Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (16 page)

It occurred to Don, then, that after years of inhabiting docile, submissive characters on stage and screen, he had come to regard himself as a loser. He had projected that image so well that the public had embraced him as a loser. And now that success had made him a winner. Don treated himself to a celebratory round of golf.

The friendship between Andy and Barney was now the central dynamic on this quintessentially male program. The relationship trumped every other, including even the tender father-son bond between Andy and Opie. By the end of the first season, Ronny Howard had effectively lost his second billing on the
Griffith Show
, and that suited him just fine: a seven-year-old boy didn't need that kind of pressure.

Many
Griffith
scripts played like instructional films on parenting. For a model, Andy and his writers looked no further than the real-life relationship between Ronny and his father, Rance, that rare Hollywood parent who seemed to manage both his own affairs and his child's with dignity and sense.

Early in the first season, Rance recalled, “a script came in where Opie had all these smart-alecky lines, kind of flip and kind of sassing his dad.” That was the relationship between Danny Thomas and child actor Rusty Hamer on
The Danny Thomas Show
. “And so the writers were just transferring what they did with Rusty to Ron and Opie.” At a script meeting, Rance piped up, “You know, these lines, the direction you're going with Ronny's dialogue, it'll get you laughs right now, but it will seem like he's a smart-ass kid, and you'll want to slap him down. And in a year or two, when he gets a little older, it's not going to be funny.”

After the meeting, Andy came up to Rance. “You know what, Rance? You're right about that, between Andy and Opie. We're gonna change it. We're gonna try to develop a relationship between Opie and Andy the same as your relationship with Ronny.”

Everyone on the
Griffith
set witnessed the dynamic between Rance and Ronny in its full complexity. One day, Rance surprised everyone on the set by bending the child star over his knee and a administering a spanking. It happened only once. Ronny doesn't recall the pretext, except that he “was probably acting up” and not concentrating on his work. The whole set grew quiet, and Rance made a little speech worthy of a
Griffith
script: “Anywhere you are—I don't care who's watching, I don't care what's going on. I have only one job, and that's to be your father, and that's to teach you right from wrong. And nothing about that job embarrasses me.”

The Howards rented a bungalow on Cahuenga Boulevard near the Desilu lot so Ronny could go home for lunch. On days when Ronny had baseball games, the entire
Griffith
production shuffled its schedule to shoot Opie's scenes first. The family kept home movies of Ronny frolicking on the back lot, his personal playground, where he would take out mitts and play catch with Don between shots. (Andy looked the better athlete but threw “like a girl,” Don confided to a friend, years later.
“Don't ever tell him I said that.”
)

On the set, “they took one of the dressing rooms and made it into a little schoolhouse,” Rance recalled. When the time came for little Ronny to do a scene, Assistant Director Bruce Bilson would summon him from his schoolroom with a cry of “Ronny,
hyeeeaaa
,” and Ronny would come running. He preferred work to school.

Though Andy turned to Rance many times for counsel on his relationship with his fictional Mayberry child, the two never spoke of Andy's own children, Sam and Dixie. Rance doesn't recall seeing either child on the Desilu set.
I
Andy kept his home life at home.

Karen and Tom Knotts did make the occasional appearance at their father's workplace. “I was visiting my dad on the set once,” Karen recalled. “And I was extremely slow, everything I did, because I was always daydreaming. And I was in the lavatory, just daydreaming, and my dad and Andy were outside the door talking. And all of a sudden Andy said, ‘Don, I love Karen, but she is so . . . darn . . . slow!' ” Don sheepishly called into the restroom, “Are you done?” And on the other side of the door, Karen heard Andy deadpan, “You're one tough dad.”

With “Bringing Up Opie,” on May 22, 1961, the first season was over and the
Griffith
ensemble had completed thirty-two episodes. For the second season, they would produce thirty-one more. That schedule put enormous pressure on Sheldon Leonard, Aaron Ruben, and the
Griffith
writers to produce material during the summer hiatus. The next seven years would see many recycled stories and reheated jokes. “The never-ending maw of the camera heartlessly devoured a script every week,” recalled writer Harvey Bullock.

At season's end, Sheldon summoned several writing teams to his office for a three-day “seminar.” His aim was to get a head start on the next season by brainstorming and stockpiling ideas. The ritual was unusual in the television industry—and with good reason: union rules forbade such meetings because they amounted to unpaid work.

