Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (15 page)

The piece made Andy sound like a disheveled madman. Andy's costar assured the reading public that he was not. “Some comedians are tight inside,” Don Knotts told the interviewer, “but Andy is warm. You can get close to him.”

When the camera wasn't rolling, Andy seemed intent on running his show like a big ole family picnic, with song and dance, food and drink, and much general merriment. Lee Greenway, the makeup man, kept a five-string banjo on hand. After lunch, Andy would grab his guitar and the two men would begin to play and sing. Don would join them sometimes, adding a warbly countertenor and occasionally breaking into a soft-shoe dance.

Lee was a man of the world and a champion skeet-shooter; he would become one of Andy's closest friends. He played a great straight man to Andy and Don backstage, “kind of like Ed McMahon,” Ron Howard recalled. “They'd start singing these hymns or these country tunes. And he'd get Andy singing, and doing these kooky harmonies, and he'd be laughing his head off.”

Apart from Andy, members of the cast and crew barely noticed Don when the cameras were off. He would retreat to a corner and sit with a polite smile, all but invisible—until Andy appeared and awakened his muse. “Don could make Andy laugh until he was crying,” Ron recalled. “He would do bits. He would do comedic sermons. He would tell stories about going to church when he was a kid. This kind of stuff would absolutely melt Andy. It would just slay him.”

Don was naturally shy. And he was frequently tired; he would exhaust himself with a high-energy performance at the start of the day, and toward the end of a ten- or twelve-hour shoot, he would begin to drag. “Barney ran around the whole day, talking his head off,” Don quipped later, “and Andy just sat there and grinned.”

Andy loved to horse around with Don, taking particular delight in any opportunity to disrupt his friend's repose and shatter his aura of quiet repose. (Don was quite the antithesis of Barney in this regard when he was not on camera.) Once, while Don was napping on a cot between scenes, Andy picked up a film canister and dropped it on the floor, awakening Don with a bug-eyed start that would have surely have drawn a laugh on-screen. Don would get Andy back by making lewd gestures during his close-ups. Few others on the set dared play practical jokes on Andy.

Andy began to spend ever-longer days at the Desilu lot. Always a smoker, Andy now put away four packs a day, along with the endless cups of coffee that he and Don would sip to stay sharp.

“I remember my dad coming home. Often he still had makeup on,” recalled Dixie Griffith, Andy's daughter. “My brother and I, we would eat dinner first, in the kitchen. And he and my mother would eat later in the dining room. He tended to go to bed pretty early. He was exhausted.” Dixie would see more of her father on weekends: “He would often be in the pool. We had this great lounge chair that floated, and it had these Styrofoam arms, and I remember him reading his scripts in the pool, and I'd be splashing around.”

Andy was a workaholic, and he loved being on his set, enjoying the daily celebration of jubilant creativity he had assembled around him. “All these characters were friends of mine, both on the screen and off the screen,” he recalled. “Everything was so grand.” At work, anyway. Andy admitted later that his marriage to Barbara was “going sour” by the time the
Griffith
project was under way.

In fourteen years with Andy, Barbara had watched her artistic currency steadily decline, from university diva to Manhattan socialite to bored Hollywood housewife. “Barbara's life changed from New York to LA,” recalled Robert Edwards King, her nephew. “New York was a very vibrant thespian community. When she got out to California and lived in the suburbs, that was a sedate lifestyle, and she wasn't very much involved. She probably did become less happy at that point.”

Andy and Barbara still knew how to go out and have fun. They spent many evenings with Don and Kay, sometimes as guests at the home of Pat and Marjorie Harrington. Everyone loved how Andy's radiant warmth drew forth flashes of droll wit from the normally reticent Don. Barbara, tall and stately, would charm the group with stories of her own. She confided one night that Sam, their son, had stumbled into the master bedroom while she and Andy were making love, drawn by his mother's moans and convinced his father was hurting his mother. She told the story not with shame but with pride, born of a happy love life.

Don, too, arrived home late many evenings. “He worked very long hours. Sometimes twelve hours,” recalled Karen Knotts, his daughter. “If he'd missed dinner, he would always come up to our room and say good-night to us.” One night, she said, “I just couldn't go to sleep, and he bought me a little radio, and I left it on all night, and it cured me of my sleeplessness.”

