Money was the least of my concerns at that point in my life. I had turned eighteen in March, whereupon my parents turned over to me the custody of my bank account and bonds. My net worth, I discovered, was well into the six figures—a sum that I was proud of, though I didn’t breathe a word of it to my friends at Burroughs High School, lest I come off as a jerk. I was irked, I will admit, when I came in third in the senior class’s voting for Most Likely to Succeed. Third? Third? C’mon! Hadn’t I already frickin’ succeeded?
No, what concerned me was uncertainty about my future. One day, a few weeks after I registered for the draft, I checked the mail at our house in Toluca Lake. Among the envelopes was one from the U.S. Selective Service System, addressed to me. Shit. I opened it. Inside was a letter notifying me that I was to report to a local military office for a physical. I had heard from friends that this was how it worked: you got this letter, you took your physical, and if you passed and were drafted, you were inducted into the military on your nineteenth birthday. My friend Noel was only a few months older than me but had a 1953 birthday, which meant that he received his draft-lottery number a year ahead of me. His number was . . . 6. I was sick for him.
The American Graffiti script carried another sting. One of George’s most brilliant, wrenching twists was that the movie’s teenage high jinks and poignant goodbyes were followed by a final beat: an end card explaining what happened to four of its male protagonists. Mine, or Steve’s, was that I stayed local, presumably to marry Laurie, and I was working in Modesto as an insurance salesman. Paul Le Mat’s character, John, died in a car crash. Rick Dreyfuss’s character, Curt, was “a writer living in Canada,” the inference being that he moved there to avoid the draft. And sweet, geeky Terry the Toad, played by Charles Martin Smith, was reported missing in action near An L?c, in South Vietnam, just three years after the events depicted in the film. It was another reminder, not that I needed one, of the worst-case outcome for any young man who was shipped over.
I told no one about the Selective Service notice. I simply folded it up and put it in my wallet, where it practically vibrated in the back pocket of my jeans. I figured that if I ignored the problem, it might go away. If they somehow followed up demanding a reply, I could say that I was away from home, shooting American Graffiti—that part was about to be true!—and that I hadn’t known about the notice.
Still, that piece of paper haunted me. Sometimes, when I was alone, I took it out, unfolded it, and reread, hoping that its meaning would somehow magically change in the process of rereading: an act of futility if ever there was one. No matter what, I kept that damned notice to myself. I didn’t want to upset anyone, least of all Mom and Cheryl, nor did I want to make them complicit in a potential felony.
I was also still uncertain about acting. Maybe this little low-budget picture would be my swan song, a respectable capper to my career as a child actor. It’s not like I was fighting off suitors for my services.
I never felt competitive with Clint, but I sometimes envied him. He was getting interesting parts of the kind that no longer came my way. The same year that I got American Graffiti, Clint was cast in a TV film called The Red Pony. Its director was Bob Totten. The actor playing Clint’s father was Hank Fonda. These were my guys! So there was Clint, working with the two men who had lit a fire under me to direct. Good for him! But I felt like I was missing out.
CLINT
The Red Pony was, as I mentioned earlier, an NBC special based on a John Steinbeck novella. It’s the story of a Depression-era farm boy named Jody who is caught in a confused state between boyhood and adolescence. His father rides him too hard about stepping up and becoming a man. His mom is more understanding and consoling.
I worked with two absolute legends in Hank Fonda and Maureen O’Hara, who played my parents. I was flattered that Bob Totten handpicked me for a role that entailed going toe-to-toe with the likes of Hank and Maureen. That gave me a ton of confidence. On top of that, Totten and Dad had become good friends since we shot The Wild Country. Totten hired Dad to be my dialogue inculcator and gave him a pretty good part as the town’s sheriff. We shot the movie on location in Sonora, California, in the foothills of the glorious Sierra Nevada. With Jack Elam also on board, playing my grandfather, I felt surrounded by trust and goodwill. The script was strong and Hank was jazzed by the script and Totten’s direction, making him more alive to the material than he had ever been on The Smith Family. I even experienced my first puppy-love crush: Totten’s daughter, Heather, who was my age and had a small part in the movie. She was a cute redhead, just like Cheryl, with whom I enjoyed a few innocent dates and several hours of expensive crosstown phone calls.