Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (8 page)

Orville released the 45 rpm record on November 14, 1953, on Colonial Records, a tiny Chapel Hill imprint. Side A was the football sketch, which Orville titled “What It Was, Was Football.” Side B was the
Romeo and Juliet
sketch. Both were credited to “Deacon Andy Griffith.”

They agreed to split the profits. Before long, Orville's record had sold fifty thousand copies, and “Deacon” Andy Griffith was in heavy rotation.

3.

The Bumpkins Take Broadway

D
ON
K
NOTTS
lay in bed in the tiny hotel room above Times Square and wondered whether his wife's first night in Manhattan might be her last.
Thump, thump, thump,
went the wall, shuddering from the weight of one body heaving against another in passion, like a sweaty human battering ram. How long could the wall endure this? How long could Kay?

In the service, Don had watched men have sex with each other. But sweet little Kay, the preacher's daughter, seemed so innocent. Now, on this cold January night in 1949, they lay in a fleabag hotel, trying to ignore the horrible noises bleeding across the shabby partition. Don imagined Kay asking herself, “What in God's name have we gotten ourselves into?”

Matters improved the next day. The Knottses rented a room at Ninety-Ninth Street and Broadway. Kay took a secretarial job with Celanese Corporation, a chemical company, for thirty-three dollars a week. Don claimed the twenty-dollar weekly allotment to which he was entitled through the military's 52-20 Club, which guaranteed unemployed servicemen a meager living for up to fifty-two weeks. Don would remain on the dole for only two weeks.

“We would go to a place; the cheapest thing on the menu was spaghetti and meatballs, but it was a white-tablecloth thing,” Kay recalled. “And every week we would eat okay until it got to be Thursday, and then it was slim pickings. They had those Automats, where you could eat for forty cents.”

Every morning, Don hit the streets to “make the rounds,” visiting theatrical agents and trolling for work. After a few weeks, he was clearly getting nowhere. Spent and frustrated, he confessed to Kay, “I don't know how to get into show business.” She replied, “Why don't you look up Lanny Ross?”

Lanny had come backstage after one of the
Stars and Gripes
performances overseas and invited Don to look him up in peacetime. Now, in 1949, Lanny was back in New York, hosting a radio show on the powerful Mutual Broadcasting System from station WOR. Taking Lanny up on his offer seemed a long shot to Don, but Kay thought he should at least try. So, Don wrote Lanny a letter. Much to Don's surprise, he received an immediate reply.

Lanny happily adopted Don as a cause. “He introduced me all around, telling all his people how talented he thought I was,” Don recalled. “And he gave me a shot on his radio show.” Don couldn't believe his good fortune.

Lanny had plenty reasons to help Don. One was the powerful bond of fraternity that linked servicemen after the war. Another was Don's prodigious talent, which seemed plain to everyone—save, perhaps, Don himself. A third was Don's manner. Suppliant and self-effacing, Don radiated a complaisant submissiveness when in the company of other men, triggering the same protective impulse as a wagging tail on a stray dog. People wanted to help him.

In his radio debut, Don performed the monologue Lanny had seen him do in the South Pacific, depicting “a sportscaster calling a football game who gets excited and mixes up his words, like, ‘They're going back to their puddle. I mean, their huddle,' ” Don recalled. Both he and Andy effectively launched their broadcast careers with skits about football.

Lanny sent Don to William Morris, and soon Don was booked onto the
Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts
. Arthur Godfrey was a star-maker, and his
Talent Scouts
was simulcast on radio and television, giving Don, in 1949, his first on-screen appearance.

New York was amid a vaudeville revival, so the William Morris agents dispatched Don to try out his stand-up act in variety shows at theaters in the outer boroughs. When Don arrived at his first engagement, in the Bronx, the booking agent told him to leave his music with the pit band. Don said he had no music.

“No play-on music, no play-off music?” the agent snarled.

“No, sir.”

The agent scowled. “Well, give me one of your eight-by-ten pictures to put out front.”

“I, uh . . . I don't have any eight-by-ten pictures.”

“What?” the agent screamed. “You've got no pictures? Listen, you do ten minutes and get off, you hear me? Not one minute more!”

The booker stormed off. Later, Don heard the man telling someone, “The kid's got no pictures. He's got no music. What kind of an act is that?”

