RON
That one-to-one time with Dad in the car was precious to us. On that same stretch of road, coming home from Desilu one day, I talked to Dad about the work he was doing as a screenwriter. Though his acting career hadn’t led to the stardom he had hoped for, he was proud of his ability to branch out, directing shows in community theater and, especially, writing scripts. He had a regular writing partner named Hoke Howell, a tall, drawling actor from South Carolina who had achieved the same level of success as Dad, taking on character parts and supporting roles in a series of movies and TV programs.
Apart from a single episode of the ABC police drama The Rookies, none of Dad and Hoke’s spec scripts were ever realized as productions. But Dad was immensely validated by the fact that The Flintstones had accepted and produced two of his solo scripts in 1964. In the car, he let me know that he was putting together a new round of story ideas that he would soon be pitching to Mr. Joe Barbera himself, of Hanna-Barbera.
I knew the Flintstones backward and forward, and as Dad talked through a couple of his notions for new episodes, I was suddenly struck with one of my own: What if Fred convinced Wilma to let him get the used car that he coveted, but when he does, he finds out that there is something that’s been hidden in the car by gangsters, thereby putting Fred in danger?
This was just a jumping-off point, not a fully realized idea. But Dad said that he would include my pitch in his meeting with Mr. Barbera, and if it sold, he would share the story money with me. A few weeks later, I was pretty damn proud of myself when Dad informed me that Mr. Barbera liked my idea, and that my half of the story money would amount to five hundred bucks. Not bad for a casual conversation on a car ride home! My idea became the germ of a 1965 episode entitled “Fred’s Second Car.”
In the long term, my exposure to Dad’s writing ambitions and achievements meant as much to me as his acting guidance. If I hadn’t grown accustomed to seeing him plugging away alone or with Hoke, working on plays, movie scripts, and TV episodes, I would not have had the understanding of storytelling and sweat equity that prepared me so well for being a director later in life.
CLINT
Before my star turn on Bonanza, I landed a job as a regular on a CBS series called The Baileys of Balboa. The show was cocreated by Bob Sweeney, Ron’s most frequent director on The Andy Griffith Show and the man who “discovered” me in my cowboy outfit and turned me into Leon. The Baileys of Balboa was set at a marina and starred Paul Ford, formerly Phil Silvers’s straight man Colonel Hall in the Sgt. Bilko series, as a charter-boat captain, and Sterling Holloway, the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh, as the Ford character’s first mate. I played a little wisecracking neighbor named Stanley.
The Baileys of Balboa turned out to be a one-season misfire, not a juggernaut like Ron’s show. But I shed my disappointments quickly as a young boy. Besides, the gigs kept on coming, even voice-acting jobs. I got to work with Holloway on one of Disney’s animated Winnie-the-Pooh shorts, voicing Kanga’s little joey, Roo. I was also in Disney’s The Jungle Book. I played the baby elephant bringing up the rear of the pachyderm parade in “Colonel Hathi’s March,” a bouncy, Sousa-like military-style song. That was my one sung line, by the way: “In the military style!” Only at my age, “military” came out as “mili-telly.” I also advised Mowgli, “Don’t talk in ranks. It’s against regga-lations.”
My garbled pronunciations posed no problem to Walt Disney. I know this because he showed up at our recording session with the Sherman Brothers, who wrote all those amazing songs for the 1960s Disney pictures—“A Spoonful of Sugar,” “It’s a Small World （After All），” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” you name it. Walt ducked his head into the studio, waved at me, and said, “You’re doing a fine job, Clint.”
This was simultaneously mind-blowing—the Walt Disney knew my name!—and entirely of a piece with our life in early-’60s Southern California. I was a Disney baby. Disney was headquartered in my hometown, Burbank. We Howards started going on day trips to Disneyland in Anaheim when I was still in a stroller.