Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (25 page)

Andy's show would be swept up in a sea change at CBS that ultimately closed the curtain on Mayberry. Ratings were down. Fred Silverman, the new programming chief, shifted the network's focus to younger viewers, who were thought more likely to buy sponsors' products. In spring 1970, he began a systematic purge of programs that skewed toward older viewers. In their place would come new programs to “deal with the now scene,” a vice president explained to
Time
magazine. Mary Tyler Moore, the outspoken spouse from
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, would be brought back to play a single career woman at a television station. Andy Griffith would return in
Headmaster
, bridging the generation gap. “I think CBS is using us to do a little face-lifting,” Andy bragged to a
Chicago Tribune
columnist that summer.

Sadly, CBS and Andy Griffith did not see eye to eye on
Headmaster
. Andy wanted to make important television. CBS wanted laughs. Would Andy's new program be a comedy, a comedy-drama, or a drama with a bit of comedy thrown in? “Griffith seems none too sure himself
,
” one columnist concluded.

Headmaster
took to the air on September 15 with big ambitions, with writing contributions from future Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and a theme song sung by Linda Ronstadt. “We're gonna try and deal with many of the situations that young people come up against these days,” Andy drawled in a CBS preview.

The pilot drew scathing reviews. “Modern TV waste,” the
New York Times
opined. Critics noted that Andy seemed inserted into the scripts almost as an afterthought, and then only for pompous, Fonda-esque soliloquies on substance abuse and civil liberties. Some whispered, too, that Andy himself was becoming a bit haughty. A visiting reporter watched him wrap a scene and bark, “Print it,” without bothering to consult the young director. By week three,
Headmaster
had fallen from the top forty.

When it became clear
Headmaster
could not be saved, a conference call was hastily arranged. Dick Linke brokered a solution: Andy would be his own “midseason replacement,” quietly scuttling
Headmaster
in January and returning the following week in an entirely different series. New series were getting clobbered in the 1970–71 season, including the sublime
Mary Tyler Moore Show
. The network wanted something old, something proven. So
The
New Andy Griffith Show
was born.

Andy would return to the air “as a kindly authority figure in a small Southern town—this time as a mayor instead of a sheriff, and with a wife (Lee Meriwether) and two children, instead of a widower with one son and an Aunt Bee,”
TV Guide
explained. “With these slight differences, it was the old
Andy Griffith Show
all over again.”

Andy, forthright as ever, took full blame for the
Headmaster
debacle, which became known across the industry as the $3.5 Million Misunderstanding. “The truth, plain and simple, is that I was lousy,” he said. “I wasn't comfortable playing a sophisticated educator. I couldn't identify with him. I realize now that every time I played a successful character in the past, the character always had the same roots. First, he was a Southerner. Second, he was based on things I knew in my dumb little town in North Carolina.”

Andy's new
Griffith Show
had much of the same talent as the old one. Aaron Ruben wrote the pilot,
Griffith
alumnus Lee Philips directed it, Earle Hagen crafted the theme song, and Mayberry regulars George Lindsey and Paul Hartman came on as guest stars. Andy even tapped ever-loyal Don, the friend with whom he had refused to collaborate on a film just a year earlier.

The goal was nostalgia, but
The New Andy Griffith Show
emerged as a surreal muddle of Mayberry memories.. Andy is cast as the mayor of a fictional town called Greenwood. (Dick Linke helpfully apprised reporters, in all seriousness, that Greenwood was “about fifteen or twenty miles” from the equally fictitious Mayberry.) His name is now Andy Sawyer. He has a wife and two children, and he seems to bear no relation to Andy Taylor. But several of the sheriff's old friends are on hand, pestering Andy to exercise his mayoral influence in rezoning some land. What are Goober and Barney doing in Greenwood? And if this is a different Andy, then why are they his friends?

Don drives up to Andy's curb, wearing Barney's familiar salt-and-pepper suit. “It can't be,” Andy gasps. He and Andy never utter each other's name, perhaps out of sheer confusion. Instead, they punch each other desperately on the shoulder, crying, “You son of a gun!” “You're a son of a gun yourself!”

