Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (26 page)

At a party at Don's house one night, Andy struck up a conversation with another invitee. Talk turned to their mutual admiration for Don's work. “He's won five Emmys,” Andy said. The two men turned to admire the awards on Don's mantel. Then the other man turned to Andy and asked, “Say, didn't you work with Don once?”

Andy wondered if the fickle American public was beginning to forget him.

For Don, the transition from employment to unemployment was just as abrupt in 1971 as in 1955. The failure of
The Don Knotts Show
“had put my name on the back burner,” Don recalled, “and it was a good three months before my phone rang again. . . . I began to wonder if my career was really over.”

Then, Jim Burrows, an ascendant director who later oversaw hundreds of episodes of
Taxi
and
Cheers
, persuaded Don to return to the theater for the first time since his run in
No Time
, two decades earlier. Don drove down to San Diego to examine the venue, and to swallow his pride. “It was a tiny house called the Off-Broadway Theatre, and it didn't pay much money, but I decided to give it a whirl,” he recalled. “Hey, I wasn't working!”

Don jotted down a note, in his choppy script, inside his dog-eared personal copy of the script for
Last of the Red Hot Lovers
: “Property of Don Knotts, who performed this play at the Off-Broadway Theatre for 6 weeks during Oct. + Nov. 1971 in San Diego.”

Encouraged by the sellout crowds, Don moved the production north to Hollywood as a showcase, hoping to leverage a return to television or cinema. It didn't work; Don wouldn't land another major role for three more years.

But regional theater opened up new chapter in Don's career. In the months that followed, Don would populate the blank pages of his script with a running diary of his travels as Barney Cashman, a middle-aged married man who yearns to join the sexual revolution before it's too late: two and a half weeks at the Marquee Theatre in El Paso, March 1972; sixteen days at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Hollywood in April and May; and parts of June and July at the Arlington Park Theatre outside Chicago.

He formed a lifelong friendship with Sandra Giles, an understudy in the
Lovers
ensemble, platonic but symbiotic. Sandra “had found a niche in Hollywood where she would become friends with stars and she would figure out what they wanted in their lives,” one friend recalled. “He wanted to throw parties—just to kind of meet people. He was kind of shy. He had this big new house in Beverly Hills. She knew how to put it together.”

The span between Don's final Universal film and his next film project was a sort of
Lost Weekend
. Don threw parties at his Beverly Hills home and hung out with other comedians, including Bill Cosby and Flip Wilson. Though he was idle—perhaps
because
he was idle—Don remained prone to deep wells of anxiety.

He became increasingly dependent on Dick Renneker, his therapist and guru, who was again prescribing sedatives for Don after successfully weaning him off them. If Andy served as surrogate brother to Don, Dick had become Don's ersatz father, providing all the counsel and comfort that Jesse Sr. could not. Dick, in turn, savored the trappings of Don's fame, accompanying him to parties and sometimes offering unsolicited advice to his writers, who were not amused. One such overture nearly landed Dick in a fistfight with Everett Greenbaum.

Don had been in therapy continuously since his arrival in Hollywood. He was still haunted by the fire-and-brimstone nightmares of his fundamentalist childhood. Someone had told Don, decades earlier, that people who didn't sleep were going to die. He worried about that story, and it made him lose sleep, and the sleeplessness made him worry more. The pills helped him find sleep.

Andy and Barbara Griffith finally separated in fall 1971, after twenty-two years of marriage. In subsequent interviews, Andy hinted that the implosion of his career was what finally drove her away. “Barbara wasn't thick-skinned enough for show business,” Andy said. “You've got to be able to fail and stand it.”

By this time, Barbara was sober. Perhaps a year before the split, Barbara had gone on a bender that left her bedridden. She and Andy were so estranged that it fell to the housekeeper to summon a doctor. Barbara was dispatched to the hospital, “and that's when she dried out and went to AA,” nephew Mike King recalled.

Barbara would sue for divorce the following June. Andy got custody of fourteen-year-old Sam, their son, and Barbara took twelve-year-old Dixie. This was a loose arrangement, though, as the children would continue spending their summers with Andy on the Carolina shore. Dick Linke found a temporary rental for Andy near the family home in Toluca Lake. The settlement awarded Andy an easement off the back of Barbara's home so Andy could continue to tinker with his beloved antique cars.

