Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (20 page)

As news leaked of Don's impending departure, no one sounded entirely sanguine about the
Griffith Show
's future.
The New York Times
opined, “Just where the Griffith show goes from here is not certain.” Andy seemed to agree, telling the
Times
columnist, “The character I play is not one who gets into trouble by himself. So the show must introduce some new characters who either get themselves into trouble or get me in trouble—or else we won't have any story.”

Betty Lynn, who played Barney's on-screen girlfriend, was on the back lot in Culver City when Andy walked up and told her Don was leaving the show. “Whaddaya mean, he's leaving?” she gasped.

“I was really stunned,” Betty recalled, “because I knew that would be the end of me, too.” The
Griffith
producers suggested various ways Thelma Lou might remain in a Mayberry without Barney: Perhaps she could open a beauty shop and be a hairdresser. “But I didn't see that,” Betty recalled. “My whole life was for Barney.”

To others on the set, Don's impending departure seemed a natural move. “There was no rancor,” Ron Howard recalled. “It was just a decision that [Don] had to make and that Andy understood. It always kind of felt more like an inevitable graduation than any kind of abandonment and betrayal.”

Andy himself greeted the development with customary candor. “It's entirely impossible to replace Don,” he told columnist Vernon Scott. “I really dread the day when we make our last show together.”

Peter Baldwin, a handsome former Paramount contract player, arrived at the Desilu studios that winter to direct some memorable episodes. One of the few
Griffith
directors who remain alive, Peter remembers endless peals of laughter during script readings. He also recalled his surprise at seeing Andy reassign many of his funniest lines to Barney.

“Andy would get a huge laugh on some line,” Peter recalled, “and as we were going through the script on the second reading . . . he'd say, ‘Wait a minute, why don't you give that line to Don? He'll kill that line.' Because Andy wanted to remain the only sane person in Mayberry. He chose to give away the big laughs, often—not just once or twice a script, but often. And it was really generous of him, because as a comic, you don't give away the big ones.”

Andy was thinking like a producer. He knew that if he gave a funny line to Don, Don would make it funnier. And then the camera could catch a reaction from Andy, a deadpan nod or subtle furrowing of the brow, and that would get another laugh—all to the ultimate enrichment of his show.

But that relationship was about to end, and the writers on
The Andy
Griffith Show
continued to telegraph that reality. The episode “Barney Runs for Sheriff,” broadcast February 8, 1965, again contemplates the dissolution of Mayberry. Andy entertains another job offer, this one from a company that might take him to a place called South America. “Well, what about Aunt Bee and Opie?” Barney cries. “You know they don't speak a word of South American.

“. . . And what about
her
?” Barney asks, referring to Andy's on- and off-screen girlfriend.

“Who's her?”

“You know who's her!”

“Now, Barney, you know how things stand between Helen and me, and if they keep going the way they have been, I expect I'd send for her.”

“Oh, you're gonna send for her.”

“Yeah, I'm gonna send for her.”

“You gonna send for me, too?”

Barney finally persuades Andy to stay. Off-screen, Don was less successful in making the same case to his wife. The February 20
Los Angeles Times
announced, in Hedda Hopper's column, that Don and Kay Knotts had split.

“It's not easy to keep a secret in this town,” Hedda wrote, “but Don Knotts has managed to keep the news quiet that he and his wife of fifteen years have been living under separate roofs for the past six months.” Don “blamed ‘personal problems' for the rift but wouldn't name them.”

By 1965, Don was deeply involved with Lynn Paul, assistant to Dick Linke, Andy's manager. The tryst was the proximate cause for the split. “Karen heard them having really bad fights,” recalled Tom Knotts, their son. “But I never heard it, because they were having fights in the bedroom. So I never saw my parents mad at each other.” In front of the children, “they always got along really well. That was one of the good things.”

Kay decamped to an apartment in Westwood with the children, leaving Don in the Glendale family home. Their relationship remained civil, even tender. “I remember once, she was crying all night, and he came over and comforted her,” Tom recalled. “I think he really hated to leave, because he was giving up a lot. But he had issues he had to deal with.”

Meanwhile, back in Mayberry, the strain of Don's impending exit seemed to be taking a toll.

