Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (23 page)

“What happened?”

“She beat the crap out of me!”

Jim exploded in laughter, but then he looked at Don. “And he was damn serious,” Jim recalled.

For Lynn, it wasn't over. She continued to show up at the Universal studio, demanding an audience. Don had her barred from the set.

The Reluctant Astronaut
premiered in Houston on January 25, 1967. Two days later, en route to Dallas, Don learned NASA had lost three astronauts in a training exercise. The picture was quietly pulled and rereleased several weeks later. It was one of Don's best. A
Los Angeles Times
reviewer said Don's characters succeed because they “are never self-pitying no matter how dismaying the defeat.”

After three hits, the critics increasingly discussed Don as a potential inheritor to the grand tradition of milquetoast stars, a lineage that included Chaplin, Laurel, and Harold Lloyd. Don and Andy began to drop hints that they might make a movie together one day. “I'd like to start out doing at least one film by myself, sort of for my own ego, then maybe one or two with Don Knotts,” Andy told the
Chicago Tribune
, with typical candor.

The seventh season of the
Griffith Show
ended sadly, as cast and crew bid farewell to Howard McNear. Though only sixty-two, Howard moved and spoke like a much older man, his body racked by successive strokes. By his final episode, the painful “Goober's Contest,” Howard could no longer hide the symptoms of neurological decay. He died two years later.

Andy had planned to fold up the
Griffith Show
after season five, only to be lured back with the promise of money and ratings. As season seven wound down, he again mulled departing. The magic—and the fun—seemed to have evaporated along with Don. Now he fantasized about walking away into a film career, if only to show up the people who chalked up his continued success “to some nonsense that I was only playing myself.” But the network offered another $1 million, and Andy halfheartedly agreed to one more year.
I

Toward the end of his eight-year
Griffith
tenure, he confessed later, Andy would “come to work without knowing my lines.”

On June 4 at the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City, Don collected his fifth and final Emmy for the role of Barney Fife, honoring his work in season seven. This time, the award was clearly no slap in the face to the
Griffith Show
. The program itself reaped a nomination—for the first time since 1962—as Outstanding Comedy Series. And for the first time, another cast member took home an Emmy: Frances Bavier, for her regal efforts as Aunt Bee.

Don's Emmys were the one subject Andy would not broach with his old friend. In all their years together on the
Griffith Show
, Don later recalled, Andy never acknowledged Don's trophies or offered congratulations. It was too painful a topic.

As cast and crew reconvened to film the last season of the
Griffith Show
, the program seemed as popular as ever;
Griffith
would finish the 1967–68 season at No. 1 in the Nielsens for the first time. Pundits predicted Andy would be television's first star to leave his own series at the top. But Andy was finding it increasingly difficult to shield Mayberry from the changing world outside.

In May 1967, the black-owned
Los Angeles Sentinel
ran a story beneath the headline “Andy Griffith Explains No Negro Policy.” The NAACP had approached CBS to note the paucity of black citizens in Mayberry. The network responded in March by featuring the program's first credited black actor, Rockne Tarkington, as Opie's football coach in the otherwise forgettable episode “Opie's Piano Lesson.”

The damage control deployed, Andy answered his critics. “The problem we face is simple,” he told the
Sentinel
. “We have to remain honest to the types of people depicted in the small, rural town of Mayberry. . . . Put a Negro doctor in a town like Mayberry and the people most probably wouldn't go to him. A story like ours, which is set in a small Southern town, just naturally leaves itself open for problems—especially when the show is a comedy.”

Virtually all of Andy's supporting players were deeply flawed human beings, and much of the fun came from poking fun at the flaws. Hal, the lovable drunk; Floyd, the doddering barber; Goober, the dim-witted mechanic—the program could mock all of those characters partly because they were all white men.

