The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(11)

I remember nothing of that bungalow. We lived there for all of five months before Dad transferred to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. Shortly before the move, my parents adopted a russet-haired spaniel-mix puppy they named Gulliver. My very first memory is of sitting under the kitchen table with Gulliver in our apartment in Biloxi, when I was two years old. I had discovered some chewing gum under a table and put it in my mouth. Neither of my parents chewed gum and the table was a holdover from the family that had previously occupied our crappy air force housing. On many levels, this was not a wise move.

Worse still, I took the gum out of my mouth and fed it to Gulliver, who eagerly gobbled it up . . . and then started retching, puking all over the floor. The memory ends with my dad marching into our apartment in his uniform and getting very angry. He reminded me that we’d had this discussion before—I shouldn’t give the dog gum under any circumstances. I guess I was a repeat offender. Dad rarely flashed anger, then or at any other time of his life. Maybe that’s why the scene remains so vivid to me.

Another early memory: watching a C-grade western called Frontier Woman at a drive-in, also when I was two. A year earlier, Dad had somehow hustled a plum role as the movie’s heavy even though he was still in the air force. He actually went AWOL for a week to shoot it! (And luckily faced no repercussions.) Mom and I accompanied him to a patch of countryside near Meridian, Mississippi, where the producers had constructed a convincing replica of a rustic Old West village.

Since the film was an all-hands-on-deck kind of operation, Mom duly dressed up in a period costume and joined the cast as a villager. I became this villager woman’s baby. The script happened to call for a scene in which a blowhard politician’s speech is comically interrupted by a baby’s cry, so my role expanded! The problem? I was too good-natured to cry on cue. Mom had befriended some of the teenage Choctaw Indians from the Pearl River Reservation who participated in the shoot. These boys were fascinated by the red-haired baby in their midst and enjoyed engaging me, pulling funny faces and tickling me. One of them handed me his miniature tomahawk. But when he tried to take it back, I became upset and cried out. Aha! Problem solved.

The timing needed to be perfect, but when the director shouted “Action!,” the politicians’ debate ensued, and, at just the right moment, the Choctaw boy, off-screen, yanked the tomahawk out of my hand. On cue, I let out a cry that echoed through the hills. Frontier Woman is technically my first film, though it was an uncredited walk-on. Or crawl-on, if you like. I’m told that I got the laugh.

Dad industriously mounted show after show at the base’s theater, Keesler Playhouse, in the process honing his directing chops—skills that would prove useful to him both in his own career and in overseeing mine and Clint’s. He directed and starred in productions of William Saroyan’s Time of Your Life, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s George Washington Slept Here, and Sam and Bella Spewack’s My Three Angels. My mom temporarily came out of retirement again to take the female lead in many of these plays. She brought me to rehearsals in a portable canvas bassinet. By osmosis, I was already soaking up the vibes of show business.


YET I TRULY did not seem destined for the business until two years later, when my parents recognized how much fun I had in filming The Journey, and how adept I proved as a juvenile actor. Why not see if I was up for more? In the summer of ’58, when we moved to California from New York, Mom typed up a résumé for me and glued onto it a black-and-white two-by-four photo of my smiling, freckled face: my first headshot. In L.A., I became a client of the same agency that represented Dad.

Our cross-country journey took four days, pretty quick for back then. Dad had traded in the Jeepster for a hardtop Plymouth Cranbrook, a big, bulbous four-door sedan shaped like an inverted bathtub. Its roomy back seat—which, this being the ’50s, had no seat belts—was mine to stretch out on.

As we drove west, eventually hooking up with the famous Route 66, I sensed an urgency in my parents to get there, to begin life anew in California as soon as possible. So it wasn’t much of a sightseeing trip.

We did stop in Duncan to call on Mom’s family. Mom was born there in 1927, when Duncan was known as “the buckle on the Oil Belt.” The Speegles, of German descent, were reasonably well-to-do. They owned the town’s grocery store and meat market, as well as the mineral rights to a few oil fields. The brains of their business operations belonged not to our Granddad Butch, a bumbling, affable man who drank too much, but to his sister, our aunt Julia.

I met Julia for the first time during our brief stay in Duncan. She was a trip: an exuberant, charismatic woman who wore oversized cat-eye glasses and treated her voluminous white hair with a blue rinse, pinning it up high like Marge Simpson’s. Julia owned and ran the Wade Hotel and Café in Duncan, a handsome three-story redbrick building on the main drag, and populated the lobby level with what she described as the world’s largest collection of dog figurines. Every available surface was covered with little dogs, be they ceramic, wooden, or metal. When you entered the hotel, you were greeted by Julia’s collection of talking mynah birds, one of whom said “Take off like a jet!” The birds also sometimes swore. If they got too raunchy in front of kids like me, Julia silenced them by throwing a drop cloth over their cage.

We made only two touristy stops on the trip. The first was to stop in Arizona to see the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest National Park. At the former, I picked up a little vial of colored sand as a souvenir, and at the latter, a chunk of petrified wood. The second was Las Vegas for a night, so Mom and Dad could see the famous Strip in all its gaudy glory.