“We'd sit around and just bounce ideas off each other,” recalled Aaron, the producer and lead writer. “ ‘How about one where Aunt Bee enters homemade pickles in the county fair?' ‘How about one where Opie meets a hobo who has a great influence on him?' ‘How about one where Don gives somebody a ticket for something ridiculous, a ticket for jaywalking?' I was the one sitting there with the yellow legal tablet, writing as fast I could.”

When the seminar was over, Aaron would take his family to Europe for a month of well-earned vacation. He would return to find a stack of scripts on his desk. Such little feats of planning probably helped elevate the
Griffith Show
above the standard run of television sitcoms in the 1960s.

The
Griffith
camp would approach the second season with some distinct advantages. They now had a solid cast of regulars with established personalities and predictable quirks. By season two, the writers knew exactly how Barney would overreact to an escaped con, and what Andy might do to rein his deputy in.

They also had a stronger sense of place. It's hard to fathom now, but Mayberry began its life as an anonymous Southern town, rendered without reference to any real city or state. The origin of the name is debated. Decades later, Andy told Larry King it had been coined by Artie Stander, the writer who penned the pilot for
The Danny Thomas Show
. But the name might also have come from Andy's own memory. Mayberry was the name of a community in Patrick County, Virginia, the birthplace of Geneva Griffith, Andy's mother.

For half a century, Andy would deny Mount Airy and its denizens the credit they obviously deserved for inspiring and populating Mayberry. He claimed Mayberry took shape around the script table, “from the imaginations of Don Knotts, me, Aaron Ruben, Sheldon Leonard, and whoever was writing or directing.”

But over time, the correspondence between Mayberry and the North Carolina of Andy's childhood became obvious. Winston-Salem, the nearest large city to Andy's home town, is introduced in Episode 3. Episode 17 alludes to Fancy Gap, a Virginia town just across the state line. In Episode 23, Aunt Bee has a sick relative in Mount Pilot, a play on Pilot Mountain, a local landmark. Subsequent scripts have Andy and Barney journey to the mighty metropolis of Raleigh. This was Southern realism, and Southern sitcom viewers hadn't seen anything quite like it.

One
Griffith
hand who wanted to know more about Andy Griffith's North Carolina was its director, Bob Sweeney. Between seasons, he and Andy traveled there for a two-week visit. They crisscrossed the state, and Bob watched Andy interact with dozens of Carolinians, the better to see Mayberry through Andy's eyes.

“Andy took him to this old lady's house in the country, up in the mountains,” said Bridget Sweeney, Bob's daughter. “They had to trot through this field to get to this little shack she lived in. She made them tea and gave them a little bourbon and talked to them for a couple of hours. He had the best time with her and watched Andy interact with her and watched Andy interact with everybody, which made him understand them better. But when they were leaving, she said, ‘Now, you be careful of that field, it's full of copperheads.' And they ran through that field like their feet were on fire.”

Andy and Barbara Griffith had been living with their children and maid in a $650-a-month Spanish-revival rental home in Pacific Palisades, a secluded enclave north of Santa Monica along the Pacific Coast Highway. In summer 1961, they purchased a spacious eight-room house at Toluca Lake, a town in the eastern San Fernando Valley framed by television and movie studios. They bought it from Gordon MacRae, star of the films
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
. The house sat on a single-acre lot, large by Hollywood standards but a mere postage stamp by comparison to Andy's Manteo spread.

Don's Emmy win ended any debate over who was Andy's second banana in Mayberry. Their friendship became the theme of the season to come.

With characteristic humility, Andy told the press his partnership with Don was nearly the only reason he turned on his television Monday nights. He told the
Chicago Tribune
, “I hate to see myself on the screen. Except when I'm doing something with Don. We can almost feel one another breathe—that man is so good you just can't believe it. He is so intense, he looks at me so deeply, he's trying so hard that half the time I just bust up right there on the set and we have to start all over.”

By this time, Andy had retreated so far from the center of the Mayberry stage that, at times, it seemed as if he were sitting in the audience. Andy's character gave viewers someone with whom they could identify, a soothing presence amid all the comedic high jinks. Without Andy,
Griffith
risked alienating at least half the nation—those who were neither rural nor Southern. Andy served as their surrogate. His knowing grin and gentle quips reminded the urban sophisticates that his show was satire. His arched eyebrows and half smiles told viewers that he knew how ridiculous his friends looked, and he loved them anyway, and so should they.

