Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (28 page)

Salvage 1
had already been approved as a series, so twelve more episodes aired in winter and spring of 1979. “I need this series,” Andy told an interviewer. “I've got to make it work.”

With
Salvage 1
, Andy happily resumed the brisk schedule of his
Andy Griffith Show
days, but with less booze and more sleep. He awakened at five thirty for a Moravian prayer, according to a
People
magazine feature, before turning to his script. He dressed and climbed into his '69 Rolls for the five-minute drive to the Burbank studio, where his RV awaited. Between setups, he snacked on crackers topped with peanut butter and mayonnaise. He sometimes indulged in a vodka gimlet at lunch. After work, he took a swim and worked out on the bedroom treadmill. He was generally in bed by nine o'clock.

With characteristic candor, Andy owned up to the interviewer that the previous decade had been one long dry spell: “I did five pilots that got nowhere, had two series that flopped. I went from pillar to post and became known as a character actor around town. A deep panic set in, mostly when I went down to North Carolina and after two weeks nothing came in the mail—no outlines, no scripts, no phone calls. The idea that the movie community was running along so beautifully without me—man, it drove me up the wall.”

Pitted against NBC's endearing
Little House on the Prairie
, Andy's
Salvage 1
did not fare well. The network waffled on a potential second season. Studio heads finally settled on half a season, but then they pulled the plug after six episodes had been filmed. Once more, Andy was out of work.

In summer 1979, Don's manager, Sherwin Bash, called with astonishing news: the producers of
Three's Company
, ABC's smash sitcom, wanted Don to join their cast.

By the late 1970s, coeducational living had spread from college campuses to urban apartments; yet, to many older adults, such domestic arrangements still shocked.
Three's Company
had pushed the boundaries of sexuality and good taste on prime-time television with a story built upon the tension among three platonic, mixed-gender, twentysomething roommates and their landlord, a man of Archie Bunker's generation. For landlord Stanley Roper to accept Jack Tripper as a new roommate for young lovelies Janet Wood and Chrissy Snow, Roper first had to be persuaded, ironically, that Jack was gay.
Three's Company
was otherwise a classic comedy of errors, with much of the humor arising from one character seeing or hearing some innocent exchange and investing it with sexual
double entendre
.

In the third year, the ABC producers persuaded Norman Fell and Audra Lindley to depart
Three's Company
for a spin-off titled
The Ropers
. The season ended without a landlord, and the producers spent the summer shopping for a replacement. They wrote a new character named Ralph Furley, a sort of anemic Hugh Hefner, a man two or three decades older than Jack Tripper but with all of Jack's romantic ambition. They auditioned hundreds of actors, looking for someone suitably vain, overwrought, and self-delusional—looking, in short, for someone like Don Knotts.

“Every day there would be this line of characters coming in. The line would get smaller, and eventually there would be no line, and no Mr. Furley,” recalled Kim Weiskopf, a
Three's Company
writer. “Finally they said, ‘Has anybody called Don Knotts?' ”

The producers were so sure of the casting that they did not subject Don to the customary audition. The network simply made him an offer.

In the decade since Don's fifth and final
Griffith Show
Emmy win, his star had only risen within the industry. Still, Don couldn't believe he was being invited to join ABC's hottest show. His new costars couldn't believe it, either.

“He was a legend in his own time,” recalled Joyce DeWitt, whose prim Janet was the closest thing to a straight man on
Three's Company
. “The first day he came in, we sat down to the table to read, and John [Ritter] and I are reaching over and pinching each other.”

The young actors didn't just know Don, they idolized him. “I was totally aware of the fact that the man had won five Emmys,” recalled Richard Kline, who played Jack's sleazy wingman, Larry. “And I had watched him in the old
Steve Allen Show
, so I was very familiar with the Nervous Guy.”

For all his accolades, Don was intimidated. He had never done a sitcom taped before a live audience, apart from a few failed pilots and guest appearances. Multicamera comedies demanded a different sort of acting from methodical, single-camera shows such as
Andy Griffith
. Much as the rest of the cast admired him, Don felt it was he who had to measure up. “Everybody was good, and I knew it,” Don recalled. “And everybody was a lot younger than me.”