In October, Don and Andy reunited for Don's first TV special, broadcast on CBS. The skits retold fictional events in Don's life. One cast his Nervous Man as a high school valedictory speaker: “Mr. Principal, faculty, fellow students, parents, and guests,” Don intones, trembling and twitching, “the theme of my address today is ‘Facing the Future without Fear.' ” In the touching final sketch, Andy and Don are two old men recounting bygone times. “You're like a brother to me,” Andy tells Don. “And I don't know what I'd do if I ever lost you as a friend. 'Cause you're the best friend I've ever had, too.”

Behind the scenes, producers of
The Andy Griffith Show
brokered a deal with its powerful sponsor, General Foods, whose principals were none too pleased to be losing a top-ten show. Word leaked in fall 1967 that
Griffith
would spawn a spin-off.

“The show has a simple premise,” Andy told the
Chicago Tribune
. “It's an exploration of what happens when a group of people with enormous love and enthusiasm for life come up against a staid sort of existence.” The operative word was
staid
.

The concept for
Mayberry R.F.D.
(the letters are a postal acronym for “rural free delivery”) came from Bob Ross, who had replaced Aaron Ruben as
Griffith
producer in season six. The star, Ken Berry, was furnished by Dick Linke, Andy's manager, ever eager to find work for his small stable of clients. In another sweet deal, Dick and Andy would own part of the spin-off. But it was a risky move nonetheless, one of the few instances in network history that a series essentially rebooted with a new central character.

Ken Berry, a song-and-dance man turned actor from Moline, Illinois, had made a name for himself on
F Troop
, a short-lived but effective sitcom set on a remote army outpost. Dick had signed him after seeing him perform sketch comedy on a Carol Burnett special. Ken joined the
Griffith
cast late in its final season as Sam Jones, a previously unseen Mayberry resident who happened to be—what a coincidence!—a lovable widower with a young son. Clearly, Mayberry could not carry on with two winsome widowers.

Andy, Opie, and Aunt Bee were gradually reduced to bit players in the final
Griffith
episodes, as the dramatic weight shifted to Ken's shoulders.

Amid the emotional final days of the
Griffith Show,
Andy and Barbara Griffith entertained a houseguest: Mike King, Barbara's nephew, now twenty-four and back from Vietnam in his navy lieutenant uniform. Mike greeted Barbara at a Beverly Hills hotel, where she was sipping cocktails with Margaret Linke, the wife of Andy's manager. “They were well into their drinks,” he recalled. When Mike and Barbara returned to the Griffith home, Mike found Andy at his wet bar. “He was smoking one Marlboro after another. He had definitely changed. He was not the guy I remembered from back in Manteo.”

When Mike had visited Andy and Barbara in the summer of 1962 on the Griffith estate, “they had their fights, but they still had fun together, and they were still pleasant to be around.” Now, it seemed to Mike that the distance between his aunt and uncle had widened considerably; whatever spark had ignited their marriage was gone. “Andy was just gloomy all the time, and there was this meanness. I'm sure they were fighting. I'm not sure it was physical. Barbara would break down and cry a lot. The alcohol was really much greater, and they were just not a happy couple.”

Later that year, Mike saw Barbara again at a beach house his parents owned at Salter Path, North Carolina. Everyone was drinking, he recalled, but Barbara was barely coherent. She kept disappearing into the kitchen. Curious, Mike followed her. He watched as she pulled out a valise and opened it, revealing two bottles of Canadian Club. She poured several ounces of the whiskey into a tumbler and knocked it back. Then, she repacked the valise and wobbled back to the party.

Barbara maintained her regal air, always reminding Andy's actor friends that she considered herself their equal. “We did the
Joey Bishop Show
one night,” recalled Ronnie Schell, Don's friend. “In those days, you did the show and you'd see the tape later that night. We went to the Villa Capri. And when we got there, I said to Barbara, who was in her cups, I said, ‘Barbara, when you see Andy tonight, you're going to be so proud of him.' And she looked at me and said, ‘Do you mind if I watch and judge for myself, Mr. Showbiz?' ”

Andy, too, was a prodigious drinker. During one of his dustups with Barbara, he put his hand through the windshield of one of his classic cars. Another time, as the two bickered in the food line at Lakeside Country Club, Andy suddenly seized the tablecloth beneath the food and ripped it away, sending food flying and pans clattering. “And nobody said anything,” Ronnie recalled. “He was Andy Griffith.”

