Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (18 page)

With Andy and Barney dominating most
Griffith
scripts, other cast members had to wait weeks for their spots to come up on Aaron Ruben's story rotation. Ronny Howard, the child star, felt palpable relief at retreating into a supporting role. Frances Bavier, on the other hand, resented being upstaged—not just by Andy and Don, but by an eight-year-old boy. “I've had to take a backseat and watch others get the laughs,” she told
TV Guide
, “and it hasn't been easy.”

There was no more enigmatic presence on the Desilu set than Frances, who turned sixty on the third season of
Griffith
. She had perhaps the longest résumé of anyone in the cast. Her romantic résumé was shorter: she was married to a businessman for five years before deciding career took precedence. By the time of her most memorable role, Frances was living alone in a rented duplex in Hollywood. She told an interviewer, “I know that our house at the studio—the set, with the kitchen and living room—isn't home, but . . .” Perhaps, to Frances, it was.

Frances was a singular, sobering presence on the
Griffith
set. She wouldn't dance and sing and laugh with the others. She didn't like coarse language or practical jokes. She could be prickly. Her rapport with Andy was particularly cool, a mutual disapprobation that Andy expressed mostly in the absence of his usual, voluble warmth. He “seemed to bear some kind of resentment toward Frances,” recalled Rance Howard, Ronny's father. “I think she was Sheldon Leonard's choice . . . and she may not have been Andy's choice.”

Jim Nabors, on the other hand, counted Frances as a dear friend. One day on the set, Andy muttered something under his breath about Frances. “And I remember we were walking back from a table reading on our way to the soundstage,” Rance recalled, “and I heard Jim say, not loudly, but he said, ‘Andy, she's a good actress. You be nice to her.' And Andy had no reply for that.”

Because Aunt Bee has no man in her life, pop-culture mythology suggests she might be gay. Scholar Alexander Doty pegged her as a “queer cult lesbian” character, along with Alice, the housekeeper on
The Brady Bunch
, and Sally Rogers, the comedy writer on
Dick Van Dyke
. Many people likewise assume Frances Bavier was herself lesbian, although no one seems to know where the rumor began. “Absolutely not,” said Jim Nabors, who is himself gay, and who knew Frances as well as anyone. They went antiquing together on weekends.

When the writers built stories around Aunt Bee, they sometimes mined the mystery surrounding the character's romantic life, perhaps because they themselves were curious about Frances. In the spring 1963 story “Aunt Bee's Medicine Man,” Bee arrives at the sheriff's office feeling faint.

“Uh, I'll get you a glass of water,” Barney cries. “Maybe I'll . . . maybe we better—better loosen something.” Then he surveys Aunt Bee, unsure which part of her to touch. “You got something we can loosen?”

Later in the episode, Bee is swept off her feet by a traveling salesman and his medicinal brew, Colonel Harvey's Indian Elixir. Andy and Barney return home to find her at the piano, leading Opie in a jaunty rendition of “Toot, Toot, Tootsie!” She spins on the piano stool. Then she lurches straight into the camera, almost tumbling into viewers' laps, nearly breaking the fourth wall.

“Aunt Bee sure is feelin' good, huh, Paw?” Opie observes.

“Andy, I don't like to say this,” Barney offers. “It was anybody else, I'd say she was tiddly.”

As the third season of
Griffith
drew to a close, the series seemed to be gaining momentum rather than losing it. Andy and Don couldn't wait to get to the studio each day. Their enthusiasm was contagious: idle cast members would wander in on their days off just to watch Andy and Barney perform.

“Barney's First Car,” broadcast on April 1, earned the program its second Writers Guild Award for television comedy. The script, from the celebrated writing team of Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, reads like a father-son story about life lessons learned, with Andy cast as the father and Barney as the son.

