Nothing happened with Dion, either. But sheesh, I was fifteen, my voice had broken, and I was growing impatient! My sexual antennae were up, and I picked up on a certain charge in the air at the Grand Vu Motel, an atmosphere of hanky-panky. Not that I needed to be that perceptive. The motel was like a navy warship hitting port—the adults involved with our shoot were real libertines after hours. And whereas I had always gone home to Burbank when I was shooting The Andy Griffith Show, this time I was on location, sharing barracks with the crew, privy to their extracurricular adventures. Clint and I had our own rooms at the Grand Vu, and the guy in the room adjacent to mine was a player. My sleep was frequently interrupted by his and his lovers’ moanings and thumpings.
On top of that, one of our hairstylists, Jackie Bone, was in the midst of a long-term but secret affair with Burt Lancaster. I saw him one weekend, a tall man surreptitiously ducking into a room on the second floor. The following Monday, the other hairstylists were teasing Jackie and she flashed a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. The Wild Country taught me a lot about how adults went about their sexual business. The Wanton World of Disney. Who knew?
But there was a downside to this uninhibited environment that wasn’t amusing at all. Though Clint and I weren’t in school and our parents were present, California’s child labor laws were among the nation’s most rigid, and we were required during the making of The Wild Country to have a welfare worker on set. Let’s call her Mrs. Baker. She was a middle-aged woman who was a stickler for following the rules to the letter. This drove Totten nuts, because we had to do a lot of night shooting. As we neared eleven o’clock, Mrs. Baker notified him that Clint and I were required to stop at eleven on the dot. Totten wanted to keep going until eleven thirty. Dad was inclined to let it slide and look the other way. But Mrs. Baker was inflexible.
This standoff was embarrassing to fifteen-year-old me. I had plenty of energy and was happy to keep working. Yet I was still a minor and therefore still subject to someone else effectively telling me, “It’s time to go to bed, Ronny.” California has since eased up a bit on these rules, but the limitations placed on actors my age were a big reason that I struggled to get hired over the next three years.
None of this is any excuse for what happened to Mrs. Baker. One night, when we were between setups, I heard a howl of terror. From the distance she came running, seemingly for her life. In pursuit was a male makeup artist on the film, inebriated. He tackled her, pinned her to the ground, and started kissing her. The crew members, rather than intervene, simply observed this scene and laughed, cheering the guy on. Mrs. Baker managed to get back up on her feet. She socked the guy in the face. Undaunted, he tackled her again and started dry-humping her in front of everyone. When Mrs. Baker finally broke free for good, she ran off, crying. I never saw her again. She was sent home in a car that night and replaced by a new welfare worker the following day.
I was shaken by the way Mrs. Baker had been treated. Totten and the other powers that be shrugged off her assault with a “boys will be boys” nonchalance. Even my parents, though they agreed that what happened was awful, took a cold view of the why of the incident. “Well, she made everybody mad,” Dad said. Like that made it okay. Totten didn’t fire the makeup artist or even discipline him. The responsibility for the assault never seemed to be assigned to its instigator.
At the time, I was left more confused than angry by what I had witnessed—how could people be so fun and seemingly good-hearted, yet sanction something so terrible? But since then I have come to recognize how toxic the culture of filmmaking was for women when I was a child actor. And it was too slow to improve. When my daughter Bryce entered the business twenty years ago, memories of this incident came rushing back and I shuddered. I had deep concerns for her emotional and, yes, physical safety. Fortunately, our industry has finally begun to evolve into a safer, more respectful one. But it took the #MeToo movement, and strong women like Bryce, to begin in earnest the process of bringing about wholesale change rather than incremental measures. This change has been too long in coming and can’t become the norm soon enough.
OUR TIME IN Jackson Hole coincided with the Manson-family murders, in which seven people were killed in two separate attacks in Los Angeles. The news cast a pall on our team, since we were mostly L.A. people and we sensed that the violence that had taken the lives of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy a year earlier had now come to our doorstep. We didn’t yet know who the killers were. There was only a widespread sentiment, based on reports that they had written RISE and DEATH TO PIGS on the walls in the victims’ blood, that “the revolution” was to blame.