It was a rare lapse. Andy was “a very big drinker,” Dick Linke recalled, but he almost never drank to excess when he was working. He had a volcanic temper—but it almost never erupted in public.

“He had two personalities,” Dick recalled. “One was laughable and affable. It was a joy. He was a joy. And the other side—he had a dark side that was unbearable. The worst. But you had to be there to know it.”

February 21, 1968, was the last day of shooting at the
Griffith Show
. The story, “A Girl for Goober,” was the 249th episode filmed. It was not the last broadcast; that honor would go to a listless story titled “Mayberry R.F.D.,” devoted almost entirely to farmer Sam.

“I felt strange this morning,” Andy told the reporters who dropped by to capture the moment. “It was the same when Don left, three years ago.” Each of the cast and crew looked “as if he had just finished running a thousand miles,” a reporter observed. Ronny Howard would return to the Burbank public schools the following Monday. Andy mused, “I don't know what I'll do next week.”

Just after four o'clock, the
Griffith
company filmed its final scene. “For one last time,”
TV Guide
reported, “Sheriff Andy Taylor stood silhouetted against the jail-cell mock-up on Stage 1 at the Desilu Studios, a six-pointed silver star pinned to the left breast of his gabardine uniform.”

The mood was wistful, and Andy struggled to stay in character. The crew needed just one take to capture his final line, a question posed to Goober about his date: “Are you gonna see her again?”

Then, Andy retreated to his dressing room and removed his badge.

That night, 251 guests converged on Andy's golf club in Toluca Lake for a wrap party. Don was there, along with Jim Nabors, Danny Thomas, and Sheldon Leonard, who took the stage and recounted the 1959 midnight meeting in New York where the program had taken shape. Dick Linke, Andy's manager, had organized the party and played master of ceremonies. Cast and crew presented Andy with an $800 twelve-gauge Beretta shotgun for his hunting trips and a silver cigarette case engraved with their signatures. An ad agency gave him a music box, its cover inscribed with the program's Nielsen ratings. It played the Earle Hagen theme song when you opened the lid. Guests arrived to the sounds of Les Brown's seventeen-piece orchestra and departed with key chains shaped like miniature Mayberry sheriff badges.

At fourteen, Ronny Howard had lived more than half his life on the
Griffith
set. “When we got to that wrap party,” he recalled, “here I was fourteen, had gone through puberty, and the last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of these people, and I was weeping openly.”

Andy was uncomfortable with good-byes. He kept his speech short. “Well, it's been awfully good,” he said, tears welling in his eyes. “It's been the best eight years of my life. I'll see ya again.”

12.

The Death of Andy Taylor

S
UMMER OF
1968 brought the release of
Wheels of Fire
, a psychedelic blues album by the British supergroup Cream with a swirling foil cover;
Rosemary's Baby
, a film about a woman impregnated by Satan; and
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
, Tom Wolfe's breathless new-journalism portrait of acid guru Ken Kesey. And for those content to dwell in the past, there was a new Don Knotts movie,
The Shakiest Gun in the West.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Don, Andy, and much of the Hollywood establishment found themselves suddenly struggling for currency. In the 1967 Emmys,
The Andy Griffith Show
had been bested by a virtually plotless, marijuana-fueled free-for-all called
The Monkees.
In 1968, the hot new show was
Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In
, a sexually and politically charged romp that took its title from hippie culture.

For Don's third Universal project, the studio wanted a remake of
Paleface
, a Bob Hope hit from twenty years earlier about a jumpy frontier dentist who winds up wed to a lady gunslinger. But Don sat down with writers Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum and “wrote an entirely different picture.”