He needn't have worried. When Don walked onto the soundstage for the first time, the audience applauded for “what seemed to be about ten minutes,” one producer recalled.

Don's first scene in “The New Landlord,” broadcast on September 25, 1979, has him enter the Regal Beagle—the neighborhood fern bar that serves as a secondary set on
Three's Company
—wearing a blue, patchwork polyester suit to match his eyes. He orders Scotch and root beer, does his trademark snort, and sips the drink. Then his eyes bug out and he chokes, “Could ya put a little more root beer in there?”

Ralph Furley approaches Janet and Chrissy. He means to introduce himself as their new landlord, but the women assume he is merely hitting on them.

“Guess what I am?” Don crows, after trying and failing to hoist his leg over the back of the chair.

“I don't have to guess what you are,” Janet sneers.

“Whatever he is,” Chrissy observes, “he's a funny-looking one.”

The trio milk the misunderstanding, Don assuring the ladies, “Just think how safe you're gonna feel when you go to bed at night, knowing I'll be sleeping right underneath you.”

Mayberry this was not.

Don's nerves subsided after a few episodes. His repertoire of facial tics was tailor-made for a program built upon misapprehension and shock. Don soon found he could keep pace—just—with John Ritter's frenetic, knee-cracking physical humor. “I was doing falls I'd never done before,” Don recalled.

Producers outfitted the aging swinger in a kaleidoscope of polyester. His arrival at the tenants' apartment would often be their first glimpse of what Don was wearing that week. “And God forbid you were the one who had to answer that door,” Joyce DeWitt recalled. “He would be standing there with absolute innocence on his face, knowing that he was about to kill you.”

Behind the macho bluster, Ralph Furley was a prude. In the episode “Chrissy's Hospitality,” broadcast November 13, 1979, Jack helps Chrissy install a shower curtain. Furley arrives and overhears the following exchange inside the closed bathroom, with mounting horror:

Jack: “Okay, Chrissy, I'll get in the tub with you, then we can get it on.”

Chrissy: “Get next to me, I'll show you what to do. . . . I don't think it'll reach.”

Jack: “Of course not, you've gotta unfold it first.”

The two emerge from the bathroom and encounter Janet, wearing a skimpy nightie. “Hey, what's goin' on?” she asks. “I thought we were all gonna go to bed together.”

Furley explodes. “Aha! I knew it! Now, you listen to me. This is a respectable place. No Roman orgies here, or else,” he cries, with a sweep of his hand.

Three's Company
ended its fourth season ranked second in the Nielsens. Don's star rose further during season five—at the expense of Suzanne Somers, who was gradually being written out of the show. Somers was in a public standoff with the network over pay; she began missing episodes. By season's end, her character was reduced to a humiliating weekly telephone conversation, as if she were in sitcom prison.

“They started writing a little looser for me, a little crazier stuff,” Don recalled. “That's when my character began to take off.”

Yet, Don empathized with Somers, who was, in his view, being punished for seeking a raise, a scenario Don himself had experienced a decade earlier with the producers of
The Andy Griffith Show
. He didn't like the way the rest of the cast was shunning her. One day, he strode up to John and Joyce and said, “Excuse me, I'm going to go talk to Suzanne.” Later, Don traveled to Las Vegas to help Somers launch her solo act.

By the time of
Three's Company
, Don's second marriage was on the wane. Son Tom returned from a trip to Europe in summer 1977 to find that his father had fled to an apartment in Malibu. “I've got a pad at the beach,” he explained to his son, sounding like a teenager himself.

Loralee recalled that she and Don had led “a much smaller life than most people would think,” keeping mostly to themselves. “Going out in places with the kids and me, that was hard, because he was basically a shy person. He did not like being trapped in public places. People expected him to be funny and tell jokes.” At such times, Don would beseech Loralee to fend off the crowds: “I've got a nice-guy complex,” he would say, “so you've got to be the bad guy.”

