The scene unfolded like one in a sitcom. Mom literally put her hands to her ears, horrified to be put in this position. Speaking in a booming “La-la-la, I can’t hear you!” voice to drown out any further disgusting revelations that I might have been sharing, she said, “You’re going to have to wait until your dad gets home to talk about that. Ask him, not me!”
So wait I did. When Dad finally did return home for Christmas break, he gave me the usual no-frills, no-thrills Rance Howard explanation: “Some people call it jerking off. But masturbation is the actual term. It’s all very normal. It’s not dirty. Don’t worry about it.” For good measure, he bought me a subscription to Playboy for my birthday, with a gentle warning never to leave an issue around where Clint could see it. Or Mom, for that matter.
BEYOND MY SURGING hormones, Mom had a lot of other stuff to deal with. With Clint and I both working a lot in the mid-1960s, her discretionary time dwindled down to almost zero. It became her duty to shuttle me to Desilu Cahuenga and the other Andy Griffith locations, and to be my guardian on set. She was also a compulsive undertaker of ambitious projects. She organized the PTA pageants at our schools, flexing her show-business chops to convince the other moms to perform intricately choreographed, elaborately costumed musical routines as the Tap-Dancing Mamas, complete with kick lines. An excellent seamstress, she became known in Burbank for the perfectly rendered doll outfits that she turned out for the school fair every year—couture for Barbie, basically. She loved sewing those costumes, and they always sold out.
On top of all this, she had to keep house. Our parents’ partnership was truly a marriage of equals, a fifty-fifty deal in terms of love, mutual respect, and the division of labor. But in practice, it hewed closely to old-fashioned gender roles, with the Howard men going off to work and the sole woman holding down the home front. Mom wasn’t a super-duper Donna Reed–style housewife. She was the first to admit that she hated cooking, even though we all loved her burgers, steaks, and Spam sandwiches. And she took no joy in the uphill battle to keep our house clean. Who could blame her? Both of her sons were slobs, and she didn’t want to press us, given our school and acting workloads. Dad pitched in with some dishwashing and vacuuming but was otherwise monomaniacally focused on writing and acting.
* * *
CLINT
Ron was the far bigger slob. He was allergic to performing even the smallest of chores, like picking his clothes up off the floor. In fact, when Ron graduated from high school, Mom hired a professional fumigator to de-skankify our house’s upstairs, such was the damage that Ron and his cat, Tiger, had done. It wasn’t until he moved in with his bride, Cheryl, that Ron was housebroken. And just barely.
RON
I plead guilty.
* * *
The bottom line is, Mom needed reinforcements. The solution, for a few months anyway, was to have our dad’s mom, Grandma Ethel, come stay with us and help out. She was an altogether different sort of person than our other grandmother, Louise. Whereas Grandma Louise had been raised in material comfort in a bustling town, Ethel grew up on a farm, riding horses and tending to the family’s hogs and chickens. She had the lean, weathered face of a woman in a Walker Evans photograph. And she was reserved where Louise was talkative. The only thing that our two grandmas had in common was that they preferred to eat their meat the same way: fried and smothered in gravy.
Grandma Ethel had a confidently steely air. While she was supportive of her son’s journey westward, she still called our dad Harold and was markedly indifferent to Disneyland, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and anything to do with “the show bidness,” as the phrase came out in her flat, Oklahoman voice.
Still, she was truly impressed by the nearby desert and the mountains that surrounded us in Burbank. And by the ocean, which she got to see for the first time in her life, in her sixties. Most importantly, she was always warm toward Clint and me, in her quiet way. She got a kick out of our suburban, baby-boomer way of life, which was exotic to an Oklahoman born in 1904, and I got a rare guffaw out of her when I modeled one of my most prized possessions, a Beatle wig.