Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (32 page)

Andy and Cindi had lunch with Fred Silverman, the man who had created
Matlock
along with Dean Hargrove. With little to lose, Andy negotiated to move the production from Hollywood to Wilmington, NC, a short plane ride from his Manteo estate. The series could be produced cheaply within the burgeoning North Carolina film industry, and Andy and Cindi could begin a gradual retirement to Roanoke Island. Andy asked that new characters be added to the cast, reducing his weekly dialogue chores and seeding more comedic subplots. NBC passed, but Fred Silverman easily sold the concept to ABC.
Matlock
was still a top-forty series, after all.

Notably absent from the meeting was Dick Linke.

Andy had once seemed closer to Dick than to his wife Barbara; Dick demanded such intimacy. Now, Andy was going to Cindi for counsel. The brush with mortality at the start of their marriage had forged an intense bond. People on the
Matlock
set felt a palpable tension between Cindi and Dick, who had become a third wheel. “I'd fire him,” Andy once told Don, “but it'd be like putting a bullet in his head.”

In December 1991, Andy called a meeting with Dick at their beloved Lakeside Golf Club. Dick knew what was coming. “Andy,” he said, “let me tell you something. I've worked hard in this business. I've been in it longer than you have. Now, at my stage in the business and in my life, I can handle everything. I can handle everything but one thing, Andy: pillow talk.”

Andy considered Don his best friend. But for decades of Andy's life, Dick had been his closest confidant. Andy once told an interviewer, “If it hadn't been for Dick Linke, there would be no Andy Griffith.”

Back in 1961, the two men were walking along Seventh Avenue in New York when Dick told Andy their seven-year management contract had lapsed. He asked whether Andy would sign another. “Contract?” Andy replied. “You don't need a contract with me. You have a contract for life.”

Now, three decades later, Dick sat across the table from Andy wearing a gold ring on his right hand, a recent present from Andy, with the number 35 etched on its face, for thirty-five years together. None of Andy's wives or girlfriends had ever come between them—until Cindi. “She wanted to take over,” Dick recalled. “And that's what happened. And I was crushed.”

Some of Andy's friends sensed his intense bond with Cindi had driven a wedge between Andy and his children, as well. The truth may be more complicated. The relationship between Andy and his children had played out along the lines drawn in his divorce settlement with Barbara, two decades earlier. Barbara got Dixie; Andy got Sam. The younger Griffith idolized his famous father but chafed at the pressure that came with being his son.

“That's why he drank,” said Mike King, Barbara's nephew, of the younger Griffith. “It had to be a rough, contentious relationship, Andy being the dominant guy that he was.”

Sam descended into alcoholism. Andy eventually cut off contact, telling friends he had emotionally disinherited his son. In September 1992, a California judge placed thirty-three-year-old Sam on probation after he admitted beating his pregnant wife, weeks after their wedding. The union was clearly dysfunctional; Sam's wife claimed he had kicked her in the stomach, while Sam alleged her bruises were the result of a car crash. They swiftly divorced.

Andy and Dixie had a loving relationship. But he saw little of Dixie in his grandfather years, largely due to his busy life with Cindi and his hectic schedule on
Matlock.

By the time filming commenced in Wilmington, in summer 1992, the cast and crew of
Matlock
scarcely resembled the company first assembled six years earlier. One change was the exit of Dean Hargrove. He and Andy had suffered what Dean tactfully termed a “falling out” over Dean's waning attention to Andy and his show. Dean was busy with other projects, and Andy felt “that I had abandoned him,” Dean recalled. “He had put me on a very high pedestal to begin with, and when you're on a high pedestal, there's nowhere to go but down.”

At the start of 1993, Andy and Don reunited for another round of Mayberry nostalgia. In his autumn years, Andy seemed to be warming to the thought of honoring his past. The gang gathered at Disney-MGM Studios and then traveled to Wilmington, Andy's
Matlock
home base, to tape
The Andy Griffith Show Reunion
. Broadcast in February on CBS, it was the first full-blown gathering of
Griffith
principals since
Return to Mayberry
in the previous decade. The show opened with a medley of celebrity Mayberry buffs whistling the theme song, including actor Burt Reynolds, country crooner Randy Travis, and pitcher Nolan Ryan.

