And don’t think that it’s easy to simply sit tight until your voice has changed and you can start playing teenagers. You may be fifteen, but you’re still a minor, bud—and the studios have a lot of twentysomething actors at their disposal who can pass for teens and aren’t required to have school breaks, guardians, or curtailed working hours. So your phone stops ringing.
For the first time, I began to understand from lived experience the psychological burden that my father carried from month to month, staring at that silent phone in hope and frustration. It’s hard not to take this rejection personally.
CLINT
I didn’t turn down my shot to be on Mod Squad. Dad and I jumped at the opportunity for me to play a little boy who is kidnapped and rescued by Linc, played by the prodigiously Afro’d Clarence Williams III. It was a memorable gig. We filmed my scenes the morning of the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, the first that I ever lived through. It tossed me out of bed at six in the morning. Next thing I knew, I was in the hallway and Dad was running toward me, stark naked, having bounded up the stairs to hustle Ron and me to safety. The telephone lines were knocked out and I presumed that we would not be filming that day. But Dad said that we had a responsibility to show up for work. Sure enough, the rest of the cast and the crew had assembled at the Paramount lot. We worked the whole day, with people checking their transistor radios to find out the fate of their neighborhoods.
My acting career was still going great guns. I found a welcoming home on the westerns that survived into the turn of the decade, such as Gunsmoke, The Virginian, and Lancer. And I was getting sitcom work, too. One night, in fact, I was on two of them the same evening—as the jerk who tormented Johnny Whitaker in an episode of Family Affair on CBS and as Felix Unger’s would-be protégé in an episode of The Odd Couple on ABC. The premise was that Felix had joined the Big Brothers program and I was the kid he was assigned to mentor. The complication, true to life, was that I preferred to hang out with his roommate, the sportswriter Oscar Madison.
Dad was so thrilled by my double occupancy in prime time that Thursday that he took out an ad in the trades with a big photo of my chubby-cheeked mug:
CLINT HOWARD
Guest stars . . .
as a Bully on
“Family Affair”
TONIGHT
7:30 CBS
&
then swing
back to a nice
Likable Kid
with a
problem on
“Odd Couple”
TONIGHT
9:30 ABC
The name of my agent, Marguerite Ogg, was helpfully offered at the bottom of the ad. The trade magazines were a serious force, read by every decision maker in our industry, so this was a big deal. And Dad’s strategy worked. I kept getting parts in good TV shows: Marcus Welby, M.D., Night Gallery, Nanny and the Professor, The Streets of San Francisco. Puberty had not yet hit me, and no doors were slamming in my face.
But it was only a matter of time before I would go through the same thing that Ron did.
RON
One saving grace of this unsettling period is that it coincided with a great era in filmmaking. I was able to catch a new wave of American directors asserting itself. Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H—I took ’em all in with Dad. From a storytelling perspective, movies worked differently than TV. Whereas The Andy Griffith Show earned its viewers’ interest and built long-term loyalty through simple stories and deep, cumulative character development, these films were rigorously planned to transport their audience in a single immersive viewing.
Dad was permissive about what I watched. Some of these movies were explicit in their depictions of violence and sexuality. Andy Griffith was mildly scandalized when, in our show’s later years, I told him that I had seen Bonnie and Clyde with my father one weekend. But Dad thought that my viewing such pictures would be useful in my maturation process as an actor, aspiring filmmaker, and young man. I wasn’t one of those kids who cringed at watching a sex scene while seated next to his father. I knew what movies were, art created through illusion. And Dad knew that I knew. These excursions to the movies became a nice way for us to hang out and talk about life in general, not just storytelling and filmmaking.