“Look, Cheryl’s a great girl,” Dad said. “But you’ve got a lot going on in your life, and the more you hang around with a girl, that’s how you end up with unwanted teen pregnancies. And you’re not married. You’re not even engaged. She’s your girlfriend. That’s fine, but these other couples you’re talking about? They’re acting like they’re already married.”
I knew that my parents weren’t accusing Cheryl specifically of being a gold digger. As controlling as they were, they were acting out of love. They felt responsible for the fact that their son was famous, and they knew that fame could have ugly ramifications. They were also thrown by how serious I was about this, my first real relationship with a girl. They suggested that I should consider dating other girls before I got in too deep with this one. Which only made me angrier.
I felt humiliated and overly policed. As my weeks with Cheryl turned into months, her father, who was more accepting of our relationship than my parents were—which is saying a lot, since he was a conservative, religious man who was a registered Republican and a member of the NRA—invited me to join him and Cheryl for an overnight camping trip. Cheryl passed along the invitation and made the conditions clear: “My dad will be there, and it’ll be fun, and you’ll have your own tent, of course.”
I presented this offer to Mom and Dad and got a flat no. Then I had the bright idea that maybe, if I had sweet, honorable, charming Cheryl explain the setup to them instead of me, they would relent. Disaster. I could not have been more wrong. With an ingratiating smile on her face, Cheryl made her case to my parents in our living room. Mom, who was normally so easygoing and people-pleasing, issued a cutting rebuttal. “Why are you pushing us on this?” she told Cheryl. “We said no. We barely know anything about you, and we know nothing about your father.”
For the first time, Cheryl got angry at me. She felt that I had walked her into a trap. That had not been my intention, of course, but it was the reality. And now she was convinced that her boyfriend’s mother didn’t like or trust her.
CLINT
Ron was kind of a nerd. It didn’t matter that he was a TV star and a household name. He was a pimply-faced, straight-arrow sixteen-year-old. I was thrilled that he now stood a chance of getting some action.
So I had no separation anxiety about losing my big brother to his new girlfriend. I liked Cheryl right away and I saw how happy Ron was. I defended their relationship to Mom and Dad and resented on Ron’s behalf the draconian restrictions that they had placed on his dating life. It just wasn’t fair.
This doesn’t mean that I was above being a pesky little brother. I was the Hee-Hee Man, let’s not forget. We had a rec room in the lower level of the guesthouse out back, underneath Dad’s office. Ron and Cheryl would inevitably gravitate toward there, looking for a place to be alone. But Mom made it known that she didn’t want them to be in the rec room by themselves, lest they start necking . . . or worse.
For me, Mom’s warning was like an invitation. I took it upon myself to be a busybody. One day when Cheryl was over, I scurried off to the rec room and hid behind a couch. Sure enough, Ron and Cheryl walked in and started to kiss. I sprang up and said, “Guess what? Clint’s here!” I was a sick little bastard.
Cheryl just giggled, but Ron was pissed. His limited time with her was sacrosanct. And, little-brother mischief aside, I respected that.
RON
As this tension over my dating life went on, I challenged Mom and Dad. What about it was bugging them so much? Mom told me that she was worried primarily about me getting Cheryl pregnant. I replied that Cheryl and I were not yet doing the thing that causes pregnancies.
She didn’t believe me. She had clocked my furtive visits to the rec room with Cheryl and worried about how late my dates went. “Oh, come on!” she said. “How can you spend that much time with her without going all the way?”
Wow. This was rich coming from someone who, though she and Dad hadn’t yet revealed this truth to me, had lived in sin with her boyfriend in New York City and eloped with him when they were twenty-one and twenty. But then, that was probably one of the reasons why Mom was so suspicious—she had been a free spirit at my age. And now it was the early 1970s, a much more sexually permissive time than that of her youth.