Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (17 page)

Andy, Barney explains, “is more than just a sheriff. He's a friend. And the people in this town, they ain't got a better friend than Andy Taylor. . . . The only ruckus you'd ever have in Mayberry is if you tried to remove him from office. Then you'd have a riot.”

Andy sits, impassive, through the speech, which Barney delivers with surprising pathos—driven, no doubt, by their powerful real-life friendship.

In May 1962, a week after the end of season two of the
Griffith Show
, Don appeared—alone, this time—on the cover of
TV Guide
.

“As the undersized, undergutted Deputy Barney Fife on
The Griffith Show
, Knotts more often than not snatches scenes right out from under the star's nose,” Richard Gehman wrote. “With a word, usually blurted in a panicky way, or a gesture, usually awkward, he quietly pulls the audience's attention to himself.”

Curiously, the star of
The Andy Griffith Show
didn't seem to mind. “Ah've never been a straight man before in mah life, but Ah'm glad to be one with him,” Andy told the writer. “Man, he's so good.”

The writer likened Andy and Don to Damon and Pythias, the characters from Greek legend who symbolize loyalty and trust in friendship. When Pythias is sentenced to death, Damon offers himself as collateral while Pythias returns home to say farewell to his family. It wasn't a bad analogy: Andy had sacrificed himself, in a way, so that Don could thrive at the center of the
Griffith Show.

“Playing a scene, even one consisting largely of pantomime, they suddenly will stop, exchange meaningful glances, look at the director, Bob Sweeney, and shake their heads,” Gehman wrote. “ ‘We goofed,' they say. Then they go at it again until it
feels
right.”

Andy and Don didn't like to watch unedited footage of their work, Gehman explained. Instead, they would wait until the finished episode aired and watch it together. When that wasn't possible, they would dissect the episode by telephone just after the broadcast had ended.

Neither Don nor Andy expected star treatment. Neither man had his own chair on the
Griffith Show
set. Late one afternoon, Don, exhausted, plopped down in a canvas chair that belonged to the cameraman. A mortified crewman shooed him out of it. Something inside Don snapped. “Hey, Reggie,” Don cried to the prop master. “Come here! I want a chair with my name on it.”

“We don't do that in this company,” the prop master replied.

“We're going to do it now,” Don seethed.

“You're serious, aren't you?”

“Yeah. I am deadly serious. I'd like to have a chair by tomorrow, with my name on it.”

Unbeknown to Don, Andy was standing right behind him, grinning broadly.

“Reg,” Andy said finally, “I want one, too.”

When Andy and Don walked onto the set the next day, two brand-new canvas chairs sat in dramatic repose, beneath spotlights, with
SHERIFF
and
DEPUTY SHERIFF
stenciled on the backs.

On May 22, Don accepted his second Emmy Award at the Sheraton-Park Hotel in LA, with typical levity. “You know,” he told the crowd, “for the first time in my life I'm really shaking?”

The
Griffith Show
itself earned a nomination in the category of outstanding humor program, but lost to
The Bob Newhart Show.
Apart from Don, the
Griffith Show
would get no love from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for five more years. It was a remarkable drought:
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, by contrast, earned twenty-five nominations and fifteen Emmy Awards between 1962 and 1966.

In an interview that spring, Don hinted at ambitions beyond the
Griffith Show
: “I frankly prefer feature movies. If I had my choice, that's what I would do the rest of my life.”

On an airplane ride from New York to Los Angeles, Don found himself seated next to Hedda Hopper, grande dame of Hollywood gossips. They chatted; Hedda asked lots of questions. Not till later did Don realize he was being interviewed. “Don Knotts to Star in Cinema Fantasy,” the
Los Angeles Times
headline announced on May 9.

For all his television success, Don yearned for a film career. That spring, he was offered his first starring role. In this military comedy, adapted from the Theodore Pratt novel
Mr. Limpet
, a nebbish from Brooklyn wants to fight the Nazis but is rejected by the navy due to his poor eyesight. Fate and animation intervene: Henry Limpet falls into the ocean and transforms into a fish, who learns to guide American destroyers to German submarines.

The Incredible Mr. Limpet
was one of the first feature films to intersperse live action and animation over much of its running time. Animators created a fishy caricature of Don. To visually link the characters, the filmmakers fitted Don with a pince-nez; animators drew matching spectacles on the fish.

Andy visited the set, where he and Don entertained the cast and crew of
Limpet
with improvisational skits, sometimes as a pair of World War II veterans, sometimes as zookeepers.

