Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (3 page)

It occurred to Don that magic might be his way into show business. Whenever he could gather ten cents, he would send away for a magic trick from Johnson Smith & Company, a mail-order house that advertised on the backs of comic books. He would approach his brothers at the card table with his new tricks, only to be shooed away when Shadow would crack, “How about doing that disappearing trick?”

Around the start of junior high school, Don glimpsed a Johnson Smith ad that beckoned, “Send ten cents and get your Ventrilo.” Don was thrilled: He never missed Edgar Bergen's radio show. Sadly, Don opened the Ventrilo package to find a glorified birdcall. But it came with a book explaining the art of throwing one's voice. By happy coincidence, a neighborhood grocer was selling a miniature Charlie McCarthy dummy on a promotion for a somewhat richer sum—fifty cents and three proof-of-purchase seals from Cocomalt drink mix. Once Don had amassed the necessary coin and Cocomalt, he rushed out in a rainstorm to buy the dummy. When Don returned home, Shadow leaped up and ran toward Don excitedly, hands outstretched. “But when he got to me, instead of grabbing the dummy, he grabbed [my] umbrella, sat down, put the umbrella on his knee, and asked it, ‘Who was that lady I saw you out with last night?' ”

Don practiced and practiced until he could voice the dummy without moving his lips. He went out on the front porch and tried his act on passersby. It worked, and one woman protested, “Have you got a recording in that dummy?” He wrote some material, borrowing heavily from the Bergen-McCarthy act. One day, a neighbor asked him to perform at his party. They passed the hat, and Don returned home with nearly a dollar in change. “I was in show business at last,” he recalled. Word spread, and soon Don was performing at other parties. A local handyman crafted Don a professional-quality dummy in his workshop. Elsie sewed him a tiny outfit. Don named him Danny.

Don's professional world was about to expand. One day in the seventh grade, Don found himself in gym class, standing on a wrestling mat opposite a much larger boy. “We were supposed to wrestle each other,” Richie Ferrara recalled. “I must've weighed fifty pounds more than him. We looked like Laurel and Hardy. And we laughed at each other. And we walked off and we had a Coke together.”

Richie, the son of Italian immigrants (his mother called Don “Donuts”), was bright, effervescent, and talented. He played the violin, the piano, and the banjo. He hosted a live revue at lunchtime every Friday in the school auditorium. At Don's request, Richie put him onstage with Danny. They were a hit, and soon the two boys were talking of a partnership. Don admired Richie for his extroversion. Don was comparatively passive and calm. “We blended together,” Richie recalled.

Don invited Richie to his home to write material. They would test their ideas on Elsie in the kitchen. “She would sit in her rocking chair and smile,” Richie recalled. “When she laughed and approved of it, then we'd go out and have confidence.”

Richie often stayed for dinner. “They had a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a cupful of mashed potatoes, a cupful of apple sauce. . . . And then after we'd eat, Don would entertain me. Don used me as an audience. And I would listen to all of his skits, all of his jokes. I love to tell jokes, too, but I don't know of one joke that's good that didn't come from him.”

Adolescence brought Don both strength and confidence. One night, probably around his fourteenth year, drunken Sid crashed into the kitchen and commenced slapping Don around. Don picked up a wine bottle, smashed it, and held the jagged edge to Sid's throat. Elsie burst in and separated the brothers, begging Don to stand down. Later, she asked Don, “You weren't really gonna do it, were you?” Yes, Don replied. He was.

To the end of his days, Don would recoil at that memory, and he seldom spoke of Sid. Yet, the moment Don rose up against his brother marked a sort of turning point. Don had been a victim, prey to the demons in his home. Now, he would fight back.

Don entered Morgantown High School as a conquering hero. He had vanquished his fears, and he was bursting with creative energy. The next four years would be “the happiest and most fertile of my life,” he recalled, second only to his time on
The Andy Griffith Show
.

