The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(10)

But late that night, Mom’s doctor came out to the waiting room and struggled to find his words. Finally, he put his hand on Dad’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t get that boy of yours to breathe.”

Dad’s first impulse was to ask after Mom. She was fine, the doctor said. When Dad reached her room, she burst into tears at the sight of him. She already knew.

Mom blamed herself. Dad told her that nothing was her fault. Mom vowed to have another baby as soon as possible.

An autopsy revealed that the baby, who they named Mark Allan Howard, had a congenital heart defect and would not have lived long even if he had been delivered alive. Dad arranged to have him buried in the Speegle family plot in Duncan. Mom didn’t want to see the body, but Dad did. “He was perfect in every way,” Dad told me. He looked just like his father-in-law, Butch Speegle.

January 31 also happened to be Mom’s birthday. Forever after, she never much enjoyed it. Ron and I didn’t know why when we were kids, though. Our folks rarely discussed Mark with us. He was simply too painful a subject for them. Not until we were adults—after Mom had died, in fact—did Dad tell us the complete version of what happened.

Dad said that not dwelling on the stillbirth was their mechanism for coping with grief. “The future was ahead of us, and that was what we focused on,” he said. My parents did not attend Mark’s burial, but my Speegle grandparents did. He is still buried in the Speegle family plot, with a marker that reads BABY HOWARD.





RON


Mom was serious about her vow. At the beginning of summer, she learned she was pregnant again.

This time, she would do things differently. She would get prenatal checkups from the doctor in Champaign, but when the birth date approached, she would move temporarily to Duncan to give birth in the town’s Lindley Hospital, where she herself was born. This guaranteed her the support system of her family, and that she would be tended to by the same ob-gyn doctor who had delivered her and her sister.

In January 1954, Dad drove Mom to Chicago, where she caught a flight to Oklahoma City. Her father picked her up at the airport. Over the next few weeks, in the bitter cold of that winter, Dad spent many lonely, nervous days at the Chanute Service Club. He was, naturally, worried about going through heartbreak all over again. Meanwhile, his programs for the airmen—plays, concerts, and revues—had a new competitor in the television set that the club had just purchased. This didn’t bug him as much as the fact that he recognized some of his New York friends on TV. He could see that a new frontier in entertainment had developed in his absence, and he was missing out. Still, as he wrote in a letter to Mom, it was better than being in a foxhole in Korea.

One day in late February, a runner from my father’s battalion delivered an urgent message: he had been granted emergency leave, effective immediately, because his wife was being prepped for a Cesarean section. Though she had long ago recovered from her accident in New York, her pelvis was still sufficiently damaged, the doctor determined, to make dilation difficult for her.

Driving like a maniac in the Jeepster, Dad blasted through southern Illinois and Missouri to the brand-new Turner Turnpike in Oklahoma, which delivered him safely to his bride. Expecting to find a woman wailing in pain and/or hooked up to tubes and wires in the OR, he instead found Mom propped up in a regular hospital bed with a cigarette and a Coke, calmly watching TV. (Hey, it was the 1950s.)

The C-section, Mom matter-of-factly explained to Dad, allowed her to choose the date of delivery based on her doctor’s availability and other factors. She had chosen the first day of March. My father’s nerves settled and they fell into a discussion about names. They decided that the baby would be named Tammy if she was a girl and Ronald William if he was a boy. Ronald was simply a good, solid name. William was for Mom’s father, better known by his nickname, Butch, because he was . . . a butcher.

On March 1, 1954, Butch and Grandma Louise accompanied Dad to the hospital. My Speegle grandparents, never the most health-conscious of people, chain-smoked furiously. Dad, blessedly, did not smoke. Soon enough, Butch made his excuses and begged off, citing urgent butcher-shop business. Louise and Dad stationed themselves in the observation window, where they watched as Mom, knocked out by anesthesia, had a red antiseptic liquid brushed on her exposed belly. As soon as the doctor’s scalpel broke through skin, Louise, too, was out of there.

Dad watched the remainder of the procedure by himself. At 9:03 A.M., the doctor removed the baby from Mom’s womb and handed “the little fella,” as Dad fondly described me when he told this story, to a nurse. The first thing I did was squirt a stream of pee right at the nurse as she held me upside down.

Ronald William Howard had made his entrance, hair the color of carrots, yowling but healthy and content.


MY PARENTS SENT out a birth announcement for me in the form of a theater program. The “show,” entitled Life Begins at 9:03 A.M., took place at the “theater” of Lindley Hospital. I was billed as Leading Man, Mom as Patient Mother, and Dad as Distracted Father. The production notes included a warning: “In the first scene, the star appears in the nude, creating quite a sensation.”

I spent the first five weeks of my life in Duncan with my mother and her family. Dad, back to work on the Chanute base, spent all his off-duty time scrubbing the floors spotless and scouring the walls and ceilings of the little bungalow in Rantoul. In that part of Illinois, everyone heated their homes with coal, consequently coating every surface with a thin layer of soot. His friends offered to help with the cleaning, but Dad wouldn’t allow it. This effort was a personal tribute to his wife and newborn.