Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (31 page)

“There good money in it?” Matlock asks.

“Ate chop suey and wore lizard-skin shoes every day,” Les replies.

Les
sounded quite a bit like
Jess
, the name Andy called Don when they weren't acting. Don called Andy's character
Benj
, a close cousin of
Ange
.

Andy worked harder on this script than on any of the forty-eight that had preceded it. He leavened it with touches of the gentle country humor that he and Don had brought to the
Griffith Show
: no punch lines, just whimsical exchanges and bits of observational humor. In one memorable line, Matlock tells his graying friend, “You ever notice, when guys our age talk about the war, nobody asks which one?”

Matlock
was hard work for Don, too. Rising at dawn was no easy task for a man who had fallen into a largely nocturnal existence.

Don's presence strained
Matlock
's
sturdy formula, just as Joel Steiger had predicted. Yet, it was the most fun either Don or Andy had had on a Hollywood set in a good long time.

For the season-four premiere, in fall 1989, Andy indulged another fantasy, bringing the cast and crew of
Matlock
to Manteo.

Andy's relationship with his longtime summer residence had evolved. In the fifties and sixties, he and Barbara had frolicked with other young couples in the sand and surf. In the post-Barbara seventies, Andy had partied with the boys. Now, ensconced with Cindi and slowed by age, Andy mostly kept to himself, walled off within his forest compound, living quietly and privately, though he still popped into Edward Greene's Christmas Shop or the local Ace Hardware from time to time. When autograph seekers appeared, it was usually Cindi who politely shooed them away. Most locals knew better than to approach them.

“We always gave Andy space,” Edward Greene recalled. “When Andy wanted to shop on his own, he'd call me and he'd come in at eight o'clock, while my staff was vacuuming the shop and we were preparing to open.”

Now, Andy persuaded the
Matlock
producers to film on location in the Outer Banks. Andy hired locals as crew and extras. “Everyone was vying to be cast in something, and a lot of them were,” Edward Greene recalled. “It was the biggest thing that ever happened in the town.”

“The Hunting Party,” a story probably inspired by Andy's own excursions into the Carolina woods, captured scenes at the beach in Nags Head and on
The Lost Colony
grounds. In the closing scene, Andy's real-life friends surround Matlock and demand photos, an ironic moment for all involved.

Toward the end of 1989, Andy took a call from Lee Greenway, his old friend. Lee said Frances Bavier was dying, and she wanted to talk to Andy. Frances had fallen out of touch with most of her old Mayberry colleagues. Ron Howard had once gone so far as to leave a note on the door of her Siler City home, never hearing a reply. Aunt Bee's relationship with Andy had been chilly for years, but they mended it the day Andy telephoned.

“I'm sorry we didn't get along better,” she told him. “It was my fault. I wish we had.” Frances died in December, the first of the principal
Griffith
actors to perish. She left a house in Siler City filled with fourteen cats, and a Studebaker with four flat tires. No one from the
Griffith
cast attended her service.

The next year, Tanya Jones of the Surry Arts Council, a nonprofit based in Andy's birthplace, attended an auction of the Bavier estate. A tall man walked up, recognized her Mount Airy name tag, and introduced himself as Jim Clark, leader of The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club.

At the dawn of the 1990s, Mayberry nostalgia was a booming business. The
Griffith Show
was airing on more than a hundred stations, including “superstations” WGN and TBS, saturating the nation. The typical fan was a man of Opie's baby-boom generation, earnestly videotaping his favorite childhood show so he could share it with his own children one day.

Jim told Tanya he was assembling a cast reunion in Charlotte to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the first
Griffith
episode. He asked her whether Mount Airy planned a similar observance. “I said that we absolutely were,” Tanya recalled. In truth, there was no plan. Tanya returned to Mount Airy and began work on an event. Thus was Mayberry Days born.

The Charlotte cast reunion was set for Saturday, September 29, so Tanya selected Friday, September 28, as Mayberry Day. “We had zero budget—zero budget for an unknown event,” she recalled. “We didn't have hotels then. We didn't have tourism support then. The infrastructure was not there.” Her expectations were correspondingly low. Then came a story in
The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, noting the new festival in Andy's hometown. “I started getting phone calls from
TheWashington Post
,
The
Baltimore Sun
, all these major newspapers.”

