From where I sit now, Andy’s story cheers me because it validated Dad as a creative person. It didn’t occur to me as a kid how profoundly he and Mom reordered their lives on my behalf. Being the overseer and coach of a child actor was not Dad’s Plan A when he and Mom upped stakes from New York to move to California. It wasn’t even his Plan B, because the very notion of me having a career, as opposed to the occasional job, was not something that he expected to happen.
But Dad had this magnificent ability to roll with the punches, to not let career disappointments or unforeseen life circumstances bring him down. Since, as I mentioned, Dad always considered himself more midwestern than southern, I call this his midwestern Zen. There was something very heartland about it, the nonchalant way he just put his head down and carried on. Somewhere around the time that I got The Andy Griffith Show, he made a choice. His own passion for acting had, in a serpentine way, led to this moment—for me. He did not balk. In fact, I think he recognized that he would never have forgiven himself if he had stood in my way for his own careerist and/or egotistical reasons.
He chose to be a great parent—to support his children’s opportunities with everything he had. His responsibility, and therefore his priority, became me, and, a little later, Clint. His own career would take its course given the circumstances that had presented themselves, and if that meant that he had less time to pursue his own goals, well, so be it. Midwestern Zen.
I should add that Dad never gave up on his own professional life. He still went out on auditions, took scene-study classes, and worked on screenplays with a variety of collaborators. But he was doing it around his sons’ schedules.
Clint and I would provide a million opportunities in the years to come for him to lay a guilt trip on us, to have at us with a vicious “Rose’s Turn” moment. He never once did.
MY NEW WAY of life as a series regular led to some big adjustments. For instance, when we were shooting, from September through early February, I didn’t attend school with other kids. This was a bit of a letdown, since I had really enjoyed kindergarten at Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School in Burbank. Instead, I had studio school.
What is studio school, you ask? It’s school . . . in a studio! At Desilu Cahuenga, this meant a rolling dressing room—plywood walls and a particleboard floor mounted on wheels—that had been kitted out with a blackboard, a teacher’s desk, a student’s desk, and even a little exterior awning and American flag, so that it looked like a one-room schoolhouse.
My teacher was Mrs. Katherine Barton, a rather stately woman in her fifties who wore her silver hair in an upswept bouffant. Ours was an association that would last for years, as The Andy Griffith Show ran and ran and I grew from a first grader to an eighth grader.
Mrs. Barton was my sole teacher, covering all the subjects in an elementary-school curriculum: reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. I was usually her sole pupil. Occasionally, though, I had classmates, like Keith Thibodeaux, who played Little Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy and had a recurring part as Opie’s friend Johnny Paul Jason. I never developed off-camera friendships with my fellow child actors, mainly because we were all so busy and didn’t live near each other. But I enjoyed the company of other kids on set. Keith was a good workplace buddy, three years older than me. He, too, had spent time under Mrs. Barton’s tutelage while working in the Desilu Cahuenga facility. I preferred studio school on the days when we were shooting episodes that Keith and other kids were in.
But this is no knock on Mrs. Barton. She was a wise and nimble educator, adept at shoehorning my lessons into breaks between scenes. The director would yell “Cut!” and I would sprint over to the schoolhouse to pick up where we left off. California state law mandated that I needed to be in school for a total of at least three hours a day, and that none of my studio-school sessions could be shorter than twenty minutes. But sometimes, twenty minutes was all the time that I was given before I had to be in another scene—and back I would sprint to the set. I guess that these sprints were what passed for P.E. With their sudden stops and pivots, they certainly helped me later on when I took up basketball.