In another routine, Andy “played like he was in some big convention hall, and it was a convention of sex therapists,” recalled Carole Cook, the Lucille Ball protégé who costarred in
Limpet
. This was a bit Andy and Don had polished at cocktail parties. Andy would introduce Don: “We've got a wonderful speaker today. Some of the language will be very technical and clinical, because we're talking about sexual things.” Then Don would stand, take a deep breath, summon his most earnest voice, and announce, “Now, I like a gal with a red bush, and I'll tell you why. . . .” And that was the skit. Those words, from that mouth, were enough to bring the house down.

While it may be Don's best-known film today,
Limpet
confounded the heads of the Warner Bros. studio in 1962. Don's character was meant to be “quiet and amusing” rather than riotously funny, Don recalled, and the movie's charms were subtle. One day, Jack Warner sent a memo to director Arthur Lubin that read, “You've got a funny actor down there. Why don't you give him something funny to do?”

Don wasn't the only one harboring ambitions beyond the
Griffith Show.
Assistant Director Bruce Bilson left the production in summer 1962 to join
Route 66
, an ambitious drama filmed on locations across the nation. “I never worked with Andy again,” Bruce recalled in a recent interview. “And I tried, and I asked an agent, and I never figured out until three months ago why I never worked for him again. And it was because I left the show and I didn't come back, and I never explained why.”

Bruce learned the same lesson Elinor Donahue had learned five decades earlier, and others before her: Andy Griffith expected loyalty. When he didn't get it, he neither forgave nor forgot.

The Griffiths retreated to their Manteo compound for the summer hiatus, as was now their habit. Barbara's sister Mary arranged for her son Mike to spend a month with his wealthy aunt and uncle on the Carolina coast. Mike King was eighteen and had just finished his first year at the university in Chapel Hill.

“It was way off the beaten path. But it was this gorgeous little island. It had all these little hideaways that were completely private,” Mike recalled. “The population was like a small fishing village. It was a great place to hide, and party. There's nothing there. You could do little things like get in a little boat and row over to a little island and do whatever you wanted to do.”

Andy and Barbara had fallen in with a clique of freewheeling couples around their age, and Mike recalled that they partied harder than him. Once, Andy came home with stitches in his face. He explained to Mike that he had fallen and cracked his head in his boat after a bout of drinking.

“They were going to the ‘camp,' ” Mike recalled, “which I found out later meant the island where they partied. This would be an all-day event. They would go early afternoon and fire up the grill and start the drinks going, and it went on into the night. And there was a lot of, how do you say,
sex
going on, I realized later, or I realized some then, among the various people involved in these parties, and some of the people were married. It was a pretty wild bunch.”

Andy loaned Mike his beloved '55 Ford station wagon and put him up in the servants' quarters off the kitchen of the Griffith home. Mike mostly kept to himself; but the walls were thin. “I heard them come in one night,” Mike recalled. “And they got in a fight, the raised voices. I think he was accusing her of flirting. And then I hear this
pow
, and this slap, and then I hear sobbing.

“So then they came in the next day for lunch, and Barbara was outside at a cabana, a table with an umbrella, having lunch, with sunglasses on, and Andy was waiting on her, serving her. She took her glasses off and had a black eye.”

For all he saw and heard that summer, Mike left Manteo still revering his uncle Andy. Andy was famous, but he was also a decent fellow, the sort who would hand you a twenty-dollar bill and the car keys on a Friday night.

Whatever drama might be playing out at home, Andy remained an impeccable professional on the set. On the break between seasons two and three of
The Andy Griffith Show
, producers Sheldon Leonard and Aaron Ruben gathered the writers for another marathon writing seminar, a chance to sketch out script ideas and hand them out among the teams. All went well until Andy Griffith walked in, and the air was sucked from the room. “For writers to listen to other writers is a near miracle,” writer Harvey Bullock explained. “For them to listen to an actor is totally beyond belief.” But Andy knew his audience, and he handled them masterfully.

“When the story meeting began, Andy did something wonderful—nothing,” Harvey recalled. “Not a word the first morning, just some nodding and laughing, ‘enjoying hisself.' He surpassed himself that afternoon. He referred to some of the past shows written by those in the room as ‘real outstanding.' . . . We were ready to bronze him.” By the end, the writers were actively encouraging Andy to speak. He began to offer down-home Southern anecdotes. He told them of a newspaper story he'd read about a thief in Raleigh who stole some cows by putting horseshoes on their feet. A few months later, Andy's memories would become a
Griffith
episode titled “The Cow Thief.”