The Mount Airy of 1990 lay largely untouched by time or tourism. Shop windows displayed few references to Andy Griffith or his show, and the telephone book held only a modest number of Mayberrys. The Snappy Lunch, one of Andy's teenage haunts, was very nearly the only surviving business that had ever been referenced on
The Andy Griffith Show
. But something in all that was charming, authentic. And in 1990, many still-living Mount Airians had genuine Andy Griffith stories to share.

By the time the press and the public rolled in, shopkeepers had dutifully pasted photographs of Andy and Barney all over the historic downtown, and Russell Hiatt's barbershop had been rechristened as Floyd's. The city paid $1,400 for a vintage 1962 Ford Galaxie and had it detailed to resemble Andy Taylor's squad car.

A couple hundred people gathered outside the old city hall for the opening ceremony, joined by a phalanx of reporters. Mount Airy's mayor arrived gamely dressed as Mayor Stoner, his Mayberry counterpart, and members of the Mount Airy High School chorus sang the
Andy Griffith
theme a cappella while snapping their fingers.

The next day, Jim Clark's fan club hosted twelve hundred Mayberry fans in Charlotte for a cast reunion, billed as the largest public gathering of its sort to date.

Andy attended neither event. “He's not doing any interviews,” manager Dick Linke barked to the
Washington Post
. “He just can't be there, and he doesn't have time to talk about it.”

Tanya Jones and her bluff would spawn an $80 million tourist industry in little Surry County, with 95 percent of it lavished on Mount Airy.

Matlock
remained a consistent top-twenty draw through five seasons. NBC's sales department would target the series from time to time because of its graying fan base; the demographic squabbles that had pulled
Mayberry R.F.D.
off the air two decades earlier had not yet subsided. But Dean Hargrove and, later, Joel Steiger managed to fend off the attacks, emboldened by the ratings.
Matlock
was becoming a part of popular culture. For good or ill, Andy and his program became synonymous with the oversixty crowd, a point frequently noted on the irreverent animated sitcom
The Simpsons.
I

In
Matlock
's
fifth season, Andy Griffith began broadcasting his intent to leave the program the following spring. “I'm financially comfortable. I'm in my sixties, and there's no reason to stay around,” Andy told
TV Guide
. For anyone old enough to remember, it was a familiar routine. Andy had threatened to leave
The Andy Griffith Show
in season five, and again in season seven, before actually exiting after season eight. Each time, CBS had offered a staggering sum, and Andy had stayed.

Now, NBC executives persuaded Andy to return for another season of
Matlock
, promising him more latitude to break with the courtroom-drama formula and inject his own gentle comedy into the scripts.

But
Matlock
lacked the cachet of
Griffith
. In the spring of 1991, Andy learned his program had been left off the schedule for that fall.
Matlock
had been relegated to the status of a relief pitcher, idling in the bull pen and awaiting a spot in the lineup. Fresh from that insult, fashionista Mr. Blackwell placed Andy on his worst-dressed list. Cindi clipped the article from
TV Guide
, hoping Andy wouldn't see it. By October, two flagging NBC shows were out and
Matlock
was back in. Once again, Andy vowed that the season would be his last, and the complicated dance played on.

Cindi Griffith was a regular and welcome presence on the
Matlock
set, keeping Andy company and fussing about his health. “She was his greatest fan; she adored everything he said,” costar Nancy Stafford recalled. “She laughed continuously. I felt he had a little extra lilt in his step when she was around. She protected him, in a wonderful way that you would want your spouse to protect you.”

Andy, in turn, fussed over Don. “Don's eyesight was failing,” Dean Hargrove recalled, “and Andy was enormously protective of him. I think we had oversized scripts made.” It was the same impulse that had driven Andy, three decades earlier on the
Griffith Show
, to demand that Don have his own seat at the writing table.

