“He wanted to do everything,” his mother once said. “He was a skater, a swimmer, involved in all the Little League sports, baseball, football, studied dancing every day, he played the violin, sang in the school choir, did the leads in the school plays from junior high up. I guess you could call him hyper, but he just has to be busy all the time.”
Busy wasn’t the problem.
Different was.
In Texas during the 1960s, a boy carrying ballet shoes and a violin didn’t blend in. He stood out — and not always in a good way.
His brother later recalled one painful moment to Biography: “He had his dance shoes in one hand and a violin in the other and these three boys were waiting for him. They said something to the effect of ‘Hey, twinkle your toes for us, pretty boy.’”
The teasing didn’t stop at words. There were bruises. There were fights. There were days he came home battered but silent.
ADVERTISEMENT
