Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (21 page)

The press was baffled. In
The New York Times
, George Gent wrote, “The series's continued popularity is remarkable because most critics were predicting that the show could not survive the loss of Don Knotts. . . . But in spite of these losses and the dire predictions of the critics, the Griffith show has been in the top 10 all season and was in second place at last count.”

Griffith
finished fourth in the ratings in the final season with Don and sixth in the first season without him. How did Andy's program remain so popular following the loss of its most beloved character and amid steady artistic decline? The
Griffith Show
was certainly buoyed in the ratings by a relative lack of comedic competition in the 1965–66 season. But there seemed to be more at work.

The interplay between Andy and Don had been central to the program's success as a comedy. “But there was also a very sweet part of
The Andy Griffith Show
,” recalled
Griffith
director Peter Baldwin. Viewers seemed to savor the simple pleasures of spending a half hour in Mayberry, even if nothing much happened. Perhaps they simply couldn't bear to leave.

The
Griffith Show
provided Andy steady work and considerable financial reward; yet, the production was beginning to feel like a burden. He missed Don terribly. He envied Don's freedom from the weekly grind, and his movie contract.

Don wasted no time in proceeding from his final
Griffith
episode to his first picture. Casting about for script ideas, Don seized upon an old
Griffith
story, “The Haunted House,” a teleplay that placed Barney inside a creaky, old mansion with Gomer and Andy and played off his childlike terror. “I thought to myself, people seem to enjoy the idea of seeing me get scared,” Don recalled. He persuaded his favorite
Griffith
writers, Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, to help him develop a script. Jim harbored a deathly fear of heights, so the first meeting with producer Ed Montagne, scheduled for the ninth floor of the Universal tower, was moved to the basement.

The trio's first outline didn't work. So, Don called Andy. After five years of
Griffith
scripts, Don knew Andy was a gifted constructionist, someone who could assemble the building blocks of a story. Plus, Don missed Andy, and Andy missed Don. Andy read the outline and said, “No, that's not any good.” Don replied, “Well, you come over and help us write one.”

The group gathered in the basement office at Universal every day for two weeks and sketched the story that would become
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.
Then Andy returned to Mayberry, and the three remaining writers spent the next month building a script. Don had never laughed so hard in his life. Andy sometimes stopped by to visit. Once, when Everett Greenbaum walked in wearing a handkerchief beneath his glasses in an impression of
The Invisible Man
, Andy laughed so hard that he put his fist through the wall; Andy punched walls when he was happy, too.

The script emerged as a gentle satire of small-town life, much like the
Griffith Show
, with the same slight thread of insanity. Don plays Luther Heggs, a cub reporter assigned to spend a night in a notorious haunted house. He witnesses a series of seemingly supernatural events. His account makes Luther a town hero. Then his story is discredited as a work of an overactive imagination, and Luther is humiliated—until he discovers that the ghostly doings are part of an elaborate plot to get the house torn down. It all sounds very much like a typical Barney Fife story from the old
Griffith Show
, minus the sheriff.

The script's most enduring line came from Andy. He loved the moment when an unseen voice cried, “Attaboy, Luther,” as Don delivered a variant of his Nervous Man speech recounting his haunted-house heroics. It reminded him of Juanita, Barney's unseen waitress girlfriend in Mayberry. Andy suggested the writers sprinkle “Attaboy, Luther” throughout the picture as a running gag. It became the film's signature line. Decades later, fans would yell it at Don when they spotted him on the street.

The film was shot in seventeen days that July, a remarkably economical schedule, on a stretch of familiar Universal back lot that invokes déjà vu in cinema buffs. The haunted mansion had seen previous action in the film
Harvey
, while the Munster home and Cleaver residence lay nearby.

The production played a bit like a Mayberry reunion. Don secured
Griffith
director Alan Rafkin. His supporting cast included Reta Shaw, who had played Big Maude Tyler in the
Griffith
episode “Convicts-at-Large”; Lurene Tuttle, the little old lady from “The Shoplifters”; as well as Hope “Clara” Summers and Al Checco, Don's army buddy. Hal Smith stumbles into the opening shot in a role clearly modeled on Otis.

