag
and swiveled in his chair.

"What have you heard?" he asked.

He listened, turning away from time to time to stare at a poster on
which he'd written "pray for peace and your enemies." Before long, the
cigarette had burned to his fingertips. He crushed it in the ashtray.

"Well," he said. "Sounds about right."

He sighed, lit another smoke, started to say something, but thought
better of it. He took a drag, tilted his head toward the ceiling and
let loose a plume that collected on the yellowed paint. "You're
looking at the loss of a myth," he said. "My life was a blessing and a
curse. At one time I had money. Hell, there were times when I'd walk
around with $16,000 in my pocket."

He leaned forward, nearly whispering, using his cigarette as a
pointer, jabbing empty air.

"You want to know a secret?" he asked. "What's more attractive and
powerful than money is fame. Fame never runs out. I had fame. But
that's the myth. I wondered if my friends liked me because of who I
was, or what I was."

What he is now is a recovering addict with hepatitis C, and a Social
Security disability payment of $475 a month. The room rent, based on a
sliding scale, is $153 a month. He stood up, stretched his arms out
and slowly turned around, taking it all in.

"This is where I am," he said. "A guy who lost his way and then found
it again. I never really lost faith, but I lost all my hope. Hope is
just the beginning of faith."

He flopped in the chair, weary, ready to talk.

"This," he said, "is where Whitey landed."

The television was turned to TV Land, a cable channel that recycles
nostalgia to baby boomers -- and the screen flickered. The theme, a
tune nearly every adult of a certain age can hum, stirred memories of
a time when a child's world stretched only as far as a mother's voice
carried.

Back then, life revolved around recess, kickball and a handful of
friends. Kids got around on their bikes, always Schwinns. They used
clothespins on a fender bracket to position playing cards between the
spokes. When the wheel turned, the cards thrummed and the bike became
a motorcycle.

This night's TV Land episode revolved around an intelligence test
given to Beaver's class. He's mistakenly labeled a genius, and his
friends shun him because he's too smart. Whitey tells him why he's
getting the cold shoulder. By the end of the show the mistake is
revealed, and Beaver's friends accept him back in the fold. As the
credits roll, the name Stanley Fafara makes its way up the screen.

The show, which aired from 1957 to 1963, has become a metaphor for a
sheltered, comfortable and simple American existence that never really
was. Beaver, his older brother Wally, slimy neighbor Eddie Haskell and
Whitey lived in the world their parents wanted to create for them. For
the Beav's parents, Ward and June Cleaver, World War II was a fresh
scab. The Korean War had just drawn to a close, the economy boomed and
the suburbs exploded with families seeking not just a better life, but
the good life they'd longed for through all the sacrifice. White,
middle-class Americans lived in a bubble, floating along, optimistic
and sure of their places in the world and their ability to control
their destiny.

But "Leave It to Beaver" was the world as war-weary Americans wanted
it to be, not as it was.

It was exclusively white, even though the battle for civil rights had
already been joined and would soon tear the nation apart. Beaver's
mother puttered around the kitchen in high heels and pearls, but Betty
Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" was about to unleash a tidal wave of
feminism. Within a year of the show's last episode, the Cleavers'
world dissolved: Assassinations, uprisings and riots in the cities.
The Vietnam War. Political scandals. Divorce and the fragmentation of
the American family.

Stanley Fafara grew up in Studio City, Calif., in a Leave-It-to-Beaver
neighborhood: A sprawling suburban home, two loving parents, four kids
and church every Sunday.

He never wanted to be an actor. That was his mother's dream, and she
pushed her children into the industry. He appeared in his first
commercial when he was 4 years old, and later had parts on a string of
TV Westerns. His life changed when his mother hauled him and his
brother to an open casting call for what would become "Leave It to
Beaver." Stanley won the role of Whitey, his brother that of Tooey,
one of Wally Cleaver's friends.

The show ran for more than 200 episodes. Hugh Beaumont, who played
Ward Cleaver, had appeared as a tough guy in dozens of character parts
for B films and television. An ordained minister with a degree in
theology, Beaumont found a spiritual element in "Leave It to Beaver."
He turned the screen into a pulpit, a place where the actors created
weekly parables about life and the way it should be lived.

In his clean-and-sober apartment, Stanley Fafara pointed to some
videos on a shelf. "Someone made me some tapes of the show," he said.
"I never watch them. But it was a good show with values. It was the
way people wanted to live and bring up their children." He chuckled.
"What they forget was that it was on a soundstage."

He shook his head. "Maybe we all forgot that."

