Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (29 page)

Andy's run of strong roles continued in 1983 with
Murder in Coweta County
, the true story of a corrupt 1940s Georgia landowner who operates above the law—until he inadvertently kills a man in an adjoining county. The murder pits bad-guy Andy against Johnny Cash, a formidable foil as Sheriff Lamar Potts.

Momentum was building in Andy's moribund career, and he had found true love.

Andy and Cindi married in April. In a modest and impromptu affair, ten guests were summoned to the living room of Andy's Manteo estate, some of them invited that same day. Andy's children, Dixie and Sam, were not among them, nor was Don. After a five-minute ceremony, Andy telephoned a local seafood restaurant and booked a table for lunch, according to the
National Enquirer
. The arrangements were odd, although not by the standards of Hollywood celebrity; Andy's passion for privacy would follow him to the grave.

After the wedding, Andy and Cindi flew to Los Angeles, where Andy contracted a flu. Days passed, and the flu gave way to “terrible, searing pain that ricocheted through my entire body,” Andy recalled. On May 7, after watching the Kentucky Derby on television, Andy stood up and fell back down, suddenly unable to control his feet. At the hospital, doctors diagnosed Guillain-Barré syndrome, an inflammatory nerve condition that causes pain and paralysis.

Doctors told him they could do nothing: “You've got to ride it out.” Andy found the pain “so consuming that there was nothing else in my life.” He spent a month in daily sessions of physical therapy and pain management. Then came a moment, Andy recalled, when “the therapist working on me saw one of my toes move.” The paralysis began to lift, and doctors slowly weaned Andy off pain medications.

But it took nearly a year for Andy to recuperate. He couldn't work, and, as a fifty-six-year-old invalid, he feared he might never work again.

The Griffiths were nearly broke. They put the old Bing Crosby estate up for sale, and Andy thought of selling his beloved antique cars. By the end of 1983, Andy recalled, “I sat in our unsold house with no bank account to speak of, and no work in sight.”

14.

The Gentleman Lawyer

I
N YEARS
PAST
, faithful Dick Linke had swept in to rescue Andy Griffith from the occasional bumps in his deeply rutted career. This time, it was Cindi Griffith.

Andy found his professional life at an impasse. He was ready to cut his losses and crawl back to Manteo, presumably for good. Cindi saw past the obstacles in Andy's path. To her it seemed that the setbacks had sapped Andy's self-confidence, a quality he had always been able to tap in the past. Sell his antique cars? That seemed an overreaction verging on panic. Ever so delicately, Cindi talked her husband off the ledge.

“Maybe it's a good thing we couldn't sell the house,” she reasoned. “Maybe it was God showing us grace. If we moved to North Carolina now, you might indeed never work again. What we need to do is stay here and stoke the fire.”

Cindi's allusion to God signaled a shift in the couple's beliefs. The protracted illness had set Andy and Cindi to thinking more seriously about their faith. Andy had always been a spiritual man, but after the year of faith-testing pain, religion loomed at the center of his thoughts. Hereafter, Andy was apt to invoke the name of the creator in casual conversation. His religious zeal would set Andy apart from many of his Hollywood peers. Yet, for a new generation of tradition-minded, churchgoing fans of
The Andy Griffith Show
, the change would have quite the opposite effect.

Emboldened by Cindi's pep talk, Andy reached back to the dogged routine that had served both him and Don so well three decades earlier in New York: making the rounds. “That day, and every day for quite a while,” Andy recalled, “Cindi and I went over to the William Morris Agency at lunchtime and sat in the lobby. My agent and every agent in the building saw us. Everybody talked to us, invited us to their offices, some to lunch.”

Cindi bade farewell to her theatrical career, just as Barbara had to hers. Andy's career became her life.

Andy had reconnected with a wide swath of the American public in the late 1970s as the spokesman for Ritz crackers (“Mmm-mmm. Good cracker”). In 1984, he resurfaced as the face of AT&T. With stories of paralysis circulating in Hollywood, Andy secured a guest spot on the television drama series
Hotel
, a role that required him to jog. He wore leg braces; the effort was agony, but he hid it, and the resulting scene quashed the rumors.

The journeyman actor had spent a dozen years refining a new character, someone with all of Andy Taylor's gravitas
and wit but with other, darker traits thrown in. He had played a tough-love priest in
Go Ask Alice
, a psychopath in
Pray for the Wildcats
, a wary prosecutor in
Street Killing
, a vengeful father in
Murder in Texas
,
and, most recently, a gay cattle baron in the Western spoof
Rustlers' Rhapsody.
They weren't all good movies, but thanks to Andy's obsession with craft, they were mostly good performances.