Don's costar was Joan Staley, a beautiful Minnesotan with an interesting résumé. Only twenty-five, Joan was a former violin prodigy who had sung backup for pioneer record producer Sam Phillips, posed for
Playboy
,
and amassed several dozen television and film credits.

Joan lacked Andy Griffith's comedic discipline as Don's straight man, and she struggled to keep her composure during a diner scene that has hapless Luther labor to eat a bowl of chicken noodle soup while standing up. “He was a master of nuance,” she recalled. “He could do just a shift of his eye and just lay you out.”

Not everyone was so moved. Skip Homeier, who played one of Luther's bullying coworkers in
Mr. Chicken
, recalled that Don “would come to work and he would work in the scenes and then he would lock himself up in his trailer. . . . He didn't socialize or say ‘Good morning' or ‘Good night' or ‘Let's go to lunch' to anybody.” Skip was crestfallen; he had expected Barney Fife.

Don enjoyed the shoot immensely once his customary first-day jitters had subsided. He kept to his trailer to nurse a pulled muscle, an injury sustained while running down the stairs of the haunted mansion, a minor injury that undoubtedly fed his hypochondria. And seventeen straight days of hyperactive performance left Don exhausted.

Mystery leg ailments would vex Don for years to come. Ronnie Schell, a friend and fellow hypochondriac, remembers visiting Don in a hospital around this time. Don had a blood clot in the leg. Andy sat at his bedside. When Andy emerged from the room, Ronnie asked him in a stage whisper, “Have they told him the truth yet?” implying that Don was gravely ill. Don heard, as he was meant to. By the time Ronnie walked in, Don's face was a paper-white mask of fear. Finally, Ronnie broke up. “He never forgave me for that,” Ronnie recalled.

When the film was finished, Don sat with his director and producer and watched the final print in an otherwise empty screening room. “The three of us sat there in deafening silence,” he recalled. When the screening was over, the men walked outside and stared at each other. Producer Ed Montagne finally said, “I think it's a damn good picture. It just needs an audience.” Director Alan Rafkin echoed, “Yeah, that's right, it needs an audience.” “Right,” Don agreed. But he wasn't so sure, and it would be months before he found out.

In September, Don was shut out of the Emmy Awards for a second consecutive year. The culprit this time was Rod Serling. Vowing “No more horse race,” the academy president had narrowed the number of Emmy categories from twenty-seven to four. Don must have assumed his Emmy chances were over.

At year's end, Don returned to the
Griffith
set for a pair of guest-star performances that seemed to put the final nails in Barney's coffin. Don had told Andy he was available, and Andy was overjoyed to have him back, if only for two weeks.

Since Don's departure, nine months earlier, the program had given no account of his absence. Now, the producers tapped their best writers and set about tying up loose ends. In “The Return of Barney Fife,” we learn that the fretful deputy has decamped to Raleigh for a job in the fingerprint section of a big-city police department, handling letters
N
through
R
. (“That's the hot section, you know,” he tells Andy.) Barney lives in a corner room at the Y; to him, that is the high life.

Barney returns to Mayberry for a high school reunion, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt that amplifies the jolting transition to color. He and Andy greet with an awkward exchange of shoulder punches.

“How does it look to you?” Andy asks.

“You mean Mayberry?” Barney surveys the Forty Acres lot. “Not bad, Ange. Not bad at all. You know, you people that live in the small towns, you've really got it made.”

Barney asks, “How's things going with you?”

“Yeah, you know, same,” Andy says, looking pensive.

The real reunion, of course, is between Andy and Don, whose palpable delight at working together again fuels the happiest Mayberry moments since Barney's departure. Don wrings every drop of poignance from the story.

“Well, I heard you got yourself a new deputy,” Barney tells Andy, rolling his eyes and pursing his lips as jealousy washes across his face.

“Yeah, yeah.” Andy looks a trifle guilty.

“Thelma Lou comin'?”

