In The Red Pony, I played a Depression-era farm boy who is entrusted with the horse of the title, a colt. The colt catches a respiratory disease known as the strangles. I fall asleep in the barn while keeping watch over him and he runs away. By the time I find him, my colt has collapsed in a stream, and a bunch of buzzards have descended on him, pecking away at his lifeless body.
I’m still very proud of how nuanced and expressive I was in conveying my character’s grief, yearning, and self-disgust at letting his horse spring free. But the film also occasioned one of the most traumatic episodes of my life. Its director, Robert Totten, was a family friend and a significant figure in the Howard family’s lives—more on him later. As we set up by the stream, Bob announced that he wanted me to pick up one of the buzzards in anger and smash him to death on a rock. Not a prop buzzard; a real one.
This would never, ever be allowed on a film set today. But the ethical mores of the 1970s were different. Nevertheless, killing a bird did not sit well with me. I had worked with animals for the better part of my young life. My costar in Gentle Ben was a bear, for Christ’s sake! I made my feelings known to Bob. He told me to man up and just do the deed. “The bird is going to take one for the team,” he said. Dad reassured me, saying that a natural predator would likely eat the buzzard anyway.
We had an animal-welfare guy on location with us, and I still can’t imagine how this was sanctioned. I was already worked up about the emotional aspect of the scene, as it was a climactic moment for my character. Now I also had to execute a bird, and in a single take, so that I didn’t have to murder more than one.
Bob called “Action!” and everyone’s eyes were on me. He staged the scene so that there was a conveniently protruding flat rock right where I stood in the stream. I picked up the buzzard by its legs and whacked its head on the rock. Mercifully, it only took a few whacks for the bird to die. You can watch the scene and see for yourself. But I can’t. It’s too painful. In what was otherwise the high-water mark of my juvenile career, that experience scarred my psyche.
As Ron has said, we were privileged to be treated respectfully as peers of our adult colleagues in the workplace. Occasionally, though, these adults lost sight of our sensitivity and innocence. We were precocious and talented, but still very much children.
MOST OF THE time, fortunately, Mom and Dad zealously protected us from the dark and predatory aspects of the business. A lot of child actors weren’t as fortunate; their own parents were the predators, withholding affection and frittering away their kids’ earnings. Our folks were scrupulously honest about money. In the 1960s, as Ron worked on Andy Griffith and I had episodic work on such shows as The Fugitive, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and The Virginian, we brought home some serious paychecks. Even so, Mom and Dad never lived outside of their means.
Let me emphasize, their means. As soon as we could understand, Dad explained to Ron and me what was happening to the money we earned. By state law, 15 percent of our earnings were automatically placed in a Coogan Trust Account, whose funds could not be accessed by anyone but us when we turned eighteen. These accounts were named for Jackie Coogan （not to be confused with Jackie Cooper）， the child actor who had starred opposite Charlie Chaplin in The Kid and made boatloads of money in the 1920s, only to discover at the age of twenty-one that his fortune had been squandered by his parents. In the aftermath of Coogan’s successful lawsuit against his mother, the State of California passed the Child Actor’s Bill, which most people in the industry referred to as the Coogan Law.
As for our remaining earnings, Mom and Dad put every penny into savings accounts and U.S. bonds in our names, apart from a 5 percent managers’ fee that they drew for looking after our careers. That’s a bargain—most managers charge triple that amount. Much later on, Dad explained his reasoning to Ron and me. He said that if we kids had ever gotten the idea that we were the household’s breadwinners, it would have messed up the family dynamic. With Mom’s help, he was making just enough as an actor and part-time manager to support the four of us. Preserving a sense of normalcy was a top priority for Dad.
IN 1963, WE moved from Hollywood back to Burbank, where Mom and Dad became homeowners for the first time. Three forty-six North Cordova Street was a small tract house just half a block from our old apartment: three bedrooms, one bathroom, and, best of all in my view, a pool. Boy, I loved to splash around in that pool. Ron and I shared a bedroom, and Dad used the spare as his office.