Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (11 page)

Kazan was rattled, but convinced. Andy had the part. Kazan loved Andy's intense natural charm and hoped to exploit it by building Lonesome Rhodes into a poignant, disarming brand of villain.

In August 1956, Andy left the cast of
Sergeants
to begin filming
A Face in the Crowd
in Piggott, Arkansas, a dusty town in cotton country. Kazan drafted its entire population into service as extras.

Andy had never acted on the big screen. As Kazan readied the first shot that required real acting from his star, he pulled Andy aside and told him, “The camera is an amazing piece of equipment. It sees everything. All you have to do as an actor is find what the character's feeling and what he's thinking, and if you feel it and think it hard enough, it will come out in your eyes and you won't have to show the camera anything.”

The first shot called for Patricia Neal's character, Marcia Jeffries, to encounter Lonesome Rhodes on a dirt road and lure him back to her uncle's radio station. Kazan coached Andy: “Now, Patricia Neal there wants you to go to work at that radio station. You don't want to go work at the radio station. But look at Patsy Neal. Can't you think of something you'd like to do with her?” They got the shot in a single take.

“And then he and I started a connection,” Andy recalled. “Every morning he'd call me into his office and tell me everything he expected to see that day in terms of color, moods, mood swings. . . . Then he'd say, ‘Go figure out how to do that.' He is a great teacher, but he preferred to let you figure it out. And I did. It was hard, hard work. It took three months to shoot it, two months to get over it.”

The production returned to New York in late August and set up at a studio in the Bronx. Kazan wanted to unleash in Andy all the anger, self-pity, and violence Kazan envisioned in Lonesome Rhodes. The director began asking Andy about his childhood, prodding for gaps in his emotional armor: “Remember all those people who said you'd never do anything but teach?”

“That doesn't bother me,” Andy replied. “I'll tell you some things that do.”

Andy told Kazan that when he was in the fourth grade and chasing a girl at school, she wanted Andy to leave her alone. Finally, she dispatched him with the command “Get away from me, white trash.” That term, Andy explained, “means rejection to me.” Thereafter, when Kazan wanted to summon his actor's wrath, he would walk up and whisper, “White trash,” in his ear.

On many days, Andy took Lonesome Rhodes home with him. “He became the part,” Patricia Neal recalled. “He wanted to be that character, and it began to be him.” Andy unleashed many torments on Barbara in the big, empty East Side apartment they had rented since that spring with his
Sergeants
earnings. In one outburst, he splintered three doors. “I did a lot of things to Barbara,” he recalled. “The thing was, I actually felt the power of Lonesome Rhodes. I'll tell you the truth. You play an egomaniac and paranoid all day and it's hard to turn it off by bedtime.”

A Face in the Crowd
was Andy's greatest single performance. Yet, much as he wished to, Andy would never again work with Kazan.

Toward the end of 1956, Don made a fateful decision. He exhumed the old Nervous Man character from two years earlier and tried it out on the cast of
No Time for Sergeants
. He still hoped the Nervous Man might be his masterpiece—a parody of the Eisenhower-era masculine ideal, and a perfect match to his delicate, vulnerable frame. The Nervous Man wore his emotions on his sleeve, just as Don did.

The Blue Angel manager had hated Don's sketch. The
Sergeants
cast loved it. “This was more like it!” Don recalled.

There is another version of the story. Andy claimed it was he, not his
Sergeants
cast mates, who rekindled Don's passion for the Nervous Man sketch. He said Don performed the skit for him several months earlier, while Andy was still in the Broadway cast.

“He came up to my dressing room one night and did a bit for me,” Andy recalled. “It was a man who had never made a speech before. . . . And he took this little piece of paper and it was shaking like that.” Andy demonstrated with a violent tremor.

“Is it funny?” Don asked when he was done.

“Lord, Don, that's brilliant.” Once Andy had stopped laughing, he begged his friend to take the sketch to
Tonight.

Tonight
was NBC's edgy and audacious foray into late-night television. Host Steve Allen had essentially invented the genre, introducing such conventions as the opening monologue, the celebrity interview, and the house band. Allen could be irreverent, even mischievous, much like the early David Letterman, who channeled Allen's spirit three decades later.

