In personality I was more like Mom, who had the gift of gab; she could make friends in an elevator in two floors. But I worshipped my dad. He was my teacher, my guide, and my moral compass. In fact, my first clear memory of him is one of those classic Rance Howard teachable moments. I observed as he took apart an old shed with a crowbar. All was going well until he reared back too fast with the crowbar and the damned thing struck him right in the kisser.
Suddenly, blood was streaming out of his mouth, along with a string of words I had never heard before: “Shit! Fuck! Goddamn!” And who could blame him? He was an actor who had just messed up his face. But then he remembered that his toddler son was sitting right there on the grass, witnessing his cuss-fest. Dad checked himself. Wiping his mouth with a rag, he calmly explained what each of these words meant, and, correspondingly, why I should never, ever say them.
As Ron mentioned, I also took after Butch. I was his spitting image, though I didn’t get to know him. He died only a year after I was born, at the too-young age of fifty-six. His drinking, smoking, and insistence that all foods must necessarily be deep-fried and smothered with gravy caught up with him fast.
When my Speegle grandparents came out to help when I was born, Dad and Butch drove to the supermarket for groceries. Butch was on his best behavior, under orders from Louise not to drink in the Howard house. But when they reached the grocery store, Butch asked Dad to buy him a pint flask of vodka. Dad obliged. “And it was the damnedest thing,” Dad told me. “He opened the flask right there in the parking lot and drank it down in three swigs.”
It turns out that I had more in common with Butch than just looks.
RON
With two little mouths to feed, Dad couldn’t afford to get complacent about his craft. He took an acting workshop with a man named Sherman Marks, who also happened to be a television director. While Mom looked after Clint, Dad invited me to tag along and observe.
Evidently, Sherman Marks was also observing me. When he got a job in 1959 to direct a pilot for an NBC comedy series, he asked for Dad’s permission to have me audition for it.
Mr. O’Malley was based on a 1940s comic strip called Barnaby by Crockett Johnson, creator of Harold and the Purple Crayon. Barnaby was a five-year-old boy who, in a subversive inversion of traditional children’s stories, had not a fairy godmother but a fairy godfather. This fairy godfather, Mr. O’Malley, was a cantankerous little man who wore a porkpie hat, smoked cigars, and was borne aloft, just barely, by a set of four dinky little wings: a little bit like Clarence the Angel in It’s a Wonderful Life, but more gruff. Barnaby was the only person who could actually see and speak with Mr. O’Malley, whose alleged existence exasperated Barnaby’s parents. They took their son to a series of child psychologists to dissuade him of his delusions.
I passed the audition and got the role as Barnaby. On paper, it sounds like a difficult concept for a five-year-old actor to grasp: a boy with an imaginary friend and parents who disbelieve him. But Dad broke things down for me, walking me through the character’s logic. With Gig Young in The Twilight Zone, I didn’t understand that I was participating in a parable about a hardened city slicker who has lost touch with his hometown values. Dad just said, “You have no idea what this man is talking about, and you think he’s crazy.” That was all I needed to know. In Mr. O’Malley, Dad said, Barnaby believes Mr. O’Malley is real and should be treated as such. When his parents say there’s no such thing as a fairy godfather—well, Barnaby’s parents are just wrong.
I didn’t think of the Mr. O’Malley job as any kind of big deal until I learned that the actor playing Mr. O’Malley was the man who played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz: Bert Lahr. That was a big whoa. In person, Lahr was simultaneously bigger than life and kind of a disappointment. He had a huge, bulbous nose and a commanding presence, but no particular affinity for his costar, me. He wasn’t rude, just trans-actional, exuding no warmth. And he seemed impossibly old, though I just looked up the dates, and guess what? He was slightly younger than I am now.
Once again, I was working opposite a profuse perspirer—Bert Lahr sweated like a faucet was on. His sweat smelled like the cigarettes that he chain-smoked. Curiously enough, he couldn’t stand cigars, so the prop department rigged up a fake cigar that could fit a cigarette inside it for Mr. O’Malley. God, the secondhand smoke that I inhaled as a kid! Between Lahr, my mom, my grandparents, and the Andy Griffith cast and crew, it’s a wonder that I don’t have severe lung issues.