He told me about the terms he had reached with ABC. “I don’t know what’s going on with your contract, but I want you to know how much I respect you,” he said. “You’ve handled this all incredibly well.”
I made plain to Henry that whatever beefs I had were not with him. “You’re not doing anything wrong, Henry,” I said. “You’re not letting this go to your head or change who you are. You’re a great team player. What you’ve created is incredible and great for the show. But I have to admit that the whole situation bothers me in some ways.”
We talked about the Fonzie’s Happy Days fiasco. Henry revealed that the idea had come from the very top. He had been approached about it by Leonard Goldenson, the president and founder of ABC. Henry had pushed back against the title change. Goldenson then suggested that maybe Fonzie should have his own show. Henry pushed back against that, too—“I’m successful because I’m in the middle of this show,” he said.
I had not been waiting for Henry to come to me and clear the air. We were friends; whatever anger I had in me was never directed at him. But it was so gracious and thoughtful of him to make this conversation happen.
“I don’t want anything to change about our friendship,” Henry said. “I love you, Ron.”
“I love you, Henry,” I said.
We still do. He is the godfather to all four of my children.
CLINT
The 1976–77 school year was my last at John Burroughs, and I treated it like a victory lap. I had piled up a bunch of summer-school credits so my workload was minimal. In the fall, I wrote for the Smoke Signal and convinced the athletic department to let my friend Gig and me take over the public-address duties for the home football games, a task we carried out with relish and a little ham. During the spring semester, I was left with only two real classes, leaving me plenty of time to enjoy my final season on the varsity baseball team.
All that, and my scholarship to Pepperdine was locked in! So I was really in cruise control. Dad and Ron knew that I was willing to work cheap, so they wrote me a funny role in Grand Theft Auto.
I turned eighteen a couple of months before I graduated from high school. As he had with Ron, Dad honored this birthday as another kind of graduation, to adulthood and financial independence. The money that had been stashed away for me by Mom and Dad （and the Jackie Coogan Law） wasn’t as big as Ron’s, but it was still a significant chunk of change.
I had already splurged at age sixteen and a half on my first car, a copper-colored 1975 AMC Pacer. My friends razzed me about buying a soap bubble on wheels, but hey, I thought that all that glass looked space-age cool. I was an idiot. Without air-conditioning, in the Southern California sun, the car’s interior became hot as blue blazes. The four-cylinder engine was too small for my tastes, lacking the giddyap teenage drivers require. The only saving grace? The hand-operated emergency brake located to the right of the driver’s seat. I learned from the stunt drivers on Eat My Dust! how to use it as a tool for screech-’n’-slide halts, a skill I showed off while making donuts in the student parking lot at Burroughs. I drove my Pacer into the ground in less than a year. I traded it in for a Pontiac Firebird. The dealer spotted me $500 for the old car, or one-sixth of what I had spent on it in the first place.
This gives you an idea of my maturity level at that time. Life was a baked joyride. I experienced just one minor hiccup: Pepperdine revoked my scholarship when they realized they had made a mistake—it was supposed to be a needs-based tuition award, and I clearly had the means to pay my own way. I was a little pissed off, as I had done nothing to mislead the school, but the matter was easily resolved. The university still guaranteed me a place in its Class of 1981, as long as I whipped out my checkbook and paid them a few hundred bucks per semester.
I also got to hang with Ron at Dodger Stadium. One nice thing that he did with his Happy Days money was get season tickets. I bought in with him, so we spent a lot of quality time at the ballpark, enjoying the Steve Garvey–Davey Lopes–Ron Cey lineup. The nights that he was tied up with work or busy with Cheryl, Ron would flip me his ticket and I’d take a beer-drinking buddy with me.