Ronald William Howard had made his entrance, hair the color of carrots, yowling but healthy and content.
MY PARENTS SENT out a birth announcement for me in the form of a theater program. The “show,” entitled Life Begins at 9:03 A.M., took place at the “theater” of Lindley Hospital. I was billed as Leading Man, Mom as Patient Mother, and Dad as Distracted Father. The production notes included a warning: “In the first scene, the star appears in the nude, creating quite a sensation.”
I spent the first five weeks of my life in Duncan with my mother and her family. Dad, back to work on the Chanute base, spent all his off-duty time scrubbing the floors spotless and scouring the walls and ceilings of the little bungalow in Rantoul. In that part of Illinois, everyone heated their homes with coal, consequently coating every surface with a thin layer of soot. His friends offered to help with the cleaning, but Dad wouldn’t allow it. This effort was a personal tribute to his wife and newborn.
I remember nothing of that bungalow. We lived there for all of five months before Dad transferred to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. Shortly before the move, my parents adopted a russet-haired spaniel-mix puppy they named Gulliver. My very first memory is of sitting under the kitchen table with Gulliver in our apartment in Biloxi, when I was two years old. I had discovered some chewing gum under a table and put it in my mouth. Neither of my parents chewed gum and the table was a holdover from the family that had previously occupied our crappy air force housing. On many levels, this was not a wise move.
Worse still, I took the gum out of my mouth and fed it to Gulliver, who eagerly gobbled it up . . . and then started retching, puking all over the floor. The memory ends with my dad marching into our apartment in his uniform and getting very angry. He reminded me that we’d had this discussion before—I shouldn’t give the dog gum under any circumstances. I guess I was a repeat offender. Dad rarely flashed anger, then or at any other time of his life. Maybe that’s why the scene remains so vivid to me.
Another early memory: watching a C-grade western called Frontier Woman at a drive-in, also when I was two. A year earlier, Dad had somehow hustled a plum role as the movie’s heavy even though he was still in the air force. He actually went AWOL for a week to shoot it! （And luckily faced no repercussions.） Mom and I accompanied him to a patch of countryside near Meridian, Mississippi, where the producers had constructed a convincing replica of a rustic Old West village.
Since the film was an all-hands-on-deck kind of operation, Mom duly dressed up in a period costume and joined the cast as a villager. I became this villager woman’s baby. The script happened to call for a scene in which a blowhard politician’s speech is comically interrupted by a baby’s cry, so my role expanded! The problem? I was too good-natured to cry on cue. Mom had befriended some of the teenage Choctaw Indians from the Pearl River Reservation who participated in the shoot. These boys were fascinated by the red-haired baby in their midst and enjoyed engaging me, pulling funny faces and tickling me. One of them handed me his miniature tomahawk. But when he tried to take it back, I became upset and cried out. Aha! Problem solved.
The timing needed to be perfect, but when the director shouted “Action!,” the politicians’ debate ensued, and, at just the right moment, the Choctaw boy, off-screen, yanked the tomahawk out of my hand. On cue, I let out a cry that echoed through the hills. Frontier Woman is technically my first film, though it was an uncredited walk-on. Or crawl-on, if you like. I’m told that I got the laugh.
Dad industriously mounted show after show at the base’s theater, Keesler Playhouse, in the process honing his directing chops—skills that would prove useful to him both in his own career and in overseeing mine and Clint’s. He directed and starred in productions of William Saroyan’s Time of Your Life, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s George Washington Slept Here, and Sam and Bella Spewack’s My Three Angels. My mom temporarily came out of retirement again to take the female lead in many of these plays. She brought me to rehearsals in a portable canvas bassinet. By osmosis, I was already soaking up the vibes of show business.
YET I TRULY did not seem destined for the business until two years later, when my parents recognized how much fun I had in filming The Journey, and how adept I proved as a juvenile actor. Why not see if I was up for more? In the summer of ’58, when we moved to California from New York, Mom typed up a résumé for me and glued onto it a black-and-white two-by-four photo of my smiling, freckled face: my first headshot. In L.A., I became a client of the same agency that represented Dad.