The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(5)

In the spring of 1958, we took off from Idlewild Airport for Europe, a first for all of us. We stopped at Shannon Airport in Ireland so the ground crew could refuel our propeller plane. While we bided our time in the terminal, the Irish airport workers took notice of my red hair and teased me affectionately. “Ya look like you’ve come home, lad,” they said. “Ya shouldn’t really be gettin’ back on that plane, should ya?”

But get back on the plane we did. On March 3, just two days after my fourth birthday, we landed in Austria. The final descent was glorious, with Vienna resplendent in a blanket of newly fallen snow.

The Journey is a heavy picture. A bunch of international travelers, including my character, are trying to flee Budapest by bus during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, only to be detained by a fearsome Soviet commander, played by Brynner. To me, though, the whole experience was pure joy, a stress-free first job.

When I wasn’t in a scene, I climbed up onto the army tanks that guarded the film’s “Soviet checkpoint.” The film’s prop master gave me a Whee-lo, that little toy with a spoked wheel that rolls along both sides of a magnetic metal track, which kept me mesmerized for hours. The wardrobe people dressed me up in a smart plaid jacket with matching earflap cap. I loved this outfit for how cool it made me look, even though the accompanying scarf itched my neck.

When the shoot was over, my pragmatic Oklahoman parents, believing this trip to be the only chance they would ever have to visit Europe, piggybacked some vacation travel onto our stay in Europe. We toured Venice, Paris, and London.

My favorite part, though, was directly tied to the work. In a pivotal scene in The Journey, Yul Brynner’s character, Major Surov, intimidates the hell out of his captives by taking a bite out of the shot glass from which he is drinking vodka. Yul, with his shaved head and severe features, looked convincingly fearsome in his Soviet officer’s uniform. But he was a kind and gregarious man who noticed that I was fascinated by the scene and didn’t want me to get any dangerous ideas. So, between takes, he invited me to sit in his lap. He held the prop glass to my face.

“Taste this, Ronny,” he said. “This is sugar, not real glass. It’s pretend, for the movie. You would never bite real glass.” He encouraged me to chomp on a little shard. It tasted just like rock candy. Whoa, I thought, this is amazing.

This marked the beginning of my fascination with the process of how stories are told on the screen. I had learned a secret of the trade. I was in on the magic trick. And wow, did I like being in on the magic trick.


THE JOURNEY WRAPPED in June 1958 and came out to good reviews the following year. But it wasn’t a game changer for the Howard family. After we returned to New York, I settled back into my preschool routine, Mom resumed her typing duties at CBS, and Dad continued to go out on auditions, without much success. TV acting work in New York had pretty much dried up by then. As the ’50s came to an end, so, too, did the golden age of live television, most of it shot on the East Coast. Dad’s agent suggested that he move west, to Los Angeles, where a raft of new detective shows and westerns were in production. When your own agent tells you to move, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s time to get out of town.

So, in the summer of ’58, we packed up the old Plymouth, bade farewell to Queens and my parents’ New York friends, and pointed the car in the direction of California. The Journey was my breakthrough, but this cross-country drive marked the beginning of my real journey.





2


Mom and Dad: A Love Story


CLINT


Generally, there are two categories of child actors. The first is the trained animal. He is basically given his line readings by an adult and asked to copy them down to the last detail, including facial expressions. It’s not really acting, more like performing a trick. If this kid has a crying scene, he is not challenged to reach within and summon real emotion. Instead, someone in the makeup department comes out with a dropper of glycerin and puts some tears on his face. The director instantly gets the result he’s after and everybody’s happy.

The second category is the child who is allowed to be a child. The director encourages him to behave naturally so he doesn’t get stiff or self-conscious. The kid does several takes of the scene, and later on, in postproduction, the editors cut away everything but the prime sirloin.

Dad devised a third way. He taught Ron and me how to understand a scene in an emotional language we could wrap our brains around. He started out by asking us three fundamental questions: Where do you think your character just was? Why is your character entering the scene? And where is it he would like to go?

We would build a little backstory for the character and then apply it to the material. This process gave my performances an honesty that the trained-animal kid could never deliver. Was I entering the room excitedly? Hesitantly? Was I hoping that we would get to eat ice cream for dinner? The viewers were oblivious to these interior monologues, but they benefited from a fuller, richer performance from me. You know who else benefited? The director. He didn’t have to settle for Category 1, a cutesy but superficial performance, or for Category 2, trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

When Ron was little, Dad was still figuring this stuff out, jerry-rigging that pretend boom mic and feeling his way through the teaching process. By the time I came along, though, Dad had a system. Preparation was the key. He had us so well drilled that we created none of the hassle with which child actors are associated—fits of temper, trouble reciting lines, incontinence. Ron and I rarely required retakes. No production ever slowed down on account of a Howard brother.