On weekends, Don would disappear into the bedroom with his script. “He would take each line and break it down maybe thirty ways,” recalled Karen, who would sit and listen outside the door as her father searched for just the right inflection. When he was satisfied with his delivery, he would repeat the line still more times, until he felt he was locked in. Then, he would put the line together with the others. “It was like a concert pianist learning a new piece,” Karen recalled. Only then would Don emerge from the bedroom, hand the script to Kay, and ask her to rehearse it with him.

Kay, unlike Barbara, was reasonably content in the role of Hollywood housewife. But Don's marriage, like Andy's, had become strained.

Don had entered therapy toward the end of the 1950s, shortly before the move to California, to deal with his insomnia, his phantom illnesses, and the crippling anxiety that would put him in bed for days before a performance. The therapists had dispensed pills, and by 1960, Don was hopelessly addicted. Ensconced in Hollywood, Don sought out Dick Renneker, a prominent Hollywood psychiatrist. Dick began seeing Don and quickly surmised that religion lay at the root of his maladies. Even as he entered middle age, Don was still haunted by the old childhood fears that he was going to hell—because he had never been possessed by the holy spirit, had never writhed on the revival-tent floor, had never spoken in ancient tongues. Dick asked Don, “Well, do you believe in God or not?”

Don replied, “No, I don't.”

“Well, then, say, ‘F—- you, God.' ” Raising his voice, Dick pointed toward the ceiling. “Look up there and say, ‘F—- you, God.' ”

Don raised his eyes skyward and vented three decades of fear.

Dick persuaded Don to go off sleeping pills, cold turkey. For four consecutive nights, Don found no sleep. On the fifth night, he went outside and took a long swim in the backyard pool. Then he came back inside, crashed into bed, and slept. The addiction was broken.

Without Dick's help, “I'm convinced my dad wouldn't have made it,” Tom Knotts said. “He would've committed suicide or something, he was so screwed up.”

Dick helped Don pull his life together. So did Andy, whose friendship and constant companionship in those
Griffith
years lifted both men's spirits.

Kay started her own sessions with Dick Renneker. While both partners made swift progress, the therapy seemed to push them in different spiritual directions. After more than a decade of marriage, Don and Kay were growing apart. “We had a very, very close relationship,” Kay recalled. “And then it was just changing.”

Don had always been faithful to Kay. But shortly after the family's arrival in California, he began dating other women—with sufficient indiscretion that he acquired a reputation among his Hollywood peers. “It was sort of an industry joke that Don had become the big lothario,” recalled Sherwin Bash, his manager. Ladies loved him. Once, while Don dined at the Villa Capri on Yucca Street in Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe sidled up and cooed, “Ooh, you're so cute.”

Don told Kay of the affairs. “He wanted me to understand it, but I didn't,” she recalled. Back home, Don tried to spice things up with sexy lingerie and such, with steadily dwindling returns.

Andy and Don sometimes squired Betty Lynn, Barney's girlfriend on the
Griffith Show
, to lunch at a hamburger shop across from the studio. One day, on the way back, Betty turned serious. “Listen to me,” she told them. “You're married to your first wives, who have probably gone through a lot with the two of you. Now that you've gotten to be big stars, you're going to have women all over you. But you'd better watch out. Those women who have stood by you, you should value that. You'd better watch your step.” The men laughed at her. “They thought I was so funny,” she recalled. “I was being sincere.”

On this topic, Betty had expertise born of Hollywood experience. A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Betty worked her way from radio to Broadway to a contract at Twentieth Century–Fox, where she compiled a lengthy film résumé along with various television guest spots. One day in 1960, she got a phone call from the
Griffith Show
. “I had seen the show only twice, but I laughed so hard,” Betty recalled. She went to the Desilu studio and read for producer Aaron Ruben and director Bob Sweeney. Though Betty never signed a contract, she would appear in twenty-six
Griffith
episodes.

When Betty worked, Andy and Don “would kind of incorporate me into their lives for that day,” she recalled. It didn't hurt that Betty, a natural, freckle-faced redhead, was the only available young woman among the regular cast outside of Elinor Donahue, and Ellie didn't fraternize much with Andy or Don.

