Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (13 page)

“Get her a chair!” the director cried, feigning awe. “We'll write a special part for her!” Oddly enough, they did. Frances made her Broadway debut in the farce
The Poor Nut
. Better parts followed. Then she was cast as a grandmother in the Broadway hit
On Borrowed Time
while still in her thirties, and her career trajectory changed. Frances evolved from ingenue to matron and amassed many screen and television credits.

On-screen, Andy, Opie, and the future Aunt Bee melted hearts. General Foods, sponsor of
Danny Thomas
, purchased the series before the pilot had even aired. They loved it for its Americana appeal, for Andy's broad grin, and for the budding magic of Mayberry.

Griffith
was budgeted for thirty-two episodes at $58,000 apiece, or about $1.8 million for its first full season. Dick Linke, Andy's manager, knew that he and his client weren't big names in Hollywood; all of Dick's career, and most of Andy's, had played out in New York. For either man to wield real clout on the
Griffith
Show
, both would need to ante up. Dick approached Bank of America and borrowed several hundred thousand dollars, enough to make Andy half owner of the show and to give them, together, a majority stake. The remaining shares would go to Sheldon Leonard and Danny Thomas. Griffith's ownership interest would give him a measure of artistic control. In time, the arrangement would also make Andy and Dick wealthy men.

Don Knotts had no ownership stake in the
Griffith Show
. Instead, the producers signed him to a single season, and then to a five-year contract, at a starting salary of $1,250 an episode, or about $35,000 a year. “I worked out this terrible deal for him, where he ended up making no money in five years,” lamented Sherwin Bash, Don's manager. The producers lowballed Don, playing on his insecurity and concealing their eagerness to sign him. Still, it was good money for a television actor in 1960, and Don bore none of the risk that Andy assumed by investing in the series.

Andy took ten days off the
Destry
production, claiming a back injury. Sheldon Leonard descended on Andy's home in Westchester County with two writers in tow. Together, they developed a half dozen story lines that would become the first episodes of the
Griffith Show
. The plots betrayed the group's artistic and commercial ambitions.

One story, “The New Housekeeper,” felt like a retooled pilot, with Andy coaxing a reluctant Opie to accept Aunt Bee as a matronly surrogate for his dead mother. Another, “The Guitar Player,” set the stage for much singing and dancing to come. But the most fateful of these half-baked ideas was “The Manhunt,” the first teleplay written to spotlight Deputy Barney Fife.

Everyone attending the meeting at the Griffith home that day sensed what they might have in Don, a man who could set off paroxysms of laughter before he even opened his mouth. His piercing, saucer eyes evoked the mute expressiveness of the great silent-film stars. His gangly frame, wiry but fragile, diminutive and stooped, seemed somehow trapped between adolescence and old age. His face was a canvas of raw emotion, so expressive it was almost painful to look upon. But no one at the meeting yet knew what Don would do with the part he had created for himself.

One more key role was yet to be cast. As executive producer, Sheldon Leonard would oversee the entire project, but not the day-to-day management of actors, locations, and scripts. For that, he needed a line producer. He approached Aaron Ruben.

Born to Polish Jews in Chicago, Aaron Ruben emerged as a gifted comedy writer, and he wrote for the best, first on radio with Burns and Allen and Milton Berle, then on television with Phil Silvers and Sid Caesar. Over time, Aaron would contribute more than any other single person, save perhaps Andy and Don, to the words and images that elevated the
Griffith
Show
above the run-of-the-mill television program in the first half of the 1960s.

Aaron met with Sheldon Leonard, who told him, “Television isn't a director's medium, television is a producer's medium.” The most important ingredient is the script, Sheldon said, and you need someone in charge of that script. Aaron was hooked.

Aaron Ruben went to meet Andy Griffith at his home in Rye, New York, and was surprised when Andy did not invite him inside. They settled onto the steps of Andy's back porch. Andy asked, “Ya hunt much?” Aaron replied, “Hunt?! I've never hunted in my life.” But then talk turned to Andy's show, and they found common ground. Andy and Aaron (and, later, Don) would be friends for life.

