Ron Howard Says His ‘Super Modest Wedding’ Amid Happy Days Fame Cost Only $800

Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1975, Ron Howard put on a sky blue tux to marry his high school sweetheart, Cheryl Alley, whom he’d first met in Mrs. McBride’s English class.

As famous as he was at 21 years old, the Happy Days star and the bride kept it low key.

“It was a small, very modest wedding in Burbank, California,” Howard, 71, tells PEOPLE for this week’s cover story. “And it was important to Cheryl’s dad that he pay for it, so therefore it was important to Cheryl to not let it get out of hand.” 

“We sent out invitations to 300 people and Cheryl kept saying, ‘That’s huge.’ My mom kept saying, ‘They won’t all show up,’ ” recalls Howard. “And that church was chock-a-block full. It was everybody from The Andy Griffith Show, everybody from Happy Days and so many other friends, Cheryl’s friends as well.” 

“It was a great day,” he says. “My mom and dad had a small kind of champagne punch reception back at their house. The whole thing was super modest, but you know what? By God it worked.”

In Howard’s 2021 memoir about his early life, The Boys, co-written with his brother Clint, 66, he revealed the wedding cost just $800, “including the price of the dress.” As he wrote, “We had no reception, just a simple ceremony followed by cake and nonalcoholic punch in the church’s courtyard.”

As he waited for Cheryl to walk up the aisle, Howard tells PEOPLE, he felt “absolute certainty,” adding, “I think Cheryl might’ve had a little runaway-bride anxiety, and I don’t think we ever went quite that far. But I think she was more aware that she was kind of entering a world that she didn’t really know anything about, show business.”

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“We knew we loved each other,” he adds. “We just had that immediately. But I think for her, she recognized there was a responsibility that was going to be required of her. I felt none of that, and she didn’t talk about that at the time. Later we did.”

The couple had four kids — daughter Bryce Dallas, now 44, twins Paige and Jocelyn, 40, and son Reed, 38 — and they left Los Angeles for Connecticut to raise them outside of Hollywood,

This past June, the director, who has a new film, Eden (a 1930s survival thriller about a small European colony on a remote island in the Galapagos), and his wife celebrated their 50th anniversary by donating a “kissing bench,” to the Johnny Carson Park in Burbank, where, as smitten teens, they’d kissed and canoodled after school.

“I just knew I wanted to be with Cheryl, and that we’d be great together,” he says, looking back. “If you would’ve asked me then, will you celebrate your 50th wedding anniversary? I would’ve said, ‘Yeah, if we live that long, absolutely.’ I was just so sure.”