Like Ron, I experienced a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions the day we went back to our old house after our pop died. Staring out at the lifeless backyard, I pictured Dad doing his antiquated 1940s-style calisthenics in the sun, with his loyal dog, Sheriff, waiting for him to finish so that he could curl up under his master’s feet for a nap. Then my mind went further back, nearly fifty years earlier, to when Ron and I were young. Like lots of American brothers, we often spent our afternoons in the backyard shooting hoops. Unlike most brothers, we sometimes spent our afternoons in the backyard shooting movies, with Ron pointing his Super-8 camera in my face, directing me in his earliest attempts at narrative filmmaking. I sometimes demanded that he pay me, because I was used to getting paid to act. Yeah, I guess we were different.
What spared Ron and me from becoming Hollywood casualties are the values Mom and Dad instilled in us. It’s true that we didn’t become farmers, but we inherited the farmer’s work ethic our folks brought with them from Oklahoma. We were grinders and scrappers. Showbiz may seem glamorous, but each battle is won in the trenches with heavy doses of perspiration and preparation. We spent our nights doing two sets of homework: our assignments for school and our run-throughs of the next day’s lines with Dad.
Not that he was any kind of joyless taskmaster. In our off-hours, we did fun, normal-family stuff: Little League, rassling on the living-room floor, dinners out at the Sizzler in our hometown of Burbank. My mother coined a term for herself and Dad: “sophisticated hicks.” Worldly enough to broaden their horizons through travel and the performing arts, yet homespun enough to live simply and humbly—as if the next town over wasn’t Hollywood but Duncan, Oklahoma.
Ron and I decided to share our story of growing up as the products of these sophisticated hicks: just your typical postwar tale of a tight nuclear family whose two kids happened to be on TV all the time . . .
1
The Accidental Actor
RON
Look him in the eyes and really listen to what he’s saying, Ronny. Don’t look at the bucket,” my father said.
He was prepping me for my first screen test. The bucket in question had come from my sandbox. Dad had drilled a hole in the bottom of it and knotted a rope through the hole, so that he could tie the bright-red bucket to the end of a broom handle, fashioning a homemade imitation of a boom microphone of that era. He did not want me to be distracted by the movements of the mic or of its operator during the screen test. A friend of Dad’s swung the “mic” around our living room to simulate what I would soon experience. Another friend sat opposite me, serving as my dialogue partner; Dad thought I should get used to reading with a stranger. For good measure, my mother pretended to be a camera operator, using one hand to shine a desk light in my face and the other to hold a large cereal box, which represented a 35 mm Mitchell Camera. Dad left nothing to chance. At my audition the following day, I would be ready to comport myself before the MGM people in a professional manner.
By the way, this was in the fall of 1957. I was three and a half years old.
MOM AND DAD, Jean and Rance Howard, never planned on being the parents of child actors. They harbored no Barrymore-like expectations of founding an acting dynasty. We lived in a modest walk-up in Queens during the golden age of live television. Dad was struggling to make ends meet as an actor himself. Mom had a steady job working as a typist for CBS.
Dad’s biggest break to date was a small part in the touring production of the Tony Award–winning play Mister Roberts, whose original Broadway star, Henry Fonda, still held the title role. My father gained not only the experience of working with first-rate actors but also the clout to direct summer-stock productions of the show.
During one of these productions, somewhere in Maryland in the summer of ’57, Dad noticed my aptitude for acting. While the actors rehearsed onstage in an outdoor theater surrounded by open fields, I sat alone in the first row of seats, observing. Rather quickly, I picked up the dialogue and started repeating it back to Dad at home, much to his amusement.