But I was thrilled to participate in a big old-fashioned Hollywood backlot musical, and to watch the huge ensemble numbers come together. For “Shipoopi,” the song that Buddy Hackett sings, they hoisted the camera to the very top of the soundstage so they could get those Busby Berkeley–style overhead shots of the chorus-line dancers forming a circle and doing the cancan. The budding director in me took mental notes.
DAD DID HIS usual prep work with me prior to filming so that I had a good handle on my character and the plot. He read the whole script to me aloud. He explained that Professor Harold Hill isn’t really a bad man, though he is up to no good at the beginning. Because the “Wells Fargo Wagon” number was such a centerpiece of the movie, he gave me a little rundown of how commerce was practiced in the days of yore.
“When I was a boy, there was no Sears store to go to, and no Albin’s toy store,” he said, referring to my favorite shopping destination in Burbank. “No, you had to send away for things you wanted to purchase.” He reminisced about how he and his parents circled the items that they wanted in a thick Sears catalog, and when they had saved enough money, they ordered these items by mail. And when these things arrived, they arrived by truck, and his parents had to leave the farm and pick them up in town.
“This is like that, but even longer ago,” Dad said. “So for these townspeople, it’s like Christmas morning when the Wells Fargo Wagon comes.” This explained Winthrop’s pent-up excitement over taking delivery of his cornet, and his “Thithter, thithter” speech. I still have that horn, by the way, and can still, just barely, play “The Minuet in G” on it.
Morton DaCosta noticed how effective my father was in preparing me and offered Dad a part as one of the townspeople. It wasn’t something that Dad had been angling for, but the powers that be recognized that having him around was good for me. He shows up in a lot of shots in The Music Man if you keep an eye out for him.
* * *
CLINT
I want to note how emotionally honest and uncute Ron’s performance was. Ron is cute, but not his acting. You see Winthrop go from a shy boy who’s inhibited by his speech impediment to a kid so confident that he’s firing finger guns at Shirley Jones and Pert Kelton to give them their cues. Props to Dad for helping Ron internalize that journey.
* * *
I returned to The Andy Griffith Show with a spring in my step, and I could sense that Andy, Sheldon, and Aaron were proud of me. I was proud of having earned some acting stripes somewhere else, and in a major motion picture, no less.
When my eighth birthday rolled around that season, the producers surprised me with a giant cake and a sing-along of “Happy Birthday.” It was also Aaron’s birthday—he was exactly forty years older than me—so we shared the cake. Planted in the icing was a little figure of Aaron, holding a megaphone, and another of me, holding a fishing pole. They served me the first slice, and it looked better than it tasted; privately, I craved my mother’s devil’s food cake with chocolate icing. She later admitted to me that she made hers from a Betty Crocker mix, straight out of the box. But, hey, my mom made it—and no chocolate cake has ever tasted better to me.
I had never had a birthday party before. Our peripatetic family life to that point had precluded it. My most memorable birthday to this point had been my fourth, when we still lived in Queens. My parents took me to FAO Schwarz in Manhattan and let me choose a gift. It was an easy call: a Zorro set, complete with a mask, a flat-brimmed gaucho hat, and a plastic fencing foil. I actually wore this outfit to my first Broadway show, a matinee performance of the Li’l Abner musical, based on the comic strip. I was bored and didn’t really get it. It was apt that Andy would later disparage the play.
For this latest birthday, celebrated on set, Andy and Aaron gave me a Bell & Howell Zoomatic 8 mm movie camera—my very first. Aaron told me that I could now make my own movies. For the next eight years or so, that camera spent most of its time sitting idle in its brown leather case. But it was eventually put to vigorous use, and, even before then, my mentors’ encouragement boosted my self-confidence.