The producers cast Dad in the show as a member of Hoss’s posse—a nice twofer for them, because they filled a role and got their child whisperer. I was not yet able to read, so he helped me embed the dialogue in my head with his usual strategy of building a backstory with me for the character. The more I understood Michael Thorpe’s interior landscape, the better I delivered my lines. A few years later, my dad’s director friend Bob Totten teased him about this technique. “Well, Howard,” Totten said, “you’re not really a dialogue coach, so what are you? I know! You’re an inculcator!” And he was right: to inculcate is to instill ideas by persistent instruction. That was Rance Howard.
Most of the time, the child whisperer literally whispered. When I had those big emotional scenes where I had to question God, metaphorically and literally, Dad put his arm around me and took me aside. In his softest voice, he said to me, “Think about if your father was hurt and you thought that he might die, and you don’t want him to. How would you behave?” He helped me find the character’s truth. In fact, I never felt closer to him than in moments like these, my head pressed against his thigh as he spoke quietly into my hair.
“We’re going to get to that emotion and you’re really going to cry, but don’t be scared,” Dad said reassuringly. “I’ll be right here when you finish.”
With any location shoot, there’s a sense of bonding that you don’t get on a soundstage. Landon and Blocker drew close to me, impressed by this tiny kid who could honestly bring the feels. I have a photo of me sitting on Dan Blocker’s knee. It’s funny because our faces are the exact same shape, but he was six four and well over three hundred pounds. In his lap, I look like a chihuahua.
I also dug learning a cool trick of the trade. My character was saved from Leif Erickson’s when the Indian, Lijah, who was played by Rodolfo Acosta, a fine Mexican American character actor, snuck up behind the villain and stabbed him in the back. To pull off this scene, they put a wooden plate under the back of Erickson’s shirt and jammed a knife into the plate. Then a prop guy applied “blood” to the stab area. On-screen, you see Leif fall forward in shock, with the knife sticking out of his back. I loved discovering how all this was pulled off; like Ron says, it’s the joy of being in on the magic trick.
This was my first major acting gig and I enjoyed it—the camaraderie and the time spent with Dad. I was already comfortable enough in my own skin as an actor to pass judgment on others. Michael and Dan were strong actors, capable of intensity and nuance. But I flagged Lorne Greene. No disrespect to the white-haired Cartwright patriarch as a person, because Lorne was as nice to me as the others. But as small and inexperienced as I was—with four front teeth missing, no less—I couldn’t help but think to myself, This guy’s acting is a little stiff, a little cheesy. Did I mention that I could be an arrogant little bastard sometimes?
I WAS SO busy as an actor in the mid-1960s that pretty soon, my life assumed the rhythms of Ron’s earlier in the decade: riding shotgun with Dad in the Chevy Nova Super Sport as we drove to and from the studios. Mom took over shuttling Ron to work unless he had a particularly weighty Andy Griffith Show episode to do, in which case Dad accompanied him to Desilu Cahuenga.
Dad and I almost never talked on the outbound ride to the job. We had done my homework the night before, running my lines, and there was nothing more to do but the work; I often grabbed a little extra sleep in the car. But on the ride home, things were looser—we talked about baseball, school, the auditions that he was going on, life in general.
We continued to do a version of this round trip, up and over the mountains into Hollywood and back, pretty much right to the end of Dad’s life. Sometimes it was for a function, other times for a script reading. Sometimes the configuration was the opposite of what it had been in my childhood, with me behind the wheel and Dad riding shotgun. No matter what, I cherished those private moments with him in the car.
Around the year 2000, not long after Mom died, we were coming back from some meeting or other, taking the usual route home on Cahuenga Boulevard. Dad was somber. At the interchange of Cahuenga and Barham Boulevards, where our chunk of the Valley comes into view, he said, “You know what I miss most about your mother? It’s that I don’t have anybody to talk to when I come home from an audition.”