The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(31)

“This is like that, but even longer ago,” Dad said. “So for these townspeople, it’s like Christmas morning when the Wells Fargo Wagon comes.” This explained Winthrop’s pent-up excitement over taking delivery of his cornet, and his “Thithter, thithter” speech. I still have that horn, by the way, and can still, just barely, play “The Minuet in G” on it.

Morton DaCosta noticed how effective my father was in preparing me and offered Dad a part as one of the townspeople. It wasn’t something that Dad had been angling for, but the powers that be recognized that having him around was good for me. He shows up in a lot of shots in The Music Man if you keep an eye out for him.




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CLINT

I want to note how emotionally honest and uncute Ron’s performance was. Ron is cute, but not his acting. You see Winthrop go from a shy boy who’s inhibited by his speech impediment to a kid so confident that he’s firing finger guns at Shirley Jones and Pert Kelton to give them their cues. Props to Dad for helping Ron internalize that journey.



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I returned to The Andy Griffith Show with a spring in my step, and I could sense that Andy, Sheldon, and Aaron were proud of me. I was proud of having earned some acting stripes somewhere else, and in a major motion picture, no less.

When my eighth birthday rolled around that season, the producers surprised me with a giant cake and a sing-along of “Happy Birthday.” It was also Aaron’s birthday—he was exactly forty years older than me—so we shared the cake. Planted in the icing was a little figure of Aaron, holding a megaphone, and another of me, holding a fishing pole. They served me the first slice, and it looked better than it tasted; privately, I craved my mother’s devil’s food cake with chocolate icing. She later admitted to me that she made hers from a Betty Crocker mix, straight out of the box. But, hey, my mom made it—and no chocolate cake has ever tasted better to me.

I had never had a birthday party before. Our peripatetic family life to that point had precluded it. My most memorable birthday to this point had been my fourth, when we still lived in Queens. My parents took me to FAO Schwarz in Manhattan and let me choose a gift. It was an easy call: a Zorro set, complete with a mask, a flat-brimmed gaucho hat, and a plastic fencing foil. I actually wore this outfit to my first Broadway show, a matinee performance of the Li’l Abner musical, based on the comic strip. I was bored and didn’t really get it. It was apt that Andy would later disparage the play.

For this latest birthday, celebrated on set, Andy and Aaron gave me a Bell & Howell Zoomatic 8 mm movie camera—my very first. Aaron told me that I could now make my own movies. For the next eight years or so, that camera spent most of its time sitting idle in its brown leather case. But it was eventually put to vigorous use, and, even before then, my mentors’ encouragement boosted my self-confidence.

Years later, when for the first time I was nominated for a Director’s Guild Award, for Cocoon, Aaron and Sheldon attended the ceremony. I didn’t win—Steven Spielberg did, for The Color Purple—but I sought out Aaron to remind him of his gift. I did not take for granted that this was a rare opportunity to thank a childhood benefactor for planting the seeds of my happy, productive adult life decades earlier.


ARMED WITH MY newfound confidence that second season, I started watching TV and movies differently. Dad took me to a screening of the original, 1931 version of The Champ, the King Vidor boxing picture that starred Wallace Beery in the title role and Jackie Cooper as his son. Cooper was incredible. I couldn’t get over how believable he was in the movie’s final scene, when his father is dead and all the grown-ups are trying to console him. His face alone does incredibly complicated work, mustering a range of faint smiles to oblige his consolers but not masking his actual state of profound grief.

Cooper’s performance, along with my newly accumulated movie experience, triggered my competitive juices. When I watched a kid actor on a TV show, I evaluated his performance and compared it to what I was doing on Andy Griffith. I took inventory of my contemporaries: Johnny Crawford on The Rifleman, Jay North on Dennis the Menace, Jon Provost on Lassie, the Leave It to Beaver guys, the My Three Sons guys.

I concluded that, in terms of acting prowess, I was second only to Johnny Crawford. Jay North I respected as more or less an equal. The rest? In my cocky state, I concluded that they weren’t on my level. Johnny brought a truthfulness to his performance, an honesty that seemed lived in. The actors on Leave It to Beaver, which began in 1957, were hamstrung by how dated their format was. That show struck me as corny, synthetic TV that encouraged a forced, mannered brand of acting.

At this point, I realized that acting was more than an exercise in pleasing adults. It was my job. From The Journey through The Music Man, I had regarded work as an elaborate form of playtime. Now I paid closer attention to Andy and Don and understood that acting was, for them, a way of life, a career, and that the longevity of their careers depended on the quality and consistency of their performance. That was a thing Andy said all the time while we worked on the show: “It’s not good enough. I’m not good enough. Let’s make this better, funnier.” He always pushed for excellence; ergo, I did, too.


THERE’S A FINE line between confidence and arrogance, and I crossed it in The Andy Griffith Show’s third season. We were shooting an episode entitled “Andy Discovers America,” whose script was by John Whedon, the patriarch of a screenwriting family that includes his son, Tom, who wrote for Captain Kangaroo and The Golden Girls, and his grandson, Joss, of Avengers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame. To Andy Griffith fans, this episode is noteworthy because it introduced Aneta Corsaut as Helen Crump, the schoolteacher who would become Andy’s girlfriend, and, later, his wife.