The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(21)

In his humble opinion, Dad told Andy, Opie was coming off as too much of a smart-ass. Andy asked Dad what he meant. Dad explained that Opie was written as a stock sitcom kid, the little wiseacre who comes off as smarter than his father—a lot like Rusty Williams, who, as played by the child actor Rusty Hamer, continually gave Danny Williams grief on The Danny Thomas Show. Dad believed that The Andy Griffith Show could try something different that might work better.

“Ronny can get laughs doing those kinds of lines, I get it,” Dad told Andy. “But wouldn’t it be more interesting and unusual if Opie actually respected his father? You could still mine a lot of humor out of that situation—just a different type.”

Now, Andy could very well have told Dad, a much less successful actor who was only present in his capacity as the father of some kid who had never before done a TV series, to take his suggestions and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine. But Andy liked Dad. They had a lot in common. Dad considered himself more midwestern than southern, but the two of them bonded over their shared experience as country boys who came to Hollywood from the sticks. They had left their hometowns behind but were keen to counter the coastal presumption that, to borrow a phrase from Annie Get Your Gun, folks are dumb where they come from. They were both, to use Mom’s term, sophisticated hicks.

Andy’s simpatico relationship with my father was one of those quirks of fate that made my mother declare, with some frequency during my childhood, that I was born with a four-leaf clover behind my ear. Every time something didn’t break my way, she said, a superior opportunity presented itself. My parents had really been crossing their fingers in the hope that Mr. O’Malley would go as a series. It would have been prestigious, their son being on a TV show with the legendary Bert Lahr. But Andy Griffith proved a far better fit.

It wasn’t until 1986, when I was thirty-two years old and already well into my directing career, that I learned of that pivotal discussion between Andy and my father about Opie. And I heard about it not from Dad but from Andy, with whom I had reunited for what remains, to date, my last proper on-screen acting job, in the TV film Return to Mayberry.

Andy and I were preparing to film a scene in which Andy Taylor drives the now adult Opie and his about-to-burst pregnant wife to the hospital. We sat in a real car, with Andy pretending to drive, while it was towed by another vehicle mounted with multiple cameras, to capture our dialogue from various angles. This setup isolated us from the crew for hours and lent itself to deep conversation, since Andy and I had only each other for company as the director called for take after take. We had plenty to catch up on. I had established myself as a director (and even grown a mustache!), while Andy, now white-haired, was beginning work on his long-running legal series Matlock. It came as a great relief to find that my childhood perception of Andy was not romanticized; he was as wonderful and bighearted as I recalled him being in the 1960s.

In the course of our chat in the car, Andy told me the story of Dad’s request in September 1960 for a little tête-à-tête, and how spot-on my father’s ideas had been. After their talk, Andy said, he directed his writers to model the Andy-Opie relationship more on the Rance-Ronny one. I was flabbergasted to learn about this conversation; Dad had never breathed a word of it to me.

But I was also moved—more than moved. This was a key moment in my life, revealed to me years after the fact: in the distant past of my early childhood, when they still barely knew each other, the two men who effectively charted my future had held this conversation, and they had come to a mutual understanding derived from mutual respect. Out of this talk came a crucial creative decision that helped chart the course of a tremendously successful, era-defining show. I realized anew, from an adult perspective, how artistically open and generous Andy was and how wise and shrewd Rance Howard was.

From where I sit now, Andy’s story cheers me because it validated Dad as a creative person. It didn’t occur to me as a kid how profoundly he and Mom reordered their lives on my behalf. Being the overseer and coach of a child actor was not Dad’s Plan A when he and Mom upped stakes from New York to move to California. It wasn’t even his Plan B, because the very notion of me having a career, as opposed to the occasional job, was not something that he expected to happen.

But Dad had this magnificent ability to roll with the punches, to not let career disappointments or unforeseen life circumstances bring him down. Since, as I mentioned, Dad always considered himself more midwestern than southern, I call this his midwestern Zen. There was something very heartland about it, the nonchalant way he just put his head down and carried on. Somewhere around the time that I got The Andy Griffith Show, he made a choice. His own passion for acting had, in a serpentine way, led to this moment—for me. He did not balk. In fact, I think he recognized that he would never have forgiven himself if he had stood in my way for his own careerist and/or egotistical reasons.

He chose to be a great parent—to support his children’s opportunities with everything he had. His responsibility, and therefore his priority, became me, and, a little later, Clint. His own career would take its course given the circumstances that had presented themselves, and if that meant that he had less time to pursue his own goals, well, so be it. Midwestern Zen.

I should add that Dad never gave up on his own professional life. He still went out on auditions, took scene-study classes, and worked on screenplays with a variety of collaborators. But he was doing it around his sons’ schedules.