This was a lot to absorb. But Mrs. Webber kept drilling and drilling me until we finally arrived at a reasonably in-tune, rhythmically acceptable version of “Gary, Indiana.” The next step was to prerecord the song in a studio; once the cameras were rolling, I would lip-sync to this recording.
The recording session took place on the large scoring stage at Warner Bros. The major studios still employed in-house orchestras, and I arrived to find about eighty musicians sitting behind their music stands, attired not in formal wear but in casual clothes, smoking cigarettes, filling out crossword puzzles, and reading the trades. That is, until Ray Heindorf, the movie’s music supervisor, arrived and tapped his baton on his stand. On cue, the musicians sat up straight, poised to begin. This was a few years before the development of sophisticated multitrack recording technology, so I sang live with an orchestra. Me, Ronny Howard, live with an orchestra, like I was Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald.
Except I was the furthest thing from them. After five or six takes, I could feel some tension emanating from Mr. Heindorf. A Warner Bros. lifer who had been in the business since the advent of the talkies, he had worked with Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Cagney, and Judy Garland. Now he was trying to get his orchestra to play in rhythm with a seven-year-old kid who, while doing his darndest to nail the pitch and a fake lisp, had no innate gift for keeping time.
Mr. Heindorf conferred with Mrs. Webber, who coached me as best she could. We did a few more takes, but it still wasn’t working. Then Mr. Heindorf hit upon an idea. He handed me his baton, positioning it in my fingers so I was holding it the correct way. An assistant brought out a box for me to stand on.
“Now, Ronny, you direct the orchestra while you sing,” Mr. Heindorf said. So we tried that. The musicians were palpably exasperated, staring at me quizzically while barely hanging on, and I think that Mr. Heindorf was back-seat-conducting them from where he stood, a few steps behind me.
One way or another, we arrived at a take that was usable, and that’s what you hear in the movie. I suspect that the powers that be, Meredith Willson and the director, Morton DaCosta, decided that my determined if off-key attempts to hit those high notes—“Not Louisiana, Paris, France, New York, or Rohhhme”—were, if nothing else, kind of adorable.
Still, my troubles with this number were not over. My first day on the set was the day that DaCosta was shooting “Gary, Indiana” on the front porch of the Paroo house—Shirley Jones and me, along with Pert Kelton as our mother. （Pert was wonderful, by the way—a stout, comically shrewd lady who, like Bob Preston, had been in The Music Man’s original Broadway cast.） The problem was that I was supposed to do a little soft-shoe at the end of the song in time with the music, a cute little tippety-tap that ended with a pirouette.
As has been previously established, I got no rhythm. Poor Mrs. Webber was also charged with getting me to master my dance steps. We practiced for hours, both of us in tap shoes. I wasn’t going to be wearing tap shoes in the movie, but this way, I could hear my steps as I took them, which provided confirmation of whether I was on or off the beat.
We thought we had the routine down, but before we shot the scene, Morton DaCosta asked us to do a rehearsal run. Mrs. Webber was there, as was Onna White, the choreographer. Despite their gentle encouragement, I kept messing up. After a couple of tries, I heard DaCosta sigh and tell the camera operator, “Dolly in and cut him at the knees.”
Having weathered a season of series television, I knew not to be alarmed by such a turn of a phrase. DaCosta only meant that they were going to frame out my feet. With a hint of exasperation, he told me, “Just turn around in a circle at the end, and we’ll put the steps in with sound.” Onna then swooped in to teach me the shortcut. In the film, you only see me from the knees up. But thanks to some movie magic—specifically, some toe-tapping sounds that were added by the Foley artists in postproduction—it appears that I am totally crushing it as a child hoofer.
I don’t want to make it sound like The Music Man was a harrowing experience. I loved being a part of something so brilliant, ambitious, and festive. There were discomforts, sure. They dyed my already very red hair even redder so that it would pop in Technicolor—and that coloring process actually burns the scalp a little. They made me wear period wool stockings under my shorts, which were held up by a garter belt and itched like a son of a bitch. And it was punishingly hot under those Technicolor-friendly lights; the crew kept giving the cast these iced, mentholated little chamois towels to apply to our necks so that we wouldn’t faint.