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Dad’s intermittent success as a TV actor wasn’t bad for a newcomer to California. But the Howard who kept getting cast without fail was me. I got almost every part I auditioned for. Thanks to my freckles and red hair, I had the perfect wholesome, gee-willikers look for the late Eisenhower era. I also caught the eye of Ethel Winant, CBS’s all-powerful casting director who would later became the first woman to hold an executive position at a major television network. My first big credit was in an episode of Playhouse 90, a prestigious, biweekly CBS anthology series. Each episode presented a ninety-minute staging of a new teleplay. The show launched such great directors as Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, and Sidney Lumet.
The episode, entitled “The Ding-a-Ling Girl,” was filmed live to tape for the West Coast and was broadcast live-live to the East Coast. Once the cameras rolled, there was no stopping for retakes. Years later, when I hosted Saturday Night Live in the Eddie Murphy era, the white-knuckle aspects of live television—the last-minute scurrying, the tension backstage, the constant countdowns—came flooding back.
Playhouse 90 was known for its heavy, often solemn material, and in this particular teleplay, my character drowned. The drowning, fortunately, took place off-screen. But there was still a scene where I descended into a pool.
Dad drove me from Burbank to CBS’s Television City in Hollywood—the first of what would turn out to be hundreds of such journeys with him to a studio workplace. Bear in mind that I could not yet read, so it fell to Dad to explain to me, in a way that a kid not quite five years old could understand, what was going on in the script. A drowning was a pretty scary thing for me to process. Especially given that I didn’t yet know how to swim.
On the studio soundstage, there was a pool that looked convincingly deep. But Dad allayed my worries by walking me right up to it. Kneeling down, he poked his finger into the water, revealing that it was only inches deep—the fathomless blackness of the pool was an illusion created by the production-design team. Dad encouraged me to follow suit. I laughed as a I plunged my hand repeatedly into the pool—the water was no deeper than the milk in a cereal bowl.
Suddenly, I was not only free of worry—I was excited! First Yul Brynner let me take a bite out of the drinking glass, and now Dad was showing me another trick of the trade. These were like initiation rites: little rituals I undertook to join the order of actors.
I could never have articulated this thought then, but I had no trouble reconciling the artifice of TV and movie production with the emotional honesty that was expected of me in performance. Ethel Winant took notice of the aplomb with which I carried off my role, unflustered by the pressures of live television, and told my parents how impressed the network’s producers were. Before long, I was all over CBS. In ’59, I did two more episodes of Playhouse 90, “A Corner of the Garden” and “Dark December” （the latter a Holocaust drama in which I played a Jewish boy, and, again, died）; an episode apiece of the western series Johnny Ringo, the military comedy-drama Hennesey, and the sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; and two more CBS anthology programs, The DuPont Show with June Allyson and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.
By the following year, I was a semiregular on Dobie Gillis, playing various little-kid roles, and on Dennis the Menace, as one of the little boys in Jay North’s posse. Ms. Winant also put me on the ratings powerhouse The Red Skelton Show, one of the most popular programs on television in the 1950s and 1960s, which virtually the whole of America tuned into on Tuesday nights. I was in a sketch featuring Skelton’s signature character, Freddie the Freeloader, the hobo clown who wore a dented top hat. This guy was a comedy legend, and I made him laugh. The cameras weren’t rolling, but there was a moment during rehearsal where I was supposed to be eating fried chicken, and Skelton, as Freddie, told me that I was eating fried cat. Without missing a beat, I improvised a response: “I guess I like fried cat.”
I WONDER WHAT was going through Dad’s mind at this time: here he was, in his first full year of living and working in California, expecting to at last fulfill a dream deferred by the Korean War. And then some good fortune broke his way—but it wasn’t in the form of a bonanza of work for him, but for his little kid, of all people.