I was riding my skateboard on his side of the street one day. We exchanged words, one thing led to another, and this time, I was the one who squared up and said, “Do you want to fight?” Skip gladly accepted.
He came out with two left jabs to the right side of my face and a right cross to my left cheek. He knocked me right on my ass. I dusted off my pants, got on my skateboard, and rolled home unsteadily, rattled and embarrassed. That’s the last time I ever challenged anybody to a fight. Fortunately, Skip was not long for Burbank and moved away.
Playing the tough guy was not going to solve my self-confidence issues. One day in second grade, an alternative presented itself. We were doing a play in class. Not a class play for the whole school, just a drama exercise as part of our reading curriculum, where we broke into smaller groups and performed little skits. My group was sitting in a circle, reading the dialogue aloud. Our skit was about a birthday party. The read-through wasn’t going well. The girl next to me was struggling with her lines, with no sense of what they meant or what the scene was about. So I explained it to her.
Then I asked the teacher if we would be getting a real cake for the proper performance of the skit in front of the whole class. She said no, it was going to be all pretend. At that point, I couldn’t help myself. My Andy Griffith Show training kicked in, and, like a mini–Bob Sweeney, I asked everyone to hop to their feet so we could block out the scene, choreographing our movements. I had the other kids putting on pretend party hats, blowing out make-believe candles, and using imaginary forks.
My teacher recognized what was going on, and, rather than rebuke me for bigfooting her, she indulged me. I sensed that she knew I was struggling as the new kid and the TV kid, and she granted me this latitude to give me the chance to build my confidence.
It worked. Our performance before the whole class was a hit, and that day marked the first time that I felt I had something to offer to the other kids, something that they appreciated. I started feeling better about myself.
Wow, I thought as I put the other kids through their paces, I’m directing! One kid in particular, a new boy from Alaska and a fellow redhead—his name was Don, I believe—was seriously good at acting. The pro in me allowed the thought to cross my mind: If this Don kid wanted to get into the business, he has the goods.
The rest of the kids were terrible actors, but I wisely kept that thought to myself.
BEFORE LONG I had my own posse of buddies. One nice thing about Cordova Street is that the lots were only fifty feet wide, so each block was packed with families whose kids were the same ages as Clint and me. Three second-grade boys who lived on Cordova, Noel Salvatore, Bob Wemyss, and John Matheus, became my best friends, with whom I bonded over our mutual love of baseball and basketball; sports was another great social equalizer. I am still close to Noel, Bob, and John. Every year, around Christmas, we reunite for a Cordova Street Boys dinner at the Smoke House, the swankiest joint in Burbank.
In our adulthood, I found out from Bob that during my early struggles at Stevenson, my mom, who was close to his, had approached Mrs. Wemyss to see if Bob might consider getting into acting. Mom offered to help set up Bob with an agent and walk Mrs. Wemyss through the ins and outs of being a child actor’s parent. But Bob’s mom shut the idea down, not wanting that life for her son.
Mom was just trying to give me a comrade in arms, a friend who understood what I was going through. Fortunately, such extreme measures proved unnecessary. My friends were there for me as I returned to Stevenson from The Andy Griffith Show every February after our season had wrapped. And mind you, I needed them to be there. Every year, not just at Stevenson but also at David Starr Jordan Middle School and John Burroughs High School, I would still be put through some sort of gauntlet, some sort of teasing and bullying by a group of kids who wanted to test me.
What’s bizarre, when I think back upon it, is that my time in front of the camera is what gave me the confidence to get through the social trials of my childhood years. In Mayberry, as Opie, I was at ease. It was away from Stages 1 and 2 of Desilu Cahuenga that I had to prove my value and self-worth. Which is crazy: the tenuous, competitive, and often merciless world of show business was actually a safer space for me than the familiar hallways and playgrounds that the rest of my generation was inhabiting. This paradox is the crux of why so many successful child actors struggle in their adult lives.