Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (2 page)

Prologue: The Call

D
ON
K
NOTTS
and his wife, Kay, spent the evening of February 15, 1960, playing bridge in the beige-carpeted living room of Pat and Marjorie Harrington. The Harringtons lived in a rented Spanish colonial on Le Conte Avenue in Westwood, not far from the historic Fox Theater and UCLA. The room was large but sparsely furnished: a baby-grand piano, butterfly chairs, and a coffee table, around which the two couples sat. Pat was a young actor, yet to hit his peak as the mustachioed handyman Schneider in the urban sitcom
One Day at a Time
. He and Don had struck up a casual friendship on the set of
The
Steve Allen Show
,
an irreverent sketch-comedy affair that had just migrated from New York to Hollywood. The cast had moved west with the show, and the shared journey had fortified the friendship between Don and Pat. This night was bridge night; Don took his bridge seriously.

Steve Allen
would air at ten o'clock; yet, that Monday evening was a night off for Don and Pat, whose show had passed from live broadcast to prerecorded tape with the move west. The gathering was bittersweet:
Steve Allen
had just been canceled, a victim of diminished energy and dwindling ambitions, maladies Don attributed to the retreat from live broadcast. Both Don and Pat would soon be out of work. But Pat, at least, had a prospective gig on the horizon: a guest spot on
The
Danny Thomas Show
,
a CBS ratings powerhouse that aired an hour before
Steve Allen
. At nine o'clock, Pat paused the bridge game so he could watch that night's episode. He switched on the set. As the dot of light swelled to life on the screen, Don beheld the face of an old friend.

The program opened with a hand-drawn sketch of Andy Griffith, a young actor from North Carolina with wild eyes and tousled hair, known chiefly for his jubilant portrayal of farm boy Will Stockdale in the Southern military farce
No Time for Sergeants
, first on Broadway and then in the movies. The drawing shortly gave way to a shot of Andy sitting in a Ford Galaxie 500 squad car, escorting Danny Thomas and his family through a town called Mayberry. Andy was its sheriff.

“You picked on the wrong guy this time, Clem,” Danny bristled.

“Name ain't Clem,” Andy replied, his face cleaving into a broad grin. “It's Andy. Andy Taylor.” On that cue, the audience erupted in polite applause.

Andy and Don had lost touch since forging a powerful bond in the Broadway cast of
No Time for Sergeants
, half a decade earlier. Now, they were three thousand miles apart—Don in Hollywood, Andy in New York—and they had allowed their correspondence to fall off. Andy was unaware
Steve Allen
had been canceled. Don had no inkling Andy was working on a television show.

As Don beheld Andy on Pat Harrington's television set, “the wheels in my brain began to whirl,” Don recalled. The part of Sheriff Andy Taylor seemed perfect for Andy. A show like that would be honey to the sponsors, with all its homespun charm. And Don wondered if there might be a place for him in Mayberry. A part on Andy's new show just might rekindle Don's career—and revive his old friendship with Andy. Don had always hoped he and Andy might work together again someday.

Don told no one at the bridge table of his plans: He wasn't about to give Pat Harrington a jump on his part. He waited till the next day. Then, he placed a call to New York, where Andy was headlining a halfhearted Broadway musical titled
Destry Rides Again
. Andy was surprised and delighted to receive Don's call. Don told Andy how much he'd enjoyed the pilot. Then he asked, “Listen, don't you think Sheriff Andy Taylor ought to have a deputy?”

1.

Don's Demons

D
ON'S JOURNEY
to Hollywood began on a broken-down farm outside Morgantown, West Virginia. William Jesse Knotts, Don's father, a man of average build and sky-blue eyes, made a living buying derelict farms, fixing them up, and selling them again. By the close of the 1910s, Jesse and his wife, Elsie, had settled on one farm long enough for Elsie to bear three children, all boys. Jesse raised crops and mined some coal he had found on the land. Theirs was not a prosperous life, but at least it was stable.

