Years later, when for the first time I was nominated for a Director’s Guild Award, for Cocoon, Aaron and Sheldon attended the ceremony. I didn’t win—Steven Spielberg did, for The Color Purple—but I sought out Aaron to remind him of his gift. I did not take for granted that this was a rare opportunity to thank a childhood benefactor for planting the seeds of my happy, productive adult life decades earlier.
ARMED WITH MY newfound confidence that second season, I started watching TV and movies differently. Dad took me to a screening of the original, 1931 version of The Champ, the King Vidor boxing picture that starred Wallace Beery in the title role and Jackie Cooper as his son. Cooper was incredible. I couldn’t get over how believable he was in the movie’s final scene, when his father is dead and all the grown-ups are trying to console him. His face alone does incredibly complicated work, mustering a range of faint smiles to oblige his consolers but not masking his actual state of profound grief.
Cooper’s performance, along with my newly accumulated movie experience, triggered my competitive juices. When I watched a kid actor on a TV show, I evaluated his performance and compared it to what I was doing on Andy Griffith. I took inventory of my contemporaries: Johnny Crawford on The Rifleman, Jay North on Dennis the Menace, Jon Provost on Lassie, the Leave It to Beaver guys, the My Three Sons guys.
I concluded that, in terms of acting prowess, I was second only to Johnny Crawford. Jay North I respected as more or less an equal. The rest? In my cocky state, I concluded that they weren’t on my level. Johnny brought a truthfulness to his performance, an honesty that seemed lived in. The actors on Leave It to Beaver, which began in 1957, were hamstrung by how dated their format was. That show struck me as corny, synthetic TV that encouraged a forced, mannered brand of acting.
At this point, I realized that acting was more than an exercise in pleasing adults. It was my job. From The Journey through The Music Man, I had regarded work as an elaborate form of playtime. Now I paid closer attention to Andy and Don and understood that acting was, for them, a way of life, a career, and that the longevity of their careers depended on the quality and consistency of their performance. That was a thing Andy said all the time while we worked on the show: “It’s not good enough. I’m not good enough. Let’s make this better, funnier.” He always pushed for excellence; ergo, I did, too.
THERE’S A FINE line between confidence and arrogance, and I crossed it in The Andy Griffith Show’s third season. We were shooting an episode entitled “Andy Discovers America,” whose script was by John Whedon, the patriarch of a screenwriting family that includes his son, Tom, who wrote for Captain Kangaroo and The Golden Girls, and his grandson, Joss, of Avengers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame. To Andy Griffith fans, this episode is noteworthy because it introduced Aneta Corsaut as Helen Crump, the schoolteacher who would become Andy’s girlfriend, and, later, his wife.
But for me, this episode was a big deal because it included some classroom scenes in which Opie and his pals tested the patience of Miss Crump. This meant I’d have company at Desilu Cahuenga for the week: Keith Thibodeaux as my sidekick Johnny Paul Jason, along with, among others, the child actors Dennis Rush and Joey Scott.
As the （relative） veteran among this crew of moppets, I felt like showing off. This was my hit show, my set. I took on the role of ringleader, strutting around like I owned the place, goofing off and telling jokes right up until the camera assistant clapped the slate. In other words, I let things go to my head and forgot about the process, the discipline, and the etiquette of the set.
I must have been hard to control that day, because Dad took me aside to remind me to concentrate, something he hadn’t needed to do since the first season. But hey, I was feeling my oats, and even my father wasn’t going to put me in my place. I continued to act the wiseass, wriggling in my desk chair, firing paper airplanes into the air, and showing off for a couple of the girls sitting next to me in the scene.
Then, between takes, Bob Sweeney, the director, took me aside, an uncharacteristically serious expression on his face. Very quietly, and without any harshness, he said words that are still imprinted upon my brain: “Ronny, I know it’s fun for you to have all these other kids around, and that you want to make them laugh. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about. Ronny, you’re a good young actor. But you still have a lot to learn. In fact, you aren’t even the best young actor in this scene today.”