Everyone knew Andy worked best as Mayberry's straight man. Yet, accepting that role put Andy's artistic sensibilities in conflict with his competitive spirit. On the Desilu lot, Andy would sometimes scan his script, frown, and ask, “When do I get some of the jokes?”

7.

A Slight Thread of Insanity

S
EASON TWO
of
The Andy Griffith Show
revisited scenes from two Southern Gothic childhoods, Andy's in Mount Airy, Don's in Morgantown, sweetening them with happy Mayberry endings.

The scripts came from several pens but seemed to draw from a single source: Andy's and Don's painful journeys through youth. Many of their memories were too dark for a television comedy. The
Griffith Show
allowed them to recast the stories as tender Mayberry parables. Perhaps this was a way for the two men to exorcise some childhood demons.

The season-two opener, “Opie and the Bully,” finds Opie surrendering a nickel to a neighborhood urchin every morning on his way to school. Barney vows to investigate and stalks the boy around Mayberry, peering through a round hole cut from a newspaper. When he sees Opie hand over a nickel, his lips purse in fury. Barney tells Andy, who persuades Opie to make a stand. “It's fine and dandy to give away somethin' because you want to,” Andy tells his son, “but not because you're scared the other fella's gonna give you a punch in the nose if you don't.” He tells Opie that he himself stood up to a bully when he was a child, and that when the rogue punched him in the nose, “I didn't even feel it.”

Opie finally summons the courage to face the bully. As he sets out for the confrontation, he turns once more to Andy and asks, “You sure you didn't even feel it?” Wordlessly, Andy lifts Opie into his arms and hugs him.

It seems as if, in that moment, the last trace of Will Stockdale drains from the face of Andy Griffith. In episodes to come, Andy would still pivot between a deep upland twang and the gentler Chapel Hill lilt, between the broadly grinning bumpkin of
No Time for Sergeants
and the sage, Lincolnesque patriarch of
Griffith
. But as the months and years passed, the ear-to-ear grins would be fewer, giving way to more furrowed brows and warm, fatherly eyes.

The episode “Opie's Hobo Friend” offered another nuanced lesson on civics and parenting. The script leaned heavily on guest star Buddy Ebsen, a colorful character actor who would resurface the next year at the helm of another “rural” sitcom,
The Beverly Hillbillies
, perhaps the most successful of many
Griffith
imitators. In this story, Ebsen plays David Browne, a rail-yard vagabond not unlike the many nomads who wandered in and out of the Morgantown boardinghouse run by Elsie Knotts. Buddy's hobo flouts the rules. He swipes sandwiches from Andy's patrol car, liberates gumballs from the corner machine, and feeds Opie roast chicken purloined from someone's farm. Opie is entranced—until the hobo finally exhausts Andy's goodwill. The hobo brags, “I live the kind of life that other people would just love to live, if they only had the courage.” Andy responds with a brief, brilliant summation of the essence of parenting: “You can't let a youngin decide for himself. He'll grab at the first flashy thing with shiny ribbons on it. Then when he finds out there's a hook in it, it's too late.”

All through the first season, Andy and Don had labored in story conferences to leaven the
Griffith
dialog with words and phrases that sounded properly Southern. By season two, the writers—virtually all of them Northern—were finding that language themselves. “Somewhere in the genes, some other force was tapping the typewriter keys,” recalled writer Harvey Bullock. “I found myself having Andy
carry
Helen to the dance; fat folks became
heavyset
; the gas station became the
fillin'
station; ladies didn't perspire, they
felt the heat
; people had
half a mind
to do things or were
just fixing to
.”

The writers soaked up Mayberry vernacular from previous scripts and listened to Andy and Don spin tales on the set. Andthey reached back into their own childhoods, in small Midwestern towns and large East Coast cities, to reclaim sweet memories. These rhetorical artifacts weren't particularly Southern or Northern, urban or rural: they were universal. The earnest realism of the
Griffith Show
was becoming a collaborative effort.

Once, early in the second season, director Bob Sweeney cued little Ronny at the doorway to the sheriff's office, and the child actor balked.

“What is it?” Bob asked.