With the 1984 television miniseries
Fatal Vision
, Andy's new persona was complete. He played Victor Worheide, a federal prosecutor assigned to go after a military doctor accused of murdering his family. In Andy's first scene, grieving father Karl Malden walks in to find Andy unceremoniously clipping his toenails. In reply to Karl's desperate entreaties, Andy growls, “So what do we have here? I'll tell you what we don't have. We have no confession. We have no apparent motive. We have no witnesses. And any attempt to convict this man is unlikely to succeed.”

Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment, saw Andy's performance and immediately envisioned the character at the center of a television series. The success of
Murder, She Wrote
for aging film star Angela Lansbury had set the networks to wonder what other graying thespians might be ready to pilot their own murder mysteries.

“Andy was a remarkable actor. They had never really given him his due,” recalled Dean Hargrove, a television writer and producer who had piloted many successful
Columbo
episodes in the 1970s. Dean was assigned, along with fellow producer Fred Silverman, to create a new show for Andy. They called it
Matlock.

As a template for Ben Matlock, Dean studied colorful Southern defense attorneys, men such as Percy Foreman, who reputedly handled fifteen hundred death-penalty cases and lost only fifty-three. “He always got his money in advance,” Dean says of Foreman. “He once saw a woman in a restaurant who owed him money, and he ripped the necklace off her neck.” Dean sketched out the character to an exultant Andy, who hid his leg braces beneath boots. Dick Linke negotiated a sweet deal for his client: $200,000 an episode, or nearly $5 million a year.

Andy's first scene in the pilot, “Diary of a Perfect Murder,” places him in a courtroom, wearing a gray seersucker suit and delivering a closing argument. Ben Matlock is defending an accused murderer, and this is his last chance to seed “reasonable doubt.” In a bold tack, Matlock announces that the murdered man is in fact alive, and that he is about to enter the courtroom. It's a bluff—but now Matlock has everyone's attention.

“Each and every one of you was staring at that door because you had a reasonable doubt that a crime was even committed,” Matlock drawls. “And you must let this man go free. He was staring at that door as hard as you were. And so were they,” he says, pointing over to the prosecution table.

Ben Matlock is a venerable Atlanta defense attorney whose just-folks persona conceals a fierce intellect. He hates to lose almost as much as he hates injustice. He's cheap enough to shine his own shoes, and sufficiently mercenary to shake down a client for his last $100,000. “Look at it this way, Steve,” Matlock reasons with his client. “If I win, it'll be worth it. If I don't, then they take you to the Georgia Diagnostic Classification Center, over near Jackson, and they electrocute you.”

The pilot, broadcast March 3, 1986, set up a formula for 193 episodes to come: Ben Matlock agrees to represent a murder defendant—reluctantly, because he harbors a thinly veiled dislike for the defendant or thinks the case unwinnable. Then he commences his own murder investigation, aided by a small but plucky team that doesn't play by the rules. He identifies and eventually confronts the real murderer, who scoffs; Matlock has no proof. Then, just before the final commercial, Matlock finds the proof, which he unveils dramatically in the epic final courtroom scene. The judge releases Matlock's innocent client as the real killer is led from the stand.

The crew traveled to Atlanta to establish
Matlock
's setting. The fall 1985 trip coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first episode of
The Andy Griffith Show
. Already, the tenth and twentieth
Griffith
anniversaries had passed with little fanfare. Now, Andy's and Don's crowning achievement was a quarter century old, and no one seemed to care.

But behind the scenes, nostalgia was taking root. In 1979, three fraternity brothers at Vanderbilt University had formed The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club as a way to get dibs on the dwelling's lone television set. A decade later, the club would count twenty thousand members in five hundred chapters. In 1981, English professor Richard Kelly published
The Andy Griffith Show
, one of the first serious book-length studies of a television series. In 1984, teenager John Meroney organized the Andy Griffith Show Appreciation Society, whose membership reportedly once included George Herbert Walker Bush. In his youthful zeal, Meroney set out to find a real town that would change its name to Mayberry to mark the coming twenty-fifth anniversary.

Andy swiftly halted John Meroney's plan. “This whole idea of searching for a town to change its name to Mayberry is enormously embarrassing to me,” he told the
Winston-Salem Sentinel
.

Slapping down a fourteen-year-old boy was not, perhaps, how Sheriff Taylor would have handled it. But it wasn't the last time Andy would block someone's seemingly benevolent memorial to Mayberry. At such times, he seemed steered by a passionate mix of emotions: proprietary indignation that others might seek to profit from his Mayberry brand, and a powerful impulse to protect the legacy of
The Andy Griffith Show
. Call it quality control, or micromanagement, or simple possessiveness, but nobody was going to celebrate Mayberry without Andy's blessing.

