Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (10 page)

Andy and Barbara used the $5,000 advance to repay their debts. They took an apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. Dick and Andy started work together on January 4. As they crisscrossed Manhattan, Dick noticed Andy had a charming Southern habit of saying “I 'preciate it” at every chance. After he'd heard it twenty times or so, he told Andy, “Hey, do me a favor. Say that all the time. When you autograph pictures, write, ‘I 'preciate it.' And someday, that'll be a household word.”

Dick smothered Andy with attention. “Dick told me where to live, where to buy food,” Andy recalled later. “He didn't suggest; he
told
me. He led me to agents; he personally took me to auditions.” For most of a decade, Andy had depended on Barbara for counsel. Now, Dick delivered an ultimatum: “Either I'm going to have to make the decisions, or Barbara is.” Andy considered and made his choice, telling his wife, “Well, Barbara, I won't be asking you any more what you think.” Barbara graciously yielded to Dick, and the Griffiths and Linkes became dear friends. Yet, the power shift marked a turning point in both relationships.

Dick got Andy a meeting with Abe Lastfogel, head of the William Morris Agency. Lastfogel was one of the most powerful men in show business. But when Andy walked into the office, he recognized neither the name nor the smallish man who owned it. Lastfogel was there with his wife, Frances, and Danny Kaye, whose presence gave Andy a hint of the man's gravitas. “They put on my record,” Andy recalled, “and I don't remember anybody laughing at all. But when it was over, Frances leaned over to Abe and said, ‘Sign him.' ”

The agency booked Andy onto Ed Sullivan's
Toast of the Town
. The Capitol Records reissue of the football sketch was on its way to selling a million copies, making it one of the bestselling comedy records in history. Ed Sullivan was so taken with Andy that he wanted to book him for eighteen appearances. But Andy was untested on the national stage, and Abe Lastfogel would give Sullivan only four nights. Abe's instinct would prove prescient.

“Deacon” Andy Griffith debuted on
Toast of the Town
on January 10, along with singer Dolores Gray, the Copacabana Dancers, and an act called Joyce's Camels. Andy followed the camels. He performed the skits on both sides of the “Football” single. And he bombed, as anyone in the viewing audience could tell.

Andy could not recall his performance afterward, except that no one had laughed. To add insult to injury, Ed Sullivan scolded the comic after the broadcast for the adult theme of the “Romeo and Juliet” sketch, telling him, “Andy, don't ever work blue.” Andy's
Toast of the Town
run would end after a single night.

Nonetheless, the spot earned Andy his first national press, short items in the January 18 issues of
Time
and
Newsweek.
The latter publication pronounced him on “the verge of a big-time career.”

Undeterred, Lastfogel booked Andy at the Blue Angel, the same Fifty-Fifth Street club where Don would audition his Nervous Man routine. On the first night, the agency packed the room with celebrities and friends, including Henry Fonda and James Garner. Andy drew big laughs. But after the show, Abe Lastfogel came up and told him, “Now, I want you to go anywhere you can and learn how to entertain.” Andy was mystified—until the next night. “And the next night,” Andy recalled, “I was by myself, and I died.”

Andy did two shows a night for nearly a month, and he never recovered his mojo. After the club had emptied, Andy would walk the streets of New York, trying to figure out how his act could have gone so quickly south after the trip North. Like Don before him, Andy was learning that success back home in no way guaranteed success in New York. Both men had come to the city and bombed: their hayseed humor died in Manhattan clubs.

“He needed a lot of work,” Dick Linke recalled. “With Andy's kind of comedy, you couldn't put him in New York, you couldn't put him in big cities. A Jewish comic, you put him in the Catskills, but with Andy, we had to talk about putting him down around the South and Southwest.”

Andy spent the next fifteen months on the road, in his car, working the Southern nightclub circuit. He would polish his delivery and timing with a growing repertoire of monologues that played off Northern stereotypes of Southern rubes.

He went to Miami and did a stint as resident comic for Eddy Arnold, the country singer, at the Olympia Theater. “And I scored, and I got my security back,” Andy recalled. “I got my self-confidence back. Same material. Same stuff.”

Andy went on to a two-week stand at a hotel in Atlanta, and he scored again. He worked as far west as Denver, and he ranged north from Florida to the Carolinas, earning as much as $1,500 a week. In September 1954, he returned to the University of North Carolina to perform his football sketch at halftime in an actual college football game.