One day, probably in 1919, Jesse collapsed on the fields. He was borne home by other men. “I can't see,” he cried, although it seemed to others that he could. They called it hysterical blindness. Jesse lay in bed, sightless, for two weeks. His vision returned in time, but his mind did not. Jesse Knotts was said to have suffered a nervous breakdown, though more likely he was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. His physical health, too, fell into rapid decline, and soon he could no longer mind the family farm. Elsie, his wife, was left to tend the family fortunes.

When Elsie lost the farm, she moved the family into town to occupy a succession of rental homes, sometimes sharing the space with various Knotts kin; Jesse's incapacity had brought the Depression to the Knotts household a decade early.

Into this arrangement Jesse Donald Knotts was born on July 21, 1924. His first home seems to have been a boxy American Foursquare on Jefferson Street in Westover, just across the Monongahela River from central Morgantown. By 1929, the family had crossed the river and settled into a permanent dwelling: a large house on University Avenue, which Elsie rented from the Galusha family, owners of a corner grocery store. Elsie confined her family to the main floor; the upper rooms she rented to students, itinerants, and anyone else who could put a dollar down.

Don was fourteen years younger than his youngest sibling, William Earl, a boy so slender he was called Shadow. Don was an accident. Elsie, thirty-nine and married to a forty-two-year-old invalid, had not planned to bring another child into the world.

Don's childhood was bleak, even by the sepia-toned standards of the Depression. The house on University Avenue sat in a crowded row of unkempt wooden colonials set against a steep hill. He slept on a cot in the kitchen, next to the stove. Two of his older brothers, Shadow and Sid, shared a bedroom with a boarder. Willis Vincent “Bill” Knotts, the most ambitious sibling, had already decamped to seek his fortune as a manager at Montgomery Ward. Don's mother and father slept in the living room, and Jesse Sr. spent most of his waking hours on the sofa, staring into space. Don's brothers liked to drink and fight; there was little to distinguish them from the vagabonds who paraded in and out of the University Avenue home.

Don emerged from infancy with a ghostly pallor, a skeletal frame, and a predisposition to illness, traits he shared with his older brother Shadow. “I did not come into the world with a great deal of promise,” Don recalled. “By the time I started grammar school, I was already stoop-shouldered, painfully thin, and forever throwing up due to a nervous stomach.”

Three decades later, Elsie Knotts would ask Don, “Do you remember when you were in nappies, and your father used to hold a knife to your throat?” Don did not. Only in therapy did the memories come flooding back. Don spent his first years living in fear of the monster on the couch. Jesse Knotts harbored a primal jealousy toward Don, the unexpected baby, who drew Elsie's attention away from her bedridden husband. From the day Don arrived, he competed with his father for his mother's care.

The only path out of Don's kitchen bedroom led through the living room, where his father lay. Don would try to tiptoe by. Sometimes he would pass unnoticed. Other times, the father would emerge from his fever dreams and train his bloodshot eyes on his youngest son. Don would freeze as he heard the ragged growl of an unpracticed voice: “Come here, you little son of a bitch.” Don would slowly retreat from the room. Usually, the summons was an empty threat. But on occasion, Jesse would rise from the couch like a shambling ghoul and stagger into the kitchen to find a blade. Then he would stumble through the house in search of his son; the hunt wouldn't take long, as there was nowhere for Don to go. Jesse would pin Don against the wall, raise the knife to his throat, and terrorize the child with dark oaths: “I'll kill you, you son of a bitch.”

Jesse terrorized the rest of his family, as well. He was twice confined in the state mental hospital in Weston after threatening Elsie with a butcher knife. Those stays bought Don a few years of relative peace in the family home.

Over years of shrewd observation, Don learned to divine his father's moods, to read his face and voice. In this effort, Don developed a preternatural power to interpret body language and vocal tics. Perhaps Don's hypervigilance was a source of his comedic gifts: What was the Nervous Man, after all, if not an ensemble of twitches and quirks?

Repulsed by his father, Don was drawn to his mother. Elsie Knotts was the angel to Jesse's foul-breathed demon, the sunlight to his darkness. Elsie was “one of the truly good people of the world,” Don recalled, “more comfortable with the downtrodden than the high and mighty. Elsie found time to help any soul who needed her.”

