9
But First, the Tranya
CLINT
I was lucky enough to have Ron pave the way for me, so I avoided a lot of the grief he endured. With a big assist from Dad, my brother had already cracked the code of how to be a kid in show business—so I felt totally at home in that environment. And Ron always included me with his buddies when they played touch football, Wiffle Ball, and basketball on the mean streets of Burbank. That put me ahead of the curve when I started playing sports with kids my own age.
I also benefited from the simple fact of birth order. I wasn’t kept in the same bubble wrap that Mom and Dad had put Ron in. They were overly protective of him. They didn’t let him ride a bike until he was eight, and even then, he wasn’t allowed to go beyond our block of Cordova Street—and only on the sidewalk. I was pedaling all over the neighborhood by the time I was six.
I got to do a lot of other normal-kid things several years earlier than Ron did, too. He was pissed about this, but he never took it out on me—he was mad at the system. After I got in the flow of working like Ron, Mom and Dad reconsidered some of their parenting choices and gave their second-born a longer leash. And sometimes I just ground them down.
At school, I didn’t face the harassment that Ron did. I was on TV a lot, but always playing different characters. He was Opie. Jeez, I felt bad for him. Later on, in junior high, after I’d been on Gentle Ben, I did have a taste of his experiences. My version of “Hey, Dopey Opie!” was “Hey, where’s your bear?” Kids tried to provoke me into fights. There was a corner three blocks away from Burbank’s David Starr Jordan Middle School where the boys my age met up: “Yeah? Why don’t we meet at Beachwood and Oak? After school, Clint, Beachwood and Oak!”
You know what I did? Not go to Beachwood and Oak! I shrugged that stuff off. Everyone’s hormones were firing like crazy at that age, and I was smart enough to recognize that taking their bait was stupid. While I never witnessed one of Ron’s fights, I frequently saw him come home red-faced and flustered. I didn’t like how he looked and avoided dustups at all costs.
But my parents weren’t totally loose with me. They had certain strict rules that neither Ron nor I could circumvent. We weren’t allowed to have sleepovers at other kids’ houses. We weren’t even allowed to have other kids’ parents drive us to birthday parties. The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby had been a major national story when Mom was a girl, and she was deathly afraid of something like that happening to us. She never put it that way, though. She and Dad always said it was about safety. If a friend’s parents offered me a ride, she’d say, “I don’t trust them to be as careful as I am. And I’m willing to drive you. That’s just how it is.”
RON
I had a lot of friction with my parents over the years about the tight grip they kept on me socially. I found it humiliating, and it exacerbated my sense that there was something Other about me. I couldn’t ride bikes with the other boys to the strip mall to buy baseball cards or get a soda. Dad thought bikes were dangerous. He didn’t grow up in a suburb and couldn’t quite process how normal it was to ride a bike in close proximity to cars—and this from a guy whose horse went down and rolled over him while he was crossing a stream at age twelve, resulting in a broken collarbone.
Still, there was nothing cynical about our parents’ protectiveness. It was rooted in love and fear, not in any stage-parent concept of protecting their assets, their cash cows. Hell, they stood back and observed while I got into fights. But sometimes, their hard-line policies exasperated me.
It was a triumph of lawyerly argument for me to convince my folks to let me walk by myself the eight blocks to Verdugo Park to shoot baskets. Walk, definitely not bike. I promised them that I would be home no later than 7 P.M. They bought into the plan, reluctantly, because they had seen the park’s gym and found it to be well-supervised. Those shoot-around sessions and pickup games became an essential outlet for me, a kind of therapy. But basically our block, the schoolyard, and Verdugo Park were my safe zones, the three places in which I was permitted to roam.