Lawrence Laurent, entertainment writer for
The Washington Post
, later recounted seeing Andy at one of those early shows. Andy was playing the Mosque, a cavernous auditorium in Richmond, Virginia, on a bill of “hillbilly” performers that included country singer Jimmy Dean. “Deacon Andy” took the stage and performed the vaudeville tune “A Good Man is Hard to Find” with his fervent, Southern-revivalist delivery. “The effect on the audience was electric, more compelling than anything I had ever seen,” Laurent wrote. “The crowd shouted with Griffith, responded to his every gesture and lapsed into a strange, almost reverent silence” when he was finished.

Andy began to upstage more famous acts. One night, after Andy opened for Mae West, Mae's manager approached him and told him to do a different act in the second show. Andy dug out an old folk song called “In the Pines” and revived his preacher character, sermonizing and stomping his foot. It was, if anything, funnier than what Andy had done in the first show. Mae loved it. Andy was promptly fired.

During the long, lonely hours on the road, Andy sometimes tuned in to the Mutual radio network to catch an afternoon broadcast of
Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders.
His favorite character was “an old man who told tall tales, named Windy Wales.”

Several months into Andy's nightclub tour, an old friend from the North Carolina theater sent him a copy of the bestseller
No Time for Sergeants
. On an airplane to Denver, Andy found time to read it. The book began, “The thing was, we had gone fishing that day and Pa had wore himself out with it the way he usually did when he went fishing. I mean he went at it pretty hard and called the fish all sorts of names. . . .”

Andy was intrigued. Will Stockdale's satirical observations of military rigmarole reminded Andy of his own monologues. When he returned to New York, Andy went straight to Abe Lastfogel's office at William Morris. He told him, “If there's ever anything that I can play, this is it.” Andy sent a copy of the book to Dick and conveyed the same message.

No Time for Sergeants
was a hot property, and the rights had already been sold. But Andy would not give up. This was the role he'd been born to play.

Andy telephoned the author, Mac Hyman. Mac coughed up the name of his literary agent. Andy found the agent and stormed into his office. The agent tried to let Andy down easy: “Andy, you have to know that this is a number one bestseller and it's been on the bestseller list ten, fifteen weeks. It's gonna be a play and a movie and a television show.”

The meeting gave Andy the edge he needed. No one in New York seemed to know about the television production, which was being staged by the storied Theatre Guild for broadcast March 15, 1955, on
The United States Steel Hour
. There was still time for Andy to read for Will Stockdale. Andy was the first actor to arrive at the audition.

Alas, Andy had spent the previous year honing his stand-up comedy skills, to the detriment of his acting. His audition fell flat. “I didn't read well because I didn't know how to read,” he recalled. Andy pleaded with the producers: “I'm a talker, not a reader.” They were unmoved. Andy retreated to the waiting room, his mind racing: How could he salvage the role of his life?

For want of another plan, Andy struck up a conversation with a random woman in the waiting room, hoping to draw attention to himself. She took the bait, asking Andy, “What do you do?”

“I work nightclubs.”

“You sing?”

“No, I talk.”

“What do you talk about?”

“Oh, Shakespeare,
Hamlet
,
Romeo and Juliet
, opera, ballet.”

“
Hamlet?
Do you read it?”

“No, I tell it.”

“Well, how does it start?”

Andy took the cue: “I went to see a play right here lately. It was one of those classical plays. It was wrote by a fella named William Shakespeare, who lived in the old country a while back. It's called
Hamlet
. And it was named after this young boy Hamlet that appeared in the play, and it was pretty good, except they don't speak as good English as we do. . . .”

One by one, actors, executives, and secretaries filed into the room to hear Andy's monologue. “It sounds like a bad B movie, but it happened,” Andy recalled. “As I went along, each of them would go out and get somebody else.”

The random woman was Armina Marshall, a director of both the Theatre Guild and the
Steel Hour
. When Andy had finished, she took him by the hand and led him to Alex Segal, the director. She told him, “I have Will Stockdale.”

The
United States Steel Hour
broadcast was nothing more than a televised play, filmed on a stage with theatrical sets before a live audience. When it commenced, Andy was terrified, just like on Ed Sullivan's stage and at the Blue Angel. But when Andy began to speak, the audience responded, first with smiles, then with chuckles, then with laughter. Andy fed on the reaction. His terror fell away and his frozen body thawed.

The teleplay opens with Andy seated alone on a chair. “Howdy, I'm Will Stockdale,” he says, his intense gaze and broad smile warming the camera. “I'm fixin' to tell you some of the things that happened to me in the draft.” He produces a Jew's harp and commences to play, then to sing: “Whoa, mule, you kicking mule / Whoa, mule, I say / Well, I ain't got time to kiss you now / My mule's run away. . . .”