Andy takes Barney out to buy his first automobile, an amusing thought in itself, given that Barney is nearing middle age. He packs Andy, Opie, Aunt Bee, Gomer, and Thelma Lou in for a ceremonial first ride, bobbing his head with smug pride. Tragedy slowly descends: first a tapping sound, then a drumbeat, then a loud clang. Then the steering column begins to float up toward Barney's widening eyes, a worthy sight gag. As the car heaves in its death throes, Barney shrinks into a deflated heap.

Andy and Barney had been padding their scripts with aimless filler skits for three years. First, the producers resisted them. Then, they embraced them. Now, the writers were contributing skits of their own, invoking folksy stories from their own pasts. The best of these was an exchange scripted for Andy and Barney as the two awaited the new car.

“Last big buy I made was my mom's and dad's anniversary present,” Barney says.

“What'd ya get 'em?”

“A septic tank.”

Andy stops peeling his apple, turns to Barney, and considers for a long, sober moment, allowing the line to sink in. “For their anniversary?”

“Yeah. Well, they're really hard to buy for. Besides, it was something they could use. They were really thrilled. Two tons of concrete, all steel reinforced.”

Andy takes another long, stern look at his deputy. “You're a fine son, Barn.”

“I try.”

Season three ended with “The Big House.” It replayed a well-worn theme: Andy putting crooks in jail and Barney letting them out. But the execution was a comic symphony, a perfection of the absurd little dance between Andy and Barney.

Two hardened criminals arrive at the Mayberry jail for holding. Andy need only keep them locked up for a few hours. He beseeches Barney not to go near them. But Barney becomes swept up in delusion, hell-bent on showing the cons his jail is no “small-town, two-bit lockup.” Barney struts up to the inmates, puffs out his chest, and delivers a shrill speech, speaking as if to an entire cellblock.

“Now, here at the Rock we have two basic rules. Memorize them so that you can say them in your sleep. The first rule is, obey all rules. Secondly, do not write on the walls, as it takes a lot of work to erase writing off of walls. As we tell all men when these gates shut behind them, you are starting a new life. If you're wise, you'll begin rehabilitation.”

Andy's face is mostly hidden from the camera, presumably because he cannot keep his composure. Gomer watches Barney in reverential awe, a mesmerized child.

Andy departs. The crooks promptly trick Barney into opening the cell door. They escape. Andy marches them back to the cell. This pattern proceeds until, by the episode's end, Barney has replaced the inmates inside the cell. Andy recaptures the bad guys and releases Barney. “Great work, Barn,” Andy exclaims. “Your scheme worked.”

“The Big House” was the last
Griffith
episode for Director Bob Sweeney, who seemed to understand the program like no director before or after. Sween wanted to try new things. He would go on to help launch the hit series
That Girl.

Five days after the finale, Andy, Don, and Ronny Howard frolicked together on the cover of
TV Guide
. The accompanying article gushed about the program's 36 million viewers and “unexpected” fans, including Frank Sinatra and
Twilight Zone
creator Rod Serling, who cited
Griffith
as “one of the few genuinely funny comedies in the medium.”

On May 26, Don earned his third Emmy, besting Tim Conway in
McHale's Navy
. Most news reports devoted only a single sentence to his achievement. Yet, he was only the second actor in Hollywood—after Jayne Wyatt of
Father Knows Best—
to have won three straight Emmys for playing the same character on the same program. Clutching the now-familiar award, Don told the Hollywood Palladium audience, “This is too much.”

Hollywood sophisticates no longer dismissed
Griffith
as a provincial knee-slapper.

9.

A Date for Gomer

S
UMMER OF
1963 surely marked the peak of Andy Griffith's professional career. The fickle stars of fame, fortune, and artistry had aligned perfectly in his favor, a moment of celestial harmony that would not come again.

Andy's home life was another story. And now, over the summer hiatus between seasons three and four of
The Andy Griffith Show
, a prototypical supermarket tabloid pounced on the fissures in the Griffith marriage. For a piece titled “The Secret Life of a Married Man,” a reporter from
TV Radio Mirror
persuaded Barbara to open up about the burden she bore as spouse to a self-absorbed Hollywood icon.