Andy Griffith had a warm regard for Steve Allen. After the Ed Sullivan debacle, Allen had almost single-handedly restored Andy's confidence in appearing on live television. Allen thought Andy had died on
Toast of the Town
because the studio design had put Andy a good twenty feet from the front row, too far away for him to work his magic with the audience. For Andy's first appearance with Allen, “they brought out two stools,” Andy recalled, “where Steve and I would sit. I would do these monologues to Steve, and Steve would get tickled and laugh out loud. The more he'd laugh, the more the audience would laugh.”

For Don's own
Tonight
debut, on November 8, 1956, he penned a sketch that presented his Nervous Man character as a last-minute replacement for a television weatherman. For his second outing, Don became a Nervous Conventioneer.

Allen was hooked. These were “monologues of [Don's] own creation,” he recalled, “that I at once recognized as classics in the Benchley tradition,” which indeed they were. After Don's third appearance, Don was told he'd be written into Allen's other television vehicle, a Sunday-night variety show that pitted the rising host against Ed Sullivan. In 1957, the network would pull Allen from
Tonight
to focus his full energy on the contest with Sullivan.

In January 1957, Andy flew to Hollywood to film the screen version of
No Time for Sergeants
. He brought Don west to spend a week with him and Barbara in their rented LA home and reprise Don's Broadway role. Don was one of a few from the play invited to join the film, at Andy's request. Don left for California three days after the birth of his second child, Tom. Don loved his family, but work came first. Kay understood.

One night that week in the temporary Griffith residence, Don awoke in the guest room to what sounded like a tinny recording of Andy and Barbara in bed. Don soon divined that someone had left the house intercom system on. All night, he heard Andy and Barbara tumble from one extreme of passion to another: fighting, screaming, crying, then falling into bed and making love—then fighting, screaming, and crying again.

That winter, Don began work on
The Steve Allen Show
as a fill-in for Tom Poston, a young comic who played a befuddled goof in a regular skit called “Man on the Street,” probably the best-remembered sketch from the Steve Allen era by dint of sheer repetition. Allen would walk up to Tom Poston and ask, “And what is your name, sir?” Tom would roll his eyes in cranial agony until Allen finally gave up. Then he would move on to Louis Nye, who played a
Mad Men
–style sophisticate. He launched a sort of catchphrase with the salutation “Hi-ho, Steverino!”

Don's Nervous Man completed the comedic triangle. For Don's first appearance on
The Steve Allen Show
, the writers inserted him into that week's “Man on the Street,” quaking with fear. When Allen asked, “Are you nervous?” Don replied, “Noop!” His bug-eyed exclamation brought down the house. It was, Don recalled, “the biggest laugh I'd heard in my life.”

They asked Don back week after week to perform new “Man on the Street” material. Don wrote some of it himself.

”My name is K. B. Morrison, and I used to work in a munitions factory.”

“What does the
K.B.
stand for?”

“ ‘Kaboom!' ”

“You say you
used
to work in a munitions factory. You don't work there anymore?”

“It isn't there anymore!”

Poston, Knotts, and Nye were becoming an item. The
New York Times
celebrated the trio in a fall 1957 article: “Their tomfoolery on the Sunday evening program has been drawing an impressive amount of mail from appreciative viewers. Much of it comes from college students.” Their edgy skits were attracting the same demographic that would flock to David Letterman in the 1980s and Jon Stewart in the 2000s.

In mid-1957, Steve Allen's producers persuaded Don to give up his small part in
No Time for Sergeants
; with eight shows a week, the theater work conflicted with Don's rehearsal schedule for
Steve Allen
. Don was characteristically reluctant to relinquish a paying gig.

As his star ascended, Don's aversion to live television escalated from discomfort to terror. His Broadway run was over, and the hour-long Sunday
Steve Allen
broadcast was very nearly Don's only concern. His life grew comparatively idle, and his neuroses expanded to fill every free moment. He couldn't sleep at night for fear he would bomb the next day.