“The Case of the Punch in the Nose,” a spring 1965 teleplay, neatly contrasts Andy's philosophy of policing to Barney's. Andy is Mayberry's fixer, a man who steers every problem to its most sensible solution—even if the remedy falls outside the fine print of the law. Barney is the ultimate doctrinarian, following every regulation to the letter and oblivious to practical concerns.

In this narrative, Barney stumbles upon a minor assault case from two decades earlier and notes it is unsolved. Over Andy's strenuous objections, Barney reopens the case. He approaches the men involved, Floyd the barber and a neighboring shopkeeper named Charlie. Charlie says Floyd punched him in the nose. Floyd denies it. Barney rushes off to investigate further. His interrogations begin to stir things up; soon, noses are being punched all over Mayberry. Barney tells Andy the nose punching is “not our fault.” Andy hollers back, “No, it's not our fault. It's your fault! You started the whole blamed thing.”

Barney protests, “You mean because I was trying to get to the bottom of a case? Because I was pursuing my duty as a police officer? Because I was trying to be neat and orderly—”

“Aww, shut up,” Andy yells—and for the first time in all his dealings with his deputy, his voice rings with real hostility.

The April 24 issue of
TV Guide
served notice to the broader viewing public of the coming changes on the
Griffith Show
. The story, headlined “Trouble in Mayberry,” hypothesized that the program's very success had begun “to unravel the close-knit world of Mayberry.” First, Gomer Pyle had jumped ship to the Marines. Now the magazine was eulogizing Barney Fife.

“There was good old pie-bakin' Aunt Bee, and Taylor's all-American son Opie,” the story said. “But the real humor derived to a large extent from the relationship between solid, twinkly-eyed old Andy and his overly efficient, slightly paranoid deputy. . .” Clearly, a powerful friendship informed that onscreen rapport, imbuing every Andy-Barney scene with sparkle and warmth. As one colleague observed, “It's hard to tell, even on the show, where one stops and the other begins.”

The report theorized that Don took displeasure in seeing Jim Nabors decamp to his own series while Don remained in Mayberry. Don denied it. Yet, now Don was leaving, and Andy was staying. The
TV Guide
reporter tracked Andy down in his Desilu lair. He found the actor scowling over a script in his dressing room. Why, he asked, was Andy carrying on with the show? Andy replied without lifting his head from the page. “Didn't get any good film offers, that's why.”

Andy wanted to do movies, just as Don did; but he wanted to do serious movies, movies like
A Face in the Crowd
; and in 1965, no such roles were forthcoming.

Griffith
producers cast around for a potential replacement for Don. A series of talented comedians paraded through Mayberry in the final weeks of season five, including Don Rickles as a traveling salesman and Jerry Van Dyke, brother of the famous Dick, as the “Banjo-Playing Deputy.” Jerry's character tells Andy he was born in Morgantown, a gentle nod to Don.

Don's final appearance on the
Griffith Show
came in a comparatively anonymous episode titled “Opie Flunks Arithmetic.” Barney is reduced to a fringe character, the same space he'd occupied on his first
Griffith
episode, five years earlier.

It was customary for
Griffith
episodes to end inside the sheriff's office, with Andy and Barney reflecting on the day's events or unfurling a handwritten skit. At the close of this story, as Andy and Barney chat, Helen Crump walks in, seats herself rather provocatively on Andy's desk, and breaks up their conversation. She and Andy exchange glances. With an odd quaver in his voice, the sheriff asks Barney to step into the other room to fetch Helen a cup of coffee. Andy knows it is the last line he will speak to Barney. When Barney returns, Andy and Helen are gone.

Andy stood behind the camera and watched Don shoot his final scene. Then, cast and crew gathered for their customary wrap party on the soundstage. Don was presented with a gold Swiss watch. On the back was a large number 5 and the inscription “See, we thought we'd put 5 on it because you've been here 5 years.” Floyd the barber had uttered that line when Barney was presented with a stainless-steel watch by his Mayberry friends at the start of the season, in the episode “Barney's Physical.”

After a time, Andy looked up and saw the stage was empty, except for Don. “They're gone,” Andy said to Don. “We might as well go, too.”

They walked to their cars.