“A comedian's wife has a hard job,” Barbara told her interviewer. “It's a constant state of giving. A continual satisfying of the other's needs, because a comic is like a child. Everything must revolve around him.” Andy, she said, dwelt in a world “so completely surrounded by himself that he often doesn't even hear me.”

Had Andy declined to comment on his wife's missives, the damage might have ended there. But when the reporter telephoned, Andy talked . . . and talked . . . and talked, giving the writer enough fodder for a seven-page spread, with ironic photos of the Griffith family frolicking at the Carolina shore.

“I'll give you a direct answer,” Andy said, a response rendered partly in his Carolina patois. “And that is that I guess I am somewhat arrogant sometimes, sure. But so's everybody. And I do have a purty violent temper. Ah sure do. Both at work and at home.

Andy recounted the time he had splintered a door in the Griffith home. He chuckled. “Guess maybe there's some difficulty in handling me—or anybody successful, for that matter. But there's less with us, because I married Barbara before I became a star.”

Perhaps sensing opportunity to sow further domestic dissent, the reporter asked whether Andy would mind if his wife returned to show business. The same question had been posed by another astute interviewer, Edward R. Murrow, in the previous decade.

Andy replied with injudicious candor: “Certainly not. Of course, I don't have a whole lot to worry about, on account of she's not about to do that.”

Andy evidently intended that his wife should never perform again. Perhaps Barbara knew that and accepted it.

Andy and Barbara would remain married for another nine years, but his eye was wandering. When nephew Robert King visited the Griffiths in Toluca Lake around this time, Andy took Robert for a ride in one of Andy's antique cars. As they drove, he pointed out a small bungalow on a quiet street, said it was his, and boasted that a young starlet had just come calling there.

“Three things made Andy Griffith what he was,” recalled Dick Linke, Andy's manager. One was “his work, his acting. He was one of the greatest actors I've ever seen. Number two, he loved to drink. . . . The third thing, with his drinking, he loved sex.” By the 1960s, Andy's potent libido was driving him to search for partners outside his marriage.

As season four of the
Griffith Show
approached, the CBS network assembled its roster of stars for an hour-long variety special to promote the fall lineup. The cast included Andy, Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Danny Thomas, Dick Van Dyke, and Phil Silvers.

As the ensemble broke for lunch one day during the production, Lucille Ball approached Andy, who was eating a sandwich and reading his script. She asked, “You play golf, Andy?” Andy shook his head. “You should,” Lucy said. “It would do you good.” She paused. “But you don't do anything you don't do well, do you?” Then she walked off. Andy's homespun naïveté was a front, and the queen of comedy knew it.

Jim Nabors, by contrast, radiated an innocence that seemed endearingly real. Thanksgiving week of 1963 brought “A Date for Gomer,” a story featuring the newest star in the
Griffith
firmament.

Backstage at the Desilu lot one day, Don asked, “Jim, has anybody recognized you out in public yet?” Jim replied, “At the supermarket the other day, a lady asked me, ‘Aren't you the guy on
The Andy Griffith Show
?' And I took fifteen minutes to sign that autograph, because I wanted everyone to see me sign my first autograph.” Over the next year, Jim Nabors would become one of the biggest names in Hollywood.

