The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(8)
And so, on the morning of October 5, 1948, in the lobby of the Brown Proctor Hotel in Winchester, Jean Speegle and Rance Howard were married. The officiant was a Methodist minister who they fortuitously met in the hotel the day before. The groomsmen were the troupe’s six little-person actors, who opened the ceremony by improvising a tap routine performed to the tune of Wagner’s “Wedding March,” better known as “Here Comes the Bride.” Dad was five weeks shy of his twentieth birthday. Mom was a comparatively mature and worldly twenty-one. He wore a plaid suit. She wore one of her costume dresses, her Cinderella ball gown temporarily denuded of its theatrical sequins.
The company put together a modest reception for them in the hotel lobby. The company manager, an older woman named Mrs. Lawton, improvised a wedding cake by having a local bakery stack three regular cakes and refrost them. Everyone danced to the jukebox in the lobby and drank through the afternoon and into the night. In Dad’s telling, the groomsmen drank more and carried on later than anyone, undaunted by the call to be on the bus at 5 A.M. the following morning.
The wedding was not entirely free of drama. Mrs. Lawton initially believed that Rance and Jean were being too rash. A couple of days before the ceremony, she asked my parents if Mom was pregnant, and if that was the reason for the hurry. Even when Mom explained that she wasn’t knocked up, Mrs. Lawton still tried to head off the ceremony, fearful that the young lovers were making a terrible mistake. Mom turned on her patented charm and brought the older woman around—to the point where Mrs. Lawton not only procured the cake but also gave the bride away.
When the news of their marriage reached the Speegles in Oklahoma and the Beckenholdts in Kansas, the reaction wasn’t entirely rapturous. Granddad Beckenholdt went to a lawyer to see if he could get the marriage annulled. The lawyer, citing the fact that Dad was of legal age, talked Granddad out of it. Dad was hurt but unsurprised by his father’s actions. He anticipated that his parents would flip out over his sudden wedding, yet he was unwavering in his commitment to Mom and their shared pursuit of a life in show business.
The Speegles were caught by surprise but not entirely shocked, given their daughter’s romanticism and determined disposition. When the theater troupe rolled into Oklahoma, Granddad Butch and Grandma Louise magnanimously held an open house in Duncan that served as the new couple’s proper reception. Dad was in black tie with a white dinner jacket. Mom was dressed in a beautiful off-the-shoulder gown with a billowing skirt of diaphanous white tulle. They looked fantastic.
Granddad Beckenholdt begged off from attending the Duncan reception, but Dad’s mother, Grandma Ethel, made the drive to Oklahoma with her sister. This was a show of good faith and also a fact-finding mission, to see, as my aunt Glee put it, “what kind of outfit Rance had married into.”
When the children’s-theater tour ended, my folks paid their first visit as a married couple to the Beckenholdts’ farm in Kansas, where they were received politely if stiffly. The Beckenholdts withheld their full approval of Mom for a long time. Not until Clint and I came along did their wariness evaporate completely.
With some savings from their theater work, my folks bought a used Willys-Overland Jeepster soft-top. After they were done visiting the Beckenholdts, Mom and Dad pulled away from the farm in Kansas, headed to the highway on-ramp, and paused for a moment to ponder which way to go: east or west? New York or Los Angeles?
Mom didn’t have to think for long. “East!” she said. New York it was.
LIFE IN THE big city was no cakewalk for the newlyweds. Mom quickly discovered that, for all the joy that acting had brought her at school and on the road, the treadmill of auditioning in New York wasn’t for her. She got some parts in some regional and off-off-Broadway productions, but the constant rejection inherent in a young actor’s life was more than she could bear, as was the prospect of taking on work that would require her to be geographically apart from Dad. This issue came to a head when she was offered a role in a touring production of a play. My parents took a long walk along the Hudson River to discuss the matter. Dad encouraged Mom to accept the job, but she decided that she couldn’t bear to part from her husband in this early stage of their marriage. When they got home from their walk, she called her agent and declined the role.
This marked the end of her pursuit of an acting career. Beyond the odd role here and there in a regional production in which she and Dad could act together, Mom essentially retired from show business in her early twenties. At that point, she redoubled her efforts to help her husband succeed. If she wasn’t going to act, by God, she would do her damnedest to earn enough money for the both of them to live on while Dad went out on auditions. To that end, she took a job at Macy’s, spritzing perfume samples on the wrists of lady customers, and another as a hatcheck girl at the Copacabana nightclub.
For a while, even this wasn’t enough. Dad wasn’t landing any parts, so he, too, took on nonacting work. He loaded fresh fish and produce onto refrigerated trucks at the docks. He worked as an usher at a seedy grindhouse theater in Times Square, his job really more akin to a bouncer’s. The theater was open all day and all night, playing the same double feature over and over again. Many indigent men more or less lived at the theater. There were constant fights, and it often fell to Dad and his fellow ushers to break them up, armed only with their flashlights.
Dad was a pretty good fighter himself. He had boxed competitively in his teens in Oklahoma. In New York, he started working out at a gym favored by pro fighters. His sparring sessions impressed a trainer there, so much so that the trainer offered to develop Dad as a light heavyweight. Needing the money, Dad announced to Mom his intent to train for his pro debut. Mom, horrified, extinguished that plan before it went any further.