Sheldon Leonard and Aaron Ruben did their best to parcel out scripts such that each of the regular characters was featured in turn, like a pitching rotation—Barney one week, Opie the next, Aunt Bee or Floyd the week after that. Writers loved to build stories around Barney. If they had a least favorite subject, it was probably Andy himself. “He was a tough guy to write for, because he was perfect,” Harvey Bullock recalled. “No foibles at all. We really had to labor on his scripts.”

By season three of
The Andy Griffith Show
, character actor Howard McNear had emerged as perhaps the funniest of the comedians working alongside Andy and Don. The writers featured Howard in the Episode 74, “Convicts at Large.” On a fishing trip, Barney and Floyd stumble across three burly women who have escaped from the local prison and commandeered a cabin in the woods. The women easily overpower the two milquetoasts, setting off a ludicrous hostage situation. Barney and Floyd are utterly dominated by “Big” Maude Tyler, a broad-shouldered, lantern-jawed, thoroughly mannish con, played by veteran character actress Reta Shaw.
Griffith
never got weirder.

Shortly after filming completed, Howard suffered a massive stroke. As 1963 dawned, the captains of Mayberry found themselves sorely in need of another actor with his gifts.

They would find him singing opera at a club in Santa Monica.

8.

Men in a Hurry

T
HE
H
ORN
was an artifact of authentic Hollywood: a Santa Monica cabaret owned by Rick Ricardi, the vocal coach from Twentieth Century–Fox; the sort of place, Andy recalled, where you could “order a cup of coffee and stay from nine till two and never see the same act twice.” The room knew no musical boundaries and drew a motley mix of big stars, studio insiders, and brash newcomers like James Thurston Nabors.

Born on June 12, 1930, in Sylacauga, Alabama, Jim Nabors grew up singing in the glee club and church choir. His father was a cop. His mother worked at a truck stop. She also played the piano by ear, a talent she bequeathed to Jim.

Jim joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity at the University of Alabama and began writing skits to perform at frat parties, mostly song parodies, not unlike the act Andy Griffith had assembled at the University of North Carolina a few years earlier. Jim graduated and moved to Los Angeles in hope that the dry weather might ease his asthma. He got a job at NBC, stacking film in the warehouse and making deliveries, before being promoted to film cutter.

In time, Jim retooled his fraternity act and took it to the Horn. He would talk in an exaggerated Alabama drawl, then rear back and unleash an aria from
Pagliacci
in a shimmering tenor. Then he would stop, mid-aria, and revert to his molasses drawl: “Waal, you see, there was this clown fella, and everyone thawt he was a real happy fella with that painted smile and awl, but he warn't happy a bit, cause . . .”

Jim was caricaturing his own provincial heritage, invoking an ensemble of unflattering stereotypes drawn up by Northerners and urbanites. He was doing with
Pagliacci
what Andy Griffith had done with
Hamlet
.

One Sunday in fall 1962, a mutual friend brought “this strange-looking man” to Andy Griffith's Toluca Lake home and dropped him off, intent that the two should meet. “I gave him a bathing suit and let him get in the pool, and I took him for a drive in the car,” Andy recalled. Two weeks later, the friend escorted Andy to the Horn to see Jim perform. “I didn't want to go,” Andy recalled. “But the man got up and was electrifying.” Afterward, Andy caught up with Jim on the sidewalk outside. “I don't know what you do,” Andy told him, “but it's magic, whatever it is.” Andy pledged, “If a part ever comes up on our show, I'll give you a call.”

Jim thought to himself, “Sure.” Two weeks later, the telephone rang.

The
Griffith
producers wanted to expand the regular cast to include another comic, someone who could play a dim-witted gas-station attendant named Gomer Pyle. Producer Aaron Ruben thought he had already found his man: George Lindsey, a former college football quarterback and Broadway actor who had migrated to Hollywood and landed several bit parts on television. “He read for me and he sounded very good, a real pro, and I was about to hire him,” Aaron recalled. “And Andy came in after rehearsal one day and said, ‘Have you already hired the guy to play the filling-station attendant?' And I said, ‘I'm about to.' And he said, ‘Before you do, would you meet somebody?'

“So in comes Jim Nabors. He has a script, he reads, and what he lacked in professionalism and experience he made up for with a certain naive charm that he had. And I said, ‘Andy, let's try him. He sounds good.' ”

Jim couldn't believe the part was his. He told the
Griffith
producers, “Guys, I gotta level with you, I never acted.”

Andy drawled, “Ain't nothin' to it.”

Andy ushered Jim onto the set. He assembled the cast and said, “This week, our guest star is Jim Nabors. Everybody be real nice to him and go real easy on him, because he's never done this before.”

