We watched the finished product together as a family, using our two-speed Bell & Howell projector and one of those stand-up screens that 1960s families had, where you hoisted up the screen from a tripod base. Dad was delighted at the finished product. I was delighted that he was delighted.
CLINT
Life was good and it was about to get better: not long after we moved to Toluca Lake, Mom surprised Ron and me with the news that she was expecting. I was over the moon. I wanted to experience what Ron had experienced: being an older brother. I imagined the baby in my mother’s womb as a boy, because that was all I knew. But I would have been equally happy with a sister. I was eager to have my own protégé and acolyte.
Ron was as happy as I was. But we noticed that Dad, normally full of energy and good cheer, seemed down. He talked about our pending sibling in sighs and shrugs—not with any negativity, but definitely with a sense of resignation. One day, when Dad was out, we brought this observation to Mom. Her explanation to us was as shocking as it was masterfully and gently delivered. Dad, she said, was happy that we boys were getting older and more independent, requiring less oversight and hand-holding. Because of this, he was looking forward to spending more time pursuing his own passions.
But this new baby was a surprise, unplanned. And raising him or her would turn back the parental responsibility clock to zero—hard news for Dad to swallow. “He loves having children, and he loves you boys,” Mom told us. “But he thought it was time to get started on his career again.”
RON
Clint and I had not really understood until that point how much Dad had intentionally deprioritized his aspirations to do important work as an actor and writer. This was the first time that I recognized that he had paid a toll of sorts for our success and our rich education in the business. Rance Howard was only forty years old, with the better part of his adulthood ahead of him. But forty is a tough age if you’re still trying to break through as a leading man. For how much longer would he have to wait for his own moment in the sun?
Dad’s worries turned out to be moot. Sadly, we never got to meet the new little Howard; Mom suffered a miscarriage a few weeks after they broke the news to us of her pregnancy. Dad rose to this moment: he was loving and gracious toward Mom, comforting her in his arms. Very little was said to Clint and me about the matter, then and ever afterward. But I could tell, without any words being spoken, that Dad was relieved.
13
Fake Blood and Opie-Shaming
RON
I will forever owe a debt to Opie Taylor. The experience of inhabiting that character, walking a mile in his Keds, defined my early life. But being associated with Opie didn’t serve me particularly well in adolescence. Especially an adolescence whose kickoff happened to coincide with the Summer of Love.
I didn’t really do the 1960s. I loved the Beatles—still do—and approvingly noted the rise of my female classmates’ hemlines. But I was never part of the drug culture, never had long hair, and never participated in political protests, though I often sympathized with their aims. I was the son of an Oklahoma farm boy whose 1930s childhood wasn’t that different from an 1890s childhood, and I was on a TV show set in the 1960s that for all intents and purposes really took place in the 1940s. With my freckles and prominent ears, I looked uncannily like one of those kids who modeled for Norman Rockwell when he was painting covers for The Saturday Evening Post during World War II. By accident more than design, I lived at a remove from the era in which I grew up.
But the ’60s proceeded nonetheless. David Starr Jordan Middle School went up to ninth grade, so when The Andy Griffith Show wrapped its seventh season, I was anxious about my reentry into the school system. Justifiably so, it turned out. On my first day of junior high, in February 1967, I was in culture shock. Some of the ninth graders were old—as in fifteen!—and had long hair and muttonchop sideburns. My reputation as Opie preceded me, and wandering through the halls that day, I felt eyes boring into me from every direction. Meanwhile, my own POV seemed distorted, like I was looking out at everyone else through a fish-eye lens, with myriad faces poking grotesquely into my view.