Jim's sexual orientation was no secret to Andy or Don or to others in the
Griffith
cast and crew. Jim maintains he neither hid nor advertised his sexuality. “I've always been out,” he recalled, “but I never made a big deal out of it.” But homosexuality did not fall within the comfort zone of the mainstream media in the middle 1960s, so news accounts of the private Jim danced around his private life. “We kept quiet about that for a long time,” recalled Dick Linke, who managed both Andy and Jim.
I

A
TV Guide
cover story in March 1964 reported that Jim lived “the life of a bachelor in a pleasant home in North Hollywood with a roommate (not an actor, an engineer), and, more recently, with his mother, who has been visiting in California following his father's death last fall. ‘Never been married, but I've been engaged a few times,' Jim says, and Andy adds, ‘I don't think he wants to undertake all that there just now.' ”

Andy and Don adored Jim, but they also resented his abilities. Perfectionist Andy and obsessive Don prepared meticulously for their performances. Jim, by contrast, seemed to rely on talent alone, and he got away with it, and that annoyed Don and Andy to no end. Andy would stop speaking to Jim several years later, when Jim fired Dick Linke and Andy sensed a certain dearth of humility. Don and Jim remained friends, but Don confessed to his psychiatrist that he felt threatened by Gomer's gifts. In later life, Don would dismiss Jim privately, perhaps defensively, as “a one-joke guy.”

Jim's effect on the viewing audience was immediate and profound, in a pop-culture sort of way. Within a few months, Gomer had elevated the exclamations “Sha-zayam!” and “Gaw-aw-lee!” to national prominence. And it was apparently he who seeded the
Griffith
tradition of uttering an exuberant “Hey!” as a greeting. William Morris agents raked in offers for Jim to star in various prospective pilots. One was a sitcom treatment of the old Andy Griffith film
No Time for Sergeants
. Jim approached Andy one day and told him of the
Sergeants
offer. Andy replied, “You're shittin' me.”

Andy had previously pestered Aaron Ruben, producer of the
Griffith Show
, to find a star vehicle for his ascendant costar. Now, Andy marched into Aaron's office, sat down, put his feet up on Aaron's desk, and announced, “I ain't leavin' until we come up with something for Jim.”

Aaron told Andy, “Well, Jim—Gomer—is such an easygoing, peace-loving, sweet guy, I'd like to see him thrust into a situation where he comes up against everything diametrically opposite to his character. Something almost violent. Something that's just like . . . the Marines.”

The next day, Andy approached Jim and said, “You need some experience. Why don't you stay on our show another year and we'll do a pilot with you, and you can be one of the owners.”

Jim was out of his depth. “I didn't know what the hell that meant,” he recalled of Andy's offer. “I was just looking for a job.”

Andy's impulse to boost Jim's career might have been pure altruism; more likely, it recognized the inevitability of Jim's departure, with or without Andy's blessing. If Andy took Jim under his wing, then he, Dick Linke, and the rest of the
Griffith
patriarchs could profit along with Jim from his ascent.

The negotiations would spawn
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C
., a series built upon the same premise that had launched Andy's
No Time for Sergeants
franchise, with Jim Nabors starring and the
Griffith
team producing.

With Jim juggling network offers, perhaps Don Knotts felt it was time that he, too, be recognized. After three Emmys, the comic backbone of the
Griffith Show
was finally being treated as an A-list actor. In January 1964, Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper announced that Don would soon be ready for a television series of his own.

“I have a tough decision to make,” Don told Hedda. “I've had several offers to do my own show when I'm free, but I don't know where to jump.” Don was contractually obliged to complete five seasons with the
Griffith Show
. After that, he was torn. His ultimate ambition was to make films. But “film offers don't always come in at the right time,” he said.

Ominously, Don hinted that the creative surge that had fueled the
Griffith
machine for three and a half years might soon burn out. “We have good writers,” he told Hedda, “but it's a grind working on the same thing. We do a mammoth amount of work in a day. . . . You grow skilled at inventing fast, memorizing fast, moving fast, to get the job done; I worry that perhaps it's sacrificing some creative instinct and may hurt eventually.”

Every week, Andy and Don and their costars had to learn parts in a swiftly paced two-act play. “When one episode was finished,” Elinor Donahue recalled, “you just had to erase it, totally erase it.” The cast termed the skill
forgettery.

Three years in,
The Andy Griffith Show
still soared atop its creative arc. But at some imperceptible point in the 1963–64 season, the peak was past. Spring of 1964 would bring several more beloved episodes, with a handful of classic stories after that. But henceforth, they would be fewer and farther between.

