Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (30 page)

As the credits roll, Andy and Barney lower the flag and walk off down the street, side by side.

Broadcast on April 13, 1986,
Return to Mayberry
reached 28 million homes, making it the most watched television movie of the year. Andy Griffith was on a roll. His
Matlock
pilot, “Diary of a Perfect Murder,” had aired on March 3 and reached 21 million homes. “We were in,” Dean Hargrove recalled.

The celebration was short-lived. A month after the Mayberry reunion, Andy flew back to Hollywood to bury his mother. Geneva Griffith died on May 13, 1986, at age eighty-six, of heart failure.

That summer, production began on
Matlock
,
and Andy resumed the grueling weekly schedule of study, rehearsal, and filming that had governed his life on
The Andy Griffith Show
for most of the 1960s. Andy had been thirty-four when
Griffith
went on the air. Now he was sixty, and coming to work in leg braces.

Andy would spend Saturday and Sunday mornings rehearsing his climactic courtroom scene till he had it memorized. He would carry around little prompts scrawled on note cards in his left hand. The scenes were long and taxing; when they were over, and the cameras were off, Andy often reaped a standing ovation.

“The whole set was filled. And I bet you ninety-eight percent of the time, he did it on the first take,” recalled Nancy Stafford, Andy's longest-serving
Matlock
costar.

Andy learned the scenes by treating each as an extended monologue, like his
Hamlet
and football sketches of three decades earlier. “That was his secret,” Nancy recalled. “He wasn't waiting for somebody to give their reply. If you go back and watch some of the shows after you get that