The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(52)

The one real injury I incurred on the show was not the fault of a bear but of Mark’s pet raccoon, Charlie. Charlie, like the bears, had his sharper teeth removed, but the trainers had not removed his claws because raccoons need them to hold their food as they eat it. We were shooting a scene where Charlie was supposed to walk up to me, and I would pick him up. Raccoons, unlike bears, go for savory snacks rather than sweet, so I had a dog biscuit in my shirt pocket to draw him near me. We did a couple of takes that worked well, but they wanted to do one more. “Roll camera!” Charlie, now understanding the scene, trotted toward me but instead of letting me pick him up, he climbed me to fetch the tasty morsel out of my shirt pocket. I am not a tree, and his claws cut right through me like X-Acto knives. My pants fared okay but my shirt was shredded. It hurt like the dickens and my chest was covered in blood from all the scratches.

The next day, the wardrobe lady, Peggy Kunkle, outfitted me in a leather under-vest that I was to wear whenever I worked with Charlie. I only wish it had been invented a day earlier. Charlie never hurt me again.


GENTLE BEN WAS given a primo time slot: Sunday nights at 7:30 P.M. on CBS, sandwiched between Lassie and The Ed Sullivan Show. It faced stiff competition against the first half hour of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, but we more than held our own, surprising everyone in the industry. We finished the first season as the number 19 show in the Nielsen ratings. The top-rated program that season was The Andy Griffith Show.

I internally wanted us to leapfrog Ron and Andy’s show. That’s just my nature. I love Ron, but I friggin’ wanted Gentle Ben to top the charts. Alas, we never got over that hump. But something almost as exciting happened: one week, Andy Griffith and Gentle Ben finished one and two in the ratings. It was a good week to be a Howard.




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RON

I was bursting with pride that week. The ratings were published in Variety, and I ran all over the soundstage holding a copy of the latest issue, showing it to Andy and the rest of the cast.



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Gentle Ben was wholesome bordering on corny sometimes, and the critics condescended to us just as they did to The Andy Griffith Show. But I was proud of the end product. We never pretended to be anything other than what we were advertised as, family entertainment. We did an excellent job and our fan base loved us. In the 1990s, I attended a party hosted by Brian Grazer, Ron’s business partner in Imagine Entertainment. One of the guests was Eddie Murphy, then at the peak of his fame and Hollywood heat. He was surrounded by swarms of people and I figured that it wasn’t worth trying to introduce myself. To my surprise, Murphy excused himself from his clique of friends and hangers-on to walk up to . . . me!

We spent about fifteen minutes talking. The upshot was that Eddie loved Gentle Ben. When it was on, he told me, he was going through a rough time in his childhood. His family was poor, his father died, and his future felt uncertain. What gave him comfort, he said, was that every Sunday night, Gentle Ben took him somewhere else. He escaped to Florida and played with the animals. He imagined himself as that little boy—me.

What moved me about this moment at the party wasn’t that it was Eddie Murphy. It was his tone—the warmth and honesty, and the way he conveyed how meaningful our show was to him. I hear similar stories from nonfamous people of Eddie’s vintage when I’m in an airport or making a public appearance. Much as Balok has followed me around, so has Mark Wedloe, reminding me, over and over, of the lasting impact of good TV.





RON


Mom gave Clint and Dad a hero’s welcome whenever they came home from one of their long stretches in Florida. This was especially true when they came home for Christmas.

Christmas was sacrosanct in the Speegle household of Mom’s upbringing, requiring elaborate lights, decorations, and festivities. She brought this spirit with her to Burbank. Every year, as soon as Thanksgiving was over, she would festoon the house with tinsel and bunting that she pulled out of storage. Our tree always dripped with shiny ornaments. Every tabletop was covered in Santa figurines, and two replica toy soldiers from The Nutcracker, each about three feet high, stood sentry outside our front door.

Mom’s enthusiasm was contagious, and Clint and I got as hyped up for Christmas as she did. We helped her with the decorations and annually visited Santa at the May Company department store to tell him what we wanted.

Inevitably, there came a year when I began to question whether or not Santa Claus was real. I put this question to Dad, who was ready with a considered but no-nonsense Rance Howard answer.

“Well, no,” he said, “there is not actually a Santa Claus who lives at the North Pole and drives a flying sled. That’s just a legend. And that man whose lap you sat in at the department store? That was just an actor pretending to be Santa Claus.”

Hearing these words was a lot like coming upon those wrestlers working on their routine in the hallway of a TV studio: the truth was mind-blowing and kind of cool to know about, but it also hurt.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to maintain my composure and stifling the urge to cry, “I thought I could see the fake beard. And I think I saw a Santa suit like that for sale at Western Costume.”

“But it’s a great story that people tell to get in the spirit of Christmas,” he said. And then he added pointedly, “And we want Clint to enjoy it for as long as he can.”