Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (14 page)

Sheldon approached Don and offered him a contract.
II
Don's pay would top out at $3,500 an episode, or about $100,000 a year, in season five. He was guaranteed an appearance in ten of every thirteen episodes; soon enough, though, Don would be begging to get even a single week off.

Andy and Don thought they had a hit. But most television shows fail, and no one would know
Griffith
's fate until the first episode aired that fall. By that time, at least ten episodes had been filmed. “We liked it. It was fun. It was funny. Everybody was good,” recalled Bruce Bilson, the assistant director. “But we were working in a vacuum, on two big soundstages on Cahuenga Boulevard.”

One day about six weeks into production, Andy found himself in the men's room, standing next to a studio electrician named Frank. He hadn't spoken to Andy once in those six weeks. Now, he turned to Andy and said, “You'll be in the top ten in six months.”

As the premiere neared, the
Griffith
producers began to mull which of the filmed episodes should be first to air. The network brass chose “The New Housekeeper.” Andy and much of the creative staff preferred “The Manhunt,” the second script filmed. The reason was Barney Fife.

“The Manhunt” opens with Andy and Opie fishing in the reservoir. As they pull their rowboat to shore, Barney tears down the dirt road in his Galaxie 500 squad car.

“Sheriff. Sheriff!” Barney bellows, leaping from his patrol car. “Sheriff, you'll never guess what's happened! Somethin' big!”

Andy calmly asks, “Well, what is it?”

Barney's eyes bug out. “Biggest thing ever happened in Mayberry. Real big. Big! Big big!”

The story would win the 1962 Writers Guild Award for best comedy writing in a television series. With this episode, the first to feature Don, the cast and crew began to sense that something special was playing out in front of the
Griffith
camera. Whenever Andy and Don would take the stage, Don's eyes would widen and his body would tense as he transformed into Barney, and Andy's eyes would warm with adoration, and some primal comedic force would be unleashed. “The Manhunt” recast the Mayberry universe. It was still Andy's show; but for the next five years, most of the laughs would go to Barney.

“By that episode,” Andy recalled later, “I knew that Don should be the comic and I should play straight for him, and that made all the difference. All the difference . . . The event of Don on this show changed the whole groundwork of it. Because every comic character that came on, we added them as fast as we could find them, and I played straight to all of them.”

By stepping back, dialing down his Will Stockdale shtick and retreating into the role of straight man, Andy Griffith brought balance to Mayberry and immortality to his program. As the production evolved and the cast grew, Andy Griffith would emerge as one of the hardest-working straight men on television, his timing and gravitas elevating the artistry not just of Don but, later, of such comedic talents as Howard “Floyd” McNear and Jim “Gomer” Nabors.

“To be a straight man is a wonderful position,” Andy recalled later. “You are privileged more than anyone else—to be in the scene and to watch it, too. I could watch Don Knotts and Frances and the rest with a thousand times more delight than anybody in the audience ever could, because I'm between the camera and you on most shots and I'm closer to Don's eyes than you can ever be. There's no more joy than that, I can tell you right now.”

Andy was always walking around the set chuckling and shaking his head over something Don had said. Don, for his part, had never worked with a better partner.

“Our timing was alike,” Don recalled. “I could almost tell when Andy was going to come in, and he said he could do the same with me. And Andy found Barney funny. I think that helped, too. I could see sometimes in Andy's eyes that he was trying to keep from laughing, which would help me try to be even funnier. And Andy was like the ultimate straight man. He was the best you could imagine.”

Neither Andy nor Don received a writing credit on the
Griffith Show
. But both men made enormous contributions to the Southern-flavored scripts almost from the start. Andy insisted that Don get a seat in Aaron Ruben's office when the
Griffith
elite gathered to fine-tune a coming episode. When a script had holes to be plugged, Andy would turn to Don and say, “Why don't you see if you can write up a funny little thing to put in there.”

The collaboration would yield Andy and Barney's first classic routine. The team was polishing the script for “Ellie Comes to Town,” which would be the fourth episode to air. As the
Griffith
producers reviewed the pages, Don sat in his chair and scribbled on a sheet of paper. Then he turned to Andy and said, “Hey, Andy, I just memorized the lawman's code. Try me out.” Andy turned to Don with palpable delight and said, “Okay, Don, go ahead.” Don handed Andy the sheet of scribble, slipped into character, and asked the sheriff to test his recall of what he'd written. Aaron Ruben and the others sat mesmerized as Don led Andy through the routine, in which Barney boasts of his memory skills and then proves unable to recall a single word.

“Wanna just check me on it? I know the whole thing,” Barney tells his sheriff in the finished episode. He hands Andy the text.