When the show ended, Fafara's parents sent him to North Hollywood High
School, where he had his first taste of fame and its perks. He had his
choice of girls, and everyone wanted to be his friend.

Life only became crazier after high school. Being Whitey gave him a
backstage pass to a hedonistic banquet that few 18-year-old boys could
ignore. For a time he lived in a house with Paul Revere and the
Raiders, the Top 40 rock band. He started drinking every day.

"Let's say it was not all a veil of tears," he said. "I had access to
all the things that were happening. I knew everyone in Hollywood. All
the players. Fame goes to your head. Fame never ran out. Drugs, money,
women. I got all of them because I was Whitey."

He stood up and left his apartment, locking the door behind him and
rattling the knob. Outside the building, he turned up the collar on
his jacket and walked onto Southwest Broadway, past a couple of
upscale hotels, the kind of places he stayed in the old days. But on
this stroll he looked like a panhandler. The doormen watched him until
he made his way up the street and became someone else's problem.

"My parents wanted me out of Los Angeles," he said. "They sent me to
live with my sister in Jamaica. She was an artist, and I started
painting, too. I drank and used pharmaceuticals. I came back to L.A.
when I was 22. I started dealing drugs and met the woman who became my
wife when I sold drugs at her apartment complex.

"Man, she was beautiful," he said. "She liked to take chances. Like
me. The excitement was as euphoric as the drugs."

In the early '80s he started breaking into pharmacies, seeing if he
could beat the clock and get out before the police came. His luck ran
out on the seventh robbery.

He pulled open the door to a coffeehouse, ordered a large, found a
seat at the counter and stared out the window.

After his arrest, his parents bailed him out of the Orange County
jail. A month later the cops nabbed him during another burglary. He
was convicted and sentenced to a year. When he got out, he worked as a
roofer, waiter and janitor. His real talent was dealing drugs, and the
profits supported his own habit.

He failed a drug test given as part of his probation, and he ran
rather than deal with the fallout. He cut ties to his old life,
divorced his wife and bounced around the country. He repeatedly tried
to clean up and stay straight, but failed. He washed up in Astoria,
where he found work at the golf course. "I cleaned out the ninth
hole," he said. "There was a slough, and I got to keep all the balls I
found."

When he learned his mother was dying, he returned to California,
cleared up the legal problems and served 300 hours of community
service in a charity thrift store. But he was arrested again, and
spent 65 days in jail. He entered a drug-treatment program, but left
after a month.

"I told my girlfriend we had to get out of L.A. I sold my car, and we
jumped on the bus and headed to Portland," he said. "Guys in the jail
told me it was an easy place to live because the cops didn't arrest
you for being drunk. They just took you to detox and let you out in
the morning."

Within an hour after the bus pulled into the Portland depot, Fafara
and his girlfriend rented a motel room, shot up and crashed. The plan
was to get high one last time and then go make something of life.

Instead the addiction took hold, and the two of them lived in the
motel for two years.

He lost nearly everything. His parents, the last people who really
cared about him, were dead. He'd alienated his siblings, who washed
their hands of him. About the only thing he had left was "Whitey." His
screen name was always good for a drink or drugs.

He'd tell people that he'd been on "Leave It to Beaver," but he'd lost
most of his teeth and weighed less than 130 pounds. So hardly anyone
would believe him. To prove his background, he'd tell them stories
about the show and the actors, what it was like behind the scenes.

Someone told him they'd seen the movie "Fast Times at Ridgemont High,"
released in 1982. He told Fafara that in one part of the movie an old
film clip of "Leave It to Beaver" was played. It was Whitey's most
famous episode, the one where he talks Beaver into climbing a
billboard and into a bowl by telling him there's real soup in the bowl.

Fafara called the Screen Actors Guild in Los Angeles and learned he
had some royalty checks waiting for him. He rented a post office box
and waited. The check was for $1,000. He cashed it and blew it on drugs.

He rummaged around the desk in his apartment and fished out three
checks. "Let's see," he said. "Here's one for $1.90. Here's one for
$1. I keep them to prove that I was on the show." He found a third
check under a book. "Hey, this one's for $20. I'm cashing that. Twenty
bucks is 20 bucks."

He shook his head.

"When people learned I was on the show, they looked at me like I was a
dumb-ass for not being rich," he said. "I had no control over
royalties. None of us did. We were day players. My parents gave me an
allowance of like $5 a week, but I was making about $2,000 a week. All
the money went to my schooling and things for me. I went through so
many cars, muscle cars, tricked-out cars. But when the show ended, so
did the money. The only time I get something is when it's used in a
movie or something."

