The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(15)
They shot The Music Man in Technicolor. To get that rich, saturated look in the early ’60s, they had to blast the set with bright light, on average about 250 foot-candles’ worth. A foot-candle is an antique unit of illumination that gets its name from the theater, where, in the days before electricity, actual candles were used as footlights. You don’t even hear about foot-candles anymore in the moviemaking business, but even for the era, 250 was a high number. A decade later, when I shot American Graffiti with George Lucas, which takes place mostly at night, George made waves by shooting at only eight foot-candles, and even four in some shots.
When we did close-ups in The Music Man, the lighting went from 250 to a ridiculous 500 foot-candles. That’s actually how I knew when I was on my mark: when I could feel an abrupt temperature shift from hot to unbearably hot. If you look at any close-up in The Music Man in high definition, you can actually see the sweat beading above the actors’ lips.
YOU KNOW WHO barely broke a sweat? Me. In those early days, performing came pretty easily to me. So much of the work seemed like play. They used me a lot on the sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a show that I enjoyed watching at home, even though its high school plot lines were mostly lost on me. My little-boy character was always returning pop bottles to Dobie’s father’s grocery store for a five-cent deposit, an action that—and man, this blew my mind—you could actually carry out in real life! Thanks to Dobie Gillis, I became serious about collecting and returning bottles for a while. I stashed my booty of nickels in an old cigar box from Aunt Julia’s hotel, which I had covered with stickers from our travels to Venice, Paris, and London after The Journey.
Beyond that, it was simply cool to be in the presence of Dwayne Hickman and Bob Denver, who played, respectively, Dobie and his beatnik sidekick, Maynard G. Krebs. (Bob later starred as Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island.) I was a genuine fan of theirs, and the vibe on that set was upbeat. When Dad got a call for me to be on that show, I went happily.
Dennis the Menace was different. My job, as a member of Dennis’s troop of pals, was not demanding. But I was bummed on behalf of Jay North, who played Dennis. He was three years older than me, a seasoned vet in my eyes, but I could tell that he was tired. They really ran him ragged. I came to recognize, when I got The Andy Griffith Show, that it was lucky for me that Opie was a supporting character. He had some choice scenes in most of the episodes, but he never had to carry the show.
Jay did. He couldn’t hang with us between scenes. That was the big thing. For me, it was always a breeze to shoot an episode of TV with other kids involved, whether it was Dennis the Menace or Andy Griffith, because you could talk and play with them when you weren’t shooting. Poor Jay had to sit by himself under one of those 1950s “beehive” bonnet hair dryers that you saw in ladies’ salons, forbidden from moving, all for his trademark hairdo.
Jay needed to have the same pointy cowlick on the back of his head that the cartoon Dennis wore in the Hank Ketcham comic strip. A weird-looking thing, Jay’s cowlick was, like the stem of a pumpkin made out of blond hair. Whenever the director yelled “Cut!” and we went on break, a small team of people surrounded Jay, spritzing the cowlick with hair spray and covering it up in a wire-mesh net—cowlick scaffolding, basically—before sitting him under the dryer. While the rest of us kids were making paper airplanes and holding contests to see whose would fly the farthest, Jay was stuck in his chair, immobile in the service of this stupid hairstyle.
A couple of years later, when I worked on Andy Griffith, I watched Dennis the Menace with my father and we both noticed that they had done away with Dennis’s cowlick. I felt relieved for Jay. Dad and I sat there, commenting, like the pair of industry professionals that we were, about the producers’ choice.
“Dad, they’re not doing the hair thing to Jay anymore.”
“No, I think it was too hard, too much of a nuisance. Good decision.”
“Yeah, good move, losing the cowlick.”
IT WASN’T LONG before we had a third Howard dude in the house, pitching in his two cents. I awoke the morning of April 20, 1959, to discover my maternal grandparents, Butch and Louise, in our apartment. They traveled west to help out with the childcare while Mom and Dad acclimated to a two-child household. Later that day, the phone rang and Grandma, still holding the receiver in her hand, announced, “You’ve got a brother, and his name is Clint.”
It felt like Christmas morning—my protégé, comrade, and future playmate had arrived!
My mother needed some time to recuperate at Saint Joseph Hospital in Burbank, so I did not meet Clinton Engle Howard, to use his full name, until a few days after his birth, when Mom was discharged. I had an audition for one of the CBS shows that day, so my father drove me straight from Television City to the hospital, where we collected Mom and Clint in the Plymouth Cranbrook and brought them home. With no children’s car seats back then, Clint rode home cradled in my grandmother’s arms in the back seat. I sat next to her, looking on in awe at this little blond-haired baby. Like Mark, the brother I sadly never knew, Clint had the same circular face and high forehead as our granddad Butch.
The birth announcement my parents sent out for Clint a couple of weeks later included a little drawing of a blond baby in a safety-pinned diaper and boxing gloves, with the words, “We’ve got a new lightweight champ—HE’S A KNOCKOUT!”