As they toured with the children’s-theater troupe during the summer of ’48, their desire to marry as quickly as possible grew ever more urgent. Dad revealed to me in my adulthood that he and Mom had no moral issue with living together unmarried, but society still frowned on couples who cohabitated without a wedding certificate. To my parents’ frustration, they discovered that in most of the states that they visited, marriage required that both parties take a blood test and then endure a three-day waiting period. That wouldn’t work—the troupe never stayed in any state for as long as three days. But as summer turned to fall, fortune smiled upon the young couple. At a diner in Ohio, a nosy but friendly waiter happened to hear Mom and Dad discussing their plight and butted in: Kentucky, the waiter said, had no such waiting-period policy. Eagerly, Mom and Dad checked the schedule: their next show was in the town of Winchester, Kentucky. Perfect. They could get hitched right away!
And so, on the morning of October 5, 1948, in the lobby of the Brown Proctor Hotel in Winchester, Jean Speegle and Rance Howard were married. The officiant was a Methodist minister who they fortuitously met in the hotel the day before. The groomsmen were the troupe’s six little-person actors, who opened the ceremony by improvising a tap routine performed to the tune of Wagner’s “Wedding March,” better known as “Here Comes the Bride.” Dad was five weeks shy of his twentieth birthday. Mom was a comparatively mature and worldly twenty-one. He wore a plaid suit. She wore one of her costume dresses, her Cinderella ball gown temporarily denuded of its theatrical sequins.
The company put together a modest reception for them in the hotel lobby. The company manager, an older woman named Mrs. Lawton, improvised a wedding cake by having a local bakery stack three regular cakes and refrost them. Everyone danced to the jukebox in the lobby and drank through the afternoon and into the night. In Dad’s telling, the groomsmen drank more and carried on later than anyone, undaunted by the call to be on the bus at 5 A.M. the following morning.
The wedding was not entirely free of drama. Mrs. Lawton initially believed that Rance and Jean were being too rash. A couple of days before the ceremony, she asked my parents if Mom was pregnant, and if that was the reason for the hurry. Even when Mom explained that she wasn’t knocked up, Mrs. Lawton still tried to head off the ceremony, fearful that the young lovers were making a terrible mistake. Mom turned on her patented charm and brought the older woman around—to the point where Mrs. Lawton not only procured the cake but also gave the bride away.
When the news of their marriage reached the Speegles in Oklahoma and the Beckenholdts in Kansas, the reaction wasn’t entirely rapturous. Granddad Beckenholdt went to a lawyer to see if he could get the marriage annulled. The lawyer, citing the fact that Dad was of legal age, talked Granddad out of it. Dad was hurt but unsurprised by his father’s actions. He anticipated that his parents would flip out over his sudden wedding, yet he was unwavering in his commitment to Mom and their shared pursuit of a life in show business.
The Speegles were caught by surprise but not entirely shocked, given their daughter’s romanticism and determined disposition. When the theater troupe rolled into Oklahoma, Granddad Butch and Grandma Louise magnanimously held an open house in Duncan that served as the new couple’s proper reception. Dad was in black tie with a white dinner jacket. Mom was dressed in a beautiful off-the-shoulder gown with a billowing skirt of diaphanous white tulle. They looked fantastic.
Granddad Beckenholdt begged off from attending the Duncan reception, but Dad’s mother, Grandma Ethel, made the drive to Oklahoma with her sister. This was a show of good faith and also a fact-finding mission, to see, as my aunt Glee put it, “what kind of outfit Rance had married into.”
When the children’s-theater tour ended, my folks paid their first visit as a married couple to the Beckenholdts’ farm in Kansas, where they were received politely if stiffly. The Beckenholdts withheld their full approval of Mom for a long time. Not until Clint and I came along did their wariness evaporate completely.
With some savings from their theater work, my folks bought a used Willys-Overland Jeepster soft-top. After they were done visiting the Beckenholdts, Mom and Dad pulled away from the farm in Kansas, headed to the highway on-ramp, and paused for a moment to ponder which way to go: east or west? New York or Los Angeles?