Craig Fincannon, Andy's old friend, witnessed a stirring moment in Wilmington that never made it to the screen: “I saw Andy walk over to the sound operator and whisper something to him. And he gathered everybody around, and he said, ‘Don, come here.' And Don walked over, and we all crowded around the monitor. And Andy said to the group, ‘This is the greatest moment of television comedy ever recorded.' And he told the guy to hit play. And he started to play the preamble-of-the-Constitution scene with Don,” from an old
Griffith
episode. “And Don had to take off his glasses and get about five inches from the monitor to see it. And Barney started, ‘We the P—, We the P—,' and everybody in the whole group was absolutely cracking up. And Andy was standing behind Don. And I watched Andy watching Don. And Andy cried. And it was tears of laughter.”

As
Matlock
neared its end, Andy filmed a pair of TV movies and joined Leslie Nielsen in the action spoof
Spy Hard.
Otherwise, the latter half of the 1990s would be a quiet time for both Andy and Don, as befits men entering their seventies. Andy was now a full-time resident of Manteo, tooling around in his Jeep or his pontoon boat and going to bed by eight.

In January 1996, Andy's idyll was shattered. His son, Sam, had been found dead, slumped over a desk in his North Hollywood home. He had drunk himself to death. He was thirty-seven. “Quite honestly, I think his body just gave out on him, after all the years of abuse,” attorney James Blatt told the
Los Angeles Daily News
. The obituary described Sam as an out-of-work developer.

When Don called to express condolences, all Andy could say was “It's very, very, very painful.” Andy didn't speak of Sam much after that. But he once confessed to Don, “I don't know how good a father I was.”

Perhaps those events put Andy in a contemplative mood. He returned to the recording studio that year for the first time since the 1960s to record
I Love to Tell the Story
, a collection of hymns sold over an 800 number flashed on television screens. The idea had come from music producer Steve Tyrell, who'd traveled to Wilmington to record country artist Randy Travis for
Matlock.
“He came into my dressing room, and I played him a cut of an old record I made twenty or thirty years ago,” Andy recalled. “I said, ‘I'd like to try that again sometime.' The next thing I know, I'm in Nashville.”

The recording sold more than 2 million copies and earned Andy a raft of national publicity—and a Grammy. It would be Andy's first top-shelf artistic award. He must have smiled at the irony of being recognized for his “overbrilliant” baritone. The television industry's failure to note Andy's talent had always haunted him; now, he was being honored for the wrong talent. Nonetheless, the award lifted his spirits and may even have softened him on the decades of past snubs. “I've got it on my mantelpiece,” he told an interviewer. “I've never won anything before. It was nice.”

Andy sent a copy of the record to Don, his old duet partner. “He sang and sang along with that thing, until he couldn't sing anymore,” Francey Yarborough Knotts recalled.

Don spent much of the 1990s on the road, performing regional theater and signing autographs at a seemingly endless series of fan events. At Walt Disney World and in Las Vegas casinos, Don would be mobbed by fans as if he were Elvis; sometimes Francey would summon security, lest she and Don be trampled. Fistfights occasionally broke out in autograph lines among overeager fans. Don, ever gracious toward his fans, would sign stacks of his signature photograph, a head-to-knees shot of Barney Fife holding his pistol. The shading of the black-and-white image left him nowhere to sign but his crotch. Don came to hate that picture.

“They would line up along the hotel, three blocks, and wait in line to get an autograph from him,” recalled Dodie Brown, a stage actress who worked with Don and Francey in that era. “They would come up and say, ‘I'm your best fan.' Every single person would say that. Every policeman would bring him bullets.” Don never knew what to do with the bullets. Hundreds of them rattled around the drawers of his Century City condo.