When Andy informs Barney that Thelma Lou has not been heard from, Barney looks unspeakably pained. Their unresolved relationship becomes the fulcrum of the story.

“You still sweet on her?” Andy asks.

“Oh, no, no. Once it's gone, it's gone, Ange. Can't go back. Course, sometimes a man wonders . . .”

Viewers hadn't been told what became of Thelma Lou after Barney's exit. Now they learned that she had remained in Mayberry, and that Barney had unwittingly broken her heart.

When Thelma Lou finally appears, she has a husband. She introduces him to Andy and Barney, whose face is a mask of horror. Barney retreats to the punch bowl and attempts to get drunk; Andy has to break it to him that the punch is not spiked.

“Sorry, Barn, I know it must've been a shock,” Andy says.

“Sure it was a shock. So what?” Barney cries. “It wasn't the first one of my life, won't be the last. That's the way life is, Ange. It's a rough life. Ya can't cry about it.” Then, of course, Barney begins to cry. “She was the only girl I ever loved, Ange. She's the only one I ever will love. I had plans. I had big plans.”

The producers try to end things happily by fixing Barney up with another old classmate at the program's end. But the resolution rings hollow. In the denouement, Barney assures Andy he has forgotten all about Thelma Lou. Then he falls silent, his face darkens, as clearly Barney doesn't believe his own words.

The notion of Thelma Lou's forsaking Barney was an unqualified bummer. To get through her scene, actress Betty Lynn convinced herself that her “husband” was actually a friend whom she had persuaded to act the part of a spouse. “I made up this whole little story for myself. But I couldn't help it. I just believed in the relationship so much.”

Don's second guest spot, “The Legend of Barney Fife,” was a last-ditch effort to shore up support for Jack Burns, who was not panning out. Set on the day after the poignant reunion, the story has Barney collaborate with Warren in apprehending an escaped con. At the close, Barney delivers a speech clearly tailored to persuade viewers it is time for them to accept the new deputy. “I've had my place in the sun here for a lot of years,” Barney tells Andy. “It's his town out there, Ange. It's not mine.”

Then Barney departs, and Warren returns. “A true living legend, that Barney Fife,” Warren tells the sheriff. “I mean, he's something, isn't he, Andy?”

“Yes, he is,” Andy says, as if speaking to himself. “He really is.”

It was a noble effort. But three weeks later, Warren Ferguson was gone.

“It was our fault,” Andy told
New York Times
columnist Val Adams. “We tried to force Jack to do those wild, peculiar things that [Don] did—and he was willing to try—but we made a mistake.” Jack's exit reopened the question, the writer mused, of “who Sheriff Andy will talk to for a greater part of the show.”

There would be no more attempts to replace Don. No one, it seemed, wanted to see Andy engage with a new buddy, least of all Andy.

Don's second film,
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
, was released in January. The reviews were mostly encouraging; the
Los Angeles Times
termed it “an appealing piece of Americana,” though
The New York Times
found the story stretched a bit thin, even at ninety minutes. Yet, half a century later,
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
is arguably the most celebrated of Don's films, cherished by film buffs and Mayberry denizens. In a sense,
Mr. Chicken
stands as one of the final bursts of artistry by the community of writers and actors who produced
The Andy Griffith Show.

Flush with movie cash, Don spent $10,500 on a new home for his mother, back in Morgantown. Elsie Knotts, now entering her eighties, had never shown much interest in leaving West Virginia. Don was Elsie's baby. He telephoned once a week and returned to Morgantown every year or two, usually during the summer hiatus from filming. When he came home, Don typically stayed not with Elsie but with Jarvie Eldred, his old school chum, receiving guests in Jarvie's living room, heading out to the old Cosmopolitan Restaurant for hot dogs and otherwise keeping a low profile.

When Elsie came to visit Don and Kay, she always felt a bit out of place. Elsie had an eighth-grade education. She felt uneasy around Kay, the college girl. When Don's illustrious friends came to visit, Elsie would sneak off to dine with the housekeeper.

Don also purchased a new house in Brentwood. Though Don and Kay were separated, their relationship remained warm, and he hoped this new investment might help them reunite.