This may have been Don's first onstage joke, told at a Morgantown High School assembly when he was fifteen, poking fun at Morgantown's two great passions, church and drink:

“If I had all the whiskey in this town, I would throw it in the river. If I had all the whiskey in this state, I would throw it in the river. If I had all the whiskey in this country, I would throw it in the river. And now, will the congregation please stand and sing ‘Shall We Gather at the River?' ”

One night, at a roller rink, Don met Jarvis Eldred, a dashing boy from a prominent family who had access to his mother's '29 DeSoto. Don quickly became besotted with Jarvie, who was not only wealthier but smoother with the ladies. “His father employed many of the people in town,” Richie recalled. “And he had a car. He was a spoiled kid.” Jarvie was musical, as well. Now, he and Don formed their own duo, with Jarvie on the musical saw. “He'd do ‘Ave Maria' on the saw, and I'd get a few laughs with Danny, and then we'd harmonize a couple of numbers and a little soft-shoe,” Don recalled.

Richie, who was a year behind, joined the group when he reached high school, singing and playing mandolin. “We called ourselves the Radio Three,” Richie recalled. “We started to be popular, and we were hired for a few bucks to play the churches, social events. But we [also] did a lot of stuff for charity, like the Rotary, and we became really known.”

Don, the businessman of the group, saw to it that the Radio Three charged for their entertainment, aside from the charity gigs. “We always had some pocket change for fun and dates,” Richie recalled, “which usually consisted of a movie or singing or dancing, a Coke, a hot dog, and sometimes the old West Virginia 3.2 beer.”

Don took a job as an usher at the art deco Warner Theater on High Street downtown. He sometimes became entranced by the movie while patrons stumbled around for seats. One day in fall 1941, while Don was tearing tickets, his brother Sid entered the lobby and walked up to him, clearly inebriated.

“What's wrong?” Don asked.

“You'd better change your clothes and come home with me,” Sid said. “It's Shadow. Shadow's dead.”

Poor, sickly Shadow had perished in his sleep while visiting Bill, his brother, at his home in Illinois. The cause was an unchecked asthma attack. Shadow's death, at thirty-one, was a blow from which Elsie Knotts never fully recovered. “He never should've been left alone,” she said over and over.

Shadow had been Don's inspiration, a beacon of warmth amid the gloom of the Knotts home. His death left less in life for Don to laugh about. The next night, Don went downtown on an errand and passed the old clock tower on the university campus, the spot where Shadow had heckled the cleaner. Now, the light on the clock was out. “I had walked by Woodburn Hall maybe a thousand nights and I had never seen the light out in that clock,” Don recalled.

Don had embraced and absorbed his older brother's dry wit, had watched his own comic star rise within the family home as sickly Shadow's had waned. Don had learned everything Shadow could teach him. It was time for Don to come into his own.

By his senior year, Don was class president and writing a humor column for the Morgantown High School newspaper. “I was a terrible president, though, because I took nothing seriously,” he recalled. “When I spoke at school assemblies, they usually laughed. I figured they were going to laugh at me anyway, so I always told jokes. I was loose, crazy, and free.”

One June morning after graduation, Don set out for New York with a close friend from high school named Ray Gosovich. Don wanted to audition for
Major Bowes Amateur Hour
, a radio show that was the
American Idol
of its day. “We told everyone in our senior class that we were going to New York,” Ray recalled, “and when you live in Morgantown, West Virginia, and you tell everyone you're going to New York, you'd better go to New York.”

Elsie offered Don this parting wisdom: “Remember, Donald, if things don't work out up there, it might be a good idea to come back home and go to college.”

The boys planned to hitchhike, but they soon found themselves stranded two hundred miles out of Morgantown in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They took a Greyhound bus the rest of the way, a concession that depleted their travel funds. They arrived at Thirty-Second Street, near the Hotel Pennsylvania, but rented a room at the more affordable Sloan House YMCA on Thirty-Fourth Street, near the Empire State Building, then the largest residential Y in the nation.

His first night in Manhattan, Don walked over to Times Square. He happened upon the theater that was playing
Claudia
, a forgotten Rose Franken production. A sign in the window touted “twofers.” Don asked the ticket seller if he could have one ticket at half price and got a withering glare in return. Don stood there until the man barked, “Okay,” and sold him a nosebleed seat for twenty-five cents. It was Don's first Broadway play.

