As nervous as I was, I could tell that my sincerity had won the audience over. They laughed in the places where I wanted them to laugh and applauded warmly when I offered them my gratitude. Mike Myers shook my hand and Adam Sandler hugged me. I looked out to see my family in the audience: Mom was too unwell to attend, but Dad, Ron, and Cheryl were there, beaming. The suits at MTV were taken by surprise by this turn of events: a moment designed for kitschy laughs had been transformed into a moment of unironic warmth and love. As a result, MTV retired their Lifetime Achievement Award after I received mine.
I was far from being a child by that point, but that night, I learned that Rance Howard, the child whisperer, still had it.
MOM’S HEALTH WENT into steep decline in the year 2000. Her youthful spirit and sense of humor remained. But between the residual issues associated with being hit by a truck in her teens, her years of heavy smoking, and three major heart surgeries, her body started to break down. A hip-replacement surgery wasn’t enough to stem the cascade of health problems. By late summer, she was bedridden and in the hospital, suffering from heart and kidney failure. She was only seventy-three when she passed on the second of September.
Before she died, Mom and I had some final conversations. She knew her days were numbered and was keen to impart advice to me, even though she was having great difficulty speaking. I was preparing to remodel my home. Had she been well, Mom would have been asking me about my plans and talking a mile a minute, offering up suggestions.
She could no longer do that. But she was aware that I was already experiencing some pain in my hips, a condition that she knew all too well. Summoning every ounce of strength that she had, Mom motioned for me to draw closer to her. Her mouth to my ear, she uttered three words, twice.
“Get . . . a . . . Jacuzzi! Get . . . a . . . Jacuzzi!”
These were sage words, for I have used my Jacuzzi every day, twice a day, since the day I had it installed. Thanks, Mom.
More meaningfully, she told me that the thing I had done that made her the most proud had nothing to do with my acting career. It was putting the plug in the jug: getting sober. She was happy for me and tremendously relieved that I hadn’t conceded defeat to drink as her father had.
At Mom’s funeral, I placed my nine-year sobriety chip from AA in her coffin. I beat myself up a little for not getting sober sooner—it would have been better to leave her a chip with a nice round number ten on it. But that was just ego nonsense. Mom went to her grave knowing that I was well, and that’s what matters.
RON
The last significant conversation that I had with Mom was also at her bedside. By then, her ability to speak was all but gone. I could see from her facial expression that she was burning to tell me something and was frustrated by her inability to do so.
“Mom, do you want to write what you want to say?”
She nodded yes. I found a clipboard and a pen. She labored for a long time over her words—it caused her physical pain even to write.
Once she was done, I took the clipboard from her. It contained a single sentence that was hard to decipher in her crabbed, compromised handwriting. But I figured it out. She had written, “Rance loves to act.” In other words, I should keep hiring him and putting him in my movies, whenever I could.
It sounds like a final, funny example of a mother being pushy. But I recognized it as an expression of her deep and abiding love for Dad. She knew more than anyone that he had a need to express himself through his creative work, a desire that had burned in him since they first met in the late 1940s. But Dad seldom had real opportunities to fulfill this desire—most of the parts he got in his career weren’t particularly big or juicy. Mom still believed he had time. Acting was the Howard family business. Saying “Rance loves to act” was her way of saying, “Take care of your father.”
DAD WAS GUTTED after Mom’s death. Were it not for his passion for acting, I don’t know if he would have been able to keep going for another seventeen years, working almost to the very end.