For his traveling shows, Don fell back on old favorites:
Last of the Red Hot Lovers
;
Harvey
;
On Golden Pond
;
Norman, Is That You?
Don was usually the big draw, although
I Dream of Jeannie
alumna Barbara Eden joined him on some dates. A stack of Don's old press clippings reveals the breadth of his travels: Jupiter Theatre, Florida, in May 1990; Des Moines Civic Center, Iowa, in April 1993; Stage West Theatre Restaurant, Mississauga, Ontario, June 1995; Claridge Casino Hotel, Atlantic City, February 1998.

Because of his eyesight, “all of the scripts we learned, he had to have orally taught to him by Francey,” Dodie Brown recalled. Yet, Don nearly always filled the house, and he could still command an audience.

Don loved the theater. During one of his tours, he and Francey passed through New York. The city brought back such warm memories: Windy Wales and the B-Bar-B Ranch; Andy Griffith and
No Time for Sergeants
. One night, with Francey in tow, Don unexpectedly glided down the stairs of the Plaza Hotel and broke into song, crooning the Burton Lane standard “How About You?” He strode into the street, still singing, as if he were in a musical. It was after midnight, and men were sleeping on the sidewalk. One by one, they awakened. One cried out, “It's Don Knotts. He's
singing
!” Some of the men rose and began to shamble along behind Don. Don popped into a store and got change for a $20. Then he ducked back onto the street and began handing dollar bills to the vagabonds, one by one, singing all the while.

Andy flew to Norfolk in 1993 to see Don in
Last of the Red Hot Lovers
. At dinner later, Cindi dutifully reported that Andy “was a-whoopin' and a-hollerin' ” through the performance. Andy and Don spent the rest of the evening breaking each other up by chanting an off-color parody of a school cheer: “We are the girls from Norfolk / We don't drink and we don't smoke / Norfolk, Norfolk, Norfolk!”

Don resurfaced on the national stage in the 1998 film
Pleasantville
. The story cast him as a TV repairman who transports Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon into a 1950s sitcom. It is a perfect role, Don portraying a sort of cathode-ray Oz with the power to sweep the unsuspecting off to Mayberry. Yet something about Don's television repairman is vaguely malevolent; he arrives unbidden, amid thunderclaps, and gently mocks the culture of television addiction that
The Andy Griffith Show
helped to spawn. He earnestly quizzes the boy on bits of
Pleasantville
trivia, just as
Griffith
fans quizzed each other at the annual Mayberry Days festivals.

Like Andy, Don was not entirely comfortable with satirizing his greatest comedic achievement. “I had a little difficulty doing that one,” he recalled later.

As the 1990s drew to a close,
The Andy Griffith Show
migrated to a new home on the cable network TV Land. In three decades of syndication, much had changed: the patchwork of local stations that had saturated the nation with
Griffith
was on the wane. Superstation TBS, which had aired
Griffith
reruns nationwide for twenty-seven years, had relegated the program to 4:30 a.m. It mattered little to hard-core fans, who had long since videotaped their favorite episodes and would purchase them on DVD a few years later. For everyone else, a prime-time berth on the nostalgia cable network was welcome news.

The network brought Andy and Don to Hollywood in January 2000 for a wave of ceremonial press coverage. TV Land also arranged for Don to receive his star—finally—on the Walk of Fame. Together at the press conference, Andy and Don boasted about their forty-five-year friendship. Living now on opposite coasts, they stoked the relationship by catching up on the telephone every two or three weeks. Andy spent much of his allotted time trying to convince the reporters that Don, not he, had made
The Andy Griffith Show
so special.

“The five years we worked together,” Andy said, “were the best five years of my life.”

15.

Death in Mayberry

D
ON
K
NOTTS
entered the autumn of life with newfound respect for his body, a man intent on cheating death. He had kicked sleeping pills, drinking, smoking, and bad living. He swam daily and galloped up stairs to reach his exclusive Beverly Hills gym. He dined on vegetables and fish. Sometimes, dinner was little more than a fruit plate.

And then, around his eightieth birthday, Don's doctor told him, “Your lungs scare the hell out of me.”

