CHAPTER ONE
BUFFALO.
New York, where David Boreanaz (to clarify, the name is pronounced Bor-ee-ah-nuz, and it's of Czech origin) was born, is a long way--geographically and culturally--from Los Angeles, where he now lives. It's the width of a continent, but also the span of several mindsets and climates. In Buffalo the winter cold seizes hold and doesn't let go for months. Blizzards, snowstorms, bitterly cold temperatures are the order of each winter. Winter is a season that doesn't touch L.A., a place where palm trees grow and the sun shines with a rare intensity, even through the smog. In Buffalo, the local dish is a pork and beef hot dog cut and mashed in the grill until it becomes a tube steak. In the City of Angels it's whatever the trendy cuisine of the week might be, served up by a celebrity chef to celebrity guests. They're two different worlds.
But David's story doesn't actually begin in Buffalo. It starts a couple of hundred miles away, in another country--Toronto, Canada, where, he says, he was conceived. His father, who went by the name of Dave Roberts--it played better than the more ethnic Boreanaz--was an entertainer who played clubs andtheaters. It was a nomadic existence, really, but one Roberts enjoyed--his only desire had been to entertain people. He traveled around the Northeast, which included stints in Ontario and Quebec, making people laugh and smile. Sometimes his wife would accompany him, and the trips would seem more like vacations than work. And she went with him to Toronto in August 1970, where the first intimations of David Boreanaz became a twinkling in his parents' eyes.
Home for the family, though, was Buffalo. Perhaps it wasn't the most romantic city in the United States, with more than its share of gritty reality, rather than the open dreams of the West, but it suited them. They were working people, even if Roberts's work was somewhat different from being on the line in a factory or pushing paper in an office.
David Boreanaz pushed his way into the world on May 16, 1971, born under the sign of Taurus, the bull. While Roberts was on the road, it was his wife Patti who stayed home with David and his two sisters, Beth and Bo. The three of them grew up with the idea of performing as a completely natural part of life; they saw it in their father every day--how could it be anything else but normal?
An entertainer's life was fine for a man with few ties or responsibilities. But with three kids, Dave Roberts needed something that was a little more secure, if he was going to provide well for his family. He wanted to be around more, to watch his children grow, to have something that seemed more stable. So when he applied for--and won--the job of weather forecaster on Philadelphia television station WPVI in Philadelphia, he was overjoyed. It meant a move, ofcourse, but that was fine. He'd have a job where he could be in front on the public, could entertain (he wasn't a meteorologist), and which was well paid. He'd be home every night. It was as if he'd been offered the perfect job.
Being a face on television meant that Roberts inevitably became something of a minor celebrity in Philadelphia. He was recognized on the street more than he'd ever been during his years as a traveling entertainer. A generous, outgoing man by nature, his attitude to the people who'd stop him had a deep effect on his son.
A lot of times when David was growing up he'd be out with his dad when fans would come up and say, "You're Dave Roberts!" His father acknowledged his fans enough to take the time to stop and talk to each one of those people, setting a solid example for David in later life.
Something else that David took from his father was performing. Although he probably couldn't really remember seeing him on stage often, somehow the idea was buried in him. Like his father, he wanted to perform.
That first came when David was four. With his own Rumplestiltskin Theater, he put on little plays at home for his family. Pictures of David back then show him with long, curly hair that was blond--the darker shade came in as he grew older.
A lot of kids put on plays for their families and friends; however, it doesn't necessarily mark them out as future actors. Besides, at four no one has a real sense of what they want to do with their lives. It's all play, as it should be, experimenting.
But not many kids find their vocation when they'reseven, either. David did. His moment of revelation came when his parents took him to see a revival of the musical The King and I, which saw the late Yul Brynner reprising his role as the King of Siam. It was a night that just hit him.
"I was in the third row, and I was just blown away by his performance," he remembers. "I just knew I wanted to be the king, I wanted to be an actor." Of course, there was a huge difference between a sevenyear-old's idea of an actor and reality. Some would perhaps have pursued the goal immediately, trying to get children's roles on television, to be in commercials, or things of that nature. It didn't happen that way for David. His parents had enough experience of the business to know they didn't want that for their son--at least, not when he was young. If he still wanted to act when he was older, when his ideas were real, they'd happily support him. For now, though, what they wanted was for their kids to have a normal childhood. And that included time in the country, most specifically at a farm, where David developed the great fear of his life--chickens.
"I think I developed that fear when I was a little kid because I used to chase them at a farm and torment them and they would torment me. I must have been three or four."
Well, maybe not perfectly normal. There was no public school for the Boreanaz children. Dave and Patti wanted their kids to have the best education, the best start in life, that they could manage, and that meant the more exclusive prep school route. And why not? It was a perfectly natural impulse.
The obvious choice for David was Malvern Prep, probably the best-known preparatory school in Philadelphia,and one with a national reputation. It was a place where David could have been involved in school drama productions, but instead he preferred to hide his light under a bushel--he was just another kid, albeit one who was quite big and strong.
Size meant, inevitably, football, and David did play on the team. And that, of course, meant that he was labeled as a jock. But, like any pigeonhole, he didn't fit neatly into a stereotype. Just because he wasn't acting himself didn't mean that his love of theater had vanished. Philadelphia wasn't far from New York, and David would often go with his parents to see stage productions.
"I was always around the theater in [New York]," he says. "It grew on me as I grew older."
With its uniform (including a tie) and code for hair length (David had no choice but to wear his short), Malvern's aim was to turn out good citizens who'd been well educated, and well prepared for college. It was a school where the boys participated in things; that was expected of them, the same way good grades were the norm, not the exception. Parents were paying for the best, and it was the school's job to deliver.
So David was a good kid. He studied hard, and played football until his junior year, when he was injured and had to quit. Every day he rubbed shoulders with the sons of Philadelphia's moneyed elite, the kids whose fathers were in business, politics, all sorts of things. The one common factor was that they were all successful, and most expected their children to be successful too. Straight teeth and good looks were common in the hallways. By the standards of most public schools, the place was a dream. There were very few disciplinary problems, the students all wanted toachieve, and there was a real sense of school spirit. But things like that were the reason people paid a lot of money for their kids to attend Malvern.
Like most teenagers, David both belonged and stood outside from the different cliques. Playing football gained him entry to the group of jocks, even after his injury stopped him playing. But his love of theater was something that set him apart from all that, something he kept hidden for a long time, in the way boys often submerge their softer side, for fear of ridicule. But he did learn one important lesson--"I found that it's okay to cry. I had a big problem with that and I always thought if you cried you were a sissy and you were pushed away and teased." But he managed to get past that, and realized later it was a good thing.
Most kids strive for the grail of coolness, of being admired by their peers. To this day, David isn't sure if he managed it, or if he really cared. One of his idols was the Fonz, Arthur Fonzarelli, the leather-jacket-wearing cool character on the sitcom Happy Days. Whether David managed the same level of cool in his own life, he doesn't know. The most important thing is that he was happy with himself.
What was it about the stage, about creating roles and characters, that intrigued him? It was hard to say. Maybe just the act of doing it, of creating this illusion. In many ways it was the creating that captivated him, as much as the acting, all the steps involved in a production. The technical side was every bit as fascinating as the artistic side.
There were plenty of subjects he could have considered study at college. He was a bright student, well grounded and well liked. He'd made good grades all the way through school, and scored high in hisSATs. While any possibility of a football scholarship had fallen by the wayside, the academic field was wide open to him. But if he was going to attend college, it seemed to him that it should be to study a subject that truly interested him; otherwise he'd simply be going through the motions, and there was no point in that. And so, in his senior year, he sent out ...