At forty-two, Don found himself acting opposite Barbara Rhoades, a tall, voluptuous redhead who had just turned twenty and had amassed only one Hollywood credit, a forgotten Robert Wagner film called
Don't Just Stand There.
Don pressured the studio to fire her, thinking her inexperienced. But the studio refused, and Don made nice.

“The first night he came to pick me up, he took me out to dinner,” she recalled. “Of course he was hysterical. I always had tears running down my face, because I was undisciplined at that age.”

Barbara was touched at how Don attended to her welfare. He didn't like to see her anywhere near a horse or wagon, a tall order on the set of a western. Don himself was terrified of stunts and mistrustful of directors. He walked up to Barbara on the set once and hissed, “Get . . . out . . . of . . . that . . . buckboard! Are you crazy? You're gonna get hurt!”

Slackening social mores permitted Don and the writers a bit more latitude in scripting the film's seduction scene. Barbara slinks into Don's chamber and coos, “I'm sorry to bother you like this, but I have a terrible toothache,” as Don's gaze drifts down toward her cleavage. “Is it in your mouth?” he stammers.

Don stumbles and fumbles around his patient, dropping his dental mirror down her dress.

She grabs his wrists and pulls his face toward hers. “You know what I think?” she purrs.

“Mmm-mmm,” he replies in a tiny voice.

“I think you're very nice.”

“You know what I think?” he sputters weakly. “I think I might faint.”

The Shakiest Gun
was ignominiously paired in a double feature with the disaster film
King Kong Escapes
. The
Los Angeles Times
detected an inferior script. “However, Knotts himself is so good it's a delight to watch him work even when he doesn't have as much to work with as he usually does,” the reviewer concluded.

The film was a hit, Don's third in a row. But when the time came for the next picture, Don and his studio decided it was time to update his image. They seized upon Jim Fritzell's concept for a spoof of Hugh Hefner and
Playboy.
Sadly, Jim and his partner weren't available to write Don's script; they were probably busy writing Andy's. (Andy's first Universal feature,
Angel in My Pocket
, was also in the works.)

To replace them, Don recruited Nat Hiken, the writer-producer behind
The Phil Silvers Show
and
Car 54, Where Are You?
Nat rivaled Don as a perfectionist and workaholic. He wrote and rewrote scenes so many times that Don found there was no point in reviewing them until the screenplay was finished.

Nat's script for
The Love God?
strays far from the classic Americana of Fritzell and Greenbaum. The story is a farcical commentary on the hormonal hysteria of Beatlemania and the hypocrisy of the sexual revolution. Don portrays the provocatively named Abner Peacock, publisher of a bird magazine,
Peacock
. The script seizes every opportunity to profit on the double entendre through such lines as “I'm sure that after our efforts here tonight,
Peacock
will remain safely in Abner's hands.”

A Larry Flynt–styled pornographer dupes poor Abner into retooling
Peacock
as smut, and Don's character evolves into a velvet-sleeved Hefner parody. For Don, the Hollywood lothario, that wasn't much of a stretch. Rat Packer Dean Martin reportedly once said of him, “Frank and I get all the publicity, but this little guy gets all the girls.”

The Love God?
pays faint homage to Don's
Griffith Show
past. As the camera pans across Abner's hometown near the start of the film, the choir at Peacock City Community Church sings “Juanita,” the song Barney Fife once warbled over the telephone line to his unseen waitress paramour. As Abner squires scantily clad women around the big city, the preacher's daughter sits back home in Peacock City, awaiting his return on a front porch that looks very much like Andy Taylor's. That role went to Maggie Peterson, a wide-eyed Coloradan who had played hillbilly daughter Charlene Darling on the
Griffith Show
. Maggie was part of Dick Linke's stable of stars and not-quite-stars. Don doted on her. “I came out of the dressing room one day and there was an extra sitting in my chair,” Maggie recalled. “So, Don went up to the person who was sitting in my chair and told him to get out so I could sit in my chair.”