The Knotts family seemed cursed with bad lungs. Shadow, Don's older brother and comedic muse, had died at thirty-one of asthma. Don's father had expired at fifty-five of pneumonia. Richie Ferrara, a doctor and Don's lifelong friend, believes the elder Knotts was afflicted with pulmonary fibrosis, a gradual hardening of lung tissue, perhaps Shadow had it as well. “I have a feeling there are two reasons for it,” Richie said, “a genetic condition, and the coal dust.” Morgantown is a mining town, and coal dust swirls in the wind.

Don fell from a pair of stilts once, during a performance in adolescence, and one of the wooden poles punctured a lung. As a young adult on
The Steve Allen Show
, Don had caught a crippling case of pneumonia.

Now, at eighty, Don had contracted pulmonary fibrosis. His doctor didn't want him thinking about it, so he told Don he suffered from “scarring of the lungs” and never uttered a formal diagnosis. He urged Don to go right on swimming and climbing stairs. He assured Don the chronic condition would not slow him down.

In the new millennium, Don was Hollywood royalty. Back in Morgantown, in 1998, a stretch of University Avenue had been renamed Don Knotts Boulevard. A new generation of comedic actors worshipped his television roles and films. In 1999, Ron Howard brought Don to Universal Studios, where he was filming
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
. Ron's star, Jim Carrey, was losing it: After spending hours each day getting in and out of his green latex Grinch makeup, “he was really miserable at work,” Ron recalled. Jim Carrey adored Don. When Don arrived, Jim squinted down from his perch at the mouth of his Grinch cave. Finally recognizing the visitor, Jim launched into “a really brilliant Don Knotts imitation, and I only wish the cameras were rolling, because here he was in the Grinch costume, doing Barney Fife,” Ron recalled. Jim spent the rest of the day with his idol.

Andy Griffith had been mostly inactive for the first half of the 2000s, living in secluded splendor on his Manteo estate. But he missed Don, and he admired his friend's seemingly inexhaustible work ethic. In 2004, Andy persuaded wife Cindi to relocate. They purchased a new $2.4 million home in Toluca Lake, the same place Andy had lived during the
Griffith
years.

Soon, Andy and Don were dining together once more, squiring their lovely young wives to exclusive Beverly Hills restaurants, sometimes in the company of former
Griffith
producer Aaron Ruben. Andy would tell bawdy jokes and make Francey laugh. That would make Don jealous: the simmering artistic rivalry that had rendered Andy unable to speak of Don's Emmys seemed to cut both ways. One night, when Francey noted how funny Andy had been at supper, Don snapped, “I'm the funny one!”

Andy delighted in Don's company. He would shake his head and tell Francey, “Oh, I love Don. I love him so much.” Then he would laugh and say, “Ha. You'd think we were gay.”

Andy and Don would send each other comedy tapes, radio performances by Garrison Keillor or Bob and Ray. They would compare notes on contemporary television and cinema; both men were obsessed with
Sling Blade
,
the 1996 Billy Bob Thornton film, which explored the darker side of growing up Southern. And they talked of working together once more. Most of that talk came from Andy, who would call Don and fantasize about going out on the road together. But Don knew it was probably a pipe dream; Andy hadn't dared a live performance in years. Don would turn to Francey and hiss, “It's not . . . gonna . . . happen. Andy's not . . . gonna . . . do it.” Then Don would turn back to the phone and say, “Oh, yes . . . Oh, yes . . .”

In his final years, Don was earning money and acclaim from the burgeoning industry of cartoon voice-overs, most notably in the role of Mayor Turkey Lurkey in the 2005 Disney feature
Chicken Little
. And he was touring the country with Tim Conway, playing the regional theater circuit.

The same month
Chicken Little
hit theaters, November 2005, Don reprised the role of lecherous landlord Ralph Furley in a brief cameo on
That '70s Show
. It would be his final on-screen performance.

As the year wore on, Don's lungs deteriorated further. He canceled a public appearance in Morgantown—something Don never did—and he started begging off gatherings with old friends. By Thanksgiving, Don was gasping for air. Within weeks, the wind seemed to have drained from his lungs. He could no longer climb stairs or even walk to the store without panting for breath.