As far back as 1972 Andy and Don had discussed reuniting the
Griffith
cast, but “they both agreed that unless it could be great, they didn't want to do it,” recalled Loralee Knotts, Don's second wife. By 1985, Andy had a new incentive. He had waited two decades for another hit series, and with the
Matlock
pilot, he had his best shot yet. A hit reunion show might help persuade NBC executives to green-light
Matlock
. And with
Griffith
nostalgia mounting, a reunion would surely find an audience.

Two surviving
Griffith
writers, Everett Greenbaum and Harvey Bullock, were enlisted to collaborate on a script. Andy himself spent six weeks on rewrites. Beloved Bob Sweeney returned to direct.

In February 1986, the surviving
Griffith
principals traveled to Southern California wine country to begin shooting
Return to Mayberry
. They had little trouble rounding up the surviving cast—including Jim Nabors, with whom Andy had patched things up after a lengthy chill. The exception was Frances Bavier, Aunt Bee. The official explanation was illness, but Frances simply wasn't interested in returning to Mayberry. She refused to record even a few lines to be played, like a voice-over from beyond, in a scene that had Andy visit her grave. She particularly disliked a line that instructed Andy to “always wear clean underwear.” She said, “I will not say
underwear
. I have never said
underwear
, and I will not say
underwear
now.” Most cast and crew “weren't all that unhappy that she declined,” recalled Dean Hargrove, an executive producer of the reunion show.

The Mayberry pecking order had changed in a quarter century. Ron Howard was now the ascendant director of
Splash
and
Cocoon
; he arrived at the reunion as head of his own production company. Don Knotts, by contrast, had fallen off the radar since the conclusion of
Three's Company
. His only notable film credit since 1980 had been a minor part in the Burt Reynolds comedy
Cannonball Run II
, a brief but rewarding reunion with Tim Conway and an orangutan.

If not superstars, Andy and Don at least remained visible. Jim Nabors, on the other hand, had retreated into semiretirement in Hawaii. George Lindsey hadn't made much of an impact since his Goober days. “When I got to the location for the first day of shooting of the movie,” George recalled, “I went up to the motel room where Andy and his wife, Cindi, were staying. We visited for a little while and then Andy said, ‘Well, Cindi and I are going to get a cheeseburger,' and they just left me there. That was about the tone for me on the set for the rest of the shoot.”

The others went home with mostly fond memories. Andy and Don shared a dirty joke on the set, and for the first time they told it to Ron, who was finally old enough to hear it. Ron talked for hours with Andy—interviewed him, really, about his memories of running
The Andy Griffith Show
, asking all the questions he had never thought to pose on the old Mayberry set. Andy told Ron he never realized at the time “how personal the show was,” how closely Andy Taylor's milieu mirrored his own.

Mayberry fans flocked to Los Olivos for the nineteen-day shoot, along with a throng of journalists—so many that the producers finally closed the set.

Return to Mayberry
was part movie, part reunion show—and on those terms, it far exceeded Andy's dim hopes. The writers wisely built the story around the friendship between Andy and Barney. A quarter century on, the deputy has ascended to acting sheriff of Mayberry, while Andy has left town to be a postal inspector in Cleveland. He returns with thoughts of running for sheriff again, only to find that Don already seeks the vacant seat.

The narrative is sufficiently thin to indulge ample moments of Mayberry nostalgia: Two versions of the old
Griffith
theme song play, one of them jazzed up for the Reagan eighties, and the
Mayberry R.F.D.
theme is tossed in for good measure. Opie now runs the town newspaper; Otis has sobered up and drives an ice cream truck. Andy and Barney escort Helen and Thelma Lou on a double date. Andy spends much of his screen time racing around town trying to protect Barney from harm and from himself, invoking memories of the sheriff at his most noble.

The story concludes with Barney and Thelma Lou marrying at last, setting right the grave injustice of her character's wedding another man twenty years earlier in “The Return of Barney Fife.” Rance Howard plays the minister.

At the reception, Andy toasts the couple with words surely meant for Don and his other friends on the
Griffith
cast: “There's something about Mayberry and Mayberry folk that never leaves you. No matter where life takes you, you always carry in your heart the memories of old times and old friends. So here's to all of us. Old friends.”

The toast—and the tears—were real. “
Return to Mayberry
was the nicest thing Andy could have done for anybody,” recalled Mitch Jayne, of the Dillards, the bluegrass ensemble Andy had discovered and promoted on the
Griffith Show
two decades earlier. “It told people that he had never forgotten the place, or the people who had loved him for creating it. He wanted to say good-bye to it in the best way he could come up with because, like all of us, he was moving on.”