Mom recognized that idleness was Dad’s enemy, and she never wanted him to drift through a day without purpose. So she would get out the paint and the brushes and tell him, “The service porch needs painting, Rance.” That sprung him out of his funk.
These painting jobs were never a ruse; the service porch really did need a new coat. But they were also the product of superstition. Mom genuinely believed that if she pulled out the paint cans, an acting job would come Dad’s way, leaving her holding the brushes. The amazing thing was that this trick worked! The clanking sound of those cans coming out was almost always followed by the sound of the phone ringing—Dad’s agent telling him that he was wanted for The Monroes or The Virginians.
Next thing you know, Dad would be off working on the Universal backlot, and when Ron and I got home from school, it was Mom we found doing the painting, up on the stepladder with a mentholated Kool in her mouth. It was a sight that never failed to crack us up.
These house-painting jobs didn’t do Mom’s lungs any favors, between her nonstop smoking and the fumes she was inhaling from the thick, oil-based paints that they used. But there was a sweetness to how this scenario played out over and over again. Mom loved the power-of-positive-thinking messaging of her superstition: if she took out the paint cans, Dad would get a part. It was only a matter of when.
I’m sure that Ron and I glimpsed only a fraction of the psychological support that Mom gave Dad to keep him going in our tough, unforgiving business. But I’m glad we have this memory of her on the stepladder. As hilarious as we found it then, it was a picture of love.
RON
As Clint mentioned, the Gentle Ben period was a good one for Dad professionally. He wrote and acted on Clint’s show, and right before he began work on it, he landed a recurring role on an ABC program called The Monroes, which starred a young Barbara Hershey. That show was a sort of western precursor to Party of Five, about five frontier kids who are left orphaned in the Grand Tetons and forced to make their own way. Since the younger kids were child actors, and since Dad had a proven track record with us, ABC hired Dad to serve also as The Monroes’ dialogue coach.
It was also a time when Dad and Mom were pulling in about twelve grand a year as our managers, in addition to what Dad was earning from his acting and writing. These weren’t earth-shattering sums of money, and my parents were extremely cautious investors, but they were disciplined about budgeting and saving. So, in 1968, after five years on Cordova Street, we moved to a larger house. We didn’t move far—all of a mile and a half, to the town immediately west of Burbank, Toluca Lake. But physically and symbolically, it was a big step up. Toluca Lake carried an air of prestige. It was where Andy Griffith lived, as well as Bob Hope and Frankie Avalon.
Our new house, on Clybourn Avenue, had four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a two-car garage. It was surrounded by leafy, mature trees. It even had a guesthouse in the back, which Dad commandeered as his office. The house had a brick facade and its handsome shingled roof had three dormers, each the front window of a bedroom. Mine was the one on the right, Clint’s was the one on the left, and the middle bedroom became Mom’s sewing room. She and Dad had the master bedroom downstairs.
By today’s standards of L.A. showbiz living, our house would be considered modest. But Clint and I couldn’t believe our good fortune. We had room to roam! And on Sundays, in a huge victory for our autonomy, we were allowed to walk by ourselves to Patys Restaurant, a diner that we loved and a Toluca Lake mainstay, still in operation today. Clint and I enjoyed sitting at the counter and watching the short-order cook in action while we ate breakfast, just the two of us.
For Dad and Mom, the house on Clybourn represented the summit of their material aspirations. It was their kingdom and castle. Though they both lived into the twenty-first century, they never moved again. And they so loved the house that, for the first and only time, they took out a mortgage, for $62,000. It took them only a few years to pay it off in full. “We own it free and clear,” Mom told us with pride.
Toluca Lake was a little ritzier than Burbank, but our way of life remained fundamentally unchanged. Dad kept driving his Chevy Nova Super Sport—all the way through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, by which time it was a certifiable road hazard. Mom drove a series of Buicks and Oldsmobiles. We never had an imported car or anything that could be described as a luxury vehicle.