“Well, I'm not sure a kid would say it that way.”

“Well, how would he say it?”

Ronny said the line the way he thought a kid would say it. (Decades later, he remembers the scene but not the exact words.)

“Well, say it that way,” Bob told the boy, then said, “Action!”

Ronny stood grinning.

Andy looked over. “What's the matter, youngin?”

Ronny said, “That's the first suggestion of mine that you've taken.”

And Andy said, “That's the first one that was any damn good. Now, let's go rehearse the scene.”

For Ronny's eighth birthday, the
Griffith
cast and crew chipped in to buy him an eight-millimeter movie camera. Ronny set about making a home movie, which he titled
The Chase
. It starred his father, Rance, as a hobo who steals a pie, a plot not unlike that of “Opie's Hobo Friend.”

Ronny took careful note of Andy's skills as benevolent boss of the Mayberry set and keeper of the
Griffith
flame. Ron remembers sitting through a Thursday script-reading: “It was pretty funny, and it was pretty outrageous. It had Andy and Barney being pretty goofy. And when it was over, people were smiling, and they were happy, and then Andy said, ‘I think we're gonna have to rewrite this script.' And there was kind of a silence because everyone had thought it was a pretty funny script, and one of the producers said so. But Andy said, ‘Yeah, I think it's funny, too.' He said, ‘We're not
The Beverly Hillbillies.
' ”

The producers now routinely approached Andy and Don when the show ran a minute or two short. The pair would retreat to a corner of the script room to write. It was filler, yes—some of the most inventive filler ever glimpsed on television. Their meandering dialogues were becoming a trademark of the
Griffith Show
. “You wouldn't know where it was coming from,” Ron Howard recalled, “but all of a sudden it would be one of the greatest scenes the show ever offered.”

The absurd little skits brought something unique and timeless to the screen. Hedda Hopper, the Hollywood gossip columnist, called it “a slight thread of insanity”: that twinkle in Andy's eye, and that tremor in Barney's frame, betrayed just a hint of Carrollian madness in sunny Mayberry.

One of those sessions probably yielded the opening scene to “The Pickle Story,” perhaps the most beloved
Griffith
story. At its start, the camera finds Andy and Barney in the sheriff's office, alternately humming and singing the hymn “Tell Mother I'll Be There” as they shuffle papers, a tender moment of shared reverie.

“The Pickle Story” celebrates the simple virtue of empathy: recognizing the feelings of another and, in the case of utopian Mayberry, going to comic lengths to protect them. Writer Harvey Bullock later recalled that the story had emerged at one of Sheldon Leonard's brainstorming conferences. Others say the inspiration came from Don's bitter hatred for cucumbers, acquired while eating them in prodigious quantity during the war.

Aunt Bee walks into the sheriff's office and announces that she has brewed a batch of pickles. For Andy and Barney, this is dire news: Aunt Bee's pickles are inedible. They watch a fly land on one and die. Yet, they cannot bear the thought of hurting Bee's feelings. “I don't know how I can face the future,” Barney moans, “when there's eight quarts of pickles in it.”

Andy and Barney empty Aunt Bee's jars and replace her toxic pickles with surrogates bought from a store. The ploy backfires when Aunt Bee enters her pickles in a contest at the fair. Now, Andy and Barney must choose between hurting Aunt Bee's pride and perpetrating a fraud. They decide the only solution is to eat all the pickles themselves.

The story further defines Andy as Mayberry's archetypal father. He labors to protect not just Aunt Bee's feelings but also those of her archrival, Clara, whose pickles eventually win the contest. Andy realizes the pickle contest is all Clara has. She tells the sheriff, “It's a great comfort to know there's something I can do.” Like so many in Mayberry, Clara has no family but the town itself.

In fact, there was a distinct dearth of traditional families in this quintessential family show. Andy is a widower, Barney a bachelor, Aunt Bee a spinster. Floyd the barber and Otis the drunk both purportedly had spouses, but they were never seen. The lesson of Mayberry, Ron Howard later asserted, was that “a community can be a family. The town of Mayberry is one big family.”

Part of the program's unique appeal was its pleasing invocation of simple virtues in a turbulent time.
The Andy Griffith Show
was anachronistic. The denizens of Mayberry wore clothing of uncertain vintage and hair of indeterminate style and drove cars of unspecified age. Scant mention was made of current affairs or changing times. Telephone calls were placed through a human operator, and no one seemed to own a television set.