Jim joined the
Griffith
ensemble for “Man in a Hurry,” broadcast on January 14. When shooting commenced, Frances Bavier walked up to Jim and asked, “Is this really your first time?” He nodded. Frances retreated behind the camera to watch. Jim read his part as if he were standing onstage at the Horn, giving a performance too broad for television. Between takes, Frances called Jim over. She told him, “Darling, the camera never misses anything. It never misses a wink or a blink or a smile. I know you're from nightclubs. You don't have to do any of that expository, expressive acting. Just settle down and be yourself.”

The
Griffith
producers thought Gomer's Alabama drawl was a bit much. Andy reassured them, “Heck, a lot of the boys back home talk like that.” Don looked out for Jim in the weeks to come, pulling him aside in his quiet way and whispering instructions into his ear so that Jim wouldn't unwittingly step in front of his costar on the next take.

Andy and Don were stunned, first at Jim's talent and then at his swift rise. Each of them had spent long years honing his craft, while Jim had arrived at the
Griffith Show
seemingly fresh off the bus from Alabama. Yet, the chemistry among the three transplanted Southerners was immediate. And the best was yet to come.

Mayberry was forever at odds with the world beyond its borders. Some outsiders came to town and stirred up trouble, such as the irreverent Buddy Ebsen in “Opie's Hobo Friend.” Others arrived to stir up trouble only to find themselves pacified—even transformed—by Mayberry's charms, such as Danny Thomas in the original
Griffith
pilot. Mayberry was more than a town: it was a philosophy to be propagated, a gospel to be spread.

This was never more evident than in “Man in a Hurry,” the
Griffith Show
's finest episode. The story began as a variation on the stuck-in-Mayberry theme first explored in the pilot. Malcolm Tucker, a businessman bound for Charlotte, trudges into town on a Sunday morning, looking for a mechanic. Played by Robert Emhardt, a veteran character actor, Tucker represents “the typical well-fed, no-nonsense, impatient, successful businessman,” Aaron Ruben recalled. In other words, he is a stand-in for every harried woman and man in our nervous world.

Malcolm Tucker is not a bad man, just a busy one. He arrives in town expecting folks to hop to, unaware that Mayberry on Sunday is closed for business. “I've got to get that car fixed now, today, this minute,” Tucker cries. “I've got to be in Charlotte. Can't you understand that?”

Andy and his friends cannot. Nothing in their lives is so urgent that it can't wait till tomorrow. Tucker journeys to Wally's filling station and finds Gomer, the simpleton. He appeals to Gomer for help. Gomer treats Tucker to a soliloquy on what a fine job the absent Wally would do, were he only there to fix the man's car.

Overcome by desperation, Tucker leaps into Gomer's battered pickup and drives off. Andy runs him down; but instead of arresting him, the sheriff invites Tucker into his home. Tucker picks up the telephone to call for help and finds even that resource unavailable: the elderly Mendelbright sisters, Maude and Cora, have tied up the town's only telephone line for a languorous weekly chat about bad circulation.

Tucker wheels on Andy and vents his spleen. “You people are living in another world! This is the twentieth century. Don't you realize that? The whole world is living in a desperate space age. Men are orbiting the earth. International television has been developed. And here, a whole town is standing still because two old women's feet fall asleep.”

Griffith
never more closely resembled Rod Serling's
Twilight Zone
, a contemporary program that plunged its guest stars into surreal dream­scapes as a way to render some life lesson.

Tucker is about to learn his. Unable to do anything, he paces back and forth on Andy's front porch. Barney is there, nodding off; Andy is sitting in his rocker with his guitar, singing the hymn “Little Brown Church in the Vale.” Barney joins in. They sing and strum and rock; slowly, the soothing music softens Tucker's face. His eyes fix on some distant point, perhaps a cherished moment from a lost childhood. Finally, Tucker lifts his voice and joins Andy and Barney in song.

The scene plays for two full minutes, a remarkable span of tranquility for prime-time television. Gomer finally breaks it up by tromping onto the set and announcing that his cousin Goober has arrived to fix Tucker's car. Tucker snaps back to his old, fretful self. He resumes pacing, while Andy and Barney unfurl a routine that will become a classic. The sketch invokes Don's childhood memories of long, languid evenings back on the farm.

“Ya know what I think I'm gonna do?” Barney says, breaking the silence on Andy's front porch.

“What?” Andy replies.

