The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(86)
Cloris was to play my mother, a diner owner who had long ago given up Johnny for adoption. Before I was awarded the role, I was told by my agent that Cloris wanted to meet with me for a read-through, just to make sure that the chemistry was there. I was given her address and a time to report for the meeting.
On the designated day, I left my dorm room and drove to Cloris’s house. I arrived at the front door to find a note taped on it. It read: MEETING WILL BE IN THE BACKYARD. COME ON IN.
As I entered, I expected to hear voices: Darren McGavin, Cloris, maybe some other people involved in the production. But all I encountered was silence and empty rooms. Finally, through the back door, I caught a glimpse of Cloris, completing some laps in her pool and then pulling herself out of the water. She saw me and waved me over.
Cloris was, at the time, forty-seven years old. She had an amazingly taut, athletic body. I know this because she was wearing nothing but an extremely skimpy black bikini and was dripping wet, and in no hurry to dry off or get dressed. “Ron, hello!” she said, flashing that broad, luminous grin for which she was known. “Can I get you an iced tea?”
I accepted her offer. But first, she told me that she had just wanted to meet with me one-on-one, to make sure that we would hit it off. I was starting to feel nervous and uncomfortable. Then Cloris asked me to follow her into the kitchen, sashaying in her bikini bottom while I stared but tried not to really stare. It occurred to me in this moment that she had won an Academy Award for playing a middle-aged woman who had an affair with a teenager.
As Cloris poured us two glasses of iced tea out of a pitcher, I was gripped by fearful anticipation, akin to what I used to feel in school when I thought I was about to get into a fight. Was I being put to some kind of test? Was she going to make a move on me? Was I not going to get the part if I demurred? Could I turn up my hands and say, Sorry, I have a girlfriend? Should I turn on my heels and simply make a run for it?
Cloris handed me my iced tea and held hers. We were standing no more than a foot apart. She flashed me another smile and leaned in ever so slightly, as if she was about to initiate something. I took a big slug of iced tea. She seemed to be enjoying my nervousness. “Um, it’s, uh . . . it’s quite the script!” I said, trying to drum up some banal shop talk.
She held her stance and her gaze for just a moment longer. Then she said, “It is! Let’s read through some of this.” Only then did she slip on a robe and invite me back outside, where we sat down and read a few scenes, very professionally.
I drove back to USC to catch an afternoon class, wondering what the hell I had just experienced. Later that day, I got a call from Darren, saying that Cloris had loved meeting me and that I was in.
When we shot the film, there were no further flirtations. In fact, my conversations with Cloris on set were relaxed, professional, and creatively inspiring. She was a dream colleague and highly intelligent artist. Happy Mother’s Day, Love George also happened to mark my debut as Ron Howard; even in American Graffiti, I was still billed as Ronny. At last, I was unveiled to the filmgoing public as a man!
Less than a year later, I again got a job playing the son of a character played by Cloris, this time in a prestigious TV movie called The Migrants, with a teleplay by Lanford Wilson. I wasn’t even asked to audition—I’m pretty sure that I got the part because Cloris had recommended me for it.
AMERICAN GRAFFITI WAS released in August 1973, a year after we wrapped. I expected it to get some good reviews, and it did. The New York Times posited that it was arguably the most important American film since Bonnie and Clyde. Roger Ebert called it “not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction.”
But the film became so much more: a word-of-mouth hit with staying power. It played in movie houses for more than two years after its initial release. I missed out on the premiere because I was on location for another film, but when I got back home, I drove past theaters where there was a two-hour wait to get into the next showing. Cheryl and I caught the movie at the Avco Theater in Westwood, near UCLA, and were astonished to come across a multigenerational audience that, as one, clapped along enthusiastically as Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” played over the title sequence. George Lucas’s little $700,000 picture went on to gross more than $100 million, at the time the greatest return on investment in the history of cinema.
All of us in the cast benefited from our association with the movie, a phenomenon that I refer to as the “Graffiti glow.” Candy received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Rick and Paul were signed up to star in multiple movies by Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Demme, respectively. Harrison landed a role in George Lucas’s next movie, an off-the-wall, long-shot sci-fi flick called Star Wars.
But some of us benefited less than others. Like me. I just wasn’t able to parlay my participation in American Graffiti into film stardom. I did Darren’s movie, and Charlie and I had supporting roles in one of Lee Marvin’s weaker outings, an uninspired western called The Spikes Gang. I wasn’t devastated, though. This lack of traction only reinforced my ambition to stay the course at USC and become the master of my own creative journey.
Unbeknownst to me, however, something was percolating in TV-land that was to affect my life profoundly. The American Graffiti juggernaut had come in the wake of some similar phenomena: the success of the retro vocal group Sha Na Na, which had played Woodstock and was selling out major rock venues, and the original Broadway production of Grease, which opened in 1972 and proved so popular that it ran for the rest of the decade. This so-called ’50s craze set off a scramble among the broadcast networks to develop 1950s-themed series for television.