Betty debuted in “Cyrano Andy,” the twenty-second episode and the first of many to put Andy and Barney on a double date. The story opens with Andy and Barney sitting on adjoining couches. Andy is paired with poor Ellie, still gamely playing out the sad charade of on-screen romance; when Andy reaches over for Ellie's hand, she leaps like a frightened cat. Ironically, the script calls for precisely this sort of tension between the other couple in the room, fretful Barney and his new girlfriend. As Barney drops Thelma Lou at her door, she pauses for a good-night kiss. Instead, Barney blurts out, “Next time I'll tell you all about the assembly and the oiling of a .38 caliber revolver,” before scurrying off.

The episode ends with one of the funnier sequences of the first season. Barney and Thelma Lou are seated on the couch, finally about to close in for their kiss, when Andy bursts in, asking, “Hey, Barney, ya want some pie?” “Pie's fine,” Barney says, dismissing Andy. Barney leans in for his kiss, and again Andy appears at the curtain, asking, “Ya want some cheese on your pie?” “Cheese is fine,” Barney barks. Andy leaves. Barney and Thelma Lou close in to kiss—and Andy bursts in again: “Ya want cream and sugar in your coffee?”

“Yeah! Yeah!” Barney explodes. “Cream an' sugar an' pie an' cheese an' I'll get it myself!” As he storms off the set, Andy and Betty are fit to burst from suppressed laughter.

“Barney was such a sweet but pitiful little character, in a way,” Betty recalled. “I can still see him suddenly turn and look at me with those big blue eyes. I don't know how I kept a straight face. But I did. I had to.”

In time, Betty would find she had real-life feelings—not for Barney, but for his television boss. “I had a crush on him,” she recalled. “But he was married, and [Barbara] was a lovely lady.” Betty once told Andy, “I wish you were twins, because that way there would be one for Barbara, and one for me.” Andy, for his part, liked to flirt with his single costar. “After Elinor left and he had no other girl to relate to, he'd sit and visit with me sometimes, hold my hand,” Betty recalled. “He was a tease. Sometimes it would make me a little angry. Other times it wouldn't.” In one well-traveled publicity shot, Betty sits with Andy, smoking a cigarette, her hand resting on his knee. Publicists airbrushed out the cigarette, but not the hand.

Years later, Betty presented Andy a portrait of himself and asked him to sign it. He returned it with the inscription “You were Don's girl, but you should've been mine.” Betty never displayed the photo, she said, “because I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings.”

Don, too, seemed to have a soft spot for Betty: “He had poetry he'd written that he would read to me,” she recalled. But neither relationship passed beyond friendship. Betty would remain friends with Andy and Don till the end.

Andy's on-screen romance with Ellie the druggist would prove less enduring. At the end of the first season, Elinor Donahue left Mayberry. She asked out of her three-year
Griffith
contract, acting before the producers could fire her. No one fought to keep her, and that hurt.

Whatever Ellie's faults, the
Griffith
producers had not expected to lose her. Plans were already afoot to release a record of Earle Hagen's music from the show for the second season. One track was titled “Ellie's Theme.” Earle sent the recording to Ellie. “I got tears in my eyes when I heard it,” she recalled.

A few years later, Elinor spotted Andy at a Christmas party. They hadn't spoken since her departure. “He must hate me,” Elinor said to Dick Linke, Andy's manager, who was standing nearby. “Don't be silly,” Dick said. But Andy had indeed taken Ellie's departure personally.

“I walked up to [Andy] and I tapped him lightly on the arm, and I didn't know what to expect,” Elinor recalled. “I said, ‘Mr. Griffith? I want to tell you how sorry I am if I upset you for having left the show.' He said, ‘No, no, don't give it another thought. We didn't know how to write for you. That's all it was.' And he gave me a look that told me I was dismissed.”

On May 16, 1961, six days before the final broadcast of the season,
The Andy Griffith Show
won its first Emmy. The award went to Don, for best performance in a supporting role. The show itself was nominated in the comedy category, but lost to
The Jack Benny Show
. It was hard for either Andy or Don to argue with that; Jack was their idol. In his acceptance speech, Don memorably told the crowd, “I don't know what to say. I've always been a prepared loser.”