“ ‘Rule number one,' ” Andy recites. “All right. Go ahead.”

Barney sits, concentrates, knits his brows, clears his throat. A grave expression crosses his face as he looks up at Andy: “You wanna just give me the first word?”

“Okay: ‘An.' ”

“ ‘An,' ” Barney repeats. “ ‘An.' ‘An'?” He looks at Andy quizzically.

“Yeah. ‘An.' ”

“You sure?”

“I'm lookin' right at it.”

“ ‘An.' ‘An' . . .” Barney sighs. “Uh, you wanna just give me the second word?”

“ ‘An officer.' ”

“Oh, yeah. ‘An officer' . . . ‘An officer' . . . ‘An officer' . . . ‘An officer' . . . ‘An officer' . . .” Barney sinks his head in his hands, twirls in his chair, and thuds his forehead against a coat tree.

The exchange goes on for more than two minutes, with Barney twisting his face and disheveling his hair in agony. It reaches a comic crescendo as Barney barks back the final words of the code, moments after they leave Andy's mouth.

Most of the scene was shot with Andy and Barney reading their lines in separate takes, so Andy wouldn't lose his composure on camera. The final seconds were shot in a single take, Andy struggling mightily to spit out his words without exploding in laughter. The camera quickly cut away to a shot of a sober Andy.

“You wanna go over it again, or you think ya got it?”

“I got it,” Barney replies.

6.

A Hollywood Friendship

O
NE CHILLY
morning in winter 1960, Sherwin Bash drove out to Forty Acres, the Desilu back lot in Culver City, to visit Don, his ascendant client. He found him huddled beneath a blanket, warming his hands at a flaming garbage can beside Andy; they looked to Sherwin like a pair of hoboes. Andy emerged from beneath his own blanket, strode over to Sherwin with a broad smile, and said, “Ah want you to meet two big stars in showbiz!”

Andy and Don had been in showbiz long enough to know a hit when they saw one. By that winter, it was clear their show was both better crafted and more plainly likable than most anything else on television that year. The first batch of teleplays by Jack Elinson and Charles Stewart explored the childlike frailty in the characters who surrounded Sheriff Andy Taylor and introduced some of the peccadilloes that would immortalize the show. Here was Otis, a lovable drunk who let himself in and out of the jail cell; Barney, a deputy of such juvenile dimensions that the sheriff entrusted him with only a single bullet; and Aunt Bee, a woman of such myopic hospitality that she insists on delivering lunch to Andy and Barney at the jailhouse. The procession of drunks, vagabonds, farmers, doting aunts, and sundry eccentrics must have reminded Don of the West Virginia boardinghouse where he was raised.

But the critics were not convinced. “The New Housekeeper,” the syrupy story chosen to launch the series on October 3, drew middling reviews.
Variety
found the episode “more sentiment than comedy” and, at moments, “dangerously close to the maudlin.” A squib in
Time
magazine offered both praise and condescension, declaring Griffith and his show “good for laughs, all of them canned.” This would be a recurring theme in press coverage to come.

The morning after
Griffith
's television debut, Assistant Director Bruce Bilson raced into the makeup room to find Andy and Don already comparing notes with their new director, Bob Sweeney, and makeup man Lee Greenway. “I said, ‘Boy, everybody I spoke to just loved the show,' ” Bruce recalled. “And the makeup man said, ‘Yeah, me, too, everybody loved it.' And Andy said, ‘Everybody I spoke to loved it, too.' And Sween said, ‘Everybody I spoke to just said, ‘What a wonderful show.' And Andy said, ‘Yeah, when I came in this morning, Tiny at the gate said, ‘Great show last night.'

“And Sween said, ‘That's where I heard it,' ” Bruce recalled. “And Don said, ‘That's where I heard it.' And that was the great moment when we thought everybody loved us, because of Tiny at the gate.”

Bob Sweeney—“Sween”—joined the
Griffith
ensemble just as it went on the air. The new director was forty-one and had risen to fame with a San Francisco radio show called
Sweeney and March
, as part of a comedy duo. Bob had done some television acting, and he knew Sheldon Leonard, who hired him on a hunch.

“He had never directed before,” recalled Bridget Sweeney, Bob's daughter. “He read every book he could get on the subject.”

Bob replaced Don Weis, a capable hand who had directed nine of the first ten episodes. The producers “were feeling around for chemistry, for somebody who Don and Andy responded to,” Bruce Bilson recalled. “And Sween turned out to be that guy.” He marched onto the soundstage one morning and announced, “Sweeney's the name, comedy's the game.” Then he assembled the cast and crew for the first shot of that week's episode, “The Christmas Story.” He was so flustered that, instead of “Action,” he yelled, “Cut!”