He pushed the royalty check under the mouse pad for his computer and
stood up. On the wall next to the door, tucked into the plastic cover
for the overhead light switch, was a small black-and-white photograph
of Jerry Mathers and Stanley Fafara -- Beaver and Whitey. He paused to
look at the photograph. "It's a long way from Studio City," he said.

He rested his hand on the doorknob, and his eyes scanned the room. He
paused.

"I know it's a dump," he said. "But it's my dump."

On the way to Portland's East Side, he glanced out the car window at
some of the old hangouts and spoke softly, almost to himself: "I was
living on the street, anywhere I could flop."

The car turned down one street, then another and passed a group of
bums hanging out in St. Francis Park. He leaned forward and peered out
the window, looking for familiar faces, for the girl who broke his
heart.

"No one I know," he said. He leaned back in his seat and said nothing
until he was blocks from St. Francis.

"I had this can of beer in front of me," he explained. "I just wanted
it to be over. The pain was killing me. Staying loaded 24 hours a day
was a job. I'd do anything to keep the drugs coming. So I said this
prayer."

He turned in the seat and smiled.

"I know," he said. "I know. Hell, I thought I was fooling myself, too.
I'd said prayers before, ask God to help me. But it was usually when I
was being hauled away in handcuffs. But I said that prayer."

No director yelling cut.

No swelling soundtrack.

No "Leave-It-to-Beaver" moment where all is set right in the world
after a talk with Dad in the den.

Just a bum pushing away a can of beer, and wandering over to the detox
center and waiting for the door to open. He checked in and stayed
nearly two weeks, eventually graduating to a clean-and-sober house for
drunks and addicts. He lived there two years.

"Most people stayed a year, but I figured I needed a double dose," he
said with a laugh. "I haven't had a drink since Aug. 22, 1995. I don't
know why it took. I should be dead. I had three overdoses in two
months and was hanging on for dear life. My associates, most of them
are gone. I know they didn't want to go, but they did."

He looked out the car window.

"Lucky?" he repeated. He shook his head.

"I don't believe in luck," he said. "Things happen for a
reason."

The years since that August day have been lived in obscurity. He
hasn't been able to find his siblings, but he reunited with a daughter
and learned he's a grandfather. He took a series of temporary jobs and
saved to buy his computer. Recently he took a one-day acting seminar,
and at times he thinks about getting in the business again. "I think
I've got the gangster look down," he said. "It comes from the L.A.
County jail and the street. Nothing fake."

He spends his days in his apartment, smoking cigarettes. Thinking and
drawing. Taped to the wall next to his bed is a sketch, in pencil, of
a woman. It's his vision of his former girlfriend.

"She's still out there," he said. "I had to leave her, and I lost
track of her. A month ago I ran into someone on the street who knew
where she was living. I took her to dinner, but it was too sad for me
to handle. When I met her, she was gorgeous. Now she's scrawny, lost
all her teeth. At dinner, I told her that I loved her and that I
wanted her to have a real life. She laughed it off."

He lit a cigarette.

"I used to think about her every day," he said. "Not as much anymore.
But I still love her. I told her that at dinner, and she just laughed
it off. Hell, we both loved drugs more than anything."

A cold rain greeted Stanley Fafara when he walked out of the lobby of
his building and onto West Burnside Street. Gusts stirred up by the
autumn's first storm stripped the last leaves out of the trees in the
Park Blocks and sent them swirling down the streets. In the old days,
Whitey might have been scouring the neighborhood for a fix or
panhandling pedestrians so that he could buy one more beer.

Today, though, he just wanted breakfast. He crossed Burnside and
headed north, looking for a plate of bacon and eggs. He pointed up the
block. "I saw a woman killed there," he said. "But compared to L.A.,
the streets here are like a college campus."

He made his way through the Park Blocks headed for a cheap cafe where
the few dollars in his pocket would buy a full meal. Cars swooshed
through puddles, their drivers ignoring the worn, hatless figure
strolling easily along the street. Weather doesn't bother Whitey. He
walks like a man who enjoys feeling the rain on his face.

He turned toward Broadway, walked to the corner and opened the cafe's
smudged glass door. The cook looked up from the grill when the door
squeaked and then went back to work.

Whitey settled into a booth, and the window framed him like the screen
of an old TV set. He ordered and sipped a coffee. In a few minutes,
the waitress dropped off his food, and Whitey ate slowly, staring at
the window at the rain and an empty street.

"I know it hasn't been a pretty picture," he said with a sigh, "but it
has a beautiful ending."