The viewing audience that night included Maurice Evans, who was to direct the play on Broadway. Maurice had found his Will Stockdale.

That September, inside the Alvin Theatre, Andy and Don sat down at a table together for the first time for the inaugural script read-through. They had yet to meet. Don was “as nervous as a cat,” he recalled, “but I couldn't get over how good Andy Griffith was. . . . When we finished, I was certain of two things: this play was going to be a hit, and a lot of people were going to know who Andy Griffith was.”

On the first day of rehearsals, Andy stood in the wings and watched as “this thin little man came out.” It was Don. “He was a young fella then, but he put on an old voice and introduced Will Stockdale.” Andy couldn't place the man, but he recognized the voice.

On the second day of rehearsals, Don wandered out the stage door and found Andy sitting on a fire hydrant. Andy was whittling. Don didn't think he had ever seen an actor whittle.

“Excuse me,” Andy said. “Are you Windy Wales?”

4.

Nervous Men

I
T WAS
a miracle Andy and Don met at all.

Both men had wound up among the rejects in the waiting rooms of their respective
No Time for Sergeants
auditions. And at the decisive moment, each had refused to concede defeat. Their improbable comebacks were a testament to their ambitions.

Yes, Don confessed, he was Windy Wales. He was frankly stunned that Andy—or anyone else past adolescence—had even heard of Windy Wales.

“Sheee-it, yes!” Andy cried, breaking into a broad grin. “I knew I recognized that voice!”

They talked for a few minutes. Andy explained that he had listened to
Bobby Benson
on the radio to pass the long hours on the road between shows. Each man was surprised to learn the other actually hailed from the South. Though
Sergeants
was a quintessentially Southern production, most of the cast and crew seemed to come either from New York or Great Britain. There weren't many Southerners on Broadway. Finding a kindred spirit gave each man a measure of comfort.

“Both of us were inherently shy people, but now the ice was broken,” Don recalled. “. . . Our friendship had begun.”

Backstage, Andy and Don spent their spare moments playing mumblety-peg, a school-yard game from the Mark Twain era that involves throwing a pocketknife at one's foot. This shared heritage bolstered their friendship immeasurably.

The producers could cut anyone from the
No Time
cast at will during the first week. Naturally, Don worried himself sick, contracting one of the worst colds of his life. When the week was over, Don shifted his angst to the director. He expected to learn a lot from the great Morton DaCosta, who would go on to direct
Auntie Mame
and
The Music Man
. But DaCosta rarely spoke aloud. After two weeks, he had not said a single word to Don.

Finally, Don approached him. “Mr. DaCosta?”

The director “whirled around and looked at me as if he had never seen me before in his life,” Don recalled. “Yes,” Morton croaked.

“Well, I . . . er . . . uh . . . er . . . Am I doing it all right?”

“Yes.”

It was the only conversation they ever had.

The schedule for
Sergeants
called for three weeks of rehearsals and three weeks of out-of-town “tryouts” in New Haven and Boston. In addition to a preacher role, Don was cast as a corporal who tests Will's manual dexterity with a steel-ring puzzle. This would prove a far more consequential casting.

Ira Levin's script calls for an “officious little Corporal.” Don played the part with palpable tension, rapping his fingers on his arm as Private Stockdale walks in.

The corporal silently motions Will to sit. “What we do here, Private, is to evaluate your manual dexterity on a time scale in relation to digital-visual coordination,” the corporal announces, sounding like a highly caffeinated carnival barker. He holds up the steel rings. “Two irregular steel links, which can be interconnected . . . thusly.” He smoothly joins them. “I separate them . . . I join them.” He sets a stopwatch as the sergeant cautions Will, “Whatever you do, don't get nervous.”

As the corporal and sergeant converse behind him, Will wrenches open one link with inhuman strength, threads it through the other, and then twists it into a knot. “I'm done,” he announces.

“Done?!” the corporal cries. “In fourteen seconds? He . . . look what he . . . look!” the corporal says, gazing at the twisted steel.

“He put them together, didn't he?” the sergeant barks.

The corporal is defeated and deflated. He seems ready to cry.

The skit was short, but Andy and Don played so well off each other that their little scene seemed to burn a bit brighter than the rest of the production. “It's there or it's not there,” Andy would remark decades later. “And it was there with us.”