The pilot drew better ratings than the debut of
Headmaster
, proving the enduring strength of the
Griffith Show
brand. Reviews ranged from sympathetic to savage. The
New York Times
termed it “a situation without the comedy.” The very name of the new series, the critic wrote, betrayed the conceit of its creators that “there are millions of Andy Griffith fans across the country who would watch Mr. Griffith brush his teeth for 30 minutes.”

By the second episode, the Mayberry gang was gone and
The New Andy Griffith Show
began to find its way. Lee Meriwether and Ann Morgan Guilbert, who played Andy's wife and his sister-in-law, procured sweatshirts for the cast and crew that had the show's title printed on the front and
HEADMASTER
crossed out on the back.

But ratings lagged, and the series was canceled at the season's end.

Just as his television world was crumbling around him, Andy Griffith found himself a surprise guest on the March 25, 1971, broadcast of
This Is Your Life
. Faithful manager Dick Linke had helped arrange the affair, which reunited Andy with a bewildering array of loved ones and long-lost friends: the Reverend Edward T. Mickey, the Mount Airy minister who'd taught Andy the trombone; members of the glee club he'd led at Goldsboro High School; director Elia Kazan, who gave Andy his greatest film role; Sheldon Leonard, Jim Nabors, and Ron Howard from
The Andy Griffith Show
; Ken Berry, his Mayberry replacement; and Andy's parents and children. Andy was furious. He liked to control his projects, not be blindsided by them.

The one curious omission was Don Knotts, Andy's dearest friend. Was this an intentional act by Dick Linke, part of a campaign to dissociate his greatest client from the former partner? Decades later, Dick maintains he never intentionally excluded Don from the broadcast. Perhaps Don was simply too busy with his variety show.

Meanwhile, Andy Griffith's lovable second banana increasingly resembled a star.

“Don Knotts and his life style have changed drastically since the days when he drove the Plymouth in from Glendale,”
TV Guide
reported in fall 1970. “Today, Don lives in Beverly Hills and drives a Cadillac. His clothes, far from the Barney Fife image of
The Andy Griffith Show
, are smartly tailored to his slight frame. He sports sideburns, and onstage he hides his spreading bald spot with a hair piece.”

Don was proud of the new show, and of the variety special that had spawned it. He marked the occasion by purchasing a new house from reclusive actress Barbara Stanwyck in Beverly Hills. But deep down, Don knew he wasn't cut out to headline a full-blown variety series. He was an actor, not a stand-up comic, and he seemed to function best when deputized to other actors. Even in his films, Don played a deceptively submissive leading man, a perpetual underdog, always taking orders or enduring abuse from some alpha-male costar. Only when the credits rolled did Don gain the upper hand.

Now, Don was about to headline twenty-two consecutive variety shows. “For the first time in my career,” he recalled, “I felt I was up against something I could not handle. For openers, I couldn't deal with writers firing that many sketches at me every week. I couldn't seem to make decisions on material that fast.” On the day when Don was to meet the press and talk up his new variety show, he awakened with a mystery ailment and begged off. Poor Bill Dana, Don's head writer, was forced to fill in.

Don was expected to serve as producer, director, and star, overseeing a regular cast that included former
Figg
costars Elaine Joyce and Frank Welker, a dozen writers, and a parade of guest stars, from Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart to Jimmy Durante and Steve Allen.

“That's the hardest I ever remember seeing him work,” recalled Tom Knotts, Don's son. “He worked day and night under such pressure. He was stressed-out.”

Like Andy, Don felt he had no choice but return to television. “Frankly, I've gotten a bit confused with what's going on in the movie world,” Don told a
Chicago Tribune
reporter in spring 1970.

Alas, Don wasn't the only Hollywood star headlining a song-and-dance series. That transitional 1970–71 season offered a glut of “variety.” Don's former costar Jim Nabors had a show. So did fellow
Steve Allen
alumnus Tim Conway. And Red Skelton, Carol Burnett, Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Dean Martin, Flip Wilson, Tom Jones, Andy Williams, and Lawrence Welk.