After the turbulent week in Hollywood filming his pilot, Andy knew a few things he would do differently on
The Andy Griffith Show
. Andy wanted his own soundstage to be productive but relaxed. He envisioned cast and crew functioning like an extended family: exchanging gifts at Christmas, eating lunch together at the commissary, playing music in the dressing rooms, even staging the occasional practical joke. And he couldn't wait to share those moments with Don.

The Andy Griffith Show
would be shot with a single camera, like a movie, the scenes filmed out of sequence and without an audience. The format guaranteed the production would focus on character, story, and human interaction. That was how Andy wanted it. Most situation comedies of the day, including
Danny Thomas
, were filmed with three cameras before a live studio audience. That format generated a natural laugh track and a wonderful chemistry between audience and performers, who fed on the energy in the room. But the actors played for laughs, an impulse that could distract actors and writers from building character and plot. “I hate those three-camera shows,” Andy once said. “You can work on values all week, and the minute you bring two hundred people in, all your values go out the window.”

Filming a one-camera comedy in 1960 meant sweetening it with a laugh track. Andy was uneasy with the laugh track. His concern may have come from Don, who believed the laugh track had killed
The Steve Allen Show
. Andy persuaded the
Griffith
producers to try an experiment: screen a filmed episode before a live audience, record the laughter, and add it to the tape before broadcast. A few early
Griffith
episodes were broadcast with “live” laugh tracks before the network pulled the plug on Andy's costly experiment. He and the producers reached a sort of compromise:
Griffith
would use a laugh track, but sparingly.

The
Griffith Show
would be shot at Desilu Studios, the production company founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and responsible for many of the best television programs of the 1950s and 1960s, including
I Love Lucy
, but also
Star Trek
,
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, and
My Three Sons
. The lot was called the Motion Picture Center and sat on Cahuenga Boulevard near Melrose, a white art deco compound with an arch of overlapping concrete rectangles stretching above the main driveway. Its soundstages were notoriously leaky; “Don and I used to do scenes when it rained, and it would often rain in between us,” Andy recalled.

The sets for the first
Griffith
episodes were “few and simple,”
Griffith
scholar Richard Kelly writes: the courthouse, where most interior shots were filmed; the living room, kitchen, and porch of the Taylor home; the barbershop; the mayor's office; and the inside of the filling station. Exteriors were mostly shot on a back lot half an hour away in Culver City named Forty Acres. It had first been used by Cecil DeMille on his silent films of the 1920s and had provided the backdrop for the classics
King Kong
and
Gone with the Wind.

The minimalist musical theme came from Hollywood composer Earle Hagen. He and the producers had been “beating our brains out for a couple of months” for an appropriate theme when Earle awoke one day “and thought, that thing ought to be simple enough to whistle. And it took me about ten minutes to write it,” he recalled. He recorded a simple, whistled demo, backed with a string bass and drums, and took it to Sheldon Leonard. Sheldon loved it. “I tell you what,” Sheldon said. “I'll shoot Andy and Ronny walking along the lake with a couple of fishing poles over their shoulder.” Earle's demo became the final theme. “I never whistled before in my life,” Earle recalled, “and never since.”

On the first day of production, in summer 1960, the core cast and crew of the
Griffith Show
drove up to the back entrance of the Desilu lot, parked along Willoughby Avenue, crossed the street to the gate, and walked past Tiny, the guard, into the concrete compound. The group gathered in a conference room to read the script for the first episode, “The New Housekeeper.” Sheldon Leonard would direct, one of only two times he oversaw a
Griffith
episode personally.

Don arrived looking “a little nervous,” Rance Howard recalled, possessed by the same paralytic first-day angst that had vexed him in most of his previous jobs. He was buoyed, though, to know that he would be working on a calm one-camera production, not a torturous live shoot. And he sensed great talent gathered around him. Andy asserted himself immediately as the group's benevolent leader. Don recalled it later as “one of the most delightful days of my life.”

