The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(16)
Ahead of Clint’s birth, we had moved into a larger apartment directly across Cordova Street from our first one: the bottom half of a nice little two-unit house with a Spanish-tiled roof. Dad got the landlord to knock ten bucks off the monthly rent in exchange for maintaining the lawn. I doted on Baby Clint, holding him in my lap with a baby blanket draped over my dungarees to protect me in case his diaper leaked. Mom didn’t nurse, so I bottle-fed Clint his formula, which I considered a big-brother privilege.
There wasn’t much else I could yet do with my brother, but one benefit of his arrival was that I really got to know my grandparents for the first time, particularly Grandma Louise. She and I were the early risers in the house, me in my pajamas, Grandma in her housecoat, with her thin, wispy hair showing because she hadn’t yet put on her wig. The Speegle side of the family was always sort of physically falling apart. They were fun and high-spirited people, but they made no effort to look after themselves. My grandparents and mother all smoked heavily. Butch was an alcoholic, albeit, thankfully, a nonaggressive one. As for Mom, she already had a mouthful of false teeth by the time that Clint and I came along.
In the kitchen, Grandma Louise would put the coffee on and tell me stories of growing up in Oklahoma in the olden days. The first automobile in Duncan, she said, was owned by a Cherokee chief who had struck it rich when oil was discovered beneath his land. He often rode into town with seven or eight men hanging from his car.
Louise had light-blond hair as a small child. One day, when she was four, the Cherokees, fascinated by her coloring, just scooped her up and drove her back to the reservation. She felt no fear, she told me, and actually had a good time playing with the Cherokee kids. But the townspeople of Duncan were alarmed, and the men formed a posse, riding out to the reservation on horseback with their rifles and shotguns, ready for a confrontation. Fortunately, the matter was resolved peacefully—the Cherokee chief explained that they meant no harm, and my grandmother was reunited with her family.
MY FATHER, BEING both thrifty and handy, decided to build a play mat for Clint—today they’re called baby gyms—rather than buy one from the store. He sanded down a big wooden board and attached fun things to it: a steering wheel, a light switch, various knobs . . . all the good stuff that will keep a baby occupied and out of trouble.
I so admired Dad’s handiwork that I ended up using the play mat as much as Clint did. Clint was physically precocious, more so than I had been, and was walking not long after his first birthday. One day I was deep in concentration, fidgeting with the switches and knobs on the board, when I felt a warm stream of liquid hitting my arm. I turned around and Clint stood there in a T-shirt but no diaper, arms straight out, pelvis thrust forward, peeing on me. Catching my eye, he threw his head back and laughed an evil little laugh, saying, “Heee hee-hee hee-hee heeee!”
I was furious. I went to Dad and reported Clint’s misdeed, pleading, “You should spank him!” Spanking happened in our house. Nothing bad, just three quick swats of the butt, whack, whack, whack. The spankings stung me emotionally more than physically, and they always scared me straight. But Dad said it would be wrong to spank Clint. “When I give you a spanking, I know that you understand what you did,” he said. “Clint is too young to understand. He doesn’t know. So he won’t get spanked. I’m sorry that he peed on you. Now go get yourself washed up.”
By the time I took a bath and returned to the living room, my mood had changed. Clint, with his squinty eyes and teeth coming in unevenly, was still doing that laugh—“Heee hee-hee hee-hee heeee!”—and, I had to admit, the sight of him was pretty hilarious. I cracked up and thereafter started calling Clint the Hee-Hee Man. It’s been one of my nicknames for him ever since.
CLINT
The Hee-Hee Man incident, of which I have no memory, is so representative of who we were and still are: Ron, the kid always on the straight and narrow, and me, the mischievous little guy toting the squirt gun, forever trying to see what he can get away with.
The five-year difference between us meant that I benefited from Ron’s experience and even-keeled nature, while Ron enjoyed the go-for-broke spirit with which I embraced life. Later on, when he first attempted to make short films with an 8 mm camera, he cast me as his leading man, knowing that I was willing to do and try anything.
Ron and I were never in competition, as siblings so often are. I looked up to him. Coming along second gave me a great vantage point from which to watch and learn. I observed and took mental notes as Ron navigated tricky waters as a juvenile actor, a schoolboy, and as a child of Rance and Jean Howard, who were way more protective of him than they were of me. A classic second-child scenario.
In personality I was more like Mom, who had the gift of gab; she could make friends in an elevator in two floors. But I worshipped my dad. He was my teacher, my guide, and my moral compass. In fact, my first clear memory of him is one of those classic Rance Howard teachable moments. I observed as he took apart an old shed with a crowbar. All was going well until he reared back too fast with the crowbar and the damned thing struck him right in the kisser.
Suddenly, blood was streaming out of his mouth, along with a string of words I had never heard before: “Shit! Fuck! Goddamn!” And who could blame him? He was an actor who had just messed up his face. But then he remembered that his toddler son was sitting right there on the grass, witnessing his cuss-fest. Dad checked himself. Wiping his mouth with a rag, he calmly explained what each of these words meant, and, correspondingly, why I should never, ever say them.