The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(64)
The production was a real manly man’s environment. Totten brought over a lot of wranglers and stuntmen from Gunsmoke. Elam was a serious gambler and he usually had a card game going near the dressing rooms. With a whiskey in his hand, he taught Ron and me how to play liar’s poker and hearts. He gave us instructions that he took very seriously, such as, “Always bring the amount of money to a card game that you’re prepared to lose.”
The town of Jackson Hole was filled with pool halls and cowboy bars. The crew guys sometimes reported to work the next morning with busted lips and black eyes, all in a good night’s fun. It really was more like the Wild West than the affluent resort area it is today. For Ron and me, Jackson Hole meant liberation. Mom and Dad allowed us to do stuff in town by ourselves. So we spent our per diem money on silver dollars that we bought in tourist shops and bottle rockets that we set off in the open fields where we were making the movie.
The Wild Country’s crew was an idiosyncratic mix of cowboys and hippies, bound together by a love of the great outdoors. In the latter category was an animal trainer named Dan Haggerty, before he became famous as an actor in his ’70s TV show The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. I spent a lot of time with him since the character I played, Andrew, had a menagerie of animals: a mare, a hawk, and some chickens, all of whom he named Ralph. Haggerty had a sidekick trainer, a fellow hippie named Bullet—just Bullet—and they had big beards and wore moccasins that looked homemade. I just thought these guys were really friggin’ cool.
Maybe it was the serendipity of having already worked with animals and good ol’ boys on Gentle Ben, but I had never felt happier than I did making The Wild Country. It was summer, so there was no studio school, no breaks for studying. And I was really in the pocket acting-wise, with my family around me. Ron and I had spent tons of time together at home, but never like this, as colleagues on a movie set. Our closeness only made our collaboration easier. And whenever I looked up, I saw Dad palling around with Totten and Mom chatting it up with Vera Miles. It was idyllic.
RON
That was a summer of sexual awakening for me, too. I met a cute local girl named Dion and went on a couple of dates with her. The rodeo was in town, and we went together, watching with amusement as some Wild Country crew members recklessly volunteered and were thrown like rag dolls off a bucking bull.
I was woefully inexperienced with girls. I’d briefly had a girlfriend in eighth grade, but our “dates” were basically playdates sprinkled with pathetically tentative attempts at kissing. I had also been on a kind-of date with Donna Butterworth, the girl singer who had appeared with me on The Danny Kaye Show. Donna and I did a Disney TV movie together called A Boy Called Nuthin’, and we junketed together to Disneyland for a promotional appearance when I was fourteen and she was twelve. I sensed an opportunity on that trip and leaned in for a kiss. Donna was amenable, but she had already started smoking, and her lips tasted of cigarettes. I was traumatized by my mom’s struggles with smoking and the damage it had done to her health. So that romance never took.
Nothing happened with Dion, either. But sheesh, I was fifteen, my voice had broken, and I was growing impatient! My sexual antennae were up, and I picked up on a certain charge in the air at the Grand Vu Motel, an atmosphere of hanky-panky. Not that I needed to be that perceptive. The motel was like a navy warship hitting port—the adults involved with our shoot were real libertines after hours. And whereas I had always gone home to Burbank when I was shooting The Andy Griffith Show, this time I was on location, sharing barracks with the crew, privy to their extracurricular adventures. Clint and I had our own rooms at the Grand Vu, and the guy in the room adjacent to mine was a player. My sleep was frequently interrupted by his and his lovers’ moanings and thumpings.
On top of that, one of our hairstylists, Jackie Bone, was in the midst of a long-term but secret affair with Burt Lancaster. I saw him one weekend, a tall man surreptitiously ducking into a room on the second floor. The following Monday, the other hairstylists were teasing Jackie and she flashed a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. The Wild Country taught me a lot about how adults went about their sexual business. The Wanton World of Disney. Who knew?
But there was a downside to this uninhibited environment that wasn’t amusing at all. Though Clint and I weren’t in school and our parents were present, California’s child labor laws were among the nation’s most rigid, and we were required during the making of The Wild Country to have a welfare worker on set. Let’s call her Mrs. Baker. She was a middle-aged woman who was a stickler for following the rules to the letter. This drove Totten nuts, because we had to do a lot of night shooting. As we neared eleven o’clock, Mrs. Baker notified him that Clint and I were required to stop at eleven on the dot. Totten wanted to keep going until eleven thirty. Dad was inclined to let it slide and look the other way. But Mrs. Baker was inflexible.
This standoff was embarrassing to fifteen-year-old me. I had plenty of energy and was happy to keep working. Yet I was still a minor and therefore still subject to someone else effectively telling me, “It’s time to go to bed, Ronny.” California has since eased up a bit on these rules, but the limitations placed on actors my age were a big reason that I struggled to get hired over the next three years.
None of this is any excuse for what happened to Mrs. Baker. One night, when we were between setups, I heard a howl of terror. From the distance she came running, seemingly for her life. In pursuit was a male makeup artist on the film, inebriated. He tackled her, pinned her to the ground, and started kissing her. The crew members, rather than intervene, simply observed this scene and laughed, cheering the guy on. Mrs. Baker managed to get back up on her feet. She socked the guy in the face. Undaunted, he tackled her again and started dry-humping her in front of everyone. When Mrs. Baker finally broke free for good, she ran off, crying. I never saw her again. She was sent home in a car that night and replaced by a new welfare worker the following day.