The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(51)
The Boomhauer character drove a vehicle that on the show was called a swamp buggy but was, in effect, a pared-down monster truck. So when I wasn’t blasting around with Dennis or by myself on the show’s awesome airboat—watch Gentle Ben’s opening credits on YouTube, you won’t be disappointed—I was joyriding with Dad in the buggy. Oh, and Ivan Tors loved having celebrity guests on the show, so I got to act with the St. Louis Cardinals pitching great Bob Gibson. In that episode, Gibson was in Florida for a fishing vacation prior to spring training when his little boat swamped. Dennis’s character happened to be in the neighborhood and rushed in to save him. In gratitude, Gibson offered young Mark Wedloe, a Little League pitcher, some private coaching sessions. It was a lesson in morality: Mark was resorting to unsportsmanlike tricks, such as looking to the sky to distract the batter and then throwing a quick pitch for a strikeout. Bob set Mark straight. The Gentle Ben writers really made out Mark to be a greedy, selfish little asshole. But in this instance I didn’t complain. I was an eight-year-old boy in the 1960s hanging with one of the game’s greats. Another episode featured the great Green Bay Packers quarterback Bart Starr. I was in paradise.
A very humid paradise, however. That was the one thing that really took some getting used to, despite my having grown up in Southern California. To live and work in South Florida was to exist in a constant state of totally drenched sweatiness. And Dad had a certain peculiarity: a deep aversion to air-conditioning. He had grown up on a farm and considered air-conditioning to be an invention for the weak.
He was also primarily concerned for my health. In his view, shuttling between an air-conditioned dressing room and 90-degree weather with high humidity would be a recipe for disaster. He was probably right. He never turned on the air-conditioning in our apartment; he just opened the windows. And he forbade the Gentle Ben people from firing up the air-conditioning in our dressing room in the show’s honeywagon.
A honeywagon is a long trailer that movie and TV productions use when they are shooting on location. It contains dressing rooms for the cast and a couple of bathrooms, men’s and women’s. I don’t know why they are called honeywagons, because they usually smell like shit, and those little cubicles that we had for dressing rooms got really, really hot. Beth Brickell availed herself of the honeywagon’s AC, and so did Dennis Weaver, the environmentalist and health nut. But Rance and Clint Howard? Never. A fan and an open window would suffice. Nowadays I am the first guy to turn on the air-conditioning—I don’t share Dad’s philosophy. But it did help me acclimate to working in those conditions.
The show learned its own lesson about the perils of air-conditioning thanks to its marquee star, Bruno. South Florida is not an ideal climate for a black bear with thick fur. When we returned for the second season, having done well in our first, everyone had received a raise. In Bruno’s case, this translated into a new dressing room that Ivan had custom-built for him, complete with, yes, air-conditioning. They basically took a flatbed truck and put a huge, climate-controlled box on it, so that Bruno would be comfortable during his breaks.
Well, the very first day of shooting, we had a problem. When Bruno went on a break, he liked the air-conditioning so much that he refused to leave, even with the trainers gently coaxing him with doughnuts. And you can’t just pull a 650-pound creature out of a room, or politely invite him to the set.
After a brief confab, the powers that be landed upon a solution. Five or six of the crew’s sturdiest guys lifted the back of the trailer off the ground, tilting Bruno’s dressing room forward. With gravity doing the rest of the work, the bear slid out and hit terra firma. That trailer was promptly driven away, never to be seen again. Bruno returned to taking his breaks the old way: by hanging out in the shade.
GENTLE BEN THE character was actually played by three different bears. Seventy percent of the time, my acting partner was Bruno, the money bear, the trained thespian. There was a slightly smaller black bear named Buck who spelled Bruno. And we had a brown bear named Drum who performed all the water scenes. For whatever reason, Bruno, atypically for his species, had an aversion to getting wet. So Drum did the water stunts.
He was a smallish, tame brown bear, but he was still brown. So they sprayed him black. I’m not kidding. They used about a dozen cans of Streaks ’N Tips, a temporary-color spray frequently used in show business, to turn Drum into a black bear for the camera.
Bruno didn’t do action stunts, either. Any time Ricou and Ivan needed to depict a bear riding on the back of a truck or jumping off a bridge, they resorted to dressing some stuntman in a bear suit. It looked terrible up close, so visibly fake, but if they shot the stunts at a sufficient distance, they didn’t look so bad on TV. Dennis and Dad, and I, I am proud to say, performed our own stunts.
I had no mishaps of any consequence with Bruno. The only time there was ever any drama was when we were shooting a scene in an episode where Mark started collecting junk. He pulled Ben on a chain while Ben pulled a red wagon; he was basically serving as Mark’s pack mule, a visual gag. They had Bruno in a harness and it was an extra hot day. I jerked on his chain and Bruno objected, just this once, to having a kid tell him what to do. He reared around, bit my hand, and then pounced on me, pinning my shoulders to the ground like he was waiting for a wrestling ref to count him down to victory. I was scared to tears. The trainers were instantly upon Bruno, and I was rushed to the hospital and x-rayed: negative. I was more stunned than anything. As I said, his chewing teeth had been removed, so the bite was more like a gumming. I never felt anger toward Bruno for this incident; I was mad at the script for putting us in that situation.