The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(36)
Then Dad would drop to his knees and do his best version of a ring announcer and introduce us as wrestlers, just like the guy did on Channel 5. He really turned it on for these matches, putting to use his skills as a former children’s thespian. “Ding, ding, ding!” he’d announce. “And now . . . the main event!” I would grab a hold of his legs and he would humor me by falling to the floor. One of the reasons I made fun of Dad’s hair loss was that his newly exposed forehead scrunched into these big lateral wrinkles when he was on the floor, and the sight of his head upside down was hilarious to me, a reconfigured face: the wrinkles looked like a mouth and his eyebrows were like a weird mustache and . . . well, you know, it’s the kind of thing a kid gets obsessed with.
Dad always let us win. He played the defeated guy really well, groaning, “Aaagh, ohhh, ya got me again.” And then he switched to the announcer doing the count and raising the victor’s arm.
As Ron and I got deeper into pro wrestling, I took a liking to the greatest heel of them all, the Sheik. To simulate the head wrap that he wore, I pulled a pair of my own tighty-whities over my head, the elastic at my temples. God, I hope they were clean.
RON
My devotion to pro wrestling was put to the test when I took my first trip to Canada the summer after The Andy Griffith Show’s second season. Andy and Don were making good money during the show’s hiatus by performing a variety act at carnivals and state fairs. With The Music Man compounding my fame, they invited me to join them for a two-week stint doing shows in the province of Ontario. Dad came along, and while it was initially frightening to perform before large crowds, some as big as twenty thousand people, I got over it fast and found it to be pretty easy work. We’d perform some sketches in character from our TV show, and then Andy would say, “You’re not just Opie, Ronny. You’re also Winthrop in The Music Man. Give us a song.” I would sing “Gary, Indiana” with the exaggerated lisp and bring the house down. There were also old-time carny attractions like a so-called wolf man who was just a sweaty guy with an inordinate amount of hair on his face and a “Wall of Death,” which was a large, barrel-shaped structure in which daredevil motorcyclists rode around in circles, defying gravity thanks to friction and centrifugal force.
One of our obligations was an appearance at a local daytime talk show in Toronto. While Andy, Don, Dad, and I were at the TV station, we were offered a tour. In an adjacent studio, we saw a setup for televised wrestling. It looked much smaller in person than it did on TV, with only three rows on each side for the fans, though careful framing made the audience look much bigger.
That was a little underwhelming and surprising. But what really opened my eyes was the sight I caught of two wrestlers in the hallway, working out their routine. These weren’t fit young Adonises. They were doughy guys who were long in the tooth, though nevertheless wearing only wrestling shoes and the brief, Speedo-like trunks that wrestlers wore back then. Both men had cigarettes dangling from their lips. One had the other in a headlock and said, “And then you reach up and do a reverse.” They practiced their moves a few times: the headlock followed by the counterattack.
As I watched this, my heart sank. Does this mean that pro wrestling is . . . FAKE? I tugged at my dad’s sleeve and asked him to explain what was going on. Sensing my disillusionment, he gently said, “They really make their moves and they really get hurt. But they’re more like stuntmen than boxers.”
I couldn’t wait to reveal this discovery to my friends back in Burbank. But it troubled me. In a neat feat of mental gymnastics, I convinced both my friends and myself that pro wrestling was fake only in Canada. In America, a championship belt was real, earned fair and square.
CLINT
There was something else to Dad’s roughhousing, his playful physicality with us. For one thing, we didn’t just wrestle; he also taught us some of the fighting techniques that he had picked up in his amateur-boxing days. Dad felt it was important that we be able to defend ourselves. I remember shadowboxing with him, that long left arm of his coming into my face for a pretend jab, with Dad shouting, “Double up, double up! Bam, bam! Break his nose, Clint, break his nose!”
What went unspoken, though Ron and I figured it out, is that Dad knew that we would be perceived as different, being show-business kids. Our lives had a different shape than those of our peers. And he didn’t want us to live in fear or be intimidated by anyone or anything. He wanted us to be ready.
RON
Dad was right to be concerned. Because of my time away filming The Music Man, I entered the second grade not having been at Stevenson Elementary since kindergarten. Back then, I wasn’t yet on The Andy Griffith Show. But now I was. And seemingly everyone in the world watched it. Certainly every kid at Stevenson did. And they all figured out that Opie rhymes with dopey, mopey, and soapy.
I joined Stevenson’s second grade when it was already in progress, so there was automatically that pressure of being the new kid, feeling every pair of eyes following you everywhere you went. In my case, this pressure was compounded by being recognized as the kid from TV. I could see it plain as day: my classmates leaning into each other conspiratorially, mouthing Opie.
This sort of thing would dog me throughout my childhood, up to and including my high school years. I mean, to this day, people recognize me and call me Opie, and that’s fine—I’m happy to be remembered in that way. But as a schoolboy, there was a malevolence to the way I was singled out. I found it demeaning and insulting when I got Hey, Opie’d, because there was an assumption that went with that, that I was wimpy and cosseted. Or that I was a braggart and a show-off. Or, when I was older, that I must be a rich dickhead with a fancy car, throwing money around, trying to buy friends. My rebellion was to be none of those things—which, by the way, didn’t take much effort. More about that later.