The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(18)

The Mr. O’Malley pilot got its shot at winning over America when it aired one evening on General Electric Theater, yet another popular anthology TV series of the era. The program’s host was a former movie star who was now in a career doldrum, reduced to being a television presenter. Give the guy credit, though: he liked what he saw in me. At the broadcast’s conclusion, Ronald Reagan ad-libbed the line “And special thanks to little Ronny Howard, who did a wonderful job as Barnaby.”

My performance also caught the eye of a major TV producer named Sheldon Leonard, the cocreator of the long-running hit sitcom The Danny Thomas Show. Leonard’s great gift was tailoring a TV show to a specific actor’s skill set. For Thomas, a successful nightclub comedian, he created a series in which Thomas played a family man who was also . . . a successful nightclub comedian. Leonard also helped Carl Reiner mold The Dick Van Dyke Show so that it played to Van Dyke’s strengths as an expressive actor with an elastic face and physical-comedy chops.

When Leonard saw me play Barnaby, he was building yet another program around a seasoned actor-comedian: in this case, a folksy guy from North Carolina named Andy Griffith.





5


Introducing Opie


CLINT


My parents used to sit face-to-face at the kitchen table like it was a partner’s desk, each of them pecking away at a manual typewriter, Mom on a big Olympia, Dad on an old, banged-up portable. In the days before copying machines and printers, everything had to be done manually, including addressing and stamping business envelopes. Lots of big companies contracted out this task to freelancers, paying a penny an envelope. It was tedious work, but Mom and Dad needed the cash. So this was a regular sight for me, the two of them with their heads down, making a mechanical racket.

This was an echo of their New York years, before Ron and I were born. Mom was a professional-grade typist, and when she gave up acting and took the job at CBS, she channeled her competitiveness into the typing pool. Every script for every CBS entertainment show had to be hand-typed. So if, say, The Jack Benny Program or Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts was about to be on TV, Mom was on it, her fingers flying across those keys.

But in our house in Burbank, the typing was an occasionally necessary source of additional income. Ron and I were disabused at an early age of any notion that acting is a glamorous profession. We understood that Dad was an actor, and we also understood that he and we did not have it easy. Mind you, Ron and I never wanted for anything. There was food on the table and there were toys all over the floor. But we saw Dad endure his share of dry spells and tense times, and, pretty early, we recognized what was going on.

A strict Howard-family policy was that one adult or the other had to be present in the house between 9 A.M. and 6 P.M. every weekday, without fail, in case the phone rang. A phone call could mean an audition or a job offer. A missed call could be the opportunity, squandered. And my thrifty parents didn’t want to waste money on an answering service whose reliability they wouldn’t trust anyway. So certain days felt like vigils, with Dad puttering around, doing his chores, but clearly waiting, waiting, waiting for the phone to ring.





RON


It was a big deal when the phone rang one day just before Christmas in 1959. Dad picked up the receiver to hear my agent, Bill Schuller, tell him that a Mr. Sheldon Leonard wanted to see me. This wasn’t about a one-day job in yet another stock-serious Playhouse 90 episode in which I played “the boy” and got killed off. No, Sheldon Leonard was developing a TV series.

Unbeknownst to me, Leonard had called Bill the day after the G.E. Theater broadcast to say he wanted to put a “hold” on me for the Griffith show he was developing, essentially guaranteeing me the role of Griffith’s son if the show was picked up. Bill explained that I was committed to Mr. O’Malley.

Leonard was unfazed. “I don’t think O’Malley is gonna go,” he said. “I’d like to put a second position on the kid.” With my father’s consent, Bill obliged the producer’s request—if Mr. O’Malley wasn’t picked up as a series, Leonard had dibs on me for his new show.

Mr. O’Malley did not go. It was too weird and whimsical, probably, for 1959 America. But what if it had? It’s one of the big what-ifs that still plays out in my brain. Suppose I had signed a long-term contract for Mr. O’Malley. It would have meant that people would have called out “Hey, Barnaby!” instead of “Hey, Opie!”

Dad and I met Mr. Leonard in his Hollywood office. A suave, dapper man who had been a busy character actor in his younger years, he had worked with the likes of Joe Mankiewicz and Frank Capra. Remember Nick the bartender in It’s a Wonderful Life, who is a kind man in Bedford Falls and a disagreeable lout in Pottersville? That was Sheldon.

I knew nothing about Andy Griffith at that point and Dad knew next to nothing. Sheldon filled us in. Andy, a tall, commanding native North Carolinian from a working-class background, had broken into show business as a comic monologist. In one of his routines, “What It Was, Was Football,” he played a rural preacher who happened upon a clearing where a football game was being played. Ignorant of the sport, he described the scene with bewilderment, as a bizarre fight between two groups of men over a “pumpkin,” with a team of “convicts” (the refs) supervising the proceedings.

The football monologue catapulted Andy into a career in radio and on Broadway. In 1957, he got his shot at film stardom, debuting in Elia Kazan’s astonishing A Face in the Crowd, written by Budd Schulberg. The movie, a dark, prescient take on American politics and mass media, is more appreciated now than it was at the time of its release. But even then, critics were mesmerized by Andy’s fiery performance as Lonesome Rhodes, a small-time radio host who, as his popularity snowballs, transforms into a lusty, egomaniacal demagogue.