Nancy Stafford recalled a “crackle of excitement” when the cast and crew knew Don would be joining Andy for a
Matlock
episode. “That was one of those rare occasions when people from other soundstages, from other shows, would start migrating toward our stage. You had executives coming from the Black Tower at Universal.”

Off the soundstage, Andy and Don would fall into their old
Griffith
routines. “Their off-camera antics were just hysterical,” Nancy recalled. “They had been together so long. They knew each other's rhythms. They fell into this kind of banter. Nobody could make Andy laugh like Don. They would start singing. They would do these little riffs.”

Some of the fun came at Don's expense. Once Andy, in his trailer, took one of
Matlock
's neckties and whipped it at Don's posterior, over and over, shattering his quiet dignity. Another time, Don's hand accidentally brushed against the hindquarters of a female costar. He swiftly apologized. Andy broke into a devilish grin and said, “Now, Don, you've gotta know the rules around here.”

Backstage, Andy would rant to Don about the simmering conflict with his producers. When Andy would offer rewrites, the producers received them coolly, ever fretful that Andy was trying to turn
Matlock
into
The Andy Griffith Show
. Andy would ask Don, “When did the accountants get control of show business?”

Don and his manic energy had often carried the
Griffith Show
. Andy just as surely carried
Matlock
, appearing in nearly every scene and speaking half the lines. It seemed to Don that Andy had grown more serious, and more grandiose, in his autumn years. Finally, a quarter century after
Griffith
, Andy again dwelled at the center of his own hit show.

At the close of
Matlock
's sixth season, the character of Les Calhoun was quietly retired. Don and Andy conceded what the producers had thought all along. “It didn't work,” Andy recalled. “
Matlock
wasn't like the
Griffith Show
. You couldn't stop for these little comedy scenes that didn't go anywhere.”

By the 1990s, Don's habit of medicating himself to sleep had escalated into a ritual that sometimes blurred the lines between night and day: he was sinking into a retread of the cycle of insomnia and pills that had nearly destroyed him before he ever reached Hollywood. One afternoon in spring 1991, Francey came home and found she couldn't awaken Don. He had just changed from one brand of pills to another, more toxic variety. This time, he had inadvertently taken a few too many.

Francey dialed 911. Rescuers rushed Don to the hospital, where he awoke an hour later. Still groggy, Don tried to convince the doctors it was a fluke. Francey persuaded them Don needed an intervention. They marched her into his room to deliver an ultimatum: “I told him that if he didn't stop, that I would go.” She expected resistance, even defiance. Instead, Don gazed back with a look of relief and said, “Okay.”

“It was the strangest reaction I ever saw in my life,” Francey recalled. “My guess is, he needed something to stop him.”

Upon his release, Francey said, sixty-six-year-old Don “became a different person. In the morning, instead of being exhausted and not in the best mood, he'd sing—and sing—and sing. Songs I'd never heard. ‘The bears went a-huntin' . . .' No more pills. Never touched a drop of alcohol again for the rest of his life.”

Don started swimming daily and resumed golfing regularly. He abandoned many of his favorite restaurants after realizing he'd patronized them only for drink; the food wasn't all that good. He broke off his thirty-year association with psychiatrist Dick Renneker, the man responsible for breaking Don's pill addiction three decades earlier. Don never saw a therapist again.

“It was the same guy, but he looked healthier and ate better,” recalled Stella Berrier, a longtime friend. “[Francey] turned his life around. . . . Every time he felt like ‘Woe is me,' they'd get in a car and drive to Las Vegas and laugh all the way. She could bring him out of any mood.”

Brandon Tartikoff, the NBC executive who had sparked Andy Griffith's television revival, left the network in 1991. His replacement, Warren Littlefield, set about “building for the future.” He immediately targeted
Matlock
and
In the Heat of the Night
, both popular crime shows headed by aging stars.
Matlock
ranked fortieth among 123 network series at the time;
Heat
, starring
All in the Family
's Carroll O'Connor, was tied for twenty-eighth. Warren offered Andy a graceful exit: six two-hour
Matlock
movies over the next three years. “I don't think Warren Littlefield ever liked the show,” Andy quipped.