Doctors found a tumor. Don had lung cancer.

Don asked the doctor, “Are you telling me there's no cure?” The question alarmed Francey because there is essentially no cure for lung cancer. “When we left, I felt we'd heard the worst news we could have heard, and Don seemed not to care,” Francey recalled. “He said, ‘I'm not going to die soon.' He was in denial. People say that's the first stage of death.”

Don started chemotherapy, and for a while it seemed that he improved. His outlook remained improbably sanguine. He and Francey would lunch at Jerry's Famous Deli in Studio City, and they made regular forays to the library to borrow books on tape. Francey brought him some favorite programs to watch. Don was an Anglophile. He loved the crime writer P. D. James and old episodes of
Upstairs, Downstairs
and
Fawlty Towers
. Francey would print out editorials from the
New York Times
and read them to Don.

Don told almost no one of his illness, lest news should leak to the tabloids. Don still wanted to work, and a sick actor could not get work. He didn't tell his children he was dying. He didn't tell Andy.

Late in 2005, Don dragged himself into a recording booth to lend his voice to
Air Buddies
, a direct-to-video Disney movie about talking dogs. Francey was horrified at Don's insistence on working. When she couldn't dissuade him, she appealed to Sherwin Bash, his manager, saying, “I don't think he's up for this.” Sherwin couldn't stop Don. Francey tried to accept his decision with stoicism. “Don wants to die onstage,” she told herself, “and that isn't any worse than dying in a hospital bed.”

Air Buddies
would be Don's final role.

Don and Francey went out with Andy and Cindi on Cindi's birthday, a few weeks before Christmas. They met at La Dolce Vita in Beverly Hills, a place where stars could dine unmolested. Andy noticed Don's labored breathing. When the party rose to leave, he could plainly see his friend was gasping for breath. Later, Andy telephoned. Francey answered. Andy said, “Something is wrong.” Cindi joined Andy on the phone and told Francey that Don needed to see a doctor. Francey bit her tongue. “He's seen the doctor,” she told them, “and he has this condition, and we're doing things for it.”

Even as his lungs weakened, Don insisted on keeping up appearances. When he and Francey went out to a holiday party, Don beseeched her to hide his oxygen canister in some bushes outside the home. Later that evening, Don walked across a room and began struggling for breath. Francey told him, “I have to go out and get the oxygen.” He looked at her with big, frightened eyes and hissed, “Don't do it!” Don would sooner have died than let people see him breathing canned oxygen.

The agony continued when Andy telephoned to arrange a visit on Christmas. Don replied, “It's not a good time; I don't think I can fit it in.” He didn't want Andy to see him sucking oxygen from a mask. Francey feared she and Don would pass his last Christmas alone. She told Don, “I'm going to have to tell Andy. Don't worry about it, he'll understand.”

Francey telephoned Andy. She told him that Don was having lung trouble, and that he was reluctant to tell anyone or be seen with his breathing aids. She said nothing of cancer.

Francey put Don on the phone. Andy told Don, “Look, I have my little scooter that I sometimes drive around the house. I don't like people to see me on my scooter. I'll have my scooter, and you'll have your oxygen.” Andy laughed. Don laughed. “We're going to get through this,” Andy said. After Don put down the phone, he seemed immeasurably relieved.

Andy and Don met at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills a few days before Christmas to dine at the Belvedere, a five-diamond restaurant. Andy brought Dixie, his daughter, and her children. Francey brought the dreaded oxygen canister in her purse, but Don wouldn't need it. Andy and Don told the old stories, about
No Time for Sergeants
and the
Griffith Show
. They talked of the work Don was doing, and of the work Andy wanted to do, and of working together again one day. “It was a beautiful thing to watch,” Dixie recalled. “You could feel the love between the two men.”

But Don looked frail. And when Dixie and her children stood to leave, Don remained seated. “Don wanted us to leave before him so we didn't see the trouble he was having,” Andy recalled later.

