When I walked onto a soundstage for the first time the following day to audition for The Journey, I saw real lights, a real boom mic, and a real camera. The assistant director instructed me to step onto a T-mark on the floor—something I hadn’t practiced in Queens. But none of it threw me. I was new at this, but, honestly, I felt pretty comfortable, like I already belonged.
And my comfort and preparation paid a huge dividend: I got the part!
THE JOURNEY WAS a Cold War drama directed by Anatole Litvak. I played the son of two Americans trying to flee Communist Hungary. E. G. Marshall and Anne Jackson played my character’s parents. Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr, reunited for the first time since The King and I, led the cast, which also included Jason Robards in his feature-film debut. Thirty-one years later, I directed Jason in my film Parenthood; we kidded about how we broke into the business together.
Principal photography for The Journey was to take place in Vienna: a beautiful setting for a young kid’s first paying job. Better still, Mom and Dad were coming with me, compliments of MGM. The studio made a family deal, casting my father in a bit part and hiring my mother as my official on-set guardian.
For my parents, this stroke of good fortune presented itself as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They were too poor even to contemplate a European vacation, and my paychecks would be set aside and earmarked for college. No one in the Howard family thought of The Journey as anything but a one-off for me as an actor.
In the spring of 1958, we took off from Idlewild Airport for Europe, a first for all of us. We stopped at Shannon Airport in Ireland so the ground crew could refuel our propeller plane. While we bided our time in the terminal, the Irish airport workers took notice of my red hair and teased me affectionately. “Ya look like you’ve come home, lad,” they said. “Ya shouldn’t really be gettin’ back on that plane, should ya?”
But get back on the plane we did. On March 3, just two days after my fourth birthday, we landed in Austria. The final descent was glorious, with Vienna resplendent in a blanket of newly fallen snow.
The Journey is a heavy picture. A bunch of international travelers, including my character, are trying to flee Budapest by bus during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, only to be detained by a fearsome Soviet commander, played by Brynner. To me, though, the whole experience was pure joy, a stress-free first job.
When I wasn’t in a scene, I climbed up onto the army tanks that guarded the film’s “Soviet checkpoint.” The film’s prop master gave me a Whee-lo, that little toy with a spoked wheel that rolls along both sides of a magnetic metal track, which kept me mesmerized for hours. The wardrobe people dressed me up in a smart plaid jacket with matching earflap cap. I loved this outfit for how cool it made me look, even though the accompanying scarf itched my neck.
When the shoot was over, my pragmatic Oklahoman parents, believing this trip to be the only chance they would ever have to visit Europe, piggybacked some vacation travel onto our stay in Europe. We toured Venice, Paris, and London.
My favorite part, though, was directly tied to the work. In a pivotal scene in The Journey, Yul Brynner’s character, Major Surov, intimidates the hell out of his captives by taking a bite out of the shot glass from which he is drinking vodka. Yul, with his shaved head and severe features, looked convincingly fearsome in his Soviet officer’s uniform. But he was a kind and gregarious man who noticed that I was fascinated by the scene and didn’t want me to get any dangerous ideas. So, between takes, he invited me to sit in his lap. He held the prop glass to my face.
“Taste this, Ronny,” he said. “This is sugar, not real glass. It’s pretend, for the movie. You would never bite real glass.” He encouraged me to chomp on a little shard. It tasted just like rock candy. Whoa, I thought, this is amazing.
This marked the beginning of my fascination with the process of how stories are told on the screen. I had learned a secret of the trade. I was in on the magic trick. And wow, did I like being in on the magic trick.
THE JOURNEY WRAPPED in June 1958 and came out to good reviews the following year. But it wasn’t a game changer for the Howard family. After we returned to New York, I settled back into my preschool routine, Mom resumed her typing duties at CBS, and Dad continued to go out on auditions, without much success. TV acting work in New York had pretty much dried up by then. As the ’50s came to an end, so, too, did the golden age of live television, most of it shot on the East Coast. Dad’s agent suggested that he move west, to Los Angeles, where a raft of new detective shows and westerns were in production. When your own agent tells you to move, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s time to get out of town.