I heard a soft groan. Henry went quiet for a moment. Then he brightened. “You’ll be unbelievable at it, Ron, unbelievable,” he said. “Go with God.”
Epilogue
RON
Now that my own children are grown, I have come to believe that one of the most important things a parent can do is learn to let go. Not completely, of course—you can’t do that because your children never stop being your children. There will be times when they call upon you to help them raise their own kids, as our parents did for us. There will be times when the stresses of life require you to turn back the clock and be their primary source of comfort and reassurance.
But it’s crucial to recognize when it’s time to get out of your kids’ way. Dad managed this brilliantly. In the late 1970s, we founded a company called Major H Productions that was built around the Howard name and the idea of collaboration between Dad, Clint, and me. We did a few made-for-TV films, including the one that Clint and I wrote, Cotton Candy, and an Emmy-nominated kids’ movie entitled Through the Magic Pyramid that Dad wrote and I directed. Major H served its purpose for a time, but I craved more ambitious projects and the opportunity to helm a big studio picture.
In the early 1980s, I met a bright, hustling young TV-movie producer on the Paramount lot named Brian Grazer. We hit it off both personally and creatively. Brian was bursting with ideas, and he conceived the stories for what became my second and third feature films, Night Shift and Splash. I watched in awe and gratitude as Brian fearlessly navigated the Hollywood studio system to get these movies produced and distributed by major studios. Night Shift was a sleeper success for Warner Bros. Splash, a Disney production, was my first bona fide hit, landing in that year’s box-office top ten and receiving Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. My working relationship with Brian was clearly working. He and I decided to stick together and create our own independent production shop, which we named Imagine Entertainment.
This marked the end of Major H Productions, a changing of the guard. Dad had no stake in this new company. Yet he never guilt-tripped me for seeking out other collaborators and business partners, nor did Mom pressure me to continue working with Dad. They let me follow my instincts—instincts that they themselves helped hone—while maintaining our familial closeness.
What a gift that was: to let me fly away, the way Opie let his baby birds fly free at the end of “Opie the Birdman.” It was their final act in raising me and positioning me for success in our shared field of work—a tremendous act of love and grace.
I WASN’T THE only Howard to take flight. In the 1980s, Mom returned to acting for the first time since Dad pressed her into service for the shows that he directed on the air force base. It started with me putting her in Cocoon as a featured extra who worked on the film for several weeks. Then Henry Winkler cast her and Dad in small parts in a Dolly Parton holiday movie he was directing, A Smoky Mountain Christmas. （Henry had already done me a major solid by agreeing to star alongside Michael Keaton in Night Shift; I wouldn’t have received the necessary financing for the film without someone of his status attached.）
Newly alive to performing, Mom started going out on auditions. Before long, she had effectively cornered the market on little-old-lady roles in sitcoms, appearing in Roseanne, The Wonder Years, Married . . . With Children, and Grace Under Fire. One day in 1994, when I was preparing Apollo 13, Dad called me.
“Ron, I want to ask you something about your casting,” he said. I immediately began to wonder if he had a role for himself in mind, which would have been unlike him; he had never, ever promoted himself to me.
“I see that in the latest Apollo 13 rewrite, there is a terrific little role for Jim Lovell’s mother, Blanche,” he said. “I think Jean would knock that out of the park.”
Okay, now I was in a bit of a dilemma. Dad was leaning on me to cast Mom, but this part wasn’t a casual walk-on. Blanche has a major scene in which her daughter-in-law breaks the news to her that there has been an explosion in the command module, putting her son in danger. Blanche, far from breaking down in tears, displays a steely resolve. She reassures her crying granddaughter by saying, “If they could get a washing machine to fly, my Jimmy could land it.”