The
Don Knotts Show
debuted on September 15, 1970. The first episode built a thin narrative around Don's vying for control of his own show with guest star Anthony Newley. It was all too close to the truth. At one point, Anthony comes onstage and commands, “Finish the joke!” “I've finished it,” Don stammers. Another lantern-jawed alpha male was dominating him.

“It was funny,” wrote Cleveland Amory in
TV Guide
. “And so was Don
trying
to be a host. But Mr. Knotts actually as a host?”

“He never throws his weight around, what little weight there is,” noted a
TV Guide
reporter who visited the set. “He speaks softly and diffidently (‘Do you want me to stand here? Unfortunately, I can't see the cue cards.'). If he has a suggestion to make to a guest star about the reading of a line or a piece of stage business, he takes the star aside and gives his advice gently and privately.”

Don's stock was high enough to attract A-list guest stars. In one pantomime sketch, Bill Cosby brought the house down simply by picking a chess piece off the board and eating it; he had asked the prop department to make one of the pawns out of chocolate.

But
The Don Knotts Show
was getting creamed in the ratings by
Mod Squad
, ABC's hip new cop show, just as
Headmaster
and
The New Andy Griffith Show
were being bested by ABC's bubblegum sitcom
The Partridge Family
. Former
Griffith
director Bob Sweeney was brought in to Don's series at midseason to shore up creative decline. Sween imported new writers and future
M*A*S*H
star Gary Burghoff and a weekly segment that invoked front-porch memories of Mayberry, all to no avail.

“He suffered so much through that,” recalled Elaine Joyce, who gave up a spot on
The Carol Burnett Show
to join Don's ill-fated project. “Every week, the ratings weren't good and the material wasn't good enough. He suffered through it. We all did. You just wanted to abandon ship.” The show was canceled at season's end. Don, exhausted, flew to Hawaii and spent a week asleep in a hotel bed.

Andy, too, was having a bad year. Still smarting from the failure of not one but two programs in the 1970–71 season, he and Dick Linke suffered further financial loss with the axing of
Mayberry R.F.D.
in the infamous “rural purge.”

The purge was particularly brutal for Dick. “CBS canceled all three of our shows on the same day,” he recalled later.
The New Andy Griffith Show
,
The Jim Nabors Hour
,
and
Mayberry R.F.D.
all had been Dick Linke productions.

Don's final Universal film,
How to Frame a Figg
, opened in February 1971 to modest returns but warm reviews. The
Los Angeles Times
theorized that, in a rapidly changing cinema universe, Don Knotts was “the last American film comedian to sustain a consistently developed screen characterization in a series of films dictated by that personality.” Ironically, Don would effectively retire the Nervous Man with
Figg
—for a few years, at least.

In summer 1971, both Andy Griffith and Don Knotts found themselves unemployed for the first time in more than a decade. Andy returned to the nightclub stage. He drove his camper bus to Las Vegas for an engagement at Caesars Palace, the second-biggest room in town. Three years earlier, buoyed by the
Griffith Show
, Andy had drawn capacity crowds. Now, “you could have shot a cannon in there without hurting anybody,” he recalled. Worse, the hotel staff kept mistaking him for Andy Williams, the singer, who sometimes played the same venue.

After every show, Andy would retreat into the desert with his camper and his motorbikes, beyond the reach of telephones, until the next night's performance.

“I'm cursing the day you got that bus,” Dick Linke growled, as a
TV Guide
reporter listened.

Andy replied, “We're putting a phone on that bus.”

“Can I have the number?”

“No.”

“What if somebody offers you a picture?”

“Take it.”

Andy dispatched Barbara and the children to Manteo for the summer. Then he sat around the Toluca Lake house, alone, thumbing through scripts. “What we're trying to do now is turn me around,” he told
TV Guide.
“It's like starting all over again. I want to become an actor and play character parts. It'll be a long time before I play the lead.”