Andy said, “Well, call me sometime.”

Don replied, “Okay.”

11.

The Color Years

T
O VIEWERS
who tuned in for
The Andy Griffith Show
on September 13, 1965, it must have seemed as if Mayberry had somehow slipped clear into the next decade during the summer hiatus. Suddenly, the town fishing hole was rendered in full color: green pine trees, white boulders, shimmering olive-black water. Andy's gabardine sheriff's uniform was khaki, just as one might have expected. But Opie's hair was shockingly, almost iridescently orange. The comforting voice-over announcement was gone; and where, just a few months earlier, Opie had stood only as high as the buckle of Andy's belt, now he reached the sheriff's breast pocket.

The season-six opener, “Opie's Job,” was surreal. No explanation was offered for Opie's hair color, a revelation with vaguely unsettling genetic implications. And no account was given for the absence of Barney Fife. Viewers had learned, in the final episode of season five, that Andy's deputy was “away”—and that, it seemed, was that. The unexplained departure of such a major figure from a long-established television program would be almost unthinkable today; imagine Kramer simply vanishing from Seinfeld's apartment building one autumn. But the television industry treated audiences differently in the 1960s. Characters came and went. So, too, did the actors who portrayed them. Good-bye, Dick York; hello, Dick Sargent.

An odd sort of ontological crisis gripped
The
Andy Griffith Show
in its sixth season. Characters appeared and disappeared, arriving without introduction and departing without fanfare; the reassuring permanence of Mayberry and its inhabitants was gone. Lost, too, was the magical time-capsule realism of years past. Before, the doings of Floyd the barber and Goober the mechanic had seemed natural; now, they looked forced. Andy's hapless costars would be placed on a sidewalk bench like props, to frame the sheriff and exchange dialog that now sounded like lines from a script. The jokes were often flaccid, the smiles strained. And the color camera had an odd effect on Mayberry itself, rendering the town eerily, unnaturally clean. The Culver City exteriors now had a depopulated look, while the Desilu interiors looked almost like . . . sets.

The program still had its tender moments, particularly those shared between Andy and Opie; but the “slight thread of insanity” that had set
Griffith
apart was irretrievably gone. Beneath his makeup, Andy Griffith looked grumpy, forlorn, weary, a man performing by rote, mourning an unspoken loss.

The
Griffith
entourage minimized Barney's exit with the press, who viewed it as a potentially fatal blow. Years later, after Don's death, Andy conceded the truth to Larry King: “I missed him. I missed him so dreadfully, I can't begin to tell you. When Don left, the show lost its heart. It stayed on for three more years and was, in fact, number one for the whole year, the last year that it was on. But it really—it really lost its heart and its soul when Don left.”

“You didn't replace him with anyone?” Larry asked.

“We tried. It just didn't work.”

Dick Linke, Andy's manager, recalled the search for Barney's replacement: “It worried Andy and me. We could see going into the sixth year and having the ratings plummet. As soon as that happened, your fate was determined. You knew the show would be canceled. . . . The producers were scurrying around, saying, ‘We're going to try this person, we're going to try that person.' ”

Into the vacuum stepped Jack Burns.

Jack was a Boston native and had gotten his start in a comic partnership with George Carlin, which ended when both men opted for solo careers. Jack did a stint in Chicago's famed Second City comedy troupe, where he worked up a new act with mustachioed comedian Avery Schreiber. By 1965, Burns and Schreiber had issued an LP titled
In One Head and Out the Other
. One sketch cast Avery as a long-suffering cabbie and Jack as a bigoted conventioneer; here they crafted their signature comedic volleys, rapid-fire exchanges of “Huh?” and “Yeah.” In that context, it worked.

“Burns and Schreiber were appearing at a nightclub in San Diego,” Dick Linke recalled. “Andy flew down with producer Bob Ross and executive producer Sheldon Leonard with the idea of trying Jack Burns out on
The Andy Griffith Show
. The three liked what they saw, and Jack was hired.”

After dispatching Deputy Fife without comment, the
Griffith
producers rolled out his presumptive replacement in like fashion, without explanation. The stakes were sufficiently high that
Griffith
creator Sheldon Leonard stepped in to direct the episode himself.

