The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(58)

RON


Clint and I had not really understood until that point how much Dad had intentionally deprioritized his aspirations to do important work as an actor and writer. This was the first time that I recognized that he had paid a toll of sorts for our success and our rich education in the business. Rance Howard was only forty years old, with the better part of his adulthood ahead of him. But forty is a tough age if you’re still trying to break through as a leading man. For how much longer would he have to wait for his own moment in the sun?

Dad’s worries turned out to be moot. Sadly, we never got to meet the new little Howard; Mom suffered a miscarriage a few weeks after they broke the news to us of her pregnancy. Dad rose to this moment: he was loving and gracious toward Mom, comforting her in his arms. Very little was said to Clint and me about the matter, then and ever afterward. But I could tell, without any words being spoken, that Dad was relieved.





13


Fake Blood and Opie-Shaming


RON


I will forever owe a debt to Opie Taylor. The experience of inhabiting that character, walking a mile in his Keds, defined my early life. But being associated with Opie didn’t serve me particularly well in adolescence. Especially an adolescence whose kickoff happened to coincide with the Summer of Love.

I didn’t really do the 1960s. I loved the Beatles—still do—and approvingly noted the rise of my female classmates’ hemlines. But I was never part of the drug culture, never had long hair, and never participated in political protests, though I often sympathized with their aims. I was the son of an Oklahoma farm boy whose 1930s childhood wasn’t that different from an 1890s childhood, and I was on a TV show set in the 1960s that for all intents and purposes really took place in the 1940s. With my freckles and prominent ears, I looked uncannily like one of those kids who modeled for Norman Rockwell when he was painting covers for The Saturday Evening Post during World War II. By accident more than design, I lived at a remove from the era in which I grew up.

But the ’60s proceeded nonetheless. David Starr Jordan Middle School went up to ninth grade, so when The Andy Griffith Show wrapped its seventh season, I was anxious about my reentry into the school system. Justifiably so, it turned out. On my first day of junior high, in February 1967, I was in culture shock. Some of the ninth graders were old—as in fifteen!—and had long hair and muttonchop sideburns. My reputation as Opie preceded me, and wandering through the halls that day, I felt eyes boring into me from every direction. Meanwhile, my own POV seemed distorted, like I was looking out at everyone else through a fish-eye lens, with myriad faces poking grotesquely into my view.

Some super-sideburned kid who was already six feet tall and as burly as a linebacker leaned into me and said, “Hey, Opium. You wanna buy a lid?” I wasn’t fluent in his terminology, but I knew that it had something to do with illegal drugs and was meant to intimidate me.

Fortunately, there was the safe harbor of my friend Noel and the game of basketball. Noel invited me to join him in a pickup game of hoops during lunch break. I was in my element, hitting one shot after another, regaining my confidence. But then I noticed that some of the spectators—girls, no less—were pointing at my groin and laughing at me. I glanced down. The zipper to my jeans was completely unzipped. I blushed inwardly, but I did not want to give anyone the satisfaction of showing how embarrassed I was. So I acted like nothing was wrong, made no effort to zip up, and simply continued playing.

After the game was over and I had discreetly rectified the situation, a ninth-grade girl waved me over to where she and some of her classmates were standing. She was wearing a very short skirt. She raised one leg up on a step, motioning to her bare inner thigh, and said, “Hey, Opie, will you sign my leg?”

Total internal panic. I don’t think she was coming on to me, but instead using her power as an older, popular girl to fluster me. She succeeded. I stammered, “No . . . No, I-I’m not gonna sign your leg!,” and scampered away.

I survived that day and actually had a fine time at Jordan over the next three years, with lots of friends and basketball teammates who liked me for who I was. But right to the end of my public-school education in Burbank, which concluded at John Burroughs High School, I was dogged by what today might be called Opie-shaming: the desire among my peers to get under my skin by taunting me as “Opie” rather than treating me as Ron. My father’s choice to train me to fight proved justified. Though I renounced violence in middle school, I benefited from toughening up.

By my senior year, I had grown into a confident young man, with a girlfriend (more on her later) and a C on my letterman’s jacket because I had been named a cocaptain of the Burroughs varsity B team. (I was too short and just not skilled enough for the varsity A team.) My name sometimes got published in the local paper, The Burbank Daily Review, not because of my acting work but because I had scored more than ten points in a game.

That felt great, and the Opie-shaming had completely dissipated on my home court at Burroughs. But at an away game that final season, the opposing team’s fans were out for blood. Every time I went to the line to shoot free throws, their band tried to psych me out by playing an abrasive, mocking version of The Andy Griffith Show’s theme song: “Da-da-dah, DAH-da-da-da, DAH-da-da-da . . .” This was punctuated by a chant of “Miss—it—Opie! Miss—it—Opie!”