How Bette Davis left Ron Howard humiliated on set: “Everybody laughed”
For years, Ron Howard was known solely as ‘that kid from Happy Days’. As Richie Cunningham, he played a vital role in one of the greatest sitcoms of all time.
There came a time, however, when he wished to cast off the shackles of the character and make his own mark in show business as a director.
From early success with Splash and Willow to winning ‘Best Director’ at the Oscars for his ‘flawed dramatisation of genius’ A Beautiful Mind, to more recent hits like Solo: A Star Wars Story and Thirteen Lives, Howard’s output and reputation have come a long way since those days in Arnold’s Drive-In.
One of his first directorial efforts was Skyward, a made-for-TV movie. It’s not much to write home about, besides the fact that it contains one of the final acting appearances from the great Bette Davis. The Golden Age icon plays an ageing flight instructor who parents up with a young disabled girl to teach her how to fly. Working with such a legend so early in his career must have felt like a dream come true for Howard, until he ran into the full force of the starlet’s wit.
“First day of shooting, I’m here in a jacket and a tie, it’s 100 degrees by 8 o’clock in the morning, and she’s in this mock-up, this little aerobatic plane, and I go walking up to her,” he told the Archive of American Television. “She turns around and she says, loud enough for the crew to hear, ‘Oh! I was so startled! It’s you! I saw this child walking toward me and I thought what in the world could this child have to say to me?’ And the crew laughed, and I laughed, and everybody laughed, and I popped a couple of Tums and went in and gave her the direction, and she was fine.”
Like many of the female actors of her time, Davis was absolutely formidable. Her feud with Faye Dunaway is the stuff of Hollywood legend, and she was far from the only one to feel her wrath. In an era where women were treated with next to no respect and when the industry was even more male-dominated than today, you had to be tough. This trait arguably developed even further as Davis got older and her status as a legend bolstered her ego. Here she was faced with a young, unproven director in an adorable little suit in the blistering heat. Poor kid didn’t stand a chance.
Luckily for the burgeoning director, he was able to win his leading lady’s respect in just a matter of hours. On the same day as the suit incident, Davis called him ‘Ron’ for the first time, which Howard felt marked a significant thawing in relations. She also made sure to pat him on the butt on her way out, which he decided to take as a compliment.
Working with legends is dicey, and Howard could have had it much worse with someone of Davis’ calibre, but he was able to ride the tide and hang up the whole suit debacle.
