Well, the very first day of shooting, we had a problem. When Bruno went on a break, he liked the air-conditioning so much that he refused to leave, even with the trainers gently coaxing him with doughnuts. And you can’t just pull a 650-pound creature out of a room, or politely invite him to the set.
After a brief confab, the powers that be landed upon a solution. Five or six of the crew’s sturdiest guys lifted the back of the trailer off the ground, tilting Bruno’s dressing room forward. With gravity doing the rest of the work, the bear slid out and hit terra firma. That trailer was promptly driven away, never to be seen again. Bruno returned to taking his breaks the old way: by hanging out in the shade.
GENTLE BEN THE character was actually played by three different bears. Seventy percent of the time, my acting partner was Bruno, the money bear, the trained thespian. There was a slightly smaller black bear named Buck who spelled Bruno. And we had a brown bear named Drum who performed all the water scenes. For whatever reason, Bruno, atypically for his species, had an aversion to getting wet. So Drum did the water stunts.
He was a smallish, tame brown bear, but he was still brown. So they sprayed him black. I’m not kidding. They used about a dozen cans of Streaks ’N Tips, a temporary-color spray frequently used in show business, to turn Drum into a black bear for the camera.
Bruno didn’t do action stunts, either. Any time Ricou and Ivan needed to depict a bear riding on the back of a truck or jumping off a bridge, they resorted to dressing some stuntman in a bear suit. It looked terrible up close, so visibly fake, but if they shot the stunts at a sufficient distance, they didn’t look so bad on TV. Dennis and Dad, and I, I am proud to say, performed our own stunts.
I had no mishaps of any consequence with Bruno. The only time there was ever any drama was when we were shooting a scene in an episode where Mark started collecting junk. He pulled Ben on a chain while Ben pulled a red wagon; he was basically serving as Mark’s pack mule, a visual gag. They had Bruno in a harness and it was an extra hot day. I jerked on his chain and Bruno objected, just this once, to having a kid tell him what to do. He reared around, bit my hand, and then pounced on me, pinning my shoulders to the ground like he was waiting for a wrestling ref to count him down to victory. I was scared to tears. The trainers were instantly upon Bruno, and I was rushed to the hospital and x-rayed: negative. I was more stunned than anything. As I said, his chewing teeth had been removed, so the bite was more like a gumming. I never felt anger toward Bruno for this incident; I was mad at the script for putting us in that situation.
The one real injury I incurred on the show was not the fault of a bear but of Mark’s pet raccoon, Charlie. Charlie, like the bears, had his sharper teeth removed, but the trainers had not removed his claws because raccoons need them to hold their food as they eat it. We were shooting a scene where Charlie was supposed to walk up to me, and I would pick him up. Raccoons, unlike bears, go for savory snacks rather than sweet, so I had a dog biscuit in my shirt pocket to draw him near me. We did a couple of takes that worked well, but they wanted to do one more. “Roll camera!” Charlie, now understanding the scene, trotted toward me but instead of letting me pick him up, he climbed me to fetch the tasty morsel out of my shirt pocket. I am not a tree, and his claws cut right through me like X-Acto knives. My pants fared okay but my shirt was shredded. It hurt like the dickens and my chest was covered in blood from all the scratches.
The next day, the wardrobe lady, Peggy Kunkle, outfitted me in a leather under-vest that I was to wear whenever I worked with Charlie. I only wish it had been invented a day earlier. Charlie never hurt me again.
GENTLE BEN WAS given a primo time slot: Sunday nights at 7:30 P.M. on CBS, sandwiched between Lassie and The Ed Sullivan Show. It faced stiff competition against the first half hour of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, but we more than held our own, surprising everyone in the industry. We finished the first season as the number 19 show in the Nielsen ratings. The top-rated program that season was The Andy Griffith Show.
I internally wanted us to leapfrog Ron and Andy’s show. That’s just my nature. I love Ron, but I friggin’ wanted Gentle Ben to top the charts. Alas, we never got over that hump. But something almost as exciting happened: one week, Andy Griffith and Gentle Ben finished one and two in the ratings. It was a good week to be a Howard.