Bruno’s trainers, Vern Debord and Monty Cox, then stepped into the cage and playfully wrestled with him. No injuries incurred. In fact, it looked like a lot of fun. I was too little to wrestle with big bears, but later on, I did get to tangle with some of the cubs in the Tors menagerie. Everything was cool. I saw that Bruno wasn’t going to hurt anybody, and Vern and Monty were really comfortable with the animals. They were always going to be on set, ready to assist me and bring Bruno under control should anything ever go awry. Furthermore, they had declawed Bruno and removed his incisors so that he posed no deadly threat—measures that would be considered inhumane today but were routine in show business back then.
I am still asked if I was ever afraid of the bear. I just wasn’t. The trainers and Ivan Tors saw to that. It was a different story when the big cats were around. A big cat is a natural adversary of a bear, and once we went to series, they occasionally brought in a cougar to play the heavy in an episode. On those days, it was like having the Secret Service around. There were men standing there with tranquilizer guns at the ready, and the guest animal was doped up a little to keep him off his predatory game. Suffice it to say, they never let me get too close to the kitties.
Bruno really was gentle. When we were making the movie, I was still so small that I could climb onto his back and ride him. He didn’t respond to affection the way a dog or cat does, with purrs and big-eyed tenderness—bears have small eyes, which inhibit their expressiveness as actors—but he was always fine with me petting and hugging him. The only negative I could hang on my costar was that he smelled. He also took prodigious dumps due to his equally prodigious diet. Every day, he consumed a dozen loaves of bread, a few heads of lettuce, some carrots, a couple of bags of Purina Monkey Chow, and several boxes of day-old sweets. If I had that diet, my poop would smell bad, too.
The shooting itself took about six weeks. Dad had a great time hanging out with Dennis again and everyone was pleased with the outcome. That’s when CBS reached out to Tors about turning the film into a series that would pick up where the movie left off. Dennis’s character, who started out as a pilot who spotted schools of fish for fisherman, would now be a game warden in the Everglades, looking out for poachers and such. Ben the bear would move in with the Wedloes, setting up the premise that he was constantly thrust into the position of rescuing little Mark from peril.
A series of my own. Sweet! Nothing against Ron, but I was competitive, and I can’t pretend that I didn’t want to give him a run for his money. Opie was already a household name. Why not Mark Wedloe?
The TV show, though, would require Dad and me to be gone for four or five months of the year, every year for as long as the series ran. Not every actor wants to pull up stakes and live somewhere else for that amount of time. Vera Miles, for example, bowed out, citing her kids, who were going to school in California. Her role was recast, with an actress named Beth Brickell stepping in.
Dad saw the opportunity as too good for me to pass up, and Dennis used his pull to ensure an expanded role for Rance Howard the actor, as Tom Wedloe’s comic sidekick, a swampland local named Henry Boomhauer. Ivan Tors magnanimously agreed in writing that Mom and Ron would be given airline tickets so that whenever The Andy Griffith Show was on hiatus, they could come stay with us in Florida. It wasn’t like Dad and I were going off to war. We were a tight-knit family, and this arrangement posed no obstacle. Or so I thought.
RON
I don’t know that I totally agree. This was precisely the scenario that motivated Mom to get out of acting in the early 1950s—she never wanted to be apart from her husband for a significant length of time.
On top of that, Clint’s getting Gentle Ben coincided with my entrance into puberty. When I was thirteen, my parents gave me the go-ahead to move into the third bedroom in the Cordova Street house, the one that Dad had been using as an office—probably because they didn’t want to expose my impressionable little brother to the behaviors of his confused, newly horny older sibling.
It was a good call. Let’s just say that around that age, I became very . . . active. Dad and Clint were away in Florida when I approached Mom, full of questions. I was used to Dad’s forthrightness and imperviousness to so-called taboos. So I thought it was perfectly okay to inform Mom of my nocturnal emissions and my more conscious bedroom activities, and to ask her if this was all normal, and, if so, if I was going about it the right way.