A year after the divorce, in 1973, Andy bought a new home: the old Bing Crosby residence, a six-bedroom colonial estate in Toluca Lake with a swimming pool and tennis court. Andy's new home lay just blocks from the old one, where Barbara remained; Andy's former rental house was purchased by none other than his manager, Dick Linke.

Andy spent that summer and the next in Manteo with his now-teenaged children, Sam and Dixie. The younger Griffiths worked at
The
Lost Colony
, the historic pageant that had once employed their parents, singing in the chorus and carrying banners on and off stage.

“It was an idyllic summer camp, and they would pay us one hundred dollars a week,” recalled Craig Fincannon, a family friend who spent summer 1974 at Manteo. “All of us were actors, and we all had dreams of being Dustin Hoffman.” Andy would occasionally slip into the choir unnoticed and join his children in song. Sam and Craig became close, and Craig soon found himself invited to the Griffith estate for dinner.

“I remember the very first time I ever saw Andy Griffith,” Craig recalled. “We were standing in the kitchen, and Andy walked in, and he was in long pants and a short-sleeved shirt, and he was barefooted. That, to me, was what Manteo was for him.”

Craig remembers Sam as “a California kid with long blond hair. He was exotic. The fact that his dad was Andy Griffith made him even more interesting to me. . . . But I guess I could tell that it was not easy to be the kid of a big star. I could feel, even in those days, that he was not an outwardly optimistic, gregarious kid.”

Andy took the boys out on his boat, tubing and water-skiing. They would anchor at one of the Tom Sawyer islands that dotted the sound and indulge in “the kind of fun that we had in the seventies,” Craig recalled. When Craig's college girlfriend came to visit, Andy had the couple over for dinner. After they'd dined, Andy invited Craig's companion to join him on the couch. “He pulled out a photo album and showed her all these picture of his travels. And I remember thinking, ‘Andy Griffith is flirting with my girlfriend.' ”

The 1970s would serve up a second adolescence for Andy; finally, this Carolina country boy was free to climb trees, skin knees, and indulge all the boyish urges his overprotective mother and hectic career had thwarted. With fewer projects to distract him, Andy began spending longer stretches in Manteo, hunting and fishing, boating, riding his red Honda motorcycle, and drinking with a band of merry pranksters, some local, some imported. Andy sometimes turned up with Lee Greenway, his makeup artist; or Jack Dodson, a far more festive spirit than the milquetoast he'd played in Mayberry.

Andy “had a big pontoon boat. He would take people out water-skiing and raising hell,” recalled Quentin Bell, a Manteo neighbor who was perhaps Andy's closest Manteo friend during this time. “We'd meet out here and play volleyball on the sand. . . . He liked to party; he liked to drink; he liked everything we did here.”

Quentin took Andy duck hunting. “I loaned Andy my gun and I said, ‘Now, when you jump a ditch to get a dead bird, make sure the barrel of the gun doesn't go in the dirt, because dirt will lodge in the end of the barrel, and when you shoot, it will blow the end of the gun off,' ” he recalled. “And damned if he didn't do that, and he came up to me and the barrel of the gun looked like a flower.”

Quentin knew how close Andy remained to Don, and they spoke often of Andy's Mayberry deputy. “But darned if he ever came to Manteo,” Quentin recalled.

Another friend recalled that Don did pay at least one brief visit to Andy in Manteo, one summer in the mid-1960s, shortly after his exit from the
Griffith Show.
Don came alone. He, Andy, and Barbara spent long hours on Andy's boat, joined by the family dogs and local friends, drinking to excess, telling stories, and laughing into the night.

In a television interview in 1972, Andy waxed nostalgic for the old comedy partnership: “I don't think anybody works together quite like we do, and I'd like to try that again.”

Andy and Don were seeing a lot of each other at the time, and they came quite close to reuniting on a film, a development that would surely have brought great acclaim to the old
Griffith Show
duo. “Andy and I are making a movie,” Don announced to a reporter in summer 1972; he said he was working on the screenplay. According to Loralee, Don's girlfriend at the time, the two friends were planning a cinematic reunion of
The
Andy Griffith Show
. But nothing would come of these ruminations for another fourteen years.

