Soon, we worked out a routine. He played Lieutenant Roberts （the Fonda part, if you’ve seen the movie） and I played Ensign Pulver （the Jack Lemmon part）：
ROBERTS/DAD: Whatever happened to those marbles you were gonna put in the captain’s overhead, so they’d roll around all night and keep him awake?
PULVER/ME （glowering）： Now you’ve gone too far. Now you’ve asked for it. （Rattling an imaginary canister full of marbles.） What does that look like? Five marbles. Got another one in my pocket. Six marbles! I’m lookin’ for marbles all day long!
Consider the visuals: my dad, a grown man, engaged in an intense conversation with a forty-pound pipsqueak with freckles and red hair who wore a striped T-shirt, shorts, and blue Keds. We turned this scene into a little parlor trick that we performed for Mom and Dad’s friends in New York, where it always brought down the house. Little did we know that my Ensign Pulver bit would serve as my first audition material.
In those days, a hustling actor like Dad had to physically make the rounds of the casting agencies, all concentrated in a cluster of buildings in Midtown Manhattan. As a matter of routine, my father went from one casting director to the next, dropping off a résumé and a headshot, reading for whoever would hear him.
One day, Dad poked his head into the office at MGM, where he knew the casting director, only to discover a waiting room jam-packed with little kids. This gave him an idea. He said to the receptionist, “Tell them that Rance Howard stopped by, and that, by the way, I have a son who is a fine actor.” He left our phone number—not with any great expectations, just as an extra flourish that would make his message stand out from the others.
But they did call the next day, asking Dad if he could bring his little boy in. Next thing I knew, I was performing my Ensign Pulver set piece for MGM’s casting director. I am told that I slayed, though I honestly don’t remember. They asked Dad if I was capable of doing anything else. To his credit, he confessed that he honestly didn’t know. That’s when they gave me a new scene to learn and scheduled me for a screen test, for a movie called The Journey.
I RECALL LITTLE of our time in Queens, just some sketchy details. A butcher store down the street. A neighbor kid whose house I played at when my parents needed a babysitter. A snowman that Dad built in our little patch of yard by piling snow into a yellow plastic trash container and flipping it over.
The screen-test prep is the one thing I remember vividly: Dad coaching me about working with his actor friend, saying, “Look him in the eyes, stay focused, really listen to what he’s saying.” The bucket on the broomstick, the lamplight in my face. It sounds intense, like Earl Woods trying to shake the teenage Tiger Woods’s concentration by trash-talking him on his backswing. My father was gentler, though—more like Obi-Wan schooling Luke Skywalker in the ways of the Force.
In my case, the Force was a simplified, preschooler’s version of the Method, the set of acting techniques developed by the Russian theater guru Konstantin Stanislavski and practiced by such actors as Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Paul Newman. Dad embraced the Method’s emphasis on emotional sincerity, the idea of putting yourself in the character’s shoes while channeling your own feelings. He never nudged me to do anything performative in a cute-kid way, like flash a big smile or pull a goofy “Oops!” face. He simply told me to stay present in the scene, to take it moment by moment.
Not until I was an adult did I appreciate how radical this approach was for a child actor. Dad never once talked down to me or treated me as a performing seal. Other kids, I would discover when we moved to California, were not so lucky—they were their parents’ meal tickets. But when I went out for auditions with Dad at my side, he put no pressure on me to win the part. He focused on execution, not end results.
If I just concentrated, he said as we practiced in the apartment, I would grasp the essential logic of the scene, and the performance would take care of itself. This was my first and most important acting lesson, and, in many ways, it remains the foundation of my creative process to this day.