Don quickly learned that Andy's perfectionist zeal matched his own. The New Haven audience was laughing nonstop that first week, but one night, the show didn't play so well. Don ran into Andy after the curtain fell. Andy began to pick apart the performance. Don surely felt the same impulse, but he tried to soothe his new friend with false levity, telling Andy, “You can't win 'em all.”

Andy, ferocity flaring in his eyes, spat back, “You can damn well try!”

October 20, 1955, was opening night at the Alvin Theatre in New York. It fell to Don to walk onstage and introduce Andy. As Don stood in the wings, he feared he might faint and felt certain he could not move. He finally summoned the strength to stagger out and deliver his lines, although he could not recall having done so when the performance was over. Then Don retreated offstage and glimpsed Andy, who was hobbling forward in a state that made Don look positively relaxed. “I've never seen a man so frightened,” recalled Roddy McDowall, Andy's costar.

Then, Andy began to speak. “And a couple of people giggled,” McDowall recalled, “and then they began to applaud. Watching from the wings, you could see old Andy's confidence coming back.”

McDowall had heard about Andy's magic. That night, he saw it: Andy could perform a powerful scene with another character and then turn around, break the fourth wall, and engage with the audience in the seats. “He played Stockdale—right to the people,” McDowall recalled. “And they loved it. He'd spot a lady in the second row all doubled up with laughter, and he'd laugh right with her.”

At intermission, Andy's manager, Dick Linke, raced out into the lobby to gauge the reaction of the newspapermen. “Everyone was there,” he recalled. “Ed Sullivan; Earl Wilson. And they said, ‘Dick, you've got a star on your hands.' ” When Andy had taken his last curtain call, the cast repaired to Sardi's, the Forty-Fourth Street restaurant where actors gathered to await the reviews. Andy knew nothing of this tradition and had made other plans, but he was easily persuaded to come along. He walked in to a standing ovation.

The critics were pleased. “A thespian nobody stepped into full stardom,”
Newsweek
pronounced.
The New York Times
noted Andy's potent chemistry: “All he has to do is walk on the stage and look the audience straight in the face. If the armed forces cannot cope with Will Stockdale, neither can the audience resist Andy Griffith.”
No Time for Sergeants
would play for 796 performances.

Andy and Don quickly grew close. Don admired Andy's abundant talent, and Andy came to adore Don's sweet vulnerability. Both men were bumpkins who had come to New York and had found ways to sell their Southernness to a national audience.

“We had similar backgrounds,” Don recalled. “When we talked about our relatives, they all seemed to be the same. Our sense of humor clicked.”

Andy and Barbara would drive out to visit Don and Kay at their home in suburban Dumont, New Jersey, or Don and Kay would drive in and pick up the Griffiths at their apartment in Queens. It was the martini era, and the two young couples made the rounds of giddy Manhattan cocktail parties. At one such gathering, the host served potent drinks. Diminutive Kay soon found herself lying woozy on a couch. She looked over to another couch, and there lay big Andy, just as sick as she.

When they were together, Andy and Don would sit and talk for hours, dishing dirt on their costars and their fellow Broadway travelers.

“They talked about everybody they knew,” Kay Knotts recalled. “They just loved to talk about people. I always thought, women get accused of being gossips, but no one could beat these two. . . . Men very rarely are as intimate as they were together.”

Andy and Don traded stories of the Old South, of dusty towns filled with old men whittling outside country stores, of lonely widows pickling cucumbers for the state fair, of lazy evenings spent strumming guitars and singing hymns on the front porch. Andy told Don of the bourgeois scorn that had shaped his childhood. Don told Andy of the household demons that had shaped his.

“One thing we've talked about a lot is the way a comedian is born,” Andy recalled. “Don says a comedian is born out of either unhappiness or embarrassment, and at some time in life, perhaps when you're about three or five years old, you start to learn to protect yourself. When you're laughed at, you turn it to your advantage.”

Andy and Don came to trust each other for counsel, perhaps even above their wives, and certainly above their managers. Those men were Northerners. Andy and Don would consult each other before making big decisions.

Alas, the spouses didn't hit it off quite so well. Kay Knotts was a minister's daughter, raised with enough domestic savvy to be a good wife and mother. Barbara Griffith was the daughter of a schools superintendent, reared around hired help, a Southern aristocrat who thought dirty dishes and discarded socks were carried off by elves. Whereas Kay was first and foremost Don's wife, Barbara saw herself as a fellow entertainer; on the North Carolina stage where she and Andy had met, Barbara was the star. Don's success put food on Kay's table. Andy's success drove a wedge between him and Barbara, who watched her own career drift away. The final straw came when a television producer approached Barbara and offered her a bit part on a show if she would persuade her husband to take the lead. That day, she vowed to leave show business.