“I'm gonna go home, have me a little nap, then go over to Thelma Lou's and watch a little TV.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Yeah, I believe that's what I'll do: go home . . . have a nap . . . head over to Thelma Lou's for TV.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Yep, that's the plan: ride home . . . a little nap—”

The prattle drives Tucker over the brink. He explodes, “For the love of Mike, do it! Do it! Just do it! Go take a nap. Go to Thelma Lou's for TV. Just do it!”

Barney glares at Tucker. “What's the hurry?”

The episode was a masterpiece, and it ensconced Jim Nabors alongside Andy and Don as a star of
The Andy Griffith Show
.

“Man in a Hurry” and the episodes to come represented
The Andy Griffith Show
at its creative zenith. It was a magical time. The program's best writers churned out classic stories at a steady pace. Its finest director, Bob Sweeney, brought the teleplays to life with exquisite camera shots and wrung every drop of pathos from the performers. Andy and Don played their roles with mastery and depth; the fatigue of consecutive thirty-episode seasons had not yet set in. Their comedic partnership was now the centerpiece of nearly every episode, even those that ostensibly showcased others. In the contest for Andy's affections, Barney had no true rival.

But that was about to change.

In the episode “Andy Discovers America,” broadcast March 4, 1963, Opie comes home from school and avows displeasure with his new teacher, “old lady Crump.” She wants Opie to learn history. Andy thinks she's starting him a bit young.

Andy and Barney assume Opie's new teacher is “one of 'em old witches.” But then, Ms. Crump strides into the sheriff's office to confront Andy. She is icy and regal and beautiful.

Aneta Louise Corsaut was born on November 3, 1933, near the salt mines of Hutchinson, Kansas. Her father was a plant scientist, her mother a schoolteacher, her name a misspelling on a Reno County birth certificate. She claimed, years later, to have been a tomboy and said her perfect nose had been broken three times in baseball games. Aneta drew suitors like flies. “She had more dates than any girl in her class,” recalled Jesse Corsaut, Aneta's brother. “The boys came around in relays.”

But there was only one man in young Aneta's life: Jesse Sr., her father. He bore a faint resemblance to Clark Gable, and Aneta adored him. When he died in her late teens, “I lost my boyfriend,” she said. For the rest of her life, she dated a great many men but married none.

Aneta went to New York for acting lessons. She lived on K rations donated by army boyfriends and studied under Lee Strasberg, the reputed father of Method acting. In 1958 she won a role in the independent film
The Blob
, opposite Steve McQueen. She moved to Hollywood in 1960 and broke into television. Soon she was dating the writer Jim Fritzell. Jim introduced her to
Griffith
director Bob Sweeney.

By the time Aneta was cast on the
Griffith Show
, the quest for an Andy Taylor love interest had been abandoned. Aneta was signed for a one-shot part. Had the producers harbored any real hope of kindling romance, surely they would have given the character a more alluring name than Helen Crump.

The
Griffith
writers, all of them men, struggled with any script that called for Andy to interact with a potential inamorata. No one knew this better than Aneta. “[They] admitted that they could write for little girls and older women, but anything in between always came out sort of sweet and bland,” she recalled. “And actually, they were not predisposed to listen to us.”

Aneta's first encounter with Andy on the Mayberry set swiftly curdled into a heated argument. “We were out on location, standing nose to nose in the middle of a road, yelling at each other,” she recounted. “I don't recall exactly what started it, or just what it was about, but it had something to do with feminism.”

Andy was smitten. By 1963, the Desilu set was filled with obsequious sycophants who would say anything they thought Andy wanted to hear. He didn't like that, and he was fascinated by this sharp-tongued beauty who seemed intent on driving him away. “I think he respected the fact that I stood up for what I believed,” she recalled.

They fought on-screen, as well. In their first meeting on celluloid, Ms. Crump storms into the sheriff's office in a rage. “Sheriff,” she fumes, “did you or did you not tell Opie that he needn't do his history?” Andy hems and haws. Helen glowers. Finally she instructs the sheriff, “Would you please do me just one favor? Just stay out of my business, please!” She slams down her purse, wheels around, and storms out.

Aneta possessed “that feminism that comes naturally to intelligent women,” a native aversion to being subjugated and controlled by men, recalled her niece, Jennifer Scarlott. In Helen Crump, Aneta would fashion one of the great proto-feminist television characters of her era. Like Laura Petrie on
Dick Van Dyke
, Helen was an equal romantic partner to her man. Like Ann Marie on
That Girl
, Helen supported herself, a single young woman living away from her parents.

Fan mail poured in. Viewers loved Helen Crump, although some questioned whether she had to be quite so hard on Andy. Producers quickly signed Aneta for further episodes.