Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (27 page)

Andy's other venture of 1974 was
Winter Kill
, another ABC Movie of the Week, which cast him in a more familiar setting. Andy plays a small-town police chief investigating a string of murders at a sleepy—and chilly—ski resort. Andy and his manager, Dick Linke, pitched it as a pilot for another series, something Andy dearly wanted. But the locale proved a poor choice. The production company endured 60 mph winds in California's San Bernardino Mountains, wearing ski masks and dragging gear up a steep slope. One wonders, too, whether this tiny town could possibly have yielded enough murders to sustain a weekly series. It was a moot point;
Winter Kill
was not picked up.

It would be another dozen years before Andy scored again.

13.

Second Chances,
Second Wives

D
ON
K
NOTTS
was in Chicago, playing in the middle-class satire
The Mind with the Dirty Man
at Arlington Park, when he got a call from Sherwin Bash, his agent. “Disney wants you to do a movie,” Sherwin said. Until that moment, in summer 1974, Don had every reason to believe his film career was over. Don hadn't headlined in three years. His telephone wasn't ringing. The family-comedy genre that had spawned
The Shakiest Gun in the West
and
How to Frame a Figg
was played out.

Disney seemed a natural move. The studio was almost single-handedly sustaining the family genre. “I had always thought I was Disney material,” Don recalled.

It wasn't Disney that wanted Don so much as Norman Tokar, who was about to direct a screen adaptation of a Jack Bickham novel called
The Apple Dumpling Gang
. The story ostensibly concerns a trio of orphaned children who are taken in by a reluctant gambler in the Old West; but much of the comedy centers on two bumbling robbers who play off the urchins. For these parts, Norman Tokar envisioned a new comedic partnership between Don and Tim Conway.

A Cleveland native, Tim Conway established himself in radio and won a part on
The Steve Allen Plymouth Show
just as Don was leaving. He became one of television's
other
great second bananas of the 1960s, working opposite Ernest Borgnine on the hit ABC series
McHale's Navy
. By the time of his Disney casting, Tim had become an established player on the smash
Carol Burnett Show
.

Don was one of Tim's idols; but until their Disney pairing, the two had never worked together. “If I'm in the business,” Tim once said, “it's because of Don Knotts.”
I

Don hadn't had a real partner since he left
The Andy Griffith Show
, nearly ten years earlier. Tim Conway was a far cry from Andy Griffith. He was the resident maniac on
Carol Burnett
; equally adept as a doddering old man or a man-boy in a beanie, he seemed to delight in reducing Harvey Korman and his other castmates to paralytic laughter with his ad-libbed insanity. Don was nearly a decade older than Tim and, at fifty, just a touch slower on the draw than in his Barney Fife heyday. Now, for the first time in his career, Don would be working with a comedian more highly caffeinated than himself.

The Apple Dumpling Gang
is a capable family western, shot on an idealized Old West set that looks lifted straight from Disney World and featuring the estimable talents of Bill Bixby, Slim Pickens, and Harry Morgan. But it is Don and Tim and their dust cloud of comedic entropy that render the film memorable.

In October, when shooting was done, Don flew to Hawaii with his son, Tom, and wed Loralee Czuchna, the former USC student who had become his more-or-less-exclusive girlfriend since their first blind date, three years earlier. Andy could not attend the remote ceremony.

Don and Loralee had grown close in the dark days that followed the cancellation of Don's variety show. “His career had just gone up,” she recalled. “The studios didn't return his calls. He was not only modest and humble, but, remember, underneath, every actor thinks he's never gonna work again. Don was up sometimes, but there were a lot of times he wasn't.” Loralee buoyed his spirits: “You had to keep reminding him, every day, how great he was.”

By this time, Don had grown dependent on an ever-changing menu of sleeping aids prescribed by his psychiatrist, Dick Renneker, Loralee recalled. Don smoked and drank, as well, although Loralee does not remember seeing him frequently drunk. He suffered relentless sinus problems and leg ailments, and he would grow nauseated if Loralee put too much food on his plate. He sometimes seemed to sleepwalk through his days. After dark, though, Don would come to life. “The funny part of being with Don,” Loralee recalled, “was late at night, when he would cut loose. I would laugh until I ached.”

