The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(55)

It never really kicked in that I was earning serious money until one day in 1966, when I was doing my usual routine of reading the sports pages of the Los Angeles Times first thing in the morning. The paper contained troubling news: Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, the future Hall of Fame pitchers who anchored the rotation of my beloved Dodgers, were holding out of training camp for more money.

This was in the days before free agency, when players had little leverage or negotiating power. Koufax and Drysdale, the Times reported, were making $85,000 and $80,000 a season, respectively, and wanted to be paid about twice that amount. This seemed fair to me. The previous season, Koufax had gone 26–8 with a 2.04 E.R.A., pitched a perfect game, and swept the Cy Young and World Series MVP awards for the second time in three years. Drysdale was right behind Koufax, having gone 23–12.

Hmmm, I thought, this makes me wonder: What do I get paid relative to these guys? Sitting down with a pencil and a piece of paper, I did some calculations. We had just completed shooting the sixth season of The Andy Griffith Show. I knew that I was earning $1,850 an episode. That season, we shot thirty episodes. Okay, that tallied up to $55,500. Plus, I was already earning residuals from summer and daytime reruns of The Andy Griffith Show, in addition to residuals for other things I’d been in. When I added all these sums together, I discovered that I was—what?—outearning Sandy and Big D.

My first reaction was mortification. It just felt unfair, flat-out wrong, that these grown men, who were the best in the world at what they did, were making less money than me, a kid actor. I cycled through emotions of embarrassment, confusion, and anger. But what I finally landed upon was gratitude. I had to acknowledge that I had been blessed with good fortune and a wealth of advantages. This marked a moment of maturation for me. First, I learned a harsh lesson: the world isn’t always fair. Next, I felt a new sense of responsibility. How do I live up to this good fortune and not squander it?

Now, think about it: I was a twelve-year-old boy. I could have reacted entirely differently. I might have figured out that I was earning six figures and thought, Hell, yeah, I’m rich, baby! Suck it, Sandy! I could have undergone a personality transformation and started strutting around school like a James Spader villain in a 1980s teen movie.

But I didn’t. Because I looked to my parents. I saw how they chose to live and how happy they were. And I redoubled my efforts to keep on working, to stay in show business beyond my boyhood. Not just because the money was good, but because I recognized how much I truly loved acting and learning about directing.

As for Koufax and Drysdale, their holdout ended after a few weeks, when they got raises to, respectively, $125,000 and $110,000 a season. It was less than what they had been asking for, but still, I was relieved. Justice had been served.


BY THE TIME I was fourteen, in 1968, I was desperate to chart my own fate, to be in charge of something. I was by then a huge Los Angeles Lakers fan, and my fame as Opie had provided me with an opportunity to meet my favorite player, Elgin Baylor, at an Easter Seals fundraising event. We stood together for no more than thirty seconds as a photographer took our picture outside of the Lakers’ locker room at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. But simply standing next to the man known as Rabbit—me pointing upward to the basket while Elgin pretended that he was about to shoot—had a huge impact on me. I knew that I had no hope of ever playing basketball on his level, but I was crazy about the game, and it became my best sport.

As a player, I was an undersized but dogged, pesky little shooting guard. Well, to be honest, I was terrible when I started out in sixth grade. My friend Noel Salvatore was legitimately good at basketball, though, and when we discovered that we had missed the cutoff date to sign up for the Burbank Parks and Recreation Center’s Bantam League, Noel audaciously proposed that we take the unusual step of putting together our own team. We went door-to-door to local businesses, cold-calling them, until we found a sponsor, a local bank called Surety Savings and Loan. Then the league found a grown-up who was willing to be our coach.

Once again, I was subjected to ridicule. The very first time I caught a pass, I nervously dribbled the ball out of bounds; I didn’t understand the court layout. Can you imagine Opie making such an ass of himself, losing track of court boundaries, and then taking too many steps to the basket and getting called for traveling? It was hideous.

But I practiced and practiced until I got pretty good. And by the time I was in eighth grade and jonesing to be a leader, I hit upon the idea of being Clint’s coach. What if I put together a squad composed of Clint and his third-grade buddies and molded them in my image? This time, I went straight to Dad: Could he be the sponsor and nominal coach of a Bantam League team?

He wrote a check, and thus, Howards Hurricanes were born. Dad was the figurehead and disciplinarian, but he left the actual coaching to me. We had HOWARDS HURRICANES uniforms made up, with green T-shirts and yellow shorts.

There was nothing subliminal about why I was so driven to do this: it was to prepare myself to become a film director. I actually said the words aloud: If I can learn how to handle a bunch of unruly eight-year-olds, I could one day probably figure out how to cope with a temperamental actor. I won’t name any names, but I have since discovered that, behaviorally, there are times when Category 1 and Category 2 are almost exactly the same thing.

In the Bantam League, the hoops were lowered from ten feet to eight to give the kids a better chance at scoring. I ran practices once or twice a week and we played the games on Saturday. Clint was a good player and he had a couple of friends who were natural athletes, authentically skilled. But the others ranged from average to downright uncoordinated. What I’m proudest of about my tenure as the Howards Hurricanes coach is that I molded our strategies to the kids’ abilities. At John Burroughs High School, where I was playing roundball, I was nagged by a feeling that my coach was too systematic and inflexible, running patterns and setting defenses that stifled our players’ individual talents. I didn’t want to duplicate his approach.