“You like that fella you got workin' for ya?” Goober asks Andy in the opening scene of “The Bazaar.” The “fella” turns out to be one Warren Ferguson, a man apparently hired as Andy's new deputy between episodes. Deputy Ferguson appears in the next scene, measuring the distance from each car to the curb and picking up bits of litter from the sidewalk, then accosting Aunt Bee and ripping a grocery bag from her hands.

The new character played like an overwrought imitation of Barney. Where Barney invoked pity and poignance, Warren Ferguson merely annoyed. Don had played Barney as an earnest and excitable child; for all his delusions and vainglory, Barney ultimately charmed viewers with his native sweetness. Warren Ferguson had much of Barney's manic vigor, but none of his humanity. The overall effect was abrasive, unpalatable, and vaguely menacing; Deputy Ferguson comes off like a deranged Boy Scout, asking Opie, “You're a chip off the old block, aren't ya? Huh? Huh? Huh?” It doesn't help that Deputy Ferguson arrives in Mayberry with a thick Boston brogue.

No one seemed more vexed at Warren's arrival than the sheriff. Andy spends much of his screen time in “The Bazaar” training a withering glare on the new deputy.

“Warren, this is altogether unnecessary,” Andy tells Warren as he hauls in Aunt Bee for running a charity bazaar without a permit. He's talking about the permit, but he might as well be appraising the deputy's very presence on the show. Later, Warren returns to place the entire Ladies Auxiliary under arrest. It's classic Barney Fife overreach; the writers even have the gall to assign Barney's trademark “Nip it in the bud” line to Deputy Ferguson. Amid the contrived chaos, Andy shouts, “Will somebody please tell me what's going on?” His pained voice bears no trace of the patriarchal benevolence that had defined Andy's workings with Barney. He looks exasperated, and when he terms Warren “my idiot deputy,” he says it without mirth.

CBS suddenly found itself in need of damage control—with the viewing public, who might soon tire of a Barney-less Andy, and with the press, who eyed the program with growing suspicion. A makeshift solution arrived with an hour-long homage to the past—
The Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, Jim Nabors Show
. It aired in October 1965, the same month as the broadcast debut of Barney's replacement.

Andy and Don had remained close since the difficult on-air parting the previous spring, speaking and socializing regularly, neither man harboring resentment or hurt over the circumstances of Don's exit. Nonetheless, Andy probably approached the artistic reunion with mixed feelings. He loved working with Don, but by this time Andy was struggling to carry on the Mayberry brand alone. “This is the last time we'll work together,” he told a reporter—a tragic pronouncement, had it proven true.

Written by ex-
Griffith
producer Aaron Ruben, the special exploits the success of the nightclub act in Lake Tahoe the previous year. It presents Andy and Barney in a replica of the Mayberry sheriff's office, singing an old Cole Porter tune titled “Friendship.” The comedy duo proceeds into a live reenactment of the judo skit from the “Barney's Uniform” episode, and thence to a demonstration of Barney's skill with firearms. Few things on television in the 1960s were quite so funny as watching Barney Fife attempt judo. But when Andy and Barney reflect on their years together, there is nary a laugh in the house.

“The main reason I keep you around is because you're my friend,” Andy says. “I mean it, Barn, you're my closest friend. I don't know what this old office'd be if you weren't in it. You're like a brother to me, you know that?”

Silence falls; Barney, his back to the camera, breaks it by blowing his nose.

“You're not gonna cry, are you?”

“Aw, c'mon,” Barney sniffs. “Are you kiddin'?”

The special drew warm reviews, and the sight of Andy and Barney in color was a revelation. “After the laughs from this one, however,” the
Los Angeles Times
noted, “a great many viewers probably realized again how much they will miss these two together.”

Even as the Warren Ferguson experiment rolled on, the
Griffith
producers cast about for a new on-screen relationship to mine. One of the better season-six stories, “Andy's Rival,” plays off the very real chemistry between Andy and his Mayberry girlfriend, Helen Crump. Helen hosts an out-of-town visitor who is male, accomplished, and handsome. This triggers a new emotion in Andy: jealousy. The writers had finally found a foible in Andy Taylor.

