The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(85)

But I had to give up the editorship for The Cowboys. And then I found myself in TV purgatory, the seventh banana in a cruddy eight-banana western that was destined to fail.

On top of that, I was losing my little-kid looks. My face was physically changing. My brows were getting bigger and darker. Acne descended upon me—pimples everywhere. Clint the cute towhead vanished seemingly overnight, his straight blond hair turning brown and frizzing into curls. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, What the hell just happened? Who will ever go out with me?

This is not atypical stuff for a kid going through puberty. But it’s brutal when you’re a child actor and you’re known for a certain look. When that look is gone, and your hormones are doing a number on your body and your brain, you start to feel the uglies, inside and out. And it sure as hell doesn’t help that your career stalls. Or that you like to get loaded.


IT’S IMPORTANT FOR me to point out that I am not in any way attributing my substance abuse to my struggles in my midteens as an actor. I’m simply saying that these two phenomena arrived in my life at the same time and made for a toxic brew. No work plus access to booze and pot equals trouble.

But here’s the thing: Initially, I thought I could handle it. I was good at keeping up appearances. I still received good grades and had good friends. It was a while before my habits and conduct were problematic enough to cause my family concern.





RON


I was no longer a full-time member of the Howard household when Clint started drinking and getting high, so I wasn’t there to bear witness to his overindulgence. Even when I learned that Clint was smoking pot, it didn’t bug me. Between USC and American Graffiti, I had become totally acclimated to environments where marijuana was a constant. My generation believed that smoking pot was actually less detrimental to one’s health than drinking. And I didn’t yet know that Clint was drinking.

Beyond all that, I knew that Clint had an active social life and I was rooting for him to have fun at Jordan Middle School and Burroughs High School. In some ways, I envied him. Growing up, I had always regarded myself as something of an outsider. I thought that I was inordinately square and Clint was normal. Now, I was comfortable being inordinately square—it hadn’t held me back from meeting and falling for Cheryl—but I didn’t want that for Clint. I admired that he wasn’t hampered by social inhibition. It took me a long while to suspect that anything about Clint’s life was amiss.


BESIDES, I WAS consumed by my own drama. In my first semester of college, I remained preoccupied by the thought of getting drafted. Then the ’72 election was decided in favor of President Nixon. Say what you will about Watergate and his many other transgressions, but Nixon kept his promise to end the draft. The last draft call that required young men to report for military duty was on December 7, 1972. The following July, the United States officially made the switch to having an all-volunteer armed forces. I can’t convey the magnitude of the relief I felt, for me and for my friends such as Noel. My draft-lottery number, 67, wasn’t as scarily low as his, but it was low enough to keep me up at night.

I was fortunate to escape the fate of the many young American men who were killed, injured, or, like my American Graffiti castmate Paul Le Mat, traumatized by their time serving overseas. I took that folded-up notice out of my pocket and tore it into pieces.

At USC, I hedged my bets about my future. I enjoyed taking classes, in particular one that was devoted to reading classic books, plays, and stories, and then watching and analyzing their film adaptations: The Grapes of Wrath, Summer and Smoke, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The last is an Ambrose Bierce story that the French director Robert Enrico turned into an Oscar-winning film short. It inspired me to adapt another Bierce story, “A Horseman in the Sky,” about a Union soldier who kills a Confederate spy—who turns out to be the soldier’s own father.

Cheryl’s dad was a gifted amateur photographer and documentarist who owned an early 16 mm Bolex, a Swiss camera that he carried with him when he climbed Mount Fuji in 1947. After a tutorial, he lent me the Bolex, which came with three Zeiss lenses that were perfect for capturing the period look I was going for. We shot the film in Malibu Canyon. Dennis Weaver’s son Robby played the Union soldier and Dad played the Confederate.

But after the positive experience of American Graffiti, I decided to keep on acting, lest my trail go cold like it had when I turned down those Bonanza and Mod Squad jobs in the late ’60s. It’s not like any prime parts were coming my way, though. One of the few decent ones I got was in a forgettable exploitation thriller theatrically released as Happy Mother’s Day, Love George and later retitled Run Stranger, Run. No matter what it was called, those titles alone are red flags, should you wish to hunt down the movie and watch it.

The actor Darren McGavin directed the movie, which was set in a sleepy New England fishing village. I played a drifter named Johnny who returns to this town in search of the father he never knew—a different kind of role for me. I barely remember the plot, except that my character got blamed for a series of gory murders that had actually been committed by his teenage cousin, played by Tessa Dahl, the daughter of Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl.

For such a tawdry movie, we had a surprisingly strong cast. Darren used his charm and charisma to bring his actor friends on board and will the movie into existence, setting an example that I would emulate a few years later, when I began trying to launch my own passion projects. Neal herself was in it alongside Tessa, as was the singer Bobby Darin, and, just a year removed from winning an Oscar for her astonishing performance as a lonely Texas housewife in The Last Picture Show, the great Cloris Leachman.