The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(48)

I SHOULD MAKE it clear that Mom was not a complainer. A chronic worrier, yes, but never a moaner or a groaner. Quite the opposite, in fact: she was a glass-half-full person, an acolyte of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Her default mode was cheerful pragmatism no matter the reality. Let’s not forget that, while Dad had the will and the gumption to dream of riding into Hollywood on his horse, it was Mom who had the actual horse sense. She was the one with a head start in show business and a practical knowledge of how to go about getting into it. It was her can-do spirit that propelled Rance and Jean Howard forward.

In 1984, when I directed my third feature film, Cocoon, Mom made her first tentative noises about returning to acting, having forsaken it three decades earlier to focus on her family. I put her in the movie as a key extra, a background actor who has no dialogue but appears in a lot of scenes. True to form, she charmed everyone in the cast. She had some heart-to-heart conversations with Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, and Gwen Verdon in which they, for all their success, voiced regrets about their life choices. They all expressed to Mom that they envied her for having spent the amount of time she had with her children. There is no one correct way to achieve work-life balance, of course, and the conditions for doing so as a working actress in the twentieth century were brutal. But Mom was buoyed by her talks with Maureen, Jessica, and Gwen. “They made me realize that, for me, I did it right,” she told me.

Mom opened up to me further in 1988, on the eve of what would be the first of her three heart surgeries. We were talking in her hospital room, whose every surface, from her bed to her tray table, was covered in ledgers, notebooks, and boxes of receipts. She was feverishly working against the clock to get her and Dad’s books together for tax season. There was an unspoken subtext to her urgency that frightened me. She was clearly concerned that she might not make it through the surgery. If she died, though, Dad could at least take solace in the fact that Mom had filed that year’s returns and left him a road map for how to do the filing himself in the future. Typical Mom—she was more worried about Dad’s having to do the taxes than her heart.

That evening, though, Mom moved the conversation in a direction that was, for her, unusual. She spoke about her youth, which she was seldom inclined to do. With sobering candor, she described the ill health that had followed her around from the New York accident onward: the constant pain, the onset of arthritis, losing her teeth, getting hooked on cigarettes because of that ill-informed doctor in Duncan. This was all related matter-of-factly, without an ounce of self-pity. And then she said, with a smile and complete sincerity, “But I had a wonderful childhood.”

I’ve turned this conversation over in my head for years. It made me recognize that, for all of Mom’s optimism and charisma, her adult life had held its share of disappointments. I didn’t understand this when I was young, because I was just a kid and she wore her setbacks and ailments lightly, at least for her kids’ benefit. After our talk in her hospital room, I came to realize that it wasn’t her family life with us that she leaned on to make her feel grateful and fortify her will to keep going. It was her memories of an idyllic time unviolated by struggle or physical pain: her childhood.

I had underestimated my mother: not only how giving and selfless she was, but also how tough she was.


I WAS ALLOWED a rare glimpse of a more carefree version of Mom when, in the mid-1960s, CBS sent me to New York on a promotional junket for The Andy Griffith Show—just me, not Andy or Don. Dad was otherwise occupied with Clint, so this became an opportunity—the only opportunity, as it turned out—for me to spend some leisure time with Mom in her favorite city. That’s what she kept saying as we were flying there: “New York is my favorite city in the world!”

The network put us up in the St. Regis, one of the grande-dame hotels along Fifth Avenue. This animated Mom in a way I hadn’t seen before. She told me why: in her and Dad’s scuffling days, she often took walks past the St. Regis, looking longingly at its ornate facade and arched entryways. On these walks, she fantasized about what it would be like to stay at the hotel. Now her fantasy was coming true.

We ordered room-service breakfast, a first for me and a major departure from Mom’s normal, frugality-minded ways. With CBS footing the bill, Mom cut loose. She took me to Sardi’s, the show-business hangout in the Theater District, and delighted in pointing out all the caricatures of famous people on the walls and telling me about each figure. While we were there, I had an in-person celebrity sighting—for a baseball-mad little kid, anyway. Right before my very eyes, sitting at a table eating a steak, was Ford Frick, the commissioner of Major League Baseball. With Mom’s prompting, I introduced myself to Mr. Frick, and he kindly engaged me in some baseball talk. I have no idea if he recognized me as Opie.




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CLINT

Some years later, I, too, enjoyed a one-to-one work trip with Mom. Along with three other child actors—one of whom was Maureen McCormick (Marcia on The Brady Bunch)—I was selected to participate in an NBC special produced by Art Linkletter entitled A Kid’s Eye View of Washington. It was basically an educational travelogue about the nation’s capital, with the four of us as hosts, culminating in a scene where we all met the president in the Oval Office.

Nixon left a lasting impression on me. He had wrinkles upon wrinkles and was sweating profusely. He also had a certain scent, one that I would later come to recognize as the acrid odor of a heavy smoker and drinker. I wasn’t so much scared of him as concerned. To Mom, I raised the question, sotto voce, “Is he sick?” Mom assured me that he was just . . . himself. And then we went to visit the Smithsonian.