The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(22)
Clint and I would provide a million opportunities in the years to come for him to lay a guilt trip on us, to have at us with a vicious “Rose’s Turn” moment. He never once did.
MY NEW WAY of life as a series regular led to some big adjustments. For instance, when we were shooting, from September through early February, I didn’t attend school with other kids. This was a bit of a letdown, since I had really enjoyed kindergarten at Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School in Burbank. Instead, I had studio school.
What is studio school, you ask? It’s school . . . in a studio! At Desilu Cahuenga, this meant a rolling dressing room—plywood walls and a particleboard floor mounted on wheels—that had been kitted out with a blackboard, a teacher’s desk, a student’s desk, and even a little exterior awning and American flag, so that it looked like a one-room schoolhouse.
My teacher was Mrs. Katherine Barton, a rather stately woman in her fifties who wore her silver hair in an upswept bouffant. Ours was an association that would last for years, as The Andy Griffith Show ran and ran and I grew from a first grader to an eighth grader.
Mrs. Barton was my sole teacher, covering all the subjects in an elementary-school curriculum: reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. I was usually her sole pupil. Occasionally, though, I had classmates, like Keith Thibodeaux, who played Little Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy and had a recurring part as Opie’s friend Johnny Paul Jason. I never developed off-camera friendships with my fellow child actors, mainly because we were all so busy and didn’t live near each other. But I enjoyed the company of other kids on set. Keith was a good workplace buddy, three years older than me. He, too, had spent time under Mrs. Barton’s tutelage while working in the Desilu Cahuenga facility. I preferred studio school on the days when we were shooting episodes that Keith and other kids were in.
But this is no knock on Mrs. Barton. She was a wise and nimble educator, adept at shoehorning my lessons into breaks between scenes. The director would yell “Cut!” and I would sprint over to the schoolhouse to pick up where we left off. California state law mandated that I needed to be in school for a total of at least three hours a day, and that none of my studio-school sessions could be shorter than twenty minutes. But sometimes, twenty minutes was all the time that I was given before I had to be in another scene—and back I would sprint to the set. I guess that these sprints were what passed for P.E. With their sudden stops and pivots, they certainly helped me later on when I took up basketball.
Mrs. Barton never allowed me to dawdle, given how tight our schedule was. If I was having trouble focusing, she would check me: “You walk in this door and this is the schoolroom, Ronny. You shut the door and pick up where you left off.” And I was never to slam the door. One day I walked into the schoolroom a little too pleased with myself. I had just gotten a big laugh doing a scene and came charging in on a performer’s high, slamming the door. On a whim, I decided to do my Popeye impression for Mrs. Barton: “I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!”
She was not amused. “I told you not to slam the door, Ronny,” she said. And then she handed down my punishment: I had to write “I will not slam the door when I come back from the set” twenty-five times on the blackboard.
I get kind of wistful when I think about Mrs. Barton now. She was someone with whom I spent every weekday for about half my childhood, but once The Andy Griffith Show was over, I never saw her again. We had an affectionate if professional relationship, and she definitely broadened my horizons. She was a worldly woman who had been married, gotten divorced, and was, as far as I know, childless. Her passion was Mexico, where she kept a house. She spoke Spanish fluently and loved the country’s culture, people, and capital, Mexico City. One lasting lesson she imparted to me, lest I ever be fooled by tourist traps, is that “Tijuana is not Mexico, Ronny!” The minute we wrapped a season and went on hiatus, she was off like a shot, zooming down the 101 to her happy place south of the border.
Mrs. Barton was a calming presence amid the inherent bustle and drama of shooting a TV show. She was serious about boundaries. She kept to her schoolroom and never watched me film a scene. Nor did she ever talk shop about the show or, later on, acknowledge its success. The only recollection I have of her acknowledging show business at all was when she let slip that “Lucille Ball is a wonderful woman and Desi Arnaz was terrible to her.”
Her firm hand in making me compartmentalize my time has paid off lifelong dividends. Those herky-jerky days of going back and forth between school and the set made me realize that I was adept at spinning plates, keeping a lot of things going at once—which is how I now spend my adulthood, usually with one picture in the shooting phase, another in prep, a few others in development, and an assortment of Imagine Entertainment projects happening on my watch.
In all our years together, Mrs. Barton got truly angry with me just once. This was in 1963, when JFK was assassinated—an event that, naturally, upset everyone at the studio, but no one more than Mrs. Barton, a devout Catholic. It was a Friday, a rehearsal day. When the news reached us that Kennedy had been shot, we all gathered around a radio, waiting to hear if the president had survived. Our somber vigil grew more so when we learned that he didn’t. The men shook their heads in disbelief, taking long drags on their cigarettes. Mrs. Barton cried.
When we came back to work the following Monday, I offhandedly remarked to Mrs. Barton that it had bugged me that I had been unable to watch my usual slate of TV shows on Saturday morning—my beloved Heckle and Jeckle cartoons and Sky King reruns—because the networks were showing nothing but news, news, news.