The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(17)
As Ron mentioned, I also took after Butch. I was his spitting image, though I didn’t get to know him. He died only a year after I was born, at the too-young age of fifty-six. His drinking, smoking, and insistence that all foods must necessarily be deep-fried and smothered with gravy caught up with him fast.
When my Speegle grandparents came out to help when I was born, Dad and Butch drove to the supermarket for groceries. Butch was on his best behavior, under orders from Louise not to drink in the Howard house. But when they reached the grocery store, Butch asked Dad to buy him a pint flask of vodka. Dad obliged. “And it was the damnedest thing,” Dad told me. “He opened the flask right there in the parking lot and drank it down in three swigs.”
It turns out that I had more in common with Butch than just looks.
RON
With two little mouths to feed, Dad couldn’t afford to get complacent about his craft. He took an acting workshop with a man named Sherman Marks, who also happened to be a television director. While Mom looked after Clint, Dad invited me to tag along and observe.
Evidently, Sherman Marks was also observing me. When he got a job in 1959 to direct a pilot for an NBC comedy series, he asked for Dad’s permission to have me audition for it.
Mr. O’Malley was based on a 1940s comic strip called Barnaby by Crockett Johnson, creator of Harold and the Purple Crayon. Barnaby was a five-year-old boy who, in a subversive inversion of traditional children’s stories, had not a fairy godmother but a fairy godfather. This fairy godfather, Mr. O’Malley, was a cantankerous little man who wore a porkpie hat, smoked cigars, and was borne aloft, just barely, by a set of four dinky little wings: a little bit like Clarence the Angel in It’s a Wonderful Life, but more gruff. Barnaby was the only person who could actually see and speak with Mr. O’Malley, whose alleged existence exasperated Barnaby’s parents. They took their son to a series of child psychologists to dissuade him of his delusions.
I passed the audition and got the role as Barnaby. On paper, it sounds like a difficult concept for a five-year-old actor to grasp: a boy with an imaginary friend and parents who disbelieve him. But Dad broke things down for me, walking me through the character’s logic. With Gig Young in The Twilight Zone, I didn’t understand that I was participating in a parable about a hardened city slicker who has lost touch with his hometown values. Dad just said, “You have no idea what this man is talking about, and you think he’s crazy.” That was all I needed to know. In Mr. O’Malley, Dad said, Barnaby believes Mr. O’Malley is real and should be treated as such. When his parents say there’s no such thing as a fairy godfather—well, Barnaby’s parents are just wrong.
I didn’t think of the Mr. O’Malley job as any kind of big deal until I learned that the actor playing Mr. O’Malley was the man who played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz: Bert Lahr. That was a big whoa. In person, Lahr was simultaneously bigger than life and kind of a disappointment. He had a huge, bulbous nose and a commanding presence, but no particular affinity for his costar, me. He wasn’t rude, just trans-actional, exuding no warmth. And he seemed impossibly old, though I just looked up the dates, and guess what? He was slightly younger than I am now.
Once again, I was working opposite a profuse perspirer—Bert Lahr sweated like a faucet was on. His sweat smelled like the cigarettes that he chain-smoked. Curiously enough, he couldn’t stand cigars, so the prop department rigged up a fake cigar that could fit a cigarette inside it for Mr. O’Malley. God, the secondhand smoke that I inhaled as a kid! Between Lahr, my mom, my grandparents, and the Andy Griffith cast and crew, it’s a wonder that I don’t have severe lung issues.
What made up for the Cowardly Lion’s indifference was O’Malley’s invisible sidekick, a leprechaun named McSnoyd, played by Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Bird, Foghorn Leghorn, and Elmer Fudd. When Dad told me who the balding man with the mustache was, I zoomed up to him, eager to shake his hand. Blanc was clearly used to awestruck kids like me and obligingly performed a highlight reel of his characters, saliva flying everywhere as I delighted in his repertoire.
And to Lahr’s credit, he was amazing once the cameras were rolling. He provided my first exposure to an entertainer for whom the command “Action!” is like the flick of a switch. He rose to the occasion and transformed into the character, bringing a completely different energy to his performance than he did to his off-camera interactions with the cast and crew.
Mr. O’Malley was good television and I felt like I was a part of something special. Right before my eyes was a sight that I, at least, found entertaining and hilarious: Lahr floating into the frame with little pink wings on his back and Blanc off to the side, bringing his voice wizardry to the leprechaun character.
What I didn’t yet understand was the relationship between the scenes that we were shooting beneath those hot lights and a living, breathing audience of viewers. I made no connection between my own passionate viewing of Superman, The Lone Ranger, Popeye, the Heckle and Jeckle cartoons, and Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts and the work that I was doing. As for prime time, it was past my bedtime—I didn’t see myself on TV until The Andy Griffith Show, which my parents occasionally allowed me to stay up to watch on Monday nights. I was not aware that the camera was a portal, and that people outside the studio were actually watching my performances, until I started hearing shouts of “Hey, Opie!” when I walked down the street.