Don quickly secured a job as an elevator operator at the Cornish Arms Hotel, next to the Grand Opera House at Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street. One day, he earned five dollars by doing a ventriloquism show with Danny at the Y. That show led to an appearance at an open-mike night at the Village Nut Club, on Seventh Avenue, giving Don a small footnote in the storied history of New York's bohemian district. By day, Don snatched up the free tickets at the Y and watched dozens of radio broadcasts, taking notes on dialogue, delivery, and timing. When he had a dollar, he would buy a balcony seat at a Broadway show.

Don had no contacts and no clout, and he never did make it onto
Major Bowes
. A few weeks into his New York odyssey, he finally landed an audition for
Camel Caravan
, another talent showcase. Don showed up with Danny and did his routine for a matronly woman. When he was finished, she told him, “You seem like a nice boy. Why don't you take your dummy and go home and go back to school?”

Don limped back to Morgantown. “New York City was still standing,” Don recalled; “I was the one who'd been brought to his knees.” He spent the second half of summer cleaning chickens in the stockroom at Raese's grocery store.

In September, Don enrolled at West Virginia University, where his mother had helpfully enrolled him before the ill-fated trip. He worked at the campus employment office, he lived at home, and he studied. Don felt his theater days were over. He applied for an announcer job at the campus radio station and was told he lacked a radio-quality voice, an ironic rebuff for the future radio star. Don parlayed his ventriloquism act into free entry to the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity, entertaining at parties and representing the chapter at talent shows.

But the fire had gone from Don's belly; this was not the same boy who had blazed through Morgantown High School. “My ambition evaporated, and I became withdrawn,” he recalled. “If it hadn't been for the war, I most probably would have become a teacher of dramatic arts.”

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had come midway through Don's senior year of high school. “Most of us in our teens felt obliged to volunteer,” Don recalled. But Don did not. Instead, he waited until the draft ensnared him, in summer 1943, at age nineteen.

By this time, Don had already acquired a healthy respect for his own mortality. He had caught most of the childhood diseases and had nearly died of diphtheria. Friends and loved ones thought him frail. In Don's grammar-school years, a county nurse, alarmed by his emaciated frame, had enrolled him in a government nutrition program. Don was actually in fine health by adulthood, but so many people seemed to think otherwise that he began to believe it. So began Don's lifelong battle with hypochondria.

Don weighed in at one pound below the army's minimum weight requirement for a man of his height, which was probably 125 pounds. He had to sign a waiver to enlist. The waiver gave Don a potential means of escape, and he thought of it often as he slogged through basic training in an antiaircraft artillery unit at Fort Bliss.

Privately, Don began to research which military assignments were the safest and scheming at how he might maneuver into one of them. But he soon concluded that even a cook or a truck driver could die in a war. At the end of basic training, Don went to his sergeant, produced his waiver, and asked to be released from duty. The sergeant had him step on a scale. Don was horrified to see he'd gained ten pounds. There would be no escape.

Don wasn't a religious man, but this seemed a good time to reconnect. He began to pray, day and night, begging God for a miracle.

Some days later, it arrived. A telegram from the War Department ordered Don to Fort Meade, outside Washington, to join Detachment X, a mysterious unit of the Special Service. Don felt his prayers had been answered, although he wasn't sure exactly how.

Detachment X was a company of army men drawn from various branches who shared a background in entertainment. Don had been chosen for citing “ventriloquist” as a skill on his enlistment form. The company spent two chilly months in rehearsal, preparing a revue titled
Stars and Gripes
, written by Harold Rome, a Broadway composer who would later score the Andy Griffith musical
Destry Rides Again
. Talented men began to trickle in from around the country: three tap dancers, two singers, one magician, and no fewer than four accordionists. The thirty-five-man roster included no big names but several big talents: Mickey Shaughnessy, a New Jersey nightclub performer who would find fame playing lovable lugs in films; Donald “Red” Blanchard, a radio cowboy in Chicago; Red Ford, a raucous comic from Houston; and Al Checco, a song-and-dance man from Pittsburgh who would become Don's lifelong friend.