The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(29)

I thought, This is too embarrassing. I gotta figure out this handwriting stuff.


AS IT HAPPENED, I didn’t attend regular school at all in first grade. It was studio school all the way. With the first season of Andy’s show coming to an end, my newfound fame presented an opportunity: Warner Bros. was adapting the 1957 Broadway hit The Music Man, by Meredith Willson, and they needed a little boy to play Winthrop Paroo, the lisping, much younger brother of the female lead, Shirley Jones’s Marian Paroo.

I don’t think I auditioned—The Andy Griffith Show essentially served that purpose. But my father left the choice of whether or not to take the part to me. Dad explained that the movie would shoot while The Andy Griffith Show was on hiatus, when I was supposed to resume my schooling at Stevenson Elementary School. It would mean sacrificing the few months when I would get to live like a normal kid.

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, Ronny,” Dad said. “With The Andy Griffith Show, it’s different—that’s a seven-year contract. That means that if the show keeps going, you have to do it. But you don’t have to do other things.”

I was torn. I was looking forward to returning to Stevenson, where I had spent kindergarten. Though we now lived in Hollywood, my parents had wangled permission for me to stay in the Burbank school system. But I could tell that Dad wanted me to say yes. He knew it was a rare opportunity and he clearly had a bullish attitude about the movie’s prospects, telling me, “This is a really good script, it’s from a successful Broadway musical, and there’ll be other kids in the cast.”

I really mulled it—in fact, it’s the only time in my childhood where I took my time and thought through the question of “Do I really want to do this?” Having seen Dad sit waiting by the phone for days, I already understood that, as an actor, you take what you can get while the getting’s good. But I was on the fence. I wanted to go to school and play with other kids.

Ultimately, I agreed to do to The Music Man. A little bit more out of respect for Dad than for any career-building purpose. At that point, I still didn’t really understand what a career was, nor did I think that what I was doing on TV and movie sets had any bearing on something as serious as my future.

But I sure am glad that I said yes. The experience proved to be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, and, for me, a new frontier in entertainment-making, creative energy, and clockwork professionalism.

Andy Griffith was excited for me, too. He had been approached by Meredith Willson about playing the male lead, Professor Harold Hill, in the original Broadway production. He paid a visit to Willson’s house, where the composer and his wife performed the whole show at the piano. Andy said it was one of the most mesmerizing performances that he ever witnessed. But Andy withdrew from consideration. Though he had serious theater chops and a genuine musicality, he felt he lacked the slickness and dance skills to pull off the role persuasively. The part of Harold Hill went to Robert Preston, its rightful owner, then, now, and forever. And now Preston was about to bring his signature role to life on the big screen.

This being a big-budget studio picture, the studio invested some time and money preparing me to learn how to sing: a good move, since I had inherited the Harold Beckenholdt gene for being hopeless at carrying a tune. And Winthrop had two big musical spotlights, singing a verse of “The Wells Fargo Wagon” and his very own song, “Gary, Indiana.”

While I was still finishing up the first season of The Andy Griffith Show, I was required to begin side sessions with a voice teacher named Mrs. Webber. She was something out of 1940s Hollywood, an Olive Oyl–thin woman with her own baroquely decorated bungalow on the Warner’s lot. Frizzy cat-lady hair, oversized glasses, big, wide eyes augmented by elaborate press-on lashes, and bright red lipstick that never quite covered up the cracks in her lips. And the patience of a saint.

I did not take to singing easily. There was a lot of repetition, a lot of “Let’s try that again, Ronny,” as Mrs. Webber pounded out the notes on the piano ad nauseum, waiting for me to absorb the melody and rhythm of “Gary, Indiana.”

Concurrently, my dad was teaching me how to do Winthrop’s lisp. I wasn’t aware of what a lisp was when I took the part. Dad explained, without judgment, “Some people have a speech impediment where the letter s comes out as a th sound.” We worked it out methodically, line by line in the script. So much so that I can still recite from memory Winthrop’s exclamation when he receives his prized cornet: “Thithter, thithter! I never thought I’d ever thee anything tho thcrumpthyuth ath thith thcrumpthyuth tholid gold thing! Oh, thithter!”

(Translation: “Sister, sister! I never thought I’d ever see anything so scrumptious as this scrumptious solid-gold thing. Oh, sister!”)

And it wasn’t just a lisp. On certain s’s, for comic effect, I also had to turn the sibilant sound into a spit-spraying raspberry. For example, the little kicker to that speech went, “Oh, thhh-thithter!” There were also raspberries built into my songs: “If you’d like to have a logical ex-thhhh-planation” in “Gary, Indiana,” and “Thhh-umpthin’ thhh-pecial just for me!” in “The Wells Fargo Wagon.”

This was a lot to absorb. But Mrs. Webber kept drilling and drilling me until we finally arrived at a reasonably in-tune, rhythmically acceptable version of “Gary, Indiana.” The next step was to prerecord the song in a studio; once the cameras were rolling, I would lip-sync to this recording.