With five films now under his belt as leading man, Don Knotts seemed poised to join the top tier of Hollywood comedians.

Andy Griffith, too, found himself at a professional peak, albeit one of a more pecuniary sort. In the previous year, manager Dick Linke had secured Andy $1 million for three CBS variety shows and another million for the final season of
Griffith
. Looking ahead, Andy's film deal with Universal would generate two films a year for five years and a minimum paycheck of $2 million, plus a third of the net profits. “This is big business,” Dick told
TV Guide
.

Andy Griffith sat at the center of a Dick Linke empire that now encompassed nearly everyone and everything Andy knew—with the notable exception of Don. According to a
New York Times
account, Don had once asked Dick to manage him, back on the set of
No Time for Sergeants
, and Dick had turned him down. Decades later, Dick recalled no such episode. In any case, Don and Dick apparently enjoyed a cordial relationship throughout the
Griffith
and post-
Griffith
years.

Dick managed ten clients. Andy, the “big A,” sat atop the heap, followed, in rough order of marketability, by Jim Nabors, Ken Berry, Bobby Vinton, Jerry Van Dyke, and the rest. Three of them, including Andy, lived within a short drive of Dick's North Hollywood home. Dick found his clients housing, helped them purchase birthday presents and life insurance policies and write wills, procured cars and jewelry and furs, and oversaw a cottage industry of side businesses launched in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including a chain of Andy Griffith Barbecue stands and “Friends and Nabors” mobile homes. Dick managed just one female client, Maggie Peterson. “Who wants to worry about their hair, or carry fifteen suitcases?” he told an interviewer.

As an overcaffeinated Hollywood manager, Dick seemed straight out of central casting. “I remember him crying at his father's funeral,” recalled Ronnie Schell, one of Dick's clients. “And as he was crying, he was checking his watch to see how long the ceremony was going to last.”

TV Guide
detailed the workings of “The Wondrous Andy Griffith TV Machine” in a July 1968 cover story: “Day-by-day operations of a complex structure involving six separate corporations are conducted behind the poker face of Linke, a former publicity man whose thinning hair is trimmed each week by a shapely female barber. He hunches in a Naugahyde judge's chair, responding to incessant jarring buzzes which signal incoming phone calls—the fuel that fires the machine. They are relayed by either of his two secretaries to any one of 11 extensions illuminating his desk-side console.”

Dick and his chauffeur drove the reporter to Andy's Toluca Lake estate, where they discussed casting plans for the maiden project of Andy Griffith Productions, Inc., a film titled
Angel in My Pocket
.

“Right down the middle for the masses,” Dick told the reporter, channeling Lonesome Rhodes. “Give me the rest of the country, the mashed-potato belt. You can have New York and Los Angeles.”

Andy gathered his Mayberry entourage around him for his first Universal feature, using much the same formula—and many of the same people—Don had tapped for
his
first Universal feature, three years earlier. He employed
Griffith
director Alan Rafkin,
Griffith
writers Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, and
Griffith
actors Jack Dodson, Maggie Peterson, and Al Checco. He also used Don's producer, Ed Montagne. For comic relief, Andy retained Jerry Van Dyke, his Dick Linke stablemate. For a love interest, he found Lee Meriwether, a lovely former Miss America who had played the villainous, leather-clad Catwoman in the first
Batman
movie.

Lee had first met Andy on Coldwater Canyon Drive, where she found him one day, standing beside his car. “He was parked on the side of the road and there was a drop-off. It was very strange; I thought, ‘That's Andy Griffith!' ” She parked and walked over to greet him. “I'm sorry to bother you,” she said, although she couldn't discern precisely what she was interrupting. They spoke for a few minutes, then Lee departed. Now, a year later, Lee was summoned to meet with Al Rafkin to read for a part in
Angel in My Pocket
. “It's so nice to see you again,” she told Andy. She was rewarded with a blank stare.