Kay, his long-suffering wife, could only roll her eyes. “His habit would be to take to his bed for about three days if he had a show coming up,” Kay recalled. “If he had a show on Sunday, he would go to bed on Friday and stay there, resting up. And that would just drive me up the wall.”

Back in childhood, when Kay's family returned home from church, her minister father would grill her on the success or failure of that day's sermon. Now, Don was doing the same thing. “I had to make sure all of the people were out of my home by the time Don came home,” she recalled, “because I had to tell him how great he was, and everything had to be positive. And maybe a couple days later we could really discuss it.”

Steve Allen preferred to operate on the edge of chaos. He favored minimal rehearsals. No one was allowed to utter any joke's punch line until airtime. Don didn't like that. He became afflicted with stage fright so severe that he would go lie down somewhere before an impending performance, sometimes warning Allen that he might not return. But he always did.

Louis Nye and Tom Poston liked to improvise. “Not Don,” writer Herb Sargent recalled. “He would take old routines that he had perfected and build them into our show, polishing them, adapting them. He left nothing to chance.”

The most terrifying moment in Don's television career came on
Steve Allen
. One Sunday, Don had prepared a monologue on a political candidate speaking to his staffers. When the floor manager offered to put it on the teleprompter, Don declined. But in the middle of the monologue, Don froze. “My mind went totally blank,” he recalled. “I had no idea what my next line was. I looked around helplessly. The teleprompters were dark and still. I was all alone out there and there was no help to be gotten from anything or anyone.” Don began to frantically ad-lib, sputtering nonsense. That was precisely what the audience expected from
Steve Allen
, so no one batted an eye. Don finally remembered his lines, finished the speech, staggered offstage, and collapsed.

Though it was fretful work, television fame had its perks, and Don soon began to partake. One Sunday, for Don's birthday, Tom and Louis planted a prostitute in Don's dressing room during the live broadcast. When the three returned to the room after a sketch, they pushed Don inside and locked the door. Other cast and crew had gathered outside to watch the fireworks. Through the door, they began to hear Don's howls of protest: “Don't do that. I have to change. I'm on next. You're not helping.”

Don had a healthy libido and would surely have welcomed the visitor at any other time. Just now, though, he had to perform, and Don approached such appointments with religious zeal. When Tom and Louis finally opened the door, Don emerged, red-faced, to a round of “Happy Birthday.” He was furious. He couldn't believe his friends would spring a prank at such a time. He cursed them. Then he rushed to the stage and did his sketch. It went well, and everyone shook hands afterward. Don turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” Tom asked.

“I'm going upstairs and finish,” Don replied.

“Don, I'm so sorry. We sent the girl home.”

“That's all right. I'm going upstairs and finish anyway.”

Backstage at
Steve Allen
, Don struck up a friendship with a theatrical manager named Sherwin Bash. Though still in his twenties, Sherwin had connections: he was the son-in-law of Ray Bloch, musical director for both Jackie Gleason and Ed Sullivan. But Sherwin's success rested on more than that: he was one of the first managers to pounce on the rising stars of television.

“Most of the people I considered important in the entertainment business, they didn't like television,” Sherwin recalled. “In television, you worked twice as much and you got paid half as much.” Radio was easy: no makeup, no wardrobe, no lines to learn. Radio attracted stand-up comics. Sherwin gravitated toward comedic actors—men, such as Tom Poston, Louis Nye, and Don Knotts, who could play parts on television. Sherwin envisioned a career for Don in television and film, “and not one that would burn out.”

Sherwin visited Don and Kay one night at their home. “I remember him telling Don how much money he was going to make and how famous he was going to be,” Kay recalled. She didn't buy it, but Don signed up. It would be a five-decade relationship.

Sherwin already viewed Don as the shadow leader of Allen's trio of “bananas.” “Even though Don was supposed to be this introverted, quiet character, I realized that he was sort of the strength of the three of them,” Sherwin recalled. “Don had this remarkable ability. He could not only remember his own lines, he could remember Tom Poston's lines and Louis Nye's lines. He was like a pillar to them.”