They married in an open-air church near the Diamond Head crater. At the reception, someone kicked Don's bad leg on the dance floor. It turned red. “We left the next day,” Loralee recalled, “and it was my parents who went on our honeymoon for us.”

Released on July 4, 1975,
The Apple Dumpling Gang
would earn $37 million, making it one of Disney's top-grossing films of the era. The
New York Times
termed the film “as cheerful and indistinguishable as rice pudding.”

Don and Tim were ready for more films. But Disney passed on the script Tim wrote for their second project, tentatively titled
They Went That-a-Way and That-a-Way.

Instead, Don's next Disney film,
No Deposit, No Return
, teamed him with David Niven, Darren McGavin, and Vic Tayback. In best Disney tradition, the three seasoned actors lent their talents in support of two children and a pet skunk.

In
Gus
, his next feature, Don acted opposite a mule. In
Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo
, he was reduced to warbling his lines to a car. Both were hits.

Disney finally reunited Don with Tim Conway for a 1979 sequel to
The Apple Dumpling Gang
. Don loved working with Tim, who seemed to understand Don's many quirks as well as Andy. When he wasn't gently eviscerating Don's neuroses, Tim would simply talk, unfurling a manic travelogue on the passing scenery. Don would laugh himself sore.

Parts of the
Dumpling
sequel were shot in Northern California, and other parts in hundred-degree Fort Kanab, Utah. The sets were hot, the dressing rooms cold. The script for
The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again
called for Tim and Don to spend a fair amount of the film in drag, disguised as showgirls. Once the shoot commenced, Don complained that he was freezing to death during the costume changes in the ice-cold wardrobe room. Tim suggested Don dress in his motel room and ride to the set in costume.

Later that week, Tim drove Don back from the set and dropped him off to change, while Tim waited in a nearby saloon. A few minutes later, Don walked into the bar still wearing his dress. “And it's up in Northern California,” Tim recalled, “where they really hate performers. They would really rather run them over. Nobody was really thrilled about our being there. And I'm sitting there, having a beer, and in comes Don, dressed in this whole rig. And he comes up to me and says, ‘Tim, have you got the key to the room?' And I look at him and say, ‘Pardon me, sir, shouldn't we talk about price first?' ”

Later Don hissed, “We could've been killed.”

The sequel turned a cool $21 million. Tim Conway, on a creative high, quickly wrote two more scripts for Conway-Knotts films and sold them as independent features. “Don was my first choice,” Tim recalled. “It's gold, what he does, and you don't have to worry about making a movie that's going to offend anybody, because we're not going to offend anybody. We're not bright enough to offend anybody.”

The first project was
The Prize Fighter
,
a boxing film that became a hit for Roger Corman's New World Pictures. The second was
The Private Eyes
, a mash-up of Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Clouseau, and various haunted-house pictures of yore. Don plays the Holmes-styled Inspector Winship, and Tim is sidekick Dr. Tart. Their interplay here is calmer and slower paced than in their Disney films; the understatement renders the slapstick more explosive, when it comes.

The Private Eyes
was shot at the historic Biltmore House in North Carolina. Tim would pick Don up for the twenty-minute drive from town. His passenger was a tireless complainer. “Don would get in the car in the morning and he would say, ‘You know, that damn air-conditioning last night, that was blowin' all over me. I'm gonna tell those people to put some cardboard over it or something. I can't take that much longer,' ” Tim recalled. “Then we'd go by some houses, and he'd say, ‘Look at that. Brick houses. I hate brick houses.' And we'd get almost out to the house in the country. And he'd say, ‘Look at those cows out there. What the hell do cows do all day?' ”

One morning, Tim surreptitiously recorded Don's rants. “So, next day, we got in the car, and Don goes, ‘I'll tell you, that meat loaf kind of got to me last night. Boy, that backed up on me.' And I said, ‘Don, would you mind very much if we don't talk this morning? Just listen to the radio?' ” Tim put on the tape, and Don heard his complaints of the previous day issue forth from the speakers. After that, “we played that thing every morning when we went to work.”

By the middle seventies, Andy Griffith's career as a Hollywood leading man seemed to be over. But he was working as hard as ever. Andy spent fall 1974 shooting
Hearts of the West
, a sort of big-budget art film. Director Howard Zieff managed to capture both Andy's dark side and his fundamental warmth, a feat few others had matched.