Andy plays Samuel Whitehead, a new minister assigned to a parish in a small town filled with mean spirits, small minds, pettiness, and hypocrisy. In many ways, Wood Falls, Kansas, is the antithesis of Mayberry, where small-town Americana is idealized and celebrated. In this film, it is scorned. Sam labors to rebuild the dilapidated church and, by extension, the town itself, but he is thwarted at every turn. Only when the church burns to the ground do the townsfolk embrace him.

The film is shot in the harsh, vérité style of its era; young marrieds Andy and Lee look sweaty, and Lee wobbles around with a prosthetic baby bump. (“Well,” Andy consoled the actress, “at least you'll get a seat in the commissary.”) Still, they emanate a gentle chemistry.

Kay Medford, the seasoned character actress who played Lee's mother, approached her on the set one day and said, “You like Andy a lot, don't you? Don't fall in love with him.”

“What do you mean? I love my husband.”

“You can fall in love with them on the screen. You look like you love him.”

“Well, good. That's what I'm acting for.”

After eight years on
The Andy Griffith Show
, Andy wanted to do drama. But the studio wanted
Angel in My Pocket
to replicate the gentle comedy of
Griffith.
The result was a gentle satire, capably acted and deftly written—but hardly a bold artistic statement.

Back at CBS, there were signs that the Wondrous Andy Griffith TV Machine was beginning to misfire. As the filming date neared for the first episode of
Mayberry R.F.D.
, CBS executives grew restless over the artistic direction of the spin-off. The plan called for the network to simply rebroadcast the final episode of the
Griffith Show
as a pilot for
R.F.D.
In that episode, farmer Sam welcomed a quirky family of Italians onto his Mayberry farm, setting the stage for rural Italo-Carolinian high jinks.

But now the network was having second thoughts about retiring the familiar ensemble of Mayberry characters to make way for the Italians. With lovely Letícia Román strutting around the kitchen of the Jones farm, there would hardly be room for Aunt Bee. In an about-face, “the network now demanded a carbon copy of the
Griffith Show
that would enable viewers to identify with their old Mayberry favorites,”
TV Guide
reported in July 1968.

CBS unceremoniously dumped the Italians.
Mayberry R.F.D.
would be populated with as many Mayberry regulars as could be rounded up. No one bothered to mention the changes to Ken Berry, the star of
Mayberry R.F.D.
“I talked to [Letícia Román] over the phone one day because I hadn't heard from her,” Ken recalled. “And she was very quiet.”

The pilot of
Mayberry R.F.D.
, when it finally aired, played more like a lost final episode of
The Andy Griffith Show
. The script neatly settled the affairs of Andy, Barney, Helen, and Aunt Bee, all of whom gamely returned for the episode. The main event was the long-awaited wedding of Andy to Helen.

In the opening scene, Andy coughs up a characteristically unromantic toast to his bride: “If I know the lady I'm marrying, and I should, then the years ahead should be no letdown.” From there, the pilot settles into a retread of the
Andy Griffith
premiere from eight years earlier. Widower Sam invites Aunt Bee out to the farm to help him raise his son, who is clearly being groomed to replace the pubescent Opie. Aunt Bee threatens to flee, but she finally succumbs to the charms of the widower and his towheaded lad.

The episode is polished, professional, and unremarkable—until Andy is reunited with Don, and then some of the old magic returns. When the preacher asks the assembled to speak now or forever hold their peace, best man Don unwittingly clears his throat, bringing the ceremony to an awkward pause. When the preacher asks the couple to join hands, Barney thinks the instruction is meant for him. Then, he cannot locate the ring. He rips at his pockets, bug-eyed, as Andy and Aneta struggle to maintain their composure. When the newlyweds retreat down the aisle, Barney rushes forward to join them, clasping Andy's shoulder and waving to the audience. Helen is aghast; Andy just smiles.