The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(70)

For the first time, Cheryl got angry at me. She felt that I had walked her into a trap. That had not been my intention, of course, but it was the reality. And now she was convinced that her boyfriend’s mother didn’t like or trust her.





CLINT


Ron was kind of a nerd. It didn’t matter that he was a TV star and a household name. He was a pimply-faced, straight-arrow sixteen-year-old. I was thrilled that he now stood a chance of getting some action.

So I had no separation anxiety about losing my big brother to his new girlfriend. I liked Cheryl right away and I saw how happy Ron was. I defended their relationship to Mom and Dad and resented on Ron’s behalf the draconian restrictions that they had placed on his dating life. It just wasn’t fair.

This doesn’t mean that I was above being a pesky little brother. I was the Hee-Hee Man, let’s not forget. We had a rec room in the lower level of the guesthouse out back, underneath Dad’s office. Ron and Cheryl would inevitably gravitate toward there, looking for a place to be alone. But Mom made it known that she didn’t want them to be in the rec room by themselves, lest they start necking . . . or worse.

For me, Mom’s warning was like an invitation. I took it upon myself to be a busybody. One day when Cheryl was over, I scurried off to the rec room and hid behind a couch. Sure enough, Ron and Cheryl walked in and started to kiss. I sprang up and said, “Guess what? Clint’s here!” I was a sick little bastard.

Cheryl just giggled, but Ron was pissed. His limited time with her was sacrosanct. And, little-brother mischief aside, I respected that.





RON


As this tension over my dating life went on, I challenged Mom and Dad. What about it was bugging them so much? Mom told me that she was worried primarily about me getting Cheryl pregnant. I replied that Cheryl and I were not yet doing the thing that causes pregnancies.

She didn’t believe me. She had clocked my furtive visits to the rec room with Cheryl and worried about how late my dates went. “Oh, come on!” she said. “How can you spend that much time with her without going all the way?”

Wow. This was rich coming from someone who, though she and Dad hadn’t yet revealed this truth to me, had lived in sin with her boyfriend in New York City and eloped with him when they were twenty-one and twenty. But then, that was probably one of the reasons why Mom was so suspicious—she had been a free spirit at my age. And now it was the early 1970s, a much more sexually permissive time than that of her youth.

I was telling the truth, though. Cheryl and I weren’t having sex. Sure, we were necking and petting, to use the terminology then still in use. But that was it. Intimacy was new for both of us and I didn’t want to push Cheryl or rush ourselves as a couple.

As my relationship with her continued, Dad became more sympathetic, even though he and Mom remained united in their clampdown. Just in case I did choose to become sexually active, he wanted me to be prepared. So, in the same plainspoken way that he explained masturbation and the bathroom graffiti at Desilu Cahuenga to me, he sat me down for another talk. First, he presented me with a copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). This was a recently published book by a doctor named David Reuben that had become an international bestseller, the first mainstream sex manual that wasn’t considered dirty or deviant.

“Listen, you don’t have to be embarrassed by sex, and this book will answer a lot of questions you may have,” Dad said. “It’s good to have the answers because sex is a natural part of life. If you ever have other questions, let me know.”

I never did hit up Dad for advice—that was just too uncomfortable to contemplate—but I avidly paged through the book. Still, I couldn’t bear my parents’ rules about how much time I got to spend with Cheryl.

So I developed some workarounds.

For starters, I pretended that I had found religion. We were not churchgoers in our household. But Cheryl went with her dad every Sunday and was, in those days, pretty pious and hardcore—sufficiently so that she was genuinely a little worried about my soul. So I told my parents that I had become interested in Cheryl’s Southern Baptist faith and wanted to go to church with her. They couldn’t object to their boy going to church, could they?

Even this proved to be a difficult negotiation. Mom and Dad said that I could go as long I came back immediately after church let out. I managed to pry out of them an allowance of half an hour of further time with Cheryl on Sundays beyond church.

Next, I declared that I was trying out for the cross-country team at Burroughs. Not because I enjoyed running. I had a scheme. To try out, I would need to train, right? Mom and Dad permitted me an hour and a half in the afternoons to go running. So I put on my shorts and running shoes and jogged over to Cheryl’s house, which was only a mile and a half away. Then I would spend about an hour hanging out with her. When my time was almost up, Cheryl drove me back to within a couple blocks of my house. From there, I sprinted pell-mell up to our door so that my face was convincingly flushed and my hair sufficiently sweaty. “Whew, good workout!” I said when I walked in, bending over to rest my hands on my knees as I breathed deeply. I don’t think my folks bought it for a second. But they tolerated it.


IT TOOK SOME time for my parents to reach détente with Cheryl, or with the idea of Cheryl and me as a couple. But simply by sticking together, Cheryl and I demonstrated that we were for real. It was one thing for Mom and Dad to have doubts about a pair of moony sixteen-year-olds and quite another to question our commitment by the time we were nineteen and still inseparable.