Elsie was raised a born-again Christian. But as an adult, she hewed to her own code of right and wrong. She was, in a sense, the real-life Aunt Bee. Ever mindful of people's feelings, Elsie couldn't bear the thought of walking home from the A&P past the window of the Galushas' grocery store, lest the Galusha brothers should see her carrying groceries from another market. Instead, she and Don would detour around the block to the back of their house. Elsie even thought it improper for a Knotts boy to walk through the front door of the city jail. When Don's older brother Shadow was locked up on a drunk-and-disorderly charge, she packed a box of sandwiches and tobacco and instructed an Opie-aged Don, “I don't want you going into that jail. I want you to go around to the back and yell up to the window there and get him to come to the window and throw this up to him.”

Though she embraced fundamentalist Christianity, Elsie also loved to play cards, and she collected autographs from the stars of screen and stage. “My mother took me to movies from the very beginning,” Don recalled. He and his mother probably saw
Steamboat Willie
, the first Disney film with synchronized sound, and
Broadway Melody
, the first talking musical, at Morgantown's Metropolitan Theatre. But nothing impressed Don quite like Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the nation's premier comedy duo. Don was transfixed by their choreographed slapstick, just as he was mesmerized by Jack Benny's uncanny comic timing on the radio. Don loved the way those men could make his mother laugh. He dreamed that Elsie might ask for his own autograph one day.

Elsie Knotts had a lovely, infectious, musical laugh, and everyone in the Knotts home wanted to hear it. Laughter brought escape from the pall that threatened to envelop them all. From an early age, Don set about finding the skills to summon that beautiful laugh. His principal instructor was his sickly brother.

Shadow Knotts, born in 1910, had been the baby of the family for more than a decade when Don arrived; thereafter, it seemed as if Elsie Knotts had two youngest children, as their personalities developed along strikingly similar lines. Shadow suffered from asthma so severe that he slept sitting up. Yet, he filled the Knotts home with irrepressible wit. Don would follow Shadow around the house like a pint-size Ed McMahon, encouraging his cracks with peals of delighted laughter. Long before Don's birth, Shadow had fallen into the role of family jester. He was about ten when his father's mind broke, and he discovered, long before Don, that laughter could deliver his family from the darkness of dementia and poverty. Don once recounted the typical scene at the Knotts dinner table, where Shadow would labor to repel the chill that rose from his father, stony and silent at the head of the table.

“The clowning would begin with Shadow buttering his bread as if it were a violin, tucking it under his chin and using the butter knife for a bow,” Don recalled, “and it might continue with Shadow commenting to Sid under his breath, but loud enough for all to hear, that poor Tom Helfrick”—a beloved boarder who joined the family at the table—“had helped himself to two helpings of meat already. Sometimes the dinner hour would become complete mayhem, and I would laugh so hard I would have to leave the table, and the tears would run down the cheeks of my dear mother.”

Shadow seemed a natural comedian. He would walk past the university clock tower, look up to the man cleaning its face, and yell, “Hey, buddy, you wouldn't happen to have the time?” Once, while Elsie Knotts hosted a bridge party, Shadow walked into the bathroom, left the door ajar, and emptied an entire bucket of water into the toilet in a slow dribble, creating the impression of a ceaseless flow of urine. By the time he was done, the ladies at the bridge table were ashen.

Shadow's humor endured even when he was bedridden, which was often. During one such spell, Don asked him what was wrong; Shadow replied, “Everything I eat goes to my stomach.”

Whenever Shadow opened the door to leave the house, Don would beg him to stay. Once Shadow was gone, the family home would sink into despair. Don would escape the gloom “by filling my space with imaginary characters with whom I would act out some happy drama. This was my first stage and, I suspect, the beginning of my acting career.”

Don's other brothers were a mixed bag. Bill, seventeen years older, was off working for Montgomery Ward by the time Don entered adolescence, moving from place to place with the retail chain. By the standards of the Knotts clan, Bill was a staggering success. He would send money home to help keep the family afloat, supplementing his mother's meager income from renting rooms and sewing and cooking for students. Nonetheless, Elsie Knotts was compelled to sell her beloved upright piano one month to pay the rent.

