The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(45)
The shooting itself took about six weeks. Dad had a great time hanging out with Dennis again and everyone was pleased with the outcome. That’s when CBS reached out to Tors about turning the film into a series that would pick up where the movie left off. Dennis’s character, who started out as a pilot who spotted schools of fish for fisherman, would now be a game warden in the Everglades, looking out for poachers and such. Ben the bear would move in with the Wedloes, setting up the premise that he was constantly thrust into the position of rescuing little Mark from peril.
A series of my own. Sweet! Nothing against Ron, but I was competitive, and I can’t pretend that I didn’t want to give him a run for his money. Opie was already a household name. Why not Mark Wedloe?
The TV show, though, would require Dad and me to be gone for four or five months of the year, every year for as long as the series ran. Not every actor wants to pull up stakes and live somewhere else for that amount of time. Vera Miles, for example, bowed out, citing her kids, who were going to school in California. Her role was recast, with an actress named Beth Brickell stepping in.
Dad saw the opportunity as too good for me to pass up, and Dennis used his pull to ensure an expanded role for Rance Howard the actor, as Tom Wedloe’s comic sidekick, a swampland local named Henry Boomhauer. Ivan Tors magnanimously agreed in writing that Mom and Ron would be given airline tickets so that whenever The Andy Griffith Show was on hiatus, they could come stay with us in Florida. It wasn’t like Dad and I were going off to war. We were a tight-knit family, and this arrangement posed no obstacle. Or so I thought.
RON
I don’t know that I totally agree. This was precisely the scenario that motivated Mom to get out of acting in the early 1950s—she never wanted to be apart from her husband for a significant length of time.
On top of that, Clint’s getting Gentle Ben coincided with my entrance into puberty. When I was thirteen, my parents gave me the go-ahead to move into the third bedroom in the Cordova Street house, the one that Dad had been using as an office—probably because they didn’t want to expose my impressionable little brother to the behaviors of his confused, newly horny older sibling.
It was a good call. Let’s just say that around that age, I became very . . . active. Dad and Clint were away in Florida when I approached Mom, full of questions. I was used to Dad’s forthrightness and imperviousness to so-called taboos. So I thought it was perfectly okay to inform Mom of my nocturnal emissions and my more conscious bedroom activities, and to ask her if this was all normal, and, if so, if I was going about it the right way.
The scene unfolded like one in a sitcom. Mom literally put her hands to her ears, horrified to be put in this position. Speaking in a booming “La-la-la, I can’t hear you!” voice to drown out any further disgusting revelations that I might have been sharing, she said, “You’re going to have to wait until your dad gets home to talk about that. Ask him, not me!”
So wait I did. When Dad finally did return home for Christmas break, he gave me the usual no-frills, no-thrills Rance Howard explanation: “Some people call it jerking off. But masturbation is the actual term. It’s all very normal. It’s not dirty. Don’t worry about it.” For good measure, he bought me a subscription to Playboy for my birthday, with a gentle warning never to leave an issue around where Clint could see it. Or Mom, for that matter.
BEYOND MY SURGING hormones, Mom had a lot of other stuff to deal with. With Clint and I both working a lot in the mid-1960s, her discretionary time dwindled down to almost zero. It became her duty to shuttle me to Desilu Cahuenga and the other Andy Griffith locations, and to be my guardian on set. She was also a compulsive undertaker of ambitious projects. She organized the PTA pageants at our schools, flexing her show-business chops to convince the other moms to perform intricately choreographed, elaborately costumed musical routines as the Tap-Dancing Mamas, complete with kick lines. An excellent seamstress, she became known in Burbank for the perfectly rendered doll outfits that she turned out for the school fair every year—couture for Barbie, basically. She loved sewing those costumes, and they always sold out.
On top of all this, she had to keep house. Our parents’ partnership was truly a marriage of equals, a fifty-fifty deal in terms of love, mutual respect, and the division of labor. But in practice, it hewed closely to old-fashioned gender roles, with the Howard men going off to work and the sole woman holding down the home front. Mom wasn’t a super-duper Donna Reed–style housewife. She was the first to admit that she hated cooking, even though we all loved her burgers, steaks, and Spam sandwiches. And she took no joy in the uphill battle to keep our house clean. Who could blame her? Both of her sons were slobs, and she didn’t want to press us, given our school and acting workloads. Dad pitched in with some dishwashing and vacuuming but was otherwise monomaniacally focused on writing and acting.
* * *
CLINT
Ron was the far bigger slob. He was allergic to performing even the smallest of chores, like picking his clothes up off the floor. In fact, when Ron graduated from high school, Mom hired a professional fumigator to de-skankify our house’s upstairs, such was the damage that Ron and his cat, Tiger, had done. It wasn’t until he moved in with his bride, Cheryl, that Ron was housebroken. And just barely.
RON
I plead guilty.