Yet, Don's act drew riotous laughs in the Bronx. Emboldened, Don sought a booking in Manhattan. He got a gig at the Jefferson Theatre on Fourteenth Street in the East Village, where agents went to scout new acts.

“I walked onstage at the Jefferson with all the confidence in the world,” Don recalled, “but after about two minutes, I realized I was in Trouble City. . . . These people had seen it all, and I'm sure they knew the punch lines to every one of my jokes. Five minutes went by and I had heard not one laugh. I was beginning to break out in a cold sweat. Finally, one guy in the balcony laughed, and I said, ‘Thanks, Dad!' ”

That was the end of Don's vaudeville career. He quit William Morris in humiliation and resolved never again to attempt stand-up, convinced it was “not my strong suit.” Once again, Don seemed to sell himself short. The agents told Don he simply needed new material; he hadn't written anything of note since his army days. But Don would not be swayed. In the meager weeks that followed, surely the low ebb of his adult artistic career, Don took a job stuffing envelopes. “I'll say this,” he recalled decades later. “It beat the hell out of plucking chickens in Raese's grocery.”

Don's confidence had abandoned him, but not his ambition. He continued to make the rounds, haunting the agencies and casting offices and popping in to visit Lanny Ross. Don's persistence soon bore fruit. Peter Dixon, Lanny's writer, asked Don one day if he could do “the voice of an old-timer like, say, Gabby Hayes.” Gabby was the quintessential geriatric cowboy sidekick, cast alongside Roy Rogers and John Wayne in films such as
Tall in the Saddle
and
Heldorado
to spout authentic frontier gibberish.

Dixon was assembling a revival of the Bobby Benson show, a radio series that had reaped a massive following in the 1930s. It was the stuff of juvenile fantasy: Bobby is an orphan who inherits a Texas cattle ranch and a gang of colorful sidekicks, including foreman Tex Mason, a “red Indian” called Harka, and an Irishman named . . . Irish. Rounding out the cast is old-timer Windy Wales. Together, they fight off cattle thieves and outwit escaped cons.

Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders
took to the air in 1949 as a summer replacement series on the Mutual Broadcasting System, home to
The Shadow
and Major League Baseball. Radio was still king in those days, two years before the debut of
I Love Lucy
.
Bobby Benson
was slated for 5:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a thirty-minute segment timed to catch young boys between homework and dinner. Don played Windy Wales.

“That first Tuesday afternoon, I found myself at the microphone with a cast of veteran radio actors,” Don recalled. “Let me tell you, I was just about as nervous as a person could be and still function. Pete Dixon [the scriptwriter] was in the control room, and when we went off the air, I sashayed by. He grinned at me. ‘Good' was all he said.” Don returned home feeling physically ill. “My body ached so much from the entire experience that I thought I was coming down with the flu.”

Don's symptoms were anxiety made manifest. Don had performed well in his radio debut. Yet, he fully expected a phone call releasing him from the part. At the very inception of his professional career, Don already suffered from a debilitating pessimism, which combined with his natural fretfulness and budding hypochondria to yield an ensemble of physical ills. At such times, Don lay frozen in bed, sleepless and incapacitated.

The dreaded call never came, and Don returned to the microphone two days later to broadcast the second episode, groggy but relieved.

It was easy work, with no makeup or costumes and no need to memorize the script, which Don held in his hand as he read the part into the microphone. Don would eventually earn nearly $200 a week, which was good pay for the time.

“There was quite a technique to it, knowing how to fade yourself on and off the mike, how to match your voice to the action you were supposed to be engaged in, and keeping your eye on the director as well as your script,” Don recalled. “The director directed the entire show from the control room behind the glass, much like an orchestra conductor. Our sound effects man; our organist, who played our musical bridges on the Hammond organ; and in our case, because we were a western, our animal sound man, the man who did all the horse whinnies and dog barks and so on; all had to be woven in with precise cues from the director. The whole thing fascinated me.”

In Don's hands, Windy Wales soon emerged as the most colorful character in the
Bobby Benson
cast. A tired, old ranch hand, Windy is faithful and devoted and happily oblivious that his best days are behind him. He spins tales of derring-do, placing himself at the center of fantastic events that, if real, are well past: “Windjammer Wales, they used to call me, back in the days when I hunted whales up near the Arctic!”
Clop-diddy-clop-diddy-clop-diddy-clop.
“Yessiree, fellers, I've killed so many men the cemetery men made me a partner!”

