The Jungle Book didn’t come out until the fall of 1967, more than a year after I met Walt. He had passed away in the interim. It was the last great animated Disney movie to be overseen by the man himself. And he liked me.
RON
I loved watching Clint act. I envied his confidence. I was always conscious of hitting my mark, not making mistakes, pleasing the director. Clint didn’t give a damn! He had a go-for-broke quality that worked because he was so well-prepared and naturally talented.
In 1966, I did a guest spot on The Danny Kaye Show, a CBS variety show that ran in the way-past-my-bedtime slot of 10 to 11 P.M. We shot it at CBS Television City, the site of my early work in Playhouse 90 and The Red Skelton Show. The premise was that I had my own show within Danny’s show, called, unsurprisingly, “The Ronny Howard Show.” It was pretty corny. My entrance was heralded by six little tap-dancing chorus girls. Then I did a monologue. Then I introduced a fellow child star, a nine-year-old girl named Donna Butterworth, who, in a Louise Brooks bob and a mod minidress, sang a medley of standards. My follow-up line was “It’s always a pleasure to hear an old pro belt out a tune.”
But the pièce de résistance was a sketch in which I played a James Bond–like character in a spy thriller called “The Spy Who Sucked His Thumb.” For this, they cast Clint as my boss, the grumpy old chief who gives the dashing spy his assignment. Clint sat at a desk wearing a fedora and a rumpled suit, completely inhabiting the part as if it was rooted in life experience, slamming a phone down as he said, “Good grief, that diabolical archfiend must be captured!”
We had a lot of eye-to-eye, quick-fire, absurdist dialogue, the kind that often makes actors break and collapse into laughter. But not young Clint Howard. He nailed his part in one take.
Danny Kaye was impressed by the Howard boys’ professionalism. We were impressed that he was a fellow baseball freak. When he learned of our mutual interest, he brought out some gloves, a bat, and a rubber ball, and we took some batting practice right there on the soundstage. Clint smacked one high into the catwalks that nearly took out a spotlight.
Clint and I never took our work home. Though we shared a bedroom and atypical lives as young kids with flourishing acting careers, we simply didn’t talk shop at 346 Cordova Street. There was no discussion of our “craft” or even of mundane stuff about our workplaces. Home was where we were simply brothers, not actors.
CLINT
The next big job for me after Bonanza was a new NBC sci-fi program that was to make its debut in the fall of 1966. Dad read the script and thought it was pretty good, if eccentric: I was cast as an alien! I was excited because the show was set in outer space, and what kid wouldn’t want to pretend he was on a spaceship? The episode was called “The Corbomite Maneuver.” The show was called Star Trek.
Neither Dad nor I had any inkling that “The Corbomite Maneuver” would have resonance beyond the week it aired. In 1965, NBC commissioned two different pilots for Star Trek. The first one, which didn’t even star William Shatner as Captain Kirk, proved unsatisfactory to the network. But the second one did the trick; Star Trek was picked up as a series. Ours was the first-ever “regular” episode of the show to be filmed, in May of ’66, though it was broadcast out of sequence, as the tenth episode of the first season.
None of this was of any concern to me or Dad. We were too busy prepping, because everything about this gig was strange. We were told by the producers that I would speak my lines in my own little seven-year-old voice, but my lines would then be processed through a synthesizer—a very new toy at the time—to create an otherworldly, “alien” effect. Furthermore, for the first time in my career, I was not playing a child. If I remember correctly, Balok had some kind of Yoda-like backstory that revealed that he was something like six hundred years old, though they never used that information in the episode.
In “The Corbomite Maneuver,” the USS Enterprise is threatened by a giant, spheroid ship called the Fesarius and its belligerent commander, Balok. Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock manages to pull up a visual of the commander on-screen. Balok is revealed to be a terrifying humanoid alien with a long face, a protruding forehead, and a permanent scowl—he sort of resembles one of those bitter old Hollywood moguls who’ve had too much plastic surgery. I won’t get deep into the weeds of the plot, except to say that Captain Kirk keeps his cool, and a landing party of Kirk, McCoy, and a one-off character named Lieutenant Bailey teleport to a tiny pilot vessel that has dispatched itself from the mighty Fesarius. They are intent on making peace with the evil commander.