The next Monday, the crew drove up into Franklin Canyon, above Beverly Hills, to a bucolic spot with a reservoir that supplied water to the city, populated with the sort of indeterminate flora that could just as easily be North Carolina as California. Assistant Director Bruce Bilson shouted,
“Roll it!”
The crew filmed the scene Sheldon Leonard had ordered up to accompany Earle Hagen's theme music. The twenty-second sequence called for Andy and Opie to amble along a dirt road, and for Opie to lob a rock into the water.

“They came walking down the road,” Bruce Bilson recalled, “and the kid threw a rock in the lake, and it didn't get in the lake. So we did another take, and the kid threw the rock, and it didn't go in the lake. And so I said, ‘Okay, propman, get behind that bush down there, and when I say, ‘Throw it,' throw it.' ” Bilson shot the scene a third time. Opie underthrew again, but this time, the propman lobbed a stone into the reservoir. In the resulting shot, careful viewers will note a slight, gravity-defying lag between Opie's throw and the consequent splash.

The canyon would serve as the backdrop for many subsequent picnics and manhunts. Andy and Barney would occasionally launch a leaky rowboat into the reservoir and fish—a delicate undertaking, given that they were rowing in the city's drinking water.

Andy, Don, and the rest of the cast settled into something approaching the nine-to-five schedule that would typify the
Griffith Show
for the next eight years. The core players would gather at nine o'clock on Thursday mornings to “read down” the script for the next week's show, as the script supervisor kept time with her stopwatch. Then, they would read the script for the following week, to give the ensemble an early feel for whether that script worked and, if it didn't, what changes might be in order. Then, most of the cast would be dismissed. Aaron Ruben would stay behind with Andy, Don, and the directors to work on rewrites. Friday morning, new scripts would be handed out, and the cast would begin rehearsals on the soundstage. Shooting would commence at eight o'clock Monday morning and would continue through Wednesday.

The first episode filmed, “The New Housekeeper,” seems to have been written largely as a concession to the network and the sponsor, General Foods, whose representatives were eager to reaffirm the heartwarming backstory set up in the pilot. The episode established Andy as a winsome widower, introduced Aunt Bee as his matronly housekeeper, and posited a tender relationship between Andy and Opie. “The New Housekeeper” also illustrated what the program might have become without Don. Andy dominates, reprising the exaggerated drawl of his
Hamlet
days and generally playing the buffoon.

Ron Howard later recounted his first impression of Barney Fife: “Andy and this man were talking very quietly. Andy was a lot bigger than that fellow. And they were talking, and I couldn't really hear much, but I started watching. All of a sudden, this very quiet man, Don Knotts, became a complete bundle of nerves. Cameras were rolling. I think he was tapping his pocket and saluting and knocking his hat off. . . . I remember turning to my dad and saying something like ‘Is that man crazy?' And he said, ‘No, no, no. He's a very funny actor.' ”

Don made the most of his first real scene, a ninety-second exchange in the sheriff's driveway, saying with a stiff salute, “Deputy Barney Fife reporting, sir, with an important message.”

“Barney, I've told you, you don't have to do that.” Andy smiles. “This ain't the army. You see, it's just me and you.”

“Well, shucks, Andy. I want to do good on this job. Even if it's just deliverin' messages, I want to do it right.”

“Well, I know you do, and I admire your attitude.”

“You see, Andy, I want the folks in this town to realize that you picked me to be your deputy because . . . Well, you looked over all the candidates for the job and you judged their qualifications and their character and their ability, and you come to the fair, the just, and the honest conclusion that I was the best suited for the job. And I want to thank you, Cousin Andy.”

The exchange gave the
Griffith
producers a glimpse of the magic that could unfold when Andy and Don shared a scene: Barney's almost unbearably taut delivery, the twinkle of love in Andy's eyes, and the impeccable timing that linked the two actors. Sheldon Leonard recalled, “There was such an electricity, there was such chemistry apparent on the screen when we saw it in the dailies in the next day after we shot it, that we all looked at one another and we said, ‘Well, that's it. Let's get [Don] tied up, let's make sure he's a part of the show.' ”