Some episodes from season four feel almost valedictory in their acknowledgment of the lengthening partnership between Andy and Barney.

“Citizen's Arrest,” broadcast on December 16, opens with Andy and Barney harmonizing a verse from the hymn “Tell Mother I'll Be There” as they shuffle papers, another unscripted moment of Zen. The story spotlights Barney's devotion to Andy and to his job, and it plays almost as real-life tribute to their work as a comedy team.

“I owe you a lot, Barn. I really do,” Andy says, noting that Barney has completed ten years on the job. “We've been through a lot together. You've been a fine deputy. A true public servant. You can feel right proud of yourself, you know that?”

“Well, a man does with what he's got,” Barney mumbles in reply, moved to the verge of tears.

The new year brought “Barney and the Cave Rescue,” one of the more elaborate shoots in a series that seldom lavished money on location. Andy and Helen wander off from the town picnic and become trapped inside an old mining cave. Barney heroically organizes a rescue party, unaware that Andy and Helen have already found their way out of the cavern. When Andy learns of the rescue effort, he has no choice but to hustle Helen and himself back inside the cavern so that Barney will have someone to save.

The episode teaches another powerful lesson on friendship: Andy cares so much about his deputy's feelings that he risks his life to protect them. When Barney breaks through the rockslide and finds Andy and Helen behind it, he is a hero. Only Andy and Helen know how far the sheriff has gone to stage this moment.

But Andy Griffith was not Andy Taylor, a point underscored in a sprawling article published in a January 1964 issue of the
Saturday Evening Post.
“Where Sheriff Taylor is gregarious, Griffith, something of a loner, holds to an unconscionably suspicious nature,” the writer mused. “ ‘It takes Andy eight months to decide if he likes you,' says a former associate on the show. Set against Taylor's benign self-assurance, Griffith is a fearsome worrier, so petrified by social situations that he avoids most big Hollywood functions.” Andy himself observed, “I wish I could be like Andy Taylor. He's nicer than I am—more outgoing and easygoing. I get awful mad awful easy.”

Andy was again being painted as a maniac: “Griffith does harbor one of the most ferocious tempers extant, his low boiling point—along with his otherwise gracious manners—being parcel to the tradition of the hot-blooded Southerner.”

Television viewers were afforded a brief glimpse of those passions two months later, in the episode “Andy's Vacation.” Week after week, Sheriff Taylor had patiently maneuvered around the bumbling miscues of his deputy, had disentangled Barney from one proverbial briar patch after another, reuniting farmers with goats, delivering medicine to widows, protecting townsfolk from feral hillbillies and hillbillies from themselves. Now, the sheriff had had enough.

Barney hauls an agrarian couple in front of the sheriff for fighting. He finds Andy in a cheerless state. Andy barks at the couple, “Won't you people ever learn?” Gone is the simpering, saccharine Andy of the
Danny Thomas
pilot. The sheriff fines the couple ten dollars and orders them out. “I'm tired of coddling these people,” he tells Barney. “From now on when they break the law, we either fine 'em or jail 'em. Time to make things easy on ourselves around here.”

Barney asks Andy what's bothering him.

“I've had it. I'm sick of sheriffin'; I'm sick of this room; I'm sick of this town.”

Barney hazards to ask, “Are you sick of me?”

“Well, in a friendly sort of hopin'-you'll-understand way, yes, I am.”

Barney tells Andy what he needs is a vacation: “Catch the Sunburst Special to that Miami Beach!”

Don himself took a trip to Florida for the January 17 premiere of
The Incredible Mr. Limpet
, his first starring film role. Warner Bros. brought 250 members of the international press corps to Weeki Wachee, the famed underwater park with its mermaid showgirls. The film was screened in the attraction's million-dollar underwater theater, an event billed as the world's first underwater premiere.