The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(41)

Apart from a single episode of the ABC police drama The Rookies, none of Dad and Hoke’s spec scripts were ever realized as productions. But Dad was immensely validated by the fact that The Flintstones had accepted and produced two of his solo scripts in 1964. In the car, he let me know that he was putting together a new round of story ideas that he would soon be pitching to Mr. Joe Barbera himself, of Hanna-Barbera.

I knew the Flintstones backward and forward, and as Dad talked through a couple of his notions for new episodes, I was suddenly struck with one of my own: What if Fred convinced Wilma to let him get the used car that he coveted, but when he does, he finds out that there is something that’s been hidden in the car by gangsters, thereby putting Fred in danger?

This was just a jumping-off point, not a fully realized idea. But Dad said that he would include my pitch in his meeting with Mr. Barbera, and if it sold, he would share the story money with me. A few weeks later, I was pretty damn proud of myself when Dad informed me that Mr. Barbera liked my idea, and that my half of the story money would amount to five hundred bucks. Not bad for a casual conversation on a car ride home! My idea became the germ of a 1965 episode entitled “Fred’s Second Car.”

In the long term, my exposure to Dad’s writing ambitions and achievements meant as much to me as his acting guidance. If I hadn’t grown accustomed to seeing him plugging away alone or with Hoke, working on plays, movie scripts, and TV episodes, I would not have had the understanding of storytelling and sweat equity that prepared me so well for being a director later in life.





CLINT


Before my star turn on Bonanza, I landed a job as a regular on a CBS series called The Baileys of Balboa. The show was cocreated by Bob Sweeney, Ron’s most frequent director on The Andy Griffith Show and the man who “discovered” me in my cowboy outfit and turned me into Leon. The Baileys of Balboa was set at a marina and starred Paul Ford, formerly Phil Silvers’s straight man Colonel Hall in the Sgt. Bilko series, as a charter-boat captain, and Sterling Holloway, the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh, as the Ford character’s first mate. I played a little wisecracking neighbor named Stanley.

The Baileys of Balboa turned out to be a one-season misfire, not a juggernaut like Ron’s show. But I shed my disappointments quickly as a young boy. Besides, the gigs kept on coming, even voice-acting jobs. I got to work with Holloway on one of Disney’s animated Winnie-the-Pooh shorts, voicing Kanga’s little joey, Roo. I was also in Disney’s The Jungle Book. I played the baby elephant bringing up the rear of the pachyderm parade in “Colonel Hathi’s March,” a bouncy, Sousa-like military-style song. That was my one sung line, by the way: “In the military style!” Only at my age, “military” came out as “mili-telly.” I also advised Mowgli, “Don’t talk in ranks. It’s against regga-lations.”

My garbled pronunciations posed no problem to Walt Disney. I know this because he showed up at our recording session with the Sherman Brothers, who wrote all those amazing songs for the 1960s Disney pictures—“A Spoonful of Sugar,” “It’s a Small World (After All),” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” you name it. Walt ducked his head into the studio, waved at me, and said, “You’re doing a fine job, Clint.”

This was simultaneously mind-blowing—the Walt Disney knew my name!—and entirely of a piece with our life in early-’60s Southern California. I was a Disney baby. Disney was headquartered in my hometown, Burbank. We Howards started going on day trips to Disneyland in Anaheim when I was still in a stroller.

The Jungle Book didn’t come out until the fall of 1967, more than a year after I met Walt. He had passed away in the interim. It was the last great animated Disney movie to be overseen by the man himself. And he liked me.





RON


I loved watching Clint act. I envied his confidence. I was always conscious of hitting my mark, not making mistakes, pleasing the director. Clint didn’t give a damn! He had a go-for-broke quality that worked because he was so well-prepared and naturally talented.

In 1966, I did a guest spot on The Danny Kaye Show, a CBS variety show that ran in the way-past-my-bedtime slot of 10 to 11 P.M. We shot it at CBS Television City, the site of my early work in Playhouse 90 and The Red Skelton Show. The premise was that I had my own show within Danny’s show, called, unsurprisingly, “The Ronny Howard Show.” It was pretty corny. My entrance was heralded by six little tap-dancing chorus girls. Then I did a monologue. Then I introduced a fellow child star, a nine-year-old girl named Donna Butterworth, who, in a Louise Brooks bob and a mod minidress, sang a medley of standards. My follow-up line was “It’s always a pleasure to hear an old pro belt out a tune.”

But the pièce de résistance was a sketch in which I played a James Bond–like character in a spy thriller called “The Spy Who Sucked His Thumb.” For this, they cast Clint as my boss, the grumpy old chief who gives the dashing spy his assignment. Clint sat at a desk wearing a fedora and a rumpled suit, completely inhabiting the part as if it was rooted in life experience, slamming a phone down as he said, “Good grief, that diabolical archfiend must be captured!”

We had a lot of eye-to-eye, quick-fire, absurdist dialogue, the kind that often makes actors break and collapse into laughter. But not young Clint Howard. He nailed his part in one take.