Sween would direct the next eighty
Griffith
episodes.

The October 1
TV Guide
introduced
The Andy Griffith Show
to its 20 million subscribers in a story titled “Doin' What Comes Natural” and featuring a photograph of Opie perched on Andy's shoulders. It described Andy “bursting into show business like an undammed waterfall.” Don drew only a passing mention.

The next week brought the “Manhunt” episode to air and introduced the first addition to this ensemble of lovable kooks, Hal Smith. Born forty-four years earlier at the northern tip of Michigan, Hal came to Hollywood and eventually landed a utility role on
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
. He was invited to the Desilu lot to read for the part of Otis the inebriate, one of a few parts from the pilot that Sheldon Leonard planned to carry forward to the series. Like many Mayberry roles, this one might have run its course as a single appearance. But Hal fit it so snugly that Aaron Ruben took him aside after the episode wrapped and told him, “Hal, this might develop into quite a part for you.”

The fourth episode, “Ellie Comes to Town,” would roll out twenty-three-year-old Elinor Donahue, a fresh face in Mayberry and potential love interest for Andy. A former child actress from Tacoma, Washington, Elinor had spent the previous six years as the eldest daughter on the landmark series
Father Knows Best
. She was as well-known in Hollywood as either Andy or Don, and she arrived to the show as its presumptive leading lady, her name announced ahead of Don's in the credits. She would last just one season.

Elinor was cast on
Griffith
as a lady druggist who arrives from up North to replace her retiring uncle at the Mayberry pharmacy. “It was sort of a loose premise to get a female in town of Andy's age,” Elinor recalled. But Andy was eleven years older than Ellie, who, months earlier, had been playing someone's college-age daughter. The pairing must have left viewers a tad uncomfortable.

The producers wanted a courtship in season one and a wedding in season two. Elinor was radiant on-screen—perhaps a bit too radiant, a debutante among gap-toothed farmers. But it became immediately apparent that no sparks would fly. When Andy wooed Ellie, the overall impression was of a benevolent uncle reluctantly courting his prim niece. Behind the scenes, Andy quietly called off the wedding.

“There's things ah can do, and things ah cain't,” Andy told an interviewer. “Love scenes are one ah surely cain't.”

There would be no wedding for Ellie, nor for lovely Joanna Moore, fiery Aneta Corsaut, or any of the other women paraded through Mayberry as romantic interests for Andy, through the entire eight-year run of
The Andy Griffith Show
. The real “marriage” in Mayberry was between Andy and Barney.

That winter, in a
Los Angeles Times
interview, Elinor hinted at simmering tensions on the set, at Andy's dissatisfaction with his leading lady and refusal to marry her on-screen. “And I'm inclined to agree with him,” she said. “The show would then become something like a
Sheriff Knows Best
.”

Elinor soon found herself with a lot of free time on the Mayberry set. As the season lengthened, she was written into fewer episodes and given fewer lines.

“Andy would say, ‘You know, why don't we give Ellie's line to Don and have Don say that,' ” she recalled. “And so my lines got taken away. But they worked when Don said them. They were funny when Don said them. They weren't funny when I said them.”

Andy and Don enjoyed nothing on the Desilu set so much as performing together. When they worked one-on-one, Don would sometimes torture Andy by pursing his lips in a certain way, or cocking his head, or flexing his eyebrows—there were so many ways he could break Andy up. He would do it again and again, until Andy would finally clutch his sides and say, “Stop it, you son of a bitch.”

In his own gentle way, Don was every bit as much the perfectionist as Andy. On those rare occasions when he felt Andy hadn't set him up just right, Don would lean in and quietly ask, “You wanna come in a little earlier there, Ange?”

Sometimes, as the two stood waiting for the crew to calibrate the stage lights, they would sing church hymns, with Don on the high harmony. Before long, Andy and Barney were harmonizing on camera, as well.

Off camera, they worked up little off-color skits to amuse the crew. In one, Andy stood straight-faced while Don narrated a mock advertisement: “I thought I was impotent. I tried everything. I went to doctors. I went to psychiatrists. I went to chiropractors. I took shots. And then I met her, and . . . [bursting into song, with Andy in harmony] ‘Love lifted me . . .' ”

“We spent every day together,” Andy recalled. “We'd sit side by side, talk or not talk. Every day. And one day he admitted that his full name was Jesse Donald Knotts. And he hated his first name. Well, I've always had a mean streak, and I started calling him Jess.”

Don already called Andy “Ange,” the nickname from his Carolina childhood. In time, those were the only names either man used for the other. These were honorifics, a treasured inside joke. They stuck till the day Don died.