Andy would spend the remainder of the 1970s largely on his own, headlining a procession of television movies, some good, some bad, nearly all forgotten. He deliberately chose roles that would shatter the benevolent image of his Mayberry sheriff. After all his success on
The Andy Griffith Show
, Andy seemed now to be trapped in the sheriff's role. He wanted out.

The first project was
The Strangers
in 7A
, a CBS Tuesday Night Movie that paired Andy with screen veteran Ida Lupino. Movies of the week had a cachet in 1970s Hollywood.Andy plays a decidedly uninspiring antihero as the meek superintendent of a Manhattan apartment building. A beautiful young woman lures him into the snare of a gang of thugs, who use his building as the base for a bold bank robbery. Andy spends most of the movie perspiring and looking licked; only in the final minutes does he find his courage and gain the upper hand. It was bold and different, and that was just what Andy wanted. A
Los Angeles Times
review declared the movie “a good vehicle for Andy Griffith's straight dramatic ability.” He was off to a solid start.

Next came
Go Ask Alice
, a teensploitation film based on the blockbuster novel and falsely marketed as the diary of a real teenage girl whose prim life spirals into drugs, sex, homelessness, and Mackenzie Phillips. Andy plays a priest who operates a shelter for recovering addicts. He faces off with Alice in one long, overwrought scene, shot in a church.

“Do you want an opinion, or do you want an alibi?” the priest asks.

“Don't hassle me,” Alice cries.

“You're looking for magic.”

“I'm looking for
help
!”

The film “was a big deal” in its day and endures as a modest cult classic, said Jamie Smith-Jackson, the blue-eyed, long-tressed actress cast as Alice. Andy, she recalled, “was just an angel. He was just so real. He cared so much about that scene in the church. He really was trying hard to become a serious actor.”

The next year, Andy retreated to the desert for a pair of roles that he hoped would shatter the Sheriff Taylor image forever.

The first was
Pray for the Wildcats
, an ABC Movie of the Week broadcast in January 1974 and ripe for rediscovery as camp. Andy plays Sam Farragut, a wealthy industrialist who stages a dirt-bike trek through Baja as a means to torment three admen who manage his account. The agency is desperate for his business, so the men indulge Sam's every whim. Imagine a midseventies
Mad Men
on motorcycles.

The picture surrounds Andy with big-name actors awaiting better roles: William Shatner, five years shy of the
Star Trek
revival; Robert Reed, in the waning days of
The Brady Bunch
; and Angie Dickinson, slumming as Mike Brady's unfaithful wife.

The men set out wearing ridiculous matching leather jackets over colored tunics that look suspiciously like cast-off Starfleet uniforms. They pull up to a cantina, where Andy's character drunkenly accosts a lovely young hippie, his eyes all menace and lust. “Now we're gettin' it on, baby,” he cries. When her boyfriend refuses Sam's offer of one hundred dollars for unsavory congress with the girl, Andy disables his truck, leaving the young couple to die in the desert. Captain Kirk takes him to task; Andy tries to run him down with his motorbike, but it is he who hurtles spectacularly off a cliff.

The night before he shot the cantina scene, Andy dreamed that he killed Don, his best friend. “I dreamed I hit his head and kept hitting him and killed him,” he recalled later. “And I woke up and my conscience was killing me and I tried to call Don [to see if he was all right] and I couldn't find him. It was driving me crazy!”

Later, Andy asked a psychiatrist friend about the dream. The shrink told Andy, to his infinite relief, that the dream wasn't really about killing Don. It was about killing Andy Taylor. Andy and Don laughed about it later.

Andy completed his cycle of terror that fall with another made-for-TV absurdity,
Savages
. This time, he plays a wealthy lawyer who accidentally shoots a man during a desert hunting trip, then spends the balance of the movie hunting down the young guide who saw it all. Andy's quarry is Sam Bottoms, a blond-maned actor in the Peter Frampton mold. The story devolves into a tiresome retelling of “The Most Dangerous Game,” with amusing David-and-Goliath imagery; shirtless Sam eventually overpowers his pursuer with an actual slingshot.