The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(12)

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CLINT

For the record: given that this cross-country trip took place in midsummer and I was born the following April, the prevailing family belief is that I was conceived in Las Vegas. This is one of those rare occasions in which what happened in Vegas did not stay in Vegas.

RON

It’s something I prefer not to think about, since I am absolutely certain that I shared the hotel room with Mom and Dad.



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The Howard Family Road Trip came to a close when, in August 1958, we pulled into our new hometown: Burbank, California. Dad had first glimpsed the town nearly a decade earlier when the touring production of Mister Roberts rolled into Los Angeles. Dad’s roommate on the road was an actor named Lee Van Cleef, who had a small part as a military policeman. One night in L.A., the great producer and director Stanley Kramer caught Mister Roberts and was struck by Van Cleef’s elongated face and dark, villainous looks. He asked Lee, my dad’s best friend in the company, to audition for his next picture: the western High Noon, starring Gary Cooper. “Do you know how to ride a horse?” Kramer said. Lee didn’t miss a beat. “Of course I do!” he said. An audition date was set.

The problem was that Lee had lied. He was from New Jersey and had never been on a horse in his life. Dad swooped in to the rescue. He was a genuine horseman and outdoorsman, the eldest of Engle and Ethel Beckenholdt’s three children, born on November 17, 1928. His folks raised hogs, cattle, and wheat, adeptly navigating the Depression by buying, improving, and flipping farms along the Kansas-Oklahoma border, each farm nicer and bigger than the last.

From the age of five, Dad carried out his daily chores: mending fences, feeding the hogs, setting traps for possums and raccoons. He was also entrepreneurial, skinning the critters he caught and selling their pelts at market for twenty-five cents apiece. As he grew older, Dad became an expert rider who rounded up his family’s cattle at day’s end. So he was particularly qualified to help out Lee.

But where could they rent a couple of horses, pronto? Some asking around revealed the answer: the stables adjoining Griffith Park in Burbank. So off they went, with Dad giving Lee a crash course in riding. Lee got the part in High Noon, and thereafter enjoyed a fruitful career, first as a Hollywood hood, and later, after he grew a mustache and crossed the radar of Sergio Leone, as a star of spaghetti westerns. As for Dad, he took a look at Burbank and decided he liked the place. It felt like his kind of town.

Before we arrived, Dad secured a lease on a two-bedroom rental in a small apartment building on Cordova Street. When we arrived, I couldn’t believe my eyes—this place was nothing like our gray, wintry block in Queens or the endlessly flat plains that surrounded Duncan. The sky was a cloudless blue, and there were palm trees everywhere. The Verdugo Mountains rose to the north and the Hollywood Hills to the south. Just a few blocks west of us was one of the first Bob’s Big Boy hamburger restaurants, complete with carhops on roller skates, and the very first International House of Pancakes, which was only a few months old. When I looked south, I saw something even more exciting: a big water tower with the Warner Bros. logo on it—the same logo that appeared with a “Boinggg!” at the beginning of the Bugs Bunny cartoons I watched compulsively.

The residential streets were chockablock with newly built ranch houses: middle-class realizations of the American dream, occupied by families whose dads might have worked in the entertainment business but just as likely were cops, teachers, salesmen, or engineers for one of the town’s largest employers, the Lockheed Aircraft Company.

As visually stimulating as my new hometown was, it did not feel glitzy. Burbank sits due north of Hollywood, but it wasn’t, and still isn’t, particularly Hollywood, or Beverly Hills or Bel Air for that matter. Picture the tidy suburban neighborhoods of such 1950s sitcoms as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Our block was like that, only the houses were much smaller and the yards weren’t big enough to warrant picket fences. Everyone’s kids ran together in a swarm, commandeering the sidewalks and front yards to play football, running bases, and army. It was the perfect place to start the school-going years of this boy’s life.


DAD HAD A good look for the type of TV that was popular in the late ’50s: westerns, military dramas, cop shows. Lean and handsome, he could credibly play a principled sheriff or, with a bit of stubble, a menacing heel. In our first couple of years in California, he scared up some decent roles on such programs as Bat Masterson, Zane Grey Theatre, and Death Valley Days.

His natural ease in rural and western programs was ironic given how motivated he was never to work on a real ranch or farm. Dad’s breaking point had come at age sixteen, when, on a hot summer day, he mouthed off to his father, complaining that doing farm chores was a waste of his valuable time. Granddad Beckenholdt pulled off his hat in the heat. Fixing his son with a withering look, he said—this is Dad’s exact quote—“Feller, you better goddamn find something you like to do and do it. Because you ain’t never going to make a farmer.” Grandma Ethel was a little more tolerant of Dad’s aspirations to act and brokered a solution to Dad’s wanderlust: applying to the drama program at the University of Oklahoma.




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CLINT

Granddad Beckenholdt—which is what we called him—was a tall, thickly built man of few words. When he did speak, it was with an Oklahoma twang. He was born in a log cabin with a dirt floor on a farm by the Arkansas River. Through sheer hard work, he lifted himself out of poverty. He intimidated the hell out of Ron and me. Even when he was getting on in years and had acquired a gut, he exuded physical strength. He wasn’t going to beat you in a footrace, but the man was a tank.