I decided not to disturb them further. I wobbled my way back to the bathroom, where I ended up falling asleep on the floor by the toilet, waking up every hour or so to throw up.
I was fine by morning, so I kept my nocturnal activities to myself. Mom and Dad did the same.
CLINT
Gentle Ben gave me the kind of work family that Ron enjoyed on The Andy Griffith Show. Beyond Dennis, there was Ricou Browning, our fearless director, and I mean fearless. For a while, he was Hollywood’s leading underwater stuntman and coordinator. He played the Creature in Creature from the Black Lagoon and coordinated the underwater sequences in the James Bond film Thunderball. He was also Ivan Tors’s partner in creating Flipper. Later on, in the early ’70s, I worked with Ricou on another project, a family movie called Salty, which was an attempt to re-create the Flipper magic with sea lions. It didn’t take, alas.
Ricou epitomized what I loved about working in Florida. In L.A., everyone took their prescribed roles seriously, adhering to Hollywood’s rigid, hierarchical structure. When we shot Gentle Ben, I heard a lot of drawls and noted that everyone dressed in loose-fitting Hawaiian shirts—when they had shirts on at all. And it was all hands on deck. Ricou was equally comfortable doing menial stuff with the crew as he was shouting “Action!” He had a fantastic work ethic and tremendous patience, no doubt the product of working with dolphins on Flipper.
Our team was rife with eccentrics. My standin, Murray Wood, was sixty years old. He was proud to have played a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz and was quite the dandy. He had an impressively groomed curlicue mustache and Vandyke beard, both snow white. Dad tailored a guest-star role specifically for Murray in one of the Gentle Ben episodes that he wrote, as a carnival promoter.
In our off-hours, Sig Walker, the man in charge of maintaining the airboat that Dennis’s character drove, introduced us to a distinctively South Floridian pastime: frog-gigging. You know what gigging is? It’s hunting for bullfrogs in the dead of night. You go out with flashlights and headlamps, trawl in very shallow water, and use your gig—which is like a trident, but with four prongs—to impale the biggest, fattest frogs you can find.
Sig was a local legend: a rugged master mechanic who raced airboats and hunted when he wasn’t working on Gentle Ben. One weekend, he invited the entire cast, along with Dad, Ron, and me, to a gigging retreat at the hunting and fishing lodge he kept in the Everglades, which was accessible only by boat. This suburban Burbank kid found the whole thing fascinating—watching Sig and his buddies pull frogs by the dozen out of the swamp. We celebrated our catch with a late-night frog-leg fry. I wasn’t squeamish. The frog’s legs were pretty good, though, really, anything tastes good if you dunk it in enough breading, butter, and garlic.
But unlike Ron and friends on The Andy Griffith Show, the Gentle Ben gang had little time on the set to hang and trade stories. We were on a tight schedule. We did a lot of outdoor shooting on location, most frequently at Fairchild Garden, a botanic wonderland in Coral Gables, and sometimes as far away as a dinky but beautiful town in central Florida called Homosassa Springs. And we worked fast: nine or ten script pages a day, which translates to three days per episode. We did twenty-eight episodes per season.
Given this work rate, Dad and I were bushed by the end of the day. During our first season, the drive “home” from the set to our house on the Intracoastal Waterway was just too far—I conked out in the car before I could eat my supper. So, for the second season of Gentle Ben, Ivan Tors rented us a penthouse apartment in a Miami high-rise complex called the Brickell Towers. It’s since been torn down, but it sat right at the beginning of the Rickenbacker Causeway, which leads out to Key Biscayne.
Dad was keen to ensure that I still got to be a kid, so as soon as we got the Brickell Towers apartment, he swapped out our dining-room table for a Ping-Pong table. On our days off, we played for hours. Every morning on workdays, Dad rose before me to prepare our three-minute eggs. “Always show up at work having eaten breakfast,” he admonished me. On a lot of gigs, craft services puts out an elaborate spread of morning donuts, eggs, bagels, and what have you, almost encouraging you to spend your first hour schmoozing and grazing on the clock. But Dad was firm: “You show up ready to work. You don’t show up ready to eat.”