On January 18, 1975, Barbara Bray Edwards Griffith married to Australian-born actor Michael St. Clair. Barbara now had half of Andy's money and a new husband.

The very next day, January 19, Andy lost his father, Carl, the wellspring of his laughter. “He was real close to his dad. Not too close to his mom,” recalled Quentin Bell, Andy's Manteo friend. “His dad died, and he was really in a funk.”

Andy's grief, perhaps coupled with the affront of his former wife's nuptials, may have driven Andy himself into hasty wedlock. That June, Andy married thirty-two-year-old Solica Capsuto,
II
a Greek American actress of Sephardic Jewish heritage, with olive complexion and deep brown hair.

Andy and Don each married three times. Of the six pairings, this was surely the most mysterious. Solica was, by all accounts, delightful, with a sharp sense of humor and a deep well of compassion. “She was funny,” recalled Ken Berry, Andy's friend. “But a more unlikely couple you never saw. She looked like a flower child. I don't mean that in a bad way at all. But the image that Andy has—you would just never pick them as a couple.”

Don and Loralee attended the wedding. Dick Linke stood as best man. “It was beautiful,” Loralee recalled. “They had a harp in the backyard. All the comedians were making jokes—‘Are we in heaven?' ” But Don never quite comprehended the relationship. “He said Andy must have been really lonely,” one friend recalled. “They were nothing alike.”

Andy and Solica set out for a two-month honeymoon in Manteo, but the couple quickly discovered that Solica disliked the Outer Banks. They returned to Hollywood.

Andy settled into a new domestic routine, inviting his children to dwell with him and Solica within their palatial home. He began spending more social time with Don; they talked of staging a play together. Andy and Solica also spent many evenings in the home of Ken Berry, Solica laughing as she regaled Ken with stories of Andy's peccadilloes.

In 1975, a full twenty years after Andy's television debut in
No Time for Sergeants
, the civic captains of Mount Airy began to rebrand their community as Andy Griffith's hometown. The city leased the old Rockford Street School—Andy's grammar school—to the Surry Arts Council. The council remodeled the structure around the 350-seat auditorium where Andy had given his first performance, back in the third grade. Andy graciously lent his name to the structure, but he was not on hand for the opening. Perhaps he had not yet forgiven his hometown for past wrongs.

Andy resurfaced on television in fall 1976 with another hopeful pilot, this one titled
Street Killing
, a Tarantino-esque mélange of conga drums, wah-wah pedals, wide-lapeled gangsters, and towering Afros. Andy's character is intelligent and refined, hiding his intellect behind a veneer of folksy Southern charm. Andy had been perfecting this act since his arrival in New York, two decades earlier. The character worked; the movie didn't. ABC passed on the series.

The late 1970s were a frustrating time for Andy, who, at fifty, surely thought his best years were behind him. In an ironic moment, Andy reaped a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in April 1976, two months shy of the milestone birthday. Don Knotts would have to wait twenty-two more years for his.

Andy was still trolling for another series. He starred in two NBC television movies in 1977 tailored to set the table for a weekly cop drama, with Andy cast as chief of another small-town police department. They posited Andy as Abel Marsh, a folksy, plainspoken law enforcer. Abel could easily be Andy Taylor, retired now and padding his Mayberry pension.

Sharon Spelman, the actress cast as Chief Abel's girlfriend, remembers Andy talking about Don and laughing, now, about his utter failure to collect so much as a single Emmy nomination to match Don's five awards. “But it was all very good-natured,” she recalled, “and Andy was proud of Don.” Perhaps Andy's competitive fire was beginning to cool.

Critics praised Andy's performances but mostly panned the films; this was becoming a trend.
Abel Marsh
would not be picked up.

Still desperate for another series, Andy signed on to star in an odd ABC pilot called
Salvage 1
. A product of that
Star Wars
era,
Salvage 1
was a genre-bending mishmash of science fiction, espionage, and Jack London adventure. Andy played Harry Broderick, a junk dealer who dared to dream big. How big? “I wanna build a spaceship, go to the moon, salvage all the junk that's up there, bring it back, and sell it,” he pronounces in the two-hour premiere.

Reception was predictably mixed. The
New York Times
termed it “an upscale, white
Sanford & Son
,” while the
Los Angeles Times
called it “so unreal, you half expect Don Knotts to come in and take over the controls.”