Hollywood’s Most Fortunate Sons

I n the early Seventies, when Ron Howard was desperate to break into directing movies but couldn’t figure out a way to secure financing, a new kind of motion picture was starting to prove immensely profitable in theaters. The idea struck 18-year-old Ron that he could rake in a lot of money quickly, and use the cash to spring into independent filmmaking, if only he directed and starred in a porn movie. He had a killer title lined up: Opie Gets Laid.

Howard thought better of the idea (which he never shared with his girlfriend or his parents), and things shortly began to look up for him anyway. He and his five-years-younger brother, Clint, also a successful actor — his childhood hit was the animal drama Gentle Ben, which inevitably stirred other kids to call out “Where’s your bear?” whenever they recognized him in public — overflow with gratitude for their family, their careers, and their lives in the wonderfully satisfying joint memoir The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family. Clint (who unlike his brother experienced a nightmare period of drug and alcohol addiction but later got clean and sober) writes in the concluding paragraphs, “I want to sign off by saying, ‘Sorry, Mr. Gehrig, I am the luckiest man to walk the face of the earth.”

Clint (who has appeared in 16 of Ron’s films and had small but memorable roles in the Austin Powers films, The Waterboy, four generations of Star Trek shows, and even the original The Jungle Book, in which he voiced the smallest elephant) is not as accomplished as Ron, whose recollections rightly take up most of the book, but Clint has a slightly edgy and mischievous persona that makes him delightful to read, and he has plenty of knockout anecdotes. Auditioning to play Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, Clint was doubtful of his chances and felt out of sorts when he noticed George Lucas was not present at the audition (although Lucas’s friend Francis Ford Coppola was). After a moment, a chair swiveled around to reveal Lucas, who called out — this was in 1976, before Star Trek really took off in reruns and Trekkies were not yet a thing — “Commander Balok! ‘The Corbomite Maneuver!’” One of Clint’s most beloved parts was the ancient alien Balok, whom he played at age seven in the second episode of Star Trek ever filmed (and the one that led to a series order from NBC, The Corbomite Maneuver).

Both Clint and Ron shower praise on their actor father Rance Howard (born Harold Beckenholdt), who in their telling seems pretty much the greatest dad in the history of showbiz. Rance and his wife Jean met while acting at the University of Oklahoma (via an introduction from actor Dennis Weaver, later the star of NBC’s McCloud), then hit the road as touring actors. Their time on stage in New York City and connections with casting agents led to Ron’s screen debut in a Cold War drama called The Journey. He auditioned at three and a half years old. Jean Howard lost interest in acting (although she would return late in life, making a much-praised appearance as an astronaut’s mom in Ron’s Apollo 13), but Rance’s acting guided the family to Burbank, where he made ends meet with small roles in television (he had a lankiness that made him perfect for Westerns) and wrote scripts when acting gigs were scarce. Little Ronny gained confidence in such shows as The Twilight Zone and was already thoroughly experienced when his work on an episode of General Electric Theater won him praise from the show’s host — Ronald Reagan — and the attention of producer Sheldon Leonard, who was looking to cast the role of Opie in The Andy Griffith Show. How lovely it is to learn that little Ronny had a great time working with Griffith, who was a gentle and generous leader and remained a good friend thereafter.

Rance Howard, who was essential in giving his sons exactly the tips they needed to perform well on camera, was hired as an on-set coach and also became friends with Griffith. Ron says it wasn’t until more than 20 years later that he learned (from Griffith) that while on set his dad had provided an astute recommendation that turned out to be critical: Instead of writing Opie as a smartass, as was the default mode on TV at the time, why not make him genuinely respectful of his old man? The parallel between the wise TV father and the real-life dad was obvious: A running joke in the book is that whenever Ron would ask Rance a question, no matter how young he was at the time, he would receive a straightforward and truthful reply, whether he was asking about sex or Santa Claus. (As a randy teen, Howard asked both parents about masturbation; his mother more or less dissolved with embarrassment and refused to discuss it, but his father calmly explained that it was normal and nothing to worry about.)

