While Mom was the love of his life, Dad was a serial monogamist who didn’t function well by himself. He was fortunate to find happiness not long after Mom died with a woman named Judy Jacobson, who had also recently lost her spouse. They were married from 2001 until Judy’s Alzheimer’s disease–related death in 2017.
Dad’s indefatigable drive to keep auditioning should be an inspiration to all working actors. When he was eighty-four, he won a part in a prestige picture, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, playing a brother of Bruce Dern’s raggedy, ne’er-do-well lead character.
Bruce received an Academy Award nomination for his performance. At one of the awards ceremonies that season, he sought me out on the red carpet. He wanted to convey to me, emphatically, how grateful he was to Dad for his performance. “He was so fucking real, man, that I realized what the movie could be,” Bruce said. “I knew that I would have to step up to that level of honesty.” This was both gratifying and funny, because back in the 1960s—now it can be told—Bruce had been one of the guys on Dad’s “list” of rat-bastard actors who were stealing his parts.
Though it’s been years since I played a fictional character on TV or in a movie, I did get to act with Dad one last time, in a supermeta episode of Arrested Development. I was that show’s coexecutive producer and off-screen narrator for the duration of its run. In its final season, there was an episode in which Michael and George-Michael Bluth, the characters played by Jason Bateman and Michael Cera, attend a backyard barbecue hosted . . . by the actual Howard family. Cheryl and I played exaggerated versions of ourselves, as did all four of our kids, Bryce, Paige, Jocelyn, and Reed.
The coup de grace of this self-referential pageant was a scene in which Dad, at the age of eighty-eight, sent up his role as the all-knowing patriarch. In the episode, Michael Bluth, while sneaking around the pretend Howard mansion, chances upon Rance Howard sitting before a bank of surveillance screens in his office, snooping on his family like Big Brother. The scene is played for laughs, but it’s not entirely untrue to who Dad was.
“I like to stay busy. Kind of keep an eye on my son, too,” he tells Michael.
“Oh, yeah? You still have to do that?” Michael says.
“That’s a father’s job,” Dad says. “Doesn’t start at nine and end at five. It’s twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”
“Even as they get older, huh?”
“That gets even harder,” Dad said. “They think they know it all. You still have to be there for them when they make mistakes. Or sometimes they need to cry a little bit. Because sometimes a person needs to cry a little bit—unless that person is a dad.”
CLINT
I was also lucky to have one last go-round with Pop on a set. His final film was a little indie road movie called Apple Seed. For the first time in his life, he was indisputably a leading man, playing an elderly ex-con who tries to warn off a younger man from making the mistakes that he made. I was cast as Dad’s long-estranged son, who had not seen his father since the older man was incarcerated for murder, a long, long time ago.
I had just one scene in Apple Seed, toward the end of the movie. Dad and I got together to rehearse it at his Toluca Lake house the night before he flew east to begin work on the production. I wanted to give him a hero’s send-off, so I stopped by the Smoke House to pick up some of their garlic bread, which we Howards consider the world’s best, and grilled salmon and asparagus for the two of us. After dinner, we cleared the table and took out our scripts.
My character, Hughie, is the only person in the film who isn’t smitten by the charismatic rogue that Dad played. He has no love for his old man. Preparing for this role meant summoning memories of painful experiences in my life, but none of them pertained to Dad, who I loved unequivocally. As we sat there at the table, I was overcome by gratitude for the privilege of working with my father—and regret that we hadn’t acted together as adults more often. We managed to read through the scene once before my eyes filled with tears. I was embarrassed—until I looked up and saw that Dad was crying, too. The only other time I ever saw him cry was when Mom passed.