Until recently, I was not particularly inclined to contemplate the “why” of this. But when my father died over Thanksgiving weekend in 2017, at the age of eighty-nine, his passing kicked off a round of introspection on my part. Clint and I were now orphans; our mother had died in 2000. It was a sad time but also, in the big picture, a time when we found ourselves counting our blessings. For both of us, life was good and fulfilling in all the ways that mattered most.
Clint and I made a pilgrimage to Dad and Mom’s now-unoccupied house—our old house—in search of photos and home movies to use in Dad’s memorial service, which was held two months after his death. As we went through Dad’s personal effects, Clint and I shared family stories in a verbal shorthand unintelligible to outsiders: “Mom and the paint cans.” “The bathroom graffiti at Desilu.” “Bicycle-pump blood.”
Our parents’ story had come to an end, a lot for us to process. As we contemplated this reality, we experienced a shock of recognition. Their journeys were rich and strange, in ways we hadn’t realized until that point. That made our journeys rich and strange, too.
I had never before viewed my life this way. For years, my stock answer, when people asked me “What was it like to grow up on TV?,” was that it seemed utterly normal, because it was the only childhood that I ever had. Clint, who was still a grade-schooler when he starred in Gentle Ben, another hit television series, would tell you the same.
My answer was too pat, though. To us, our childhoods seemed normal, but they were really anything but. We grew up in circumstances that were profoundly unusual, dividing our time between attending public schools, being tutored on set, and working in an industry fraught with way more snares and traps than we were aware of in our innocence.
Our parents’ own show-business aspirations were never realized as fully as ours, yet neither of them ever articulated or even telegraphed any bitterness or resentment toward us. They were show people but they weren’t narcissists. They were stage parents but they weren’t monsters. And Clint and I, even though we were as familiar with soundstages and makeup artists as we were with playgrounds and Wiffle Ball, grew up in their down-to-earth image.
Mom and Dad managed this feat with remarkable grace, navigating their boys through terrain that, by all rights, should have left us psychologically damaged. And make no mistake, Clint and I didn’t get through our childhoods unscathed. We both have our share of emotional scar tissue. But like Indiana Jones in that famous scene where he narrowly escapes getting crushed by a giant rolling boulder, we somehow made it through intact, ready for the next adventure.
As the parent of four children （now thankfully all grown）， I wonder: How the hell did Mom and Dad pull this off? How did we?
CLINT
Ron talks in positive terms. He’s a glass-half-full guy. But if we’re playing the alternative-realities game, some unsavory outcomes pop into my head.
I’m not sure I would’ve handled those harsh Oklahoma winters particularly well. As Granddad Beckenholdt once wrote to Dad about the local weather in a Christmas letter, “Wind blow, rain, snow.” Frigid temperatures and sideways hail don’t hold much appeal to me. There’s a good chance I might still have become a familiar face as a young man—to the Oklahoma State Troopers. Any speculative “Clint Beckenholdt” conversation should factor in the potential for brushes with the law.
As it is, I don’t know if I’d even be here right now if it weren’t for Dad. Even when we were kids, the term “child actor” was shorthand for “future fucked-up adult.” Then as now, Hollywood was littered with cautionary tales. Carl Switzer, who played Alfalfa in Our Gang, died the year I was born, shot to death at age thirty-one in a dispute over money. Bobby Driscoll, who starred in such 1940s Disney movies as Song of the South, fell into heroin addiction when the industry no longer had any use for him. I didn’t spin out as tragically as those guys, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I put Mom and Dad through their unfair share of hell in my teens and early adulthood by getting loaded and carrying on like an idiot. Yet Dad never bailed on me. He drew me in closer, using his salt-of-the-earth sensibility to right the ship and get me on the path to sobriety.