The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(9)

Fortunately, Dad soon got the break he had been waiting for: a call to audition for the touring company of Mister Roberts. The show had been a hit on Broadway for more than two years. For part of the tour, Henry Fonda was going to step back into the title role, which he had originated. Fonda was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, known for playing the title role in Young Abe Lincoln and Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. He was also to become a significant figure in our lives, offering counsel both to Dad and me as our paths crossed with his in the decades that followed.

At his audition, Dad read for two theater legends, the producer Leland Hayward and the director Joshua Logan, the team that brought Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific to the stage. This was the big time. All the actors had to take off their shirts to prove that they were, quite literally, in shipshape condition. Dad easily passed that test. But he didn’t win the colead part that he coveted, of Ensign Pulver, the role that I would later act out as a precocious three-year-old. Still, Logan took a liking to Dad and found a part for him, as a crewman named Lindstrom. The pay was one hundred dollars a week for the run of the tour—not Hollywood money, but a princely sum for a working actor, especially given that the tour was to last nearly a year. He and Mom were ecstatic.

By this time, they were living on their own, at last with no roommates, in an apartment in Chelsea. They spent much of Dad’s off-hours from rehearsal sunning themselves on their building’s roof, to ensure that Dad would look convincingly like a sailor who has spent months in the South Pacific. When the Mister Roberts tour began, they gave up their apartment and Mom joined Dad on the road in such cities as Boston and Chicago, occasionally parting from him to visit her family in Oklahoma.

My folks were happy and in love, and Dad believed he was on the cusp of making it in the business. When the tour arrived in Los Angeles, he took a meeting with Republic Pictures, a prolific producer of westerns and B movies, and the incubator of Roy Rogers’s and Gene Autry’s careers, about possibly becoming a contract player—a prospect that excited him no end.

But then fate intervened: the Korean War was on, and Uncle Sam wanted him. So much for his prospects. So much for Hollywood.

At Mom’s suggestion, in 1951, Dad proactively enlisted in the air force to avoid conscription into the army, where the odds were greater that he might find himself in combat. He excelled at basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. The military brass even offered him an opportunity to attend Officer Candidate School. But he had no aspirations to become an officer—he just wanted to put in his mandatory four years of service and be done with it. He requested to be assigned to Special Services, the entertainment branch of the U.S. military. Hank Fonda, Joshua Logan, and Leland Hayward wrote letters of recommendation to the sergeant in charge, attesting to Dad’s suitability. That did the trick.


AS WARTIME ASSIGNMENTS went, life in the Special Services was as good as it got. The assigning sergeant helpfully advised Dad to put in for off-base housing. This allowed him and Mom to find their own place and receive a living allowance—a small sum, but one that gave them the freedom to lead a semicivilian life while Dad served. His job played to his strengths: he was in charge of staging shows on the base to keep his fellow airmen in good spirits. Better still, Dad would never see combat or travel overseas.

Still, he was tremendously frustrated. He was finally getting somewhere in his acting career, and he would forevermore maintain that his four long years away from the business derailed whatever professional momentum he had built up. What’s more, he was already a grown man, and he bristled at the enforced loss of individuality that the air force demanded. During basic training, he couldn’t believe that he had to spend hours upon hours of his day marching in formation. His drill instructor barked out the commands: “Flight, forward march! Flight, halt! Flight, about face!” (A flight was a group of sixty airmen.)

Dad viewed this period as a regression into an earlier part of his life. Legally, he was still Harold Beckenholdt, and he winced at the sound of his birth name, especially when it was mangled by his commanding officers. One drill sergeant, who had both a strong Boston accent and some kind of speech impediment, would shout, “Breckenbruck! Keep ya tums lahng da teems ah ya trou-sahs!” Dad looked at the man blankly, which only prompted a more furious recitation of the command: “Gah-dammit! Tay an’ keep ya tums lahng da teems ah ya trou-sahs!” It took Dad three weeks to figure out that the sergeant was saying “Try and keep your thumbs along the seams of your trousers.”

Dad had lots of other funny stories about the air force. He respected his peers and recognized the benefits that many of them reaped from this regimented way of life. But he never romanticized his military service. He considered it a duty, not a passion.

That said, he was not totally bereft of passion in his air force years. A year into Dad’s time in the service, he and Mom received the news that their first child was on the way.





3


Becoming Californians


CLINT


On January 31, 1953, Dad was on duty at the Service Club at Chanute Air Force Base, outside of Champaign, Illinois. He and Mom lived in a little rental bungalow in the nearby town of Rantoul. Mom called Dad to report that her water broke, and that she needed to get to the hospital in Champaign ASAP.

Dad was excused from duty and immediately picked up Mom, who already had her bag packed. They calmly drove to the hospital, where the orderlies wheeled Mom in. And then Dad waited. And waited. And waited. In those days, fathers were kept away from the delivery room, in suspense. Dad’s mother had told him that she was in labor for a day and a half before he was born. So, while he was antsy, he wasn’t particularly worried.