Ralph “Sid” Knotts, the eldest brother, was another story. By the time of Don's birth, eighteen-year-old Sid already had run away from home, married, and fathered a child, who was discreetly dispatched to a grandmother on a family farm upon Sid's return. “Sid was a real hick,” recalled Richie Ferrara, Don's childhood friend. “Sid was the decadence of West Virginia. He was a coal miner and he was an alcoholic, and he'd go out and get drunk and come back and get mean. He'd get mean to Don. Sometimes he would attack him, abuse him, hit him.”

Between odd jobs, Sid brewed moonshine to survive. Don wondered, later, whether drink had damaged Sid's brain. Sober, he was a gentle soul, joining brother Shadow in high jinks at the dinner table. Drunk, he was a bully. Once, Don stumbled upon Sid in the house, drinking home brew with friends. Don thought of their mother and scolded Sid, “You can't be down here like that.” Sid raised the bottle and emptied it over Don's head. “Now I'm gonna tell Mama you've been drinking,” he slurred.

Sid would crash into the house after a midnight binge, singing, “Is it true what they say about Sidney?” to the tune of “Is It True What They Say about Dixie?” Then he would storm into the kitchen to clatter around and fry eggs, waking Don on his cot. When Don would protest, Sid would slap him across the face, saying, “Ha ha, get back down, you little brat.”

Between her sons' escapades and those of her boarders, Elsie Knotts spent countless hours policing propriety in her home. “I think my mother spent half her time chasing girls out of the rooms she rented to male students,” Don recalled, “to say nothing of my brothers' tarts. More than once as a youngster did I see a half-naked woman dive out a bedroom window, and my mother charging through the front door, broom in hand, in an effort to head her off at the pass.”

The Depression brought hobos, as well, and a steady parade passed through the Knotts home. Some would try to jump the rent by lowering their suitcases from the window. But some of the male boarders would show a paternal interest in Don, who was essentially fatherless, taking him aside and teaching him small amusements. An itinerant guitarist showed Don how to play the ukulele. A carnival barker revealed how he fleeced his customers.

Don spent many hours in his uncle's barbershop, a welcome escape from the perils of home. Uncle Lawrence, in some ways an antecedent to Mayberry's Floyd, would keep the customers laughing for hours with jokes and tall tales while Don sat and soaked it up. Lawrence would cut Don's hair for free, but only after the last paying customer had left.

Don feared Sunday church just as he feared his father's daily schizophrenic ravings at home. Church was a weekly spectacle of fire and brimstone; overwrought parishioners would work themselves into a froth of faith, speak in tongues, fall to their knees, and roll in the aisles, sweating and twitching and weeping. Don would watch the congregation shake and shudder and babble, plainly enraptured by the Lord, and he would sit and wait for the wave of divinity to wash over him, and it never did. He feared he was doomed to hell.

Finally, Don brought his fears to his mother. Elsie took him to see the preacher.

“It's all right, son,” the preacher said.

“But—I'm not feeling that thing that everyone's feeling,” Don said.

“Don't worry, son. You're saved.”

Jesse Knotts, Don's menacing father, died of pneumonia in spring 1937, at fifty-five. The family mourned; yet, after a time, it seemed to Don as if a bitter chill had lifted from the University Avenue house. His demon father exorcised, twelve-year-old Don began to come into his own, embarking upon that path of socialization and self-promotion that renders someone visible who has previously been invisible.

With Shadow often too sick to jest, bit by bit the role of court jester in the Knotts household passed from him to Don. His first performances reprised scenes from Laurel and Hardy films or Abbott and Costello routines from the Kate Smith radio show. Don would play them for his mother while she baked bread. She would laugh in all the right places and offer rich dollops of praise when he was done. She was his first fan. Years later, when an interviewer asked why a scrawny kid such as him thought he could make it in New York, Don replied, “Because my mother said I could.”