Like many of the better
Griffith
episodes, this one mirrored real life. Aneta Corsaut collected friends, including former lovers. Her life, one article said, was “cluttered with old boyfriends.” Now, the
Griffith
writers assigned the same traits to Helen. At the start of the episode, the sheriff moans, “If anybody gets stuck with anybody, Helen always does.” Andy eventually confronts Helen about the ambiguous relationship. The resulting argument, heavy by Mayberry standards, was surely inspired by their off-screen liaison.

“You like him, don't you,” Andy snaps.

“What?”

“Frank Smith, that's what. You sure finished work early, didn't ya.”

“What are you accusing me of?” Helen asks haughtily.

Andy pleads, “I'm just trying to figure out where I stand. I mean, if you want to run with me, you can run with me, and if you want to run with him, you can run with him. Just kinda make up your mind,” he says, sounding like a wounded schoolboy.

“Yes,”—Helen affirms, veritably shaking with fury—, “I will decide with whom I will and will not run. . . . Who I go out with happens to be my own, personal—”

Andy cuts her off with an impassioned kiss.

“—I'll go out with whomever I please—”

Another kiss.

“—and what's more—”

Another kiss. And for one steamy moment, Mayberry is Peyton Place.

A three-week excursion to Hollywood marked another creative peak in the post-Don years. The pretext—that a Hollywood studio had worked up a movie based on Andy's life—was preposterous; yet, writers Sam Bobrick and Bill Idelson milked the journey for considerable laughs. And goodness knows Andy appreciated a three-week reprieve from his new deputy.

“Keep away from those starlets,” Helen coos to Andy as he departs in the opening episode, “Off to Hollywood.” It's an ironic request, given their off-screen situation. In midflight, Andy realizes he might have forgotten to turn off the gas back home. He raises his head and bellows, “Stewardess, what's the first stop?”

The next episode, “Taylors in Hollywood,” brims with Hollywood-insider jokes. On a tour of star homes, the Taylors stop and take a picture of Opie holding Cesar Romero's newspaper, recycling a gag about star worship from the first season. Then Andy's family visits the film set—and is appalled to find the sheriff portrayed by a bald-headed ass. Gavin MacLeod, future captain of
The Love Boat
, just might be the funniest guest star in
Griffith
history. His toupee-clad sheriff is a cross between Marlon Brando and some oily maître d', alternately tossing back his head and stage-punching desperadoes. Aunt Bee protests bitterly—until she learns her part will be played by a glamorous, rifle-toting blonde. “It's a movie, Andy,” she then scolds the sheriff. “They have to take liberties in order to make it interesting.”

The third episode, “The Hollywood Party,” exploits Andy's genuine discomfort with the opposite sex to fine comic effect. Sheriff Taylor is pressured into a photo op with the starlet who plays his girlfriend in the Hollywood film. The starlet, played by real-life glamour queen Ruta Lee, torments Andy playfully when he admits he's “never been in a lady's dressing room before.” She sidles over and coos, “You are a big one, aren't you,” a rather provocative line for a
Griffith
script. She scoots into his lap, then darts back up and asks, “Ooh, wait a minute, what's that?” For the briefest moment, viewers are left to ponder just what might be protruding from Andy's groin. It turns out to be Opie's autograph book.

Andy winds up in the starlet's apartment that night, on the pretext of taking her out to dinner. Her unabashed flirtation creates the faint impression that Andy might actually bed her. He doesn't, of course. But the sheriff has clearly committed the sin of lust, and Helen Crump treats him to a brutal tongue-lashing afterward. It was all an ironic twist on the reality: Aneta Corsaut was the sexy starlet and Barbara Griffith the gal back home, sulking in her housecoat.

The Taylors returned to Mayberry for a series of mediocre episodes, burdened with unimaginative scripts and a palpably dispirited Andy Griffith. The writers tried to reassign Barney's lines and traits to Warren Ferguson, with jarring results. Artistically,
The Andy Griffith Show
teetered on the brink. “I think
The Andy Griffith Show
, for me, jumped the shark when Don left,” recalled Sam Bobrick, one of the show's best writers from its later days. “It became situation comedy, and not at its best.”

The cast and crew braced themselves for the ratings decline . . . but none came.