Ex-’Dead End’ kid Blackwell revisits his scruffy past

Before there was Mr. Blackwell, there was Johnny.

Well, not really.

“I lied,” Blackwell says. “I didn’t know if he was a cop.”

“He” would be the talent scout who was foraging for real teenage hoodlums to play fake teenage hoodlums in Sidney Kingsley’s Depression-era drama “Dead End.” At the time, long before Blackwell became a fashion designer and catty critic, he was 14-year-old Richard Selzer, a thief and a truant who haunted the streets of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, a few blocks from the East River. When the scout came across Selzer, he was fast-tracking his way toward a future as a racketeer. But then he hit a fork in the road. He got the job. Then he got a life.

Last week, a clean and contained doppelganger of New York’s murky East River rippled before him in the orchestra pit of the Ahmanson Theatre. It was opening night of artistic director Michael Ritchie’s elaborate revival of the operatic “Dead End,” which originally gave rise to the movie franchise spotlighting the Dead End Kids in the late 1930s. Blackwell wasn’t one of the six official Kids, but for several months in 1936, he understudied the role of Tommy, the beleaguered gang leader. So at the age of 83, Blackwell is one of only two surviving members of the original Broadway production.

Before his stage debut, Blackwell -- a name selected for him by Howard Hughes, when the actor was under contract to Hughes’ movie studio some years later -- hadn’t even been to a Broadway house. Movie theaters, yes, but he sneaked into those with his brother.

“We had a way of doing it which was wonderful,” Blackwell says. “One of us would go in and say we were looking for my mother. At the door, they said, ‘Of course, go look.’ We’d go in and open the exit door. Then we ran around the building, pushed the door open and came in. Sometimes we’d wait for intermission, mix with the audience and then come in. Except our clothes were not always acceptable.”

But today he could pass for the king of Beverly Hills. The author of the notorious Worst Dressed List is sporting a black, shadow-striped Brioni suit and a lavender silk tie by Turnbull & Asser. A big golden belt buckle in the shape of a Versace lion gleams at his waist. Yellow and blue sapphires are pinned to his lapel, and a 15-carat yellow diamond shines on his left pinkie. A brown chenille scarf, his lifelong signature because of a delicate throat, is flung over his left shoulder.

He has been at once anticipating and dreading the evening -- anticipating it because he would be able to relive his Broadway debut, brief though it was. (In the course of 100 performances, he was called on only once to play the role onstage.) But he was also dreading it because when he was in the guise of “Dead End’s” poverty-stricken denizens, he wasn’t really playing a part.

“I look back at this and I think, ‘How horrible,’ ” he says softly, gazing at the crumbling, 46-foot-high tenements on the Ahmanson set. “How devastating.”

Blackwell rode the wave of the hit Broadway production to a mediocre career in Hollywood as well as on the New York stage. He moved to Los Angeles in 1937 and had a minor role in the first Dead End Kids film, “Little Tough Guy” (1938).

“I started to do other movies like ‘Passage to Marseilles,’ ‘Cross of Lorraine,’ ‘Guy Named Joe.’ I was in ‘National Velvet.’ Very forgettable moments, but I was there. And if you didn’t belch twice you had a good shot at me.”

Blackwell gave up acting in 1958 and became a fashion designer and a radio talk-show host. In 1970, he began his Worst Dressed List, which propelled him onto TV talk show couches and made his reputation, as he mischievously puts it, as “the worst bitch in the world.”

But when the Ahmanson’s lights come up, he confesses that for the longest time he felt like a fraud when he walked through the doors of Spago, like he was really still the boy who had to sneak through the exit. So he had expected the show to send him back to his incarnation as the rough kid Richard Selzer. And he was surprised when it didn’t.

“Time has given us a different viewpoint,” he says thoughtfully. “This is all true, but it kind of cartoons itself. It has a wonderful sense of theater, good theater. [The Broadway run] was different. It was a reality. They were living that truth.

“I never forgot it, but I don’t remember it, which is weird. My whole life, I’ve lived with this. And I’m free. Tonight, I’m free. I can walk away now.

Blackwell joins the throng spilling onto the Music Center Plaza where a themed after-party buffet of hamburgers and hot dogs awaits. The Ahmanson staff told him he’ll have his photo taken with Ricky Ullman, who plays Tommy in the current production, and he eagerly scans the crowd for his successor.

Afterward, Ullman, a slight, dark-haired 19-year-old who looks younger than his age, bathes in congratulations and glad-hands fellow Dead Ender Adam Rose, who plays Angel and has also met Blackwell. “It was great to meet him,” Rose says. “Between his performance and our performance there have been so many years -- it’s just crazy to think about.”

Ullman nods. “If 71 years from now, I was ever to come back and see the show ... ,” he muses. “It’s such a huge part of me, and I’ve only been on it for a month. Michael Ritchie said during our table read, ‘You guys will remember the show for the rest of your lives.’ I truly will.”

Blackwell is still beaming after telling Ullman he was better in the role than anyone he’d seen, better than Blackwell was on Broadway.

“I couldn’t have done that two days ago,” he says of bonding with the show’s young star. “I would have been intimidated by his youth, by his life in front of him. I wasn’t free. He’s an incredible young man.”