In the workplace, Jim, while private about his private life, was not closeted. He didn’t pretend to date women or insist he wasn’t gay. Mom explained this to me when I grew a little older, in my post-Opie years: everyone in the cast knew the deal about Jim’s sexuality, but it went uncommented upon—a Hollywood version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
The crew, unfortunately, was not as enlightened. Listening to their on-set chatter, I heard a word I didn’t know: homo. That’s what they called Jim behind his back, and not with any hint of kindness. Something about this word didn’t feel right.
“Dad,” I said one day, “what is a ‘homo’？”
He instantly understood the context. And he offered his usual plainspoken response. “Jim is attracted to men instead of women,” Dad said. “And they call that homosexuality.”
The definition was framed this narrowly, only as it related to Jim, really. I didn’t yet understand that there were gay people all around me, and all across the world. But this was my introduction to the very concept of queerness. Mayberry was a small town, but for those of us who actually spent our days there, it contained the whole of human experience.
7
Hot Lights, Real Tears
RON
I struggled a bit in elementary school. I’d rate myself academically as having been barely average. I later figured out, when my own kids were having some difficulties here and there, that I had what would today be diagnosed as learning disabilities. Mrs. Barton proved a boon in this respect; I responded well to one-on-one tutoring. But in the 1960s, my public-school teachers’ diagnosis was pretty much “Well, he’s a C student, but at least he’s well-behaved.” I flailed sometimes. Cursive, for example, did not come easily to me. But do you know what kicked me into gear to figure it out once and for all? Having to sign autographs.
Near the end of The Andy Griffith Show’s first season, TV Guide convened a bunch of child and teen stars to pose for a photo shoot in the swimming pool of the grand Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. There were about twenty of us in total in our bathing suits: I waded near the front, in the shallow end. Jay North was also there, along with Rusty Hamer and Angela Cartwright from The Danny Thomas Show, Jon Provost from Lassie, and, for sex appeal, some older actors like the twins Dack and Dirk Rambo, who were starring on The New Loretta Young Show, and Donna Douglas, who played Ellie Mae Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. （The term “teen” was used loosely: the Rambos were in their early twenties, and Douglas was around thirty.）
This was my first taste of Hollywood glamour, and the perks and perils it held. I’d never experienced the excitement of fans, gawkers, and paparazzi, calling out our names. But it was daunting to have kids thrusting pieces of paper and pens at me, asking for my signature.
Johnny Crawford, who played Chuck Connors’s boy, Mark, confidently obliged everyone who wanted his autograph, which made sense—he was in his midteens. But I was still in first grade. I was sweating it out self-consciously, doing my best to sign my name for a fan in my slow, rudimentary scrawl—R . . . O . . .—when he grew impatient and just ripped the piece of paper right out of my hands. “There’s the Beav!” he said, making a beeline for Jerry Mathers, who was six years older than me and consequently could write a whole lot faster.
I thought, This is too embarrassing. I gotta figure out this handwriting stuff.
AS IT HAPPENED, I didn’t attend regular school at all in first grade. It was studio school all the way. With the first season of Andy’s show coming to an end, my newfound fame presented an opportunity: Warner Bros. was adapting the 1957 Broadway hit The Music Man, by Meredith Willson, and they needed a little boy to play Winthrop Paroo, the lisping, much younger brother of the female lead, Shirley Jones’s Marian Paroo.
I don’t think I auditioned—The Andy Griffith Show essentially served that purpose. But my father left the choice of whether or not to take the part to me. Dad explained that the movie would shoot while The Andy Griffith Show was on hiatus, when I was supposed to resume my schooling at Stevenson Elementary School. It would mean sacrificing the few months when I would get to live like a normal kid.