That honor he bestowed upon Dennis Rush, who was indeed doing a bang-up job. “It’s not just that he is paying attention and behaving well, Ronny,” Bob said. “It’s that he is really thinking about the scene. He is connecting.”
Bob had more to say. He noticed that I had been slipping into some sloppy acting habits, falling into the classic series-regular trap of phoning it in. He urged me to bear down, to focus my attention on some small real-life detail like the lint on my shirt or a chipped corner of my school desk, to put my mind in a place where I wasn’t caught up in the lights and microphones, but, rather, grounded in Opie’s reality. In short, Bob challenged me.
I still feel a twinge of queasiness just thinking about this gentle but firm dressing-down. Bob was right: I was falling into bad habits, such as reciting my lines in a lazy singsong way instead of linking them to the real ideas that the words in the script conveyed. One reason that so many child actors fail to evolve into adult professionals is that, under pressure, they default to a perky autopilot, an artificial cuteness that some directors are willing to settle for. Left alone, these kids never grow as actors, and they reach their young adulthood unable to react, improvise, make spontaneous discoveries, or develop multiple approaches to their scene work. And then one day they’re no longer little and no longer adorable, and they have never really learned how to act. The business is done with them.
I pulled it together for Miss Crump’s debut episode, and Bob told me that I performed . . . acceptably, if not superbly. He saved me that day from sliding further into bad habits—and, arguably, from becoming a toxic Hollywood brat, forevermore resting on laurels earned in short pants. I don’t recall any other director ever having to crack the whip in my direction again.
Later on, in the 1970s, when I had the chance to work with some of the greats from Hollywood’s golden age—acting with John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda, and directing Bette Davis in a TV movie—I saw firsthand what separated them from the lower ranks: a remarkable work ethic and an unwillingness to brook substandard work, whether their own or someone else’s.
I also had Dad. He set an example in two ways. First, he armed me with the fundamentals so that I had the tools with which to grow. Second, he kept hustling for parts in the face of constant rejection. His career struggles were a sobering reminder of just how rare a position I was in as a series regular.
WE WERE STILL living in Hollywood when Clint and I experienced our first tragic death. Gulliver, our beloved Weimaraner, somehow broke loose from our backyard one day and ran into the street, where he was struck by a car. We were all home. I heard a horrible yelp and ran out to the street, a few steps behind Dad.
What I saw didn’t seem real: my dog whimpering on the blacktop, his life draining out of him, his blood strangely dark and thick like motor oil. Dad cradled Gulliver and carried him into the house, still alive but fading fast. We Howards are not a particularly tearful family, but I lost it, sobbing as Gulliver breathed his last.
This sad moment came to bear on my Mayberry work not long afterward. We began the fourth season in 1963 with an episode called “Opie the Birdman.” This was only about six months after my misbehavior during the Miss Crump episode, and a big test for me. The episode had two big emotional scenes for Opie. In the first, Opie is outside playing with a new slingshot he has made with Barney’s help. Though Andy tells him to use it only to shoot stones at tin cans, Opie aims at a tree and accidentally kills a little songbird, which falls to the ground.
At first, Opie tries to talk the bird—and, really, himself—into believing that what just happened isn’t so bad. “It’s probably just a scratch,” he says to the animal, which is lying still on the sidewalk. He picks the bird up and holds it in both hands, begging, “Fly away. Please! Fly away!” But when he opens his hands and gives the bird a little upward push, the bird falls back to the ground like a lead weight. In tears, Opie backs away in horror and then runs into the house, aghast at what he has done.
The second big scene is in the episode’s resolution. Andy gives Opie the responsibility of raising the bird’s orphaned chicks in a cage until they are capable of flying. At that point, Opie must let them fly free and rejoin nature, even though he has grown close to his little flock. For that scene, I thought of Jackie Cooper, layering conflicting emotions one on top of the other. And I was good.