Back in college, “she was the big girl on campus, and he was just a hayseed,” Kay Knotts recalled. “When he became famous and was picked up on Broadway, I think she felt left out, and that bothered her a lot. And she had problems with domestic things. . . . She would never drive on the freeway. Margaret Linke”—Dick's wife—“had to take her around and about. I had her fill in for a bridge game I had once, and she was very uncomfortable there.”

Once, at a dinner party, Don and Kay watched in horror as Barbara lurched up from her seat, dead drunk, and launched into a seductive dance, a bit like Brigitte Bardot in the film
And God Created Women
. “It was very embarrassing,” Kay recalled. “Barbara, she had problems, lots of problems. She drank too much. It was another codependency relationship, I think. I think Andy was very consistent, but Barbara wasn't.”

No Time for Sergeants
made Andy a celebrity. A group from Mount Airy traveled to New York for the premiere. They were Andy's old classmates, kids “from prominent families” who “thought they were a bit better than he” and had ignored Andy until he made it big, a former classmate recalled. Now, they asked to go backstage for autographs. Andy turned them away. This wasn't Andy being a prima donna: it was a grudge, one that would endure for five more decades.

No crowds gathered for Don Knotts. He remained, for the time, a talented bit player.

“I had finally gotten my salary up to one hundred and ten dollars a week,” Don recalled, “but that still wouldn't quite pay the bills, so I had to hustle for TV work on the side.” It wasn't just about money: Don wanted to stay active in television because the TV medium was growing and
Sergeants
would not last forever. “I was on the backstage pay phone quite a lot,” Don recalled. “Some of the actors would tease me. ‘Hey, why the hustle?' they would say. ‘Relax. You're in a hit.' But looking ahead had already become my modus operandi. It's the only way to survive in show business.”

Don's performance did not go entirely unnoticed. Other
No Time
actors immediately noted the electricity he stirred onstage, both alone and with Andy. “I didn't feel he was a small part at all,” recalled Earle Hyman, perhaps the only original
Sergeants
cast member still living. “He would pop his eyes, as we say down home, and the audience would just holler. They loved him.”

As the play concluded its first season, Andy got word that he was being considered for the lead role in the next picture from Elia Kazan, one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. Kazan had made
On the Waterfront
with Marlon Brando. Now, he and his collaborator, writer Budd Schulberg, wanted to take on the rising power of television. Schulberg's script for
A Face in the Crowd
chronicles the rise and fall of a hillbilly singer who transforms into a powerful television personality under the sway of a young female producer, a Sarah Lawrence intellectual who becomes smitten with his brutish charm and plucks him from obscurity. She creates a monster, and “Lonesome” Rhodes rampages through the second half of the picture like Godzilla through Tokyo. Lonesome Rhodes was a composite of several men who had wielded outsize influence on popular culture in Andy's lifetime: Will Rogers, the cowboy philosopher who shaped national politics in the 1920s and 1930s; Arthur Godfrey, the folksy but mercurial variety-show host; and Elvis Presley, the Mississippi crooner who unleashed sexual frenzy in teenaged girls.

R. G. Armstrong, Andy Griffith's friend and fellow North Carolina thespian, recommended Andy to Kazan. The director went to three showings of
No Time for Sergeants
, liked what he saw, and short-listed Andy for the part. But a series of meetings left Budd Schulberg unconvinced. “Griffith could give us the hillbilly stuff all right,” Schulberg recalled, “but what about the power madness that dominates the whole second half of the picture?”

Andy scarcely needed the work. He was gainfully employed on Broadway. But he thirsted to play Lonesome Rhodes. He persuaded Kazan to hold one last meeting at Gallaghers Steakhouse on West Fifty-Second Street. Andy had gone to the earlier meetings as Will Stockdale. He arrived at this one as Lonesome Rhodes. “I knew I had to do something outrageous or I wouldn't get the part,” Andy recalled, “because everybody in town was out for it.”

Kazan and Schulberg wanted Andy to prove he could play a monster. Andy thought he could. He asked Kazan, “Have you ever heard of Oral Roberts?” Andy took Kazan aside and told him of the Oklahoma faith healer—how Roberts would line up the faithful at a table, seize their heads in his hands, and say,
“Heal.”
Then Andy grabbed Kazan by the ears, squeezing the head of the great director between his palms. Fever washed over Andy's face as he gazed in Kazan's eyes and cried,
“Heal!”