On Christmas Day, Don and Francey hosted the children, Karen and Tom. Don looked deathly, yet forbade Francey to tell them of his illness. When Francey protested, Don replied, “I'm not going to die anytime soon.”

Shortly after the New Year, Don sank into delirium and entered Cedars-Sinai hospital. “He didn't want a soul to come in,” Francey recalled. But Don finally agreed to tell his children he had cancer. Karen and Tom arrived at the hospital. Francey swore them to secrecy.

During his two-week stay on the pulmonary ward, Don grew more lucid and was finally able to speak. Once, he opened his eyes, trained them on Francey and Karen, and said, “I'm waiting for the great wizard in the sky to take me away.” Don was not one for spiritual pronouncements. Was he talking about God and the hereafter, or simply having a laugh? Neither listener was quite sure.

Don was sent home with a round-the-clock nurse. A few weeks later, on February 23, a sensor attached to his finger triggered an alarm, signaling that his lungs were no longer furnishing enough oxygen to his body. In the ambulance, his heart stopped, then it started again. He slipped into a coma. He had still told no one outside his family, apart from his manager, that he was dying.

From the hospital room, Francey telephoned Andy. Andy raced to the hospital. Francey called Tom Poston, Don's old friend from the
Steve Allen
days, and held the phone to Don's ear so Tom could say good-bye. She telephoned Richie Ferrara. Francey feared Don's old friends didn't grasp the finality of the moment. She told Richie, “You have to listen to me: This is it. He's not going to make it through the night.” Francey held the phone to Don's ear. Richie told Don, “Keep it up. You've got things to do yet.” While Richie spoke, Don's body visibly responded.

Kay, Don's first wife, was summoned to the phone, and again someone held the receiver to Don's ear so she could say a few words.

Andy arrived at the UCLA Medical Center. Francey and Karen left the room so Andy could speak to Don alone. Andy took Don's hand. He said, “Jess, breathe. You gotta make this. You gotta pull through. Breathe.” Don's chest heaved. Andy said, “That's a boy. Keep breathing.” Andy told Don he loved him.

Then Andy departed, leaving Karen and Francey with Don in the hospital room. “They were really just keeping him alive at that point,” Francey recalled, “waiting for everybody to say good-bye,” including son Tom, who was flying in from San Francisco.

Don had written in his will that he was not to be sustained artificially. Doctors unplugged the machines. Don Knotts died at 11:00 p.m. on February 24, 2006, a Friday, with Francey, Karen, and Tom embracing him.

The
Los Angeles Times
wrote that Don had, in his later years, attained the stature of “lodestar for younger comic actors. The new generation came to appreciate his highly physical brand of acting that, at its best, was in the tradition of silent-film greats such as Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Harold Lloyd.” The
New York Times
hailed Don as “a high-status comic who played low-status roles. Actors who worked with him almost universally deferred to him as a comedic grandmaster,” yet his characters inevitably found themselves the butt of jokes.

Andy appeared on the
Today
show and said, “I lost my best friend.”

Later, Andy spoke by telephone to Dixie, his daughter. He said he was worried that Don, comatose in his hospital bed, might not have heard Andy's final words. Dixie, who worked with the dying, reassured her father: Don had heard. “I think it was really important to my dad for Don to know he was there,” she recalled.

More than that, Andy yearned to know whether his best friend had accepted God and gone to heaven. He knew the Bible-thumpers back in West Virginia had spooked Don, had given him nightmares, had ultimately chased him away from organized religion. Don and Andy didn't talk much about God, but Andy sensed Don's position on faith was agnostic at best. Alas, Don had died before Andy could ask. Now he dearly hoped to see Don in the hereafter.

The funeral was set for March 6 at Pierce Brothers in Westwood, a small, storybook campus of graves and greenery set among the towers of steel and glass on Wilshire Boulevard. Don's casket, dusky-blue enamel decorated with silver dancing fish in homage to Mr. Limpet, was set against a towering rock wall. Andy, Tim Conway, and Tom Poston gathered with Don's less celebrated friends and relations inside Chapel of the Palms, a faux-Japanese pavilion.