“Andy used to say that ‘even though we're making this show in the sixties, Mayberry is really the town I grew up in, in the forties,' ” Ron Howard recalled. Andy encouraged cast and crew to discard their contemporary affectations and treat the production as a journey through the past. That spirit would infuse every episode of the
Griffith Show
, inspiring viewers to reach back to their own tender memories of smaller towns in simpler times.

When current events did creep into Mayberry conversation, they were invoked in defense of the good old days, or in a sort of mocking defiance of the change simmering all around.

“People are in too much of a hurry nowadays,” a barbershop customer intones at the start of Episode 48, “The Manicurist,” broadcast in January 1962. “What happened to the fine art of settin', just settin' and starin'?”

“Ohhh, that's the finest thing in the world,” Andy chimes in, “settin' on the porch on a moonlit night, starin' up at the sky. That's what probably folks will do when they get to the moon: They'll set on the porch up there and stare down here.”

Andy was remarkably adept at shielding his production from the turmoil outside; on the streets of Mayberry, it seemed as if the sixties had never happened. He was somewhat less successful in shutting out the tumult in his own home. One morning, Andy arrived on the set with his right hand in a cast. The official line was that he had injured it while building a toy garage for his son, Sam, according to Griffith biographer Terry Collins. In fact, Andy had put the hand through a door—or a wall; accounts vary—during a particularly explosive argument with Barbara.

On-screen, yet another story was told: Sheriff Andy had broken his hand while apprehending some crooks. In the opening shot of the March 1962 episode “Aunt Bee, the Warden,” Andy emerges from the squad car looking as if he has been worked over, with a bruised face, disheveled hair, puffy eyes, and a torn uniform, an odd sight in tidy Mayberry. It was hard to tell which of the injuries were real.

Andy had spoken openly and honestly about the darker angels of his nature—his bitter grudges, his explosions of temper, his attraction to drink—since his
Face in the Crowd
days. Even now, immersed in the bucolic Mayberry universe he had created, Andy could not entirely purge Lonesome Rhodes from his soul. Friends winced at the thought of spending an evening in the Griffith home. By the 1960s, Andy and Barbara were feuding openly, and drunkenly.

“His and Barbara's relationship was insane,” recalled Bridget Sweeney, daughter of
Griffith
director Bob Sweeney, who spent many childhood evenings as their guest. “They used to bust up furniture and break windows and break walls. . . . They were like the battling Griffiths. The way they talked to each other was awful, and the guests would be so uncomfortable.”

As the
Griffith Show
rolled on, the contrast between Andy Griffith's fictional world and the real one would grow yet starker.

Anyone who had missed the first sixty episodes of the
Griffith Show
could watch the episode “Andy on Trial” that April and come away understanding why this docile comedy connected so powerfully with viewers, and why the program's central character looked so pleased every time his spindly deputy walked on-screen.

“Andy on Trial” revisits themes first aired in the Danny Thomas pilot. Andy arrives at the office of a big-city sophisticate and attempts to arrest him for a neglected speeding ticket back in Mayberry. Andy insists the executive return to town and pay the fine as a matter of simple propriety.

The vengeful executive owns a newspaper. He dispatches a glamorous Rosalind Russell type to gather dirt on the seemingly unimpeachable sheriff, and the reporter quickly pegs Barney as an easy mark. Over milk shakes, she tricks the deputy into a prideful soliloquy of self-aggrandizement at the expense of his boss. “The kid is a little lax,” Barney blusters, appraising the sheriff.

The executive publishes a hit piece on Andy, airing vague allegations of corruption and negligence. An overeager state prosecutor orders a hearing to weigh Andy's fitness for office. He calls Barney to the stand and confronts him with his own statements against his employer: Isn't it true that Sheriff Taylor allows prisoners to let themselves in and out of their cells? That he takes the patrol car out on personal errands?

Horrified at the effect of his own braggadocio, Barney is seized with a rare moment of self-awareness: “The truth is, sometimes I get carried away with myself. When I was talking with the young lady there, I—well, I got to braggin' a little bit. I guess that's one of my faults. . . . Why, Andy's the best friend I got in the whole world. And as far as I'm concerned, he's the best sheriff, too.”