Don's character was derivative, and he knew it. One day, Gabby Hayes himself came storming onto the set. “Goddamn you!” he raged. “You've been doing me on the radio every day and I'm sick of it!” Don stared at him in agony. Then, Gabby's lip trembled and he burst out laughing. Don looked into the control room and saw his producers in hysterics.

The nation's ten-year-old boys laughed with Windy Wales, and they laughed at him. His wheezy tenor was implicitly funny, and his tough-guy bluster made Windy an easy target for mockery from both the narrator and his costars. Windy Wales was the first iteration of Don's comedic caricature of male machismo, his first send-up of all the smirking swagger and action-hero posturing he saw in other men. Windy Wales was Don's absurdist critique of the postwar masculine ideal. The same ironic bravura would come to define Barney Fife a decade later, and Ralph Furley after that.

The revival worked: Bobby Benson again became a household name, at least among prepubescent boys. B-Bar-B riders formed clubs across the nation. Herbert Rice, a British immigrant who owned the show, ordered up a cornucopia of Bobby Benson merchandise and began to arrange publicity tours, dispatching Don and Ivan Cury, the twelve-year-old actor who played Bobby, to rodeos and county fairs up and down the East Coast along with a few hired hands and truckloads of collectibles.

“There were hundreds of things: Bobby Benson bikes, Bobby Benson hats, handkerchiefs, socks, gloves, flashlights, everything,” Ivan recalled. “They would get a lot of money. We would get nothing.”

In spring 1950, the success of Bobby Benson spawned a local television program, shot at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-Second Street and broadcast live on the brand-new WOR television station. The broadcast prominently featured Windy Wales, signaling the character's rising currency with the Cracker Jack set. At the end of some broadcasts, no doubt to the delight of Manhattan parents, the station gave away a pony.

In one early television episode, Bobby and the gang are trapped in a bunkhouse by the bad guys. As Ivan Cury recalled, the director cut back and forth between live shots of the imperiled friends and a recorded loop of horses galloping through dust, with Tex Mason shouting, “Watch out!” and “Keep your head down!” Bobby and his friends hatch a plan to light a fire and create a smoke screen, providing cover to escape the bad guys. The crew had rounded up some crude smoke bombs; TV was still in its infancy, and visual effects were not yet an exact science.

“They set off a smoke bomb in the studio, and Don was at the door, and there was not much smoke coming in,” Ivan recalled. Don began flapping the door open and shut to fan the smoke, which then engulfed the studio. “I couldn't see Don standing next to me,” Ivan recalled. “Somebody came in and grabbed me by the arm and took me over to the next set.”

The adjoining set was staged for the pony giveaway. The cameras rolled. “And this pony was hysterical, because of all the smoke,” Ivan recalled. “Well, this pony couldn't bear it, and so it defecated and urinated at the same time, big, loud, and close to me. Don and the sound guys were hysterical with laughter. The guy on the boom fell off the boom.”

By 1951, Ivan Cury's voice was changing and the Mutual radio network began searching for a new Bobby Benson. By the time Clive Rice, Ivan's replacement, joined the cast,
Bobby Benson
was a hit. The producers upgraded from the cheesy Hammond organ to a prerecorded score played by an actual orchestra. The promotional tours continued, with Clive replacing Ivan as the public face of Bobby Benson. Don and Clive traveled in a Boeing Stratocruiser emblazoned with the Bobby Benson logo.

Don and Clive played to huge crowds, but Don loathed the journeys, and he was becoming increasingly paranoid about his health. “He had quite a collection of medications when he was on the road,” Clive recalled. “I can remember seeing, for the first time in my life, one of those throat-spray things. He had one of those, and he had this collection of pills he had to take for one reason or another. . . . He was very conscious of anyone who had a cold.” Don would fret daily about his health for the next five decades.

Don's
Bobby Benson
duties occupied about four hours of his day, from his arrival at the studio after lunch to the conclusion of the daily broadcast at five thirty. Don was free every morning. He spent those hours making the rounds, visiting casting offices, trolling for parts, and trying to make his mark on television. There was little money to be made, but “everything was up for grabs,” and Don sensed opportunity.