Howard (like me) spent much of his childhood being taunted with calls of “Opie!” — he calls this Opie-shaming, and it must have driven him crazy. (I know this because in my case it continued until I was 25 years old and an Army lieutenant, and I wasn’t even on television, merely a redhead.) Sometimes he’d hear someone whistling the Andy Griffith theme song in his vicinity, and he knew “I’d been made.” Imagine the irritation of this going on for decades. Yet he is grateful for the whole strange experience, acknowledging that his parents kept him from getting a swelled head. When he was finally able to access his (large) childhood earnings at 18, the car he bought himself was not a hot rod but a VW bug. He still has it, and he still has the girl he took out on dates in it — the former Cheryl Alley. They are the quintessential innocent high-school sweethearts, a couple for 50 years, two beautiful squares. Before their first date, there was a long pause on the phone when he suggested they go see It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World — she took a break to look it up in the paper to make sure it was rated G because, as a strict Southern Baptist, she wasn’t allowed to see PG films. She was, however, allowed to fly planes, which she had done solo by age 16. Things do change, no?

Both brothers write touchingly about how quickly acting opportunities dry up once you’re no longer an adorable little kid — Clint writes that his tow-headed cuteness disappeared at puberty, when his hair went from straight and blond to dark and frizzy, while Ron found that despite eight years with Andy Griffith, casting directors had little use for him. He desperately wanted the role of John-Boy on the TV movie The Homecoming, which became the hit show The Waltons, but humiliated himself by showing up unannounced to audition for it, only to be coolly rebuffed. But his mother often said he was born with a four-leaf clover behind his ear, and so he was. He was carrying around a draft notice in his wallet that felt like a ticking time bomb when the draft ended weeks after Richard Nixon (for whom he voted) was elected in 1972, when he was 18.

Just before that, his turn as a Fifties teen on a seemingly forgettable episode of the anthology series Love, American Style, led to his getting a screen test with Lucas for American Graffiti, which cost less than $1 million and grossed more than 100 times that. The resulting ’50s craze — Grease was becoming a Broadway sensation and Sha Na Na had made an unlikely splash at Woodstock — made TV suits scramble for something they could put together quickly that was along the same lines. Garry Marshall, the guy who had made that Love, American Style episode, suggested reworking it for a sitcom he called “Happy Days,” which hit the air just five months after American Graffiti. One of the few sour interludes of the book comes when Ron beefs with ABC over his relative marginalization as Henry Winkler turned a supporting part into the most beloved TV character of the late Seventies. Ron threatened to quit the show and go back to USC to study directing if ABC went ahead with its plan to rename the show Fonzie’s Happy Days in its third season. Winkler didn’t like the idea either, Marshall refused, and ABC backed off. Meanwhile, Ron landed a role in John Wayne’s last movie, The Shootist. Its director, Don Siegel, brought a copy of TV Guide that had Howard and Winkler on the cover. Wayne looked at it and said, “Ah! Big shot, huh?” On set, Wayne would slaughter Howard at chess and regale him with stories of John Ford, who told his actors to give the audience only 80 percent of their characters’ emotions: The viewers should do the rest.

If there’s a dig to be made at Ron Howard’s movies, it’s that they tend to be a bit soft and lacking in bite. But as he jogs through 60-plus years of bright, cheery, blissfully happy days, how could it have been anything but? What a treat it is to learn that Opie Taylor, Richie, and Ron had so much in common. He’s the one Hollywood brat who emerged stout, hale, and whole. About the most horrifying stuff he was exposed to, apart from Clint’s 1980s drug woes, was the dirty drawings on the bathroom walls at the studio where he was filming The Andy Griffith Show and, later, watching Harrison Ford and Paul Le Mat tossing beer bottles out the window of the motel that served as home base for American Graffiti, coming alarmingly close to hitting Howard’s beloved Beetle. (When Ron went out to move the car, Le Mat chucked more bottles at his feet, yelling, “Dance, Opie, dance!”) He’d never even heard the word graffiti before he auditioned for the movie, and had to look it up. Marion Ross, his mom on Happy Days, told him she heard he was one of the biggest drug dealers on the USC campus. Nope! That was Howard’s roommate, who was growing weed in the boys’ closet. Howard says he never saw anyone do cocaine, which is the Seventies Hollywood equivalent of a miracle. Only once did he hear his beloved parents have a serious fight. They stayed married until Jean died, Rance following years later. And Ron has gotten exactly one speeding ticket in his life: “while busting ass to get from Happy Days to a Grand Theft Auto preproduction meeting.” Growing up in Babylon, Howard managed to emerge as grounded as a child of Mayberry.