Showbiz lives: Ron and Clint Howard on their breezy, brotherly Hollywood memoir
, shaped them and their careers. Jean gave up her acting dreams early on in service of the family; Rance pursued his until the end while mentoring their sons in the business. Ron says the brothers’ “survival” through the perils of Hollywood had “everything to do with our upbringing and the kind of offbeat parental sensibility that affected us in such a powerful way.”Clint Howard rides on Ron’s back.
“Something I learned from [working on] the book: Our parents, they were eccentrics. They were outliers,” says Ron. “They came from the Midwest [Oklahoma], and if you met them, you’d say, ‘Salt-of-the-earth Americana stands before you.’ But the reality was, what middle-of-the-road Middle American kid thinks, ‘I’ll just leave and go to New York or L.A.’? And they did that.
“They were too adventurous for Oklahoma and a little too cornpone for Hollywood. They were ‘sophisticated hicks’ — my mom came up with that one.” A lot of actors would love to have Rance Howard’s career — close to 300 film and TV credits, plus some screenwriting along the way — but the book’s portrait of him professionally is of a constant scrapper: A working man struggling through long, painful dry stretches. All along, his sons’ view of him as a loving, pragmatic guide stays steady.
“We could have failed spectacularly. Arguably, should have,” he adds. “I began to recognize the great fortune but also a handful of turning points where things could have gone in a very different direction for me. With help from my parents and great fortune and some of my own personal tenacity, it sort of added up to a better outcome than I could have dreamed.”