Our gaffer, the guy in charge of the lights, was a large, intimidating man named Joe Barnes. He had a swollen, veiny nose like W.C. Fields’s and an anchor tattoo on his forearm like Popeye’s. He had been in the navy and he wore one of those skipper’s hats of the sort that Alan Hale Jr. wore on Gilligan’s Island.
Joe always called me Obie. So did the rest of the crew that first season, because “Opie” wasn’t yet part of the American lexicon and sounded strange, whereas “Obie” was a term of the trade in cinematography. An Obie light was a fixed light above the camera, three bright flood bulbs with a square of silk in front of them. It got its name from the actress Merle Oberon, a beautiful star of Hollywood’s golden age. She had been in a car accident in 1937 that scarred her face. In the ’40s, her husband, the cinematographer Lucien Ballard, customized an arrangement of lights that would flatter Oberon and wash out her scars. The Obie proved so effective that Ballard’s setup became an industry standard.
I knew precisely none of this when I began playing Opie on The Andy Griffith Show. And when I was standing on my mark at the beginning of a shooting day, keeping as still as I could while they tried to optimize my lighting, Joe scared the wits out of me. He was hovering more or less on top of me, his huge gut pressing into my side, holding a light meter directly in front of my face. As he worked through his adjustments, he shouted out to his guys, in his sandpapery voice, “Kill the Obie! Kill the Obie!”
There I stood on my mark, terrified, thinking, What did I do?
Dad must have recognized what was going on. He took me aside right afterward and explained the difference between the Obie light and the “Obie” character. He assured me that Joe had only meant “Turn off that light on top of the camera” and was really and truly a nice man who sure as heck was not asking to have me executed.
And the thing is, they all were nice men. They made me welcome on the set and treated me with empathy and kindness. These guys were just uninhibited in their language, behavior, and jokes, and no freckle-faced kid was going to change that.
Beyond that, Dad made me feel safe in that working environment. When we were shooting our very first episode, “The New Housekeeper,” I had a big emotional scene at the end where I do a 180 on my negative attitude toward Aunt Bee and beg her to stay on with Andy and me. Sheldon Leonard was directing the episode himself—it was our proper debut and it had to come off perfectly. Sheldon was under a lot of pressure, and he wasn’t believing my performance in that scene—my emotional honesty just wasn’t there. So he conferred with Dad. As he was walking away, he said, a little too loudly and sharply, “I might have to spank him into it.”
The words jarred me, but I never believed them. “No one is going to hurt you,” Dad said. Sheldon was just venting—in time, he became another guiding light in my life along with Dad and Andy.
DAD NEVER FLINCHED during episodes like this one or the “Kill the Obie!” one. He never rushed to cup his hands over my impressionable young ears. It was all life experience to him, and he was great at seeing to it that with this experience came instruction: as Clint says, a Rance Howard teachable moment.
In keeping with the rough, navy-frigate-like atmosphere created by the crew guys, the walls of the men’s bathroom at Desilu were covered with raunchy graffiti. In one of the toilet stalls, there was a poem that I read and reread with fascination, so much so that I can still recite and type it from memory:
Here I sit
All broken-hearted
I came to shit
But only farted
Those who read these words of wit
Eat those little balls of shit
This, I am sorry to say, was my introduction to poetry. （That’s a studio-school education for you!） But it did do the job of a poem: it made me reflect. What does it all mean?
The bathroom stalls were also full of obscene drawings—your standard stuff, depictions of cocks, balls, and blow jobs. I mentioned these to Dad, expressing curiosity about what they were meant to be. He reacted just like he had when I asked him where babies came from. I saw him pause for a moment to think about what to say. Then he took action.