Don's neuroses had fed mostly on unfounded fears and phantom ills. Now, well into his fifties, Don faced a real and potentially crippling malady. On a trip to Hawaii around 1980, Don gazed out at the horizon from the hotel patio and told Loralee, “Gee, it's funny how it's so curly.” Doctors diagnosed macular degeneration, a deterioration of the retina that causes loss of sight in the center of the field of vision. In time, the disease would compromise Don's ability to read scripts and navigate sets.

For Don's marriage, this was a fatal blow. “When he started to lose his vision, I think he just panicked, and he started to live out some sort of bucket list,” Loralee recalled. Don began to stray. In spring 1984, she filed for divorce.

Andy had separated from his own second wife, Solica, well before their own 1981 divorce. The parting was bitter; Andy deeply resented handing over assets to Solica. “He never said a kind word [about her] after that,” recalled Quentin Bell, Andy's friend.

In 1978, Andy struck up a friendship with a lovely, elfin-featured dancer named Cindi Knight. Cindi was a high school English teacher—a real-life Helen Crump!—from Jacksonville, Florida, and a summer performer in Andy's beloved
Lost Colony
production. Cindi had joined the company in 1976 as a dancer. By 1978, she was an understudy for Eleanor Dare, the same part played by Andy's first wife, Barbara, almost three decades earlier. Cindi and Andy met at a volleyball game. Cindi was twenty-two, nearly three decades younger than Andy, whose age had not yet caught up with him. Over the next five years, Andy and Cindi would become inseparable.

Professionally, the 1970s ended in frustration for Andy with the failure of his
Salvage 1
series, and the next decade began with yet another setback. One day in early 1980, Andy climbed to the roof of the old Bing Crosby home to repair a leak. As he worked, Andy watched his tools slide down the roof. “Then, I started to slide off,” he recalled. I made one lunge for a big tree limb, missed, and hit the ground in a sitting position twenty feet later. I felt an extraordinary pain going through my whole body. Then, I passed out.”

The impact fractured Andy's back and shaved a quarter inch off his height. Bizarrely, Andy found himself hospitalized in the same wing as Barbara, his ex-wife, who was dying of cancer, according to Bridget Sweeney, daughter of
Griffith
director Bob Sweeney: “He said it was the worst karma he ever felt.” Andy visited his former spouse on her deathbed more than once, according to friend Quentin Bell, but Barbara didn't recognize him.

Barbara died on July 23, 1980, at fifty-three, of a brain tumor. It was a “rough death,” nephew Robert recalled, and the experience drove her daughter, Dixie, into a career of hospice care. Barbara's will instructed that her former husband not benefit in any material way from her passing, such was her ire for Andy at the end, according to nephew Mike King. The Griffith name does not appear on her tombstone. Andy was grateful that Barbara chose to leave her estate—most of it earned by Andy—to their children, Sam and Dixie.

Don was deeply moved at how Andy, in Don's view, had stuck by Barbara through the years of decline. Andy spoke well of her to the end. “She had some problems with alcohol,” Andy told an interviewer, years later. “And anyhow . . .” His voice trailed off.

For nearly two decades, Andy's career had been his life and Barbara's, too. He had lived those years “surrounded by himself,” as Barbara put it, and she never found a way back to the man she had married.

Andy spent several months in Manteo recuperating from his injury. When he returned to Hollywood, Cindi Knight followed. Andy and Cindi were now a couple. He helped her get a bit part in his next film.

Andy was cast in the NBC production
Murder in Texas
, a film treatment of a true-crime bestseller about the mysterious deaths of a celebrated Houston plastic surgeon and his wife. In yet another impressive cast, rugged Sam Elliott plays John Hill, the surgeon who discreetly poisons his wife (a ponytailed Farrah Fawcett) and runs off with his mistress (Katharine Ross, a decade past
The Graduate
). Andy portrays the vengeful father, who sacrifices everything to bring his former son-in-law to justice.

For his efforts, Andy earned an Emmy nomination, the only one of his life. Alas, he did not win. Andy told the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, “I've never won anything in my life and I don't expect to. I'm not angry about that.” He joked, “It would be nice to have one when my mother comes over, or a cousin comes to visit. But I can manage without it.”