Episode seven, “Andy the Matchmaker,” revealed an emerging theme in the
Griffith
scripts. In Mayberry people would go to any length to shield each other from hurt, and Andy was the town's protector. Barney storms into the sheriff's office and threatens to resign over a whimsical poem someone has written at his expense on the wall of the bank, alleging the deputy is incapable of catching a crook. Andy plots to revive his deputy's confidence by manufacturing a crime for him to solve; Barney has never actually collared a criminal, crime being so scarce in Mayberry. Andy summons Barney to the drugstore, where Ellie, the druggist, claims someone has made off with twenty-four dollars. Barney tries to console Ellie but can scarcely contain his glee at her misfortune. He produces a canister of fingerprint powder and promptly spills it, setting off a fit of sneezing. Don's performance is magnificently manic, and the camera cleverly cuts away from Andy and Ellie when they can no longer keep from laughing.

Andy wasn't yet entirely comfortable with his own character. Story conferences were leaving him less and less to do. It became increasingly clear that Andy's role was to solve problems, not to create them. His character was coming to resemble a benevolent parent in a room full of riotous children. The best jokes were going to Barney. At home, watching the dailies one evening, Barbara turned to Andy and said, “Honey, you're too samey.”

At the script table, surrounded by the regular Mayberry cast, Andy aired his misgivings. His bosses were horrified. Aaron Ruben took Andy aside and told him, “You know, you're the star of the show, and they look to you, and if you're going to express misgivings about where we're going, how do you expect Don, or Frances, or the kid, or the kid's father, to get up that energy and that morale that we need?”

It wouldn't happen again.

The January 2, 1961, broadcast of Episode 13, “Mayberry Goes Hollywood,” introduced another new face to Mayberry: Howard McNear as Floyd the barber. Howard had gotten his start at the Savoy Theatre in San Diego in the 1920s. He had worked hundreds of roles in radio, television, and cinema, most notably as grumpy Doc Adams on the radio series
Gunsmoke
. His delivery was quirky and unpredictable: Howard would mumble and stammer and mutter before fixing his eyes on a costar and uttering some comedic chestnut. “You never knew which look or gesture or reading you were going to get from Howard, and he usually caught you completely off guard,” Don recalled. “I cannot tell you how many takes I ruined, breaking up at Howard.”

The October 26 issue of
Variety
put
Griffith
at No. 8 in the Nielsen ratings, just ahead of
Candid Camera
. Not yet a month old,
Griffith
had cracked the top ten, where it would remain for the rest of its eight-year run. “One of the most remarkable, and unexpected, successes of this television season has been the popularity of
The Andy Griffith Show
,” wrote Lawrence Laurent, television critic for the
Washington Post
. “This is an unpretentious comedy, and it was not expected to do much opposite the ABC-TV powerhouse,
Adventures in Paradise
.”

“Unpretentious” was code for “rural,” “hick,” or worse. But the show was an undeniable hit.
Adventures in Paradise
vanished from the airwaves two years later.

Andy's success aroused envy in his peers. One day, Andy and Don were eating lunch in the Desilu commissary along with directors Bruce Bilson and Bob Sweeney. Up walked Danny Thomas, the star of
The Danny Thomas Show
and part owner of Andy's new show. Danny patted Andy on the back and said, in his most patronizing voice, “There's my little moneymaker.”

Another grudge was sown; Andy would neither forgive nor forget the remark. “We never ate in the commissary again,” Bruce recalled.

By 1961, Andy was his own little moneymaker. He owned a Carolina waterfront estate, half of the
Griffith Show
,
and parts of a shopping center, a record store, and two music companies; and his résumé included a hit record, a smash play, a blockbuster movie, and now a top-rated television show.

In January,
The Andy Griffith Show
made the cover of
TV Guide
for the first of eight times
.
A two-part story portrayed the enigmatic Andy as “a hard worker and a hard worrier,” vexed by self-doubt: “He begins his day of worries at 5:30 a.m. when he props a script against the toaster at home and reads intensely while he has his cereal and coffee. He is often on the Desilu lot half an hour earlier than anyone else and seems surprised to find nobody around at 7:30 a.m.”

The article depicted the working Andy as an ensemble of tics and quirks, ritually tweaking his ear or rubbing his nose as he guzzled coffee and pawed through
Griffith Show
scripts. “If he is frustrated or angry, he prowls the set, rampaging in all directions and mussing his curly hair until it looks as though he had spent the night in a hayloft. He writes appointments on slips of paper and then loses them, a habit he's had all his life.” Once, while greeting visitors to the set, absent-minded Andy found himself fervently shaking hands with Barbara, his wife.