The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(6)

DAD WAS THE child whisperer, with an innate grasp of how to motivate a young actor to succeed without applying undue pressure. Mom was the child whisperer’s whisperer, bucking up her husband as he weathered the ups and downs of his own show-business career. As good as they were in these roles, they did not anticipate playing them.

Both my parents graduated from high school dreaming of stardom. They met in a drama class at the University of Oklahoma. Dad, an underclassman still going by his birth name, Harold Beckenholdt, had found a mentor figure in a senior theater major named Dennis Weaver, later to become the star of the long-running NBC series McCloud. One day in 1947, for a two-person scene study, Dennis decided to pair Harold with another drama student: a young woman named Jean Speegle.

Harold was green and unsophisticated. He grew up enamored of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry movies, but he never saw them in a proper movie house. In Shidler, Oklahoma, the little town nearest to his family’s farm, you sat on your coat and watched a picture as it was projected onto the side of a building. Dad fancied himself the heir to Rogers and Autry, the next singing-cowboy star. At one point he had a plan, and I mean a serious plan, to ride his horse, who was named Lucky, from Oklahoma all the way to Hollywood. He told Ron and me years later how it was supposed to work: he would camp out along the way, live off the land and by his wits, and finally arrive in Tinseltown on horseback, rugged and resplendent in his cowboy hat. The industry’s grandees would be bowled over at the sight of a real singing cowboy and sign him up right quick!

There was one big issue that kept him from pursuing this plan: Dad couldn’t sing. Could not carry a tune to save his life. This trait would not prove unique to him in our family. No one has ever mistaken the Howards for the Osmonds. Our group renditions of “Happy Birthday” were unlistenable to outsiders.

Jean Speegle was more polished, from a merchant family in the booming railroad town of Duncan, Oklahoma. She was considered by her peers to be one of the most gifted actors at OU and was nearly two years older than Harold. Dad had seen her in a campus production of Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday in which she knocked ’em dead as Billie Dawn, a sleazy tycoon’s floozy who blossoms into a strong, independent woman. Country-boy Harold was intimidated by his scene partner’s charisma and talent. He was also instantly besotted.

Nobody likes to think of their parents as passionate young lovers, but, from everything that Ron and I know, Cupid’s arrow struck, and Harold and Jean quickly embarked upon a torrid romance. Dad was tall and lean, a rangy, good-looking young man who carried himself like a real-life cowboy. Mom was petite, not much over five feet in height, with a round, porcelain-doll face and wavy red hair.

Their love was too big for the college town of Norman, Oklahoma, to contain. Not long after becoming a couple, Harold and Jean ditched school to chase the dream of becoming professional actors. After a period of struggle and penury, they booked a steady gig as members of a touring children’s-theater troupe, traveling from town to town in a repurposed school bus, playing venues as big as four-hundred-seat theaters and as small as rinky-dink school auditoriums.

Composed of around a dozen actors, the company included six adult little people who played the dwarves in Snow White and other fairy-tale characters. Mom played ingenues and princesses, including the title role in Cinderella. Dad played the Huntsman, the Prince, and any other role that was required of him. When they needed an extra dwarf, he would kneel behind the scenery upstage, pacing back and forth on his knees to the point that they turned black and blue. He earned an additional five bucks a week driving the prop truck, which followed behind the bus. This job granted him the extra benefit of scoring some alone time with Mom, who rode alongside him in the cab.


DAD DESPISED HIS name growing up. He hated the way “Harold” sounded and the nerdy image it projected. He would do imitations of people whining, “Harrr-old, Harr-old!” As for “Beckenholdt,” it was a mouthful and an albatross—Dad lost too many hours of his precious childhood spelling it out for people. On top of that, this surname was way too German-sounding for an aspiring star of stage and screen in the post–World War II era.

Sometime after he and Mom left school, Dad became Rance Howard. He never told us exactly where his new name came from, but our aunt Glee, Dad’s younger sister, says that he played a character named Rance in a play somewhere and liked how it sounded when his fellow actors addressed him by that name. And our surname? Shortly after Dad ran off with Mom, his folks, who had owned several farms over the course of his childhood, settled for good in Moline, Kansas, in Elk County, east of Wichita. Contiguous to Moline is the town of . . . Howard. In fact, Howard, Kansas, is where Dad’s youngest sibling—his brother Max—still lives. “Rance” from a play plus “Howard” from Kansas equals Rance Howard. That’s our best guess.

Aunt Glee also says that our grandparents’ feelings were bruised by Dad’s name change.

Granddad Beckenholdt told Glee that he had spoken about the situation with a prosperous friend, a local car dealer, and the friend said that if it had been his son, he would have written the kid right out of his will. But Grandma understood Dad’s reasoning and told anyone who asked that Harold had become Rance to better his odds in “the show bidness.”





RON


I used to wonder why Dad didn’t simply shorten his name to something like Hal Beck. As a kid, I sometimes wished that my name was Ronny Beck—it sounded cooler than Ronny Howard.