We returned home with some apprehension. Mom had not entirely regained her composure, but she was palpably de-escalating. She hadn’t taken a return to Duncan off the table, she said, “But I haven’t called to get a flight yet. Maybe I will tomorrow.” She was talking herself off the ledge.
Mom shut down my attempts to have a conversation about what went down, though. She needed to work through her feelings by herself.
CLINT
Dad flew home a few days later, after his filming was complete, and they were fine, as loving as ever. Ron and I both asked him what had happened. He said he really didn’t know. He assured us that there was nothing going on between him and Vera Miles.
“There’s no reason for your mother to be afraid,” he said. “Vera is with Bob Jones. That’s what she was doing in North Carolina. I don’t know what got her so upset.”
Being an immature wiseass, I made some ill-considered crack about menopause. Dad gently but firmly shut me down. He wasn’t the type to sweep things under the rug and pretend that their fight had never happened, but he made it clear to me, in no uncertain terms, that Mom’s pain was nothing to joke about. Her fuse had been lit, and Dad’s needing to stay on location longer than anticipated was the thing that made her combust.
Now that I’m older and a little wiser, I think that the fight was really about love. Mom and Dad had sparks flying between them from the moment they met. I don’t mean that they had a tempestuous relationship, because they didn’t. But it was a passionate one. When you love someone that much and don’t feel like you’re receiving reciprocal love, you’re capable of being more deeply hurt by that person than by anyone else.
RON
This marked the only time that we ever saw Mom truly crack under the pressures that life placed upon her. For two decades, hers was the voice of optimism and good cheer in our family, and her sense of self was linked to her husband’s and children’s careers. I suspect that she felt emotionally vulnerable in ’73 because, as a family, we were in a period of transition. Clint and I were growing up and becoming less reliant upon her; the empty nest loomed. Dad wanted to reclaim his life as an actor, rather than as his kids’ manager and mentor. Remember, one of the reasons Mom gave up acting is that she didn’t want to be apart from Dad for extended periods. So Dad’s long location shoot came at a bad time in that regard.
I also suspect that Dad must not have handled what she was saying with his usual patience and grace. It takes two people for a blowup like that to happen. In fairness to Mom, we only heard her side of the telephone conversation. Whatever Dad was saying on his side, he was not soothing her.
I don’t think Mom meant all those comments she made about regretting her life choices. It was heat-of-the-moment stuff, not unlike when young parents at their most exasperated question why the hell they had kids in the first place. The talk that Mom and I had fifteen years later in her hospital room—before her open-heart surgery, where she revealed her conversations with the Cocoon actresses and spoke of her idyllic Duncan childhood—was like a bookend to this episode. She chose positivity over negativity.
In her final year, as her body was failing her, she demonstrated this philosophy by asking Dad to help her revisit the places they had cherished in their younger years: Sequoia National Park in Northern California, with its mighty trees; the Grand Canyon; and her beloved New York City. In a twist out of Dickens, just as she and Dad pulled up in a yellow cab to look at the old apartment building on Riverside Drive where they had shacked up as young lovers, a wrecking ball swung through the building’s brick facade. They hung around to observe the demolition of their love nest. I asked Mom if she found the scene upsetting.
“No, just lucky,” she said. “We got there just in time. It’s like they waited for us.”
I THOUGHT A lot about my own life’s arc when I got Happy Days. I was pleased to have landed the role that I considered to be rightfully mine in the first place. But I was ambivalent. I questioned whether my pragmatism was getting in the way of my passion. I was replaying scenes from my childhood, of Dad sitting by the phone, and of him and his character-actor buddies hanging out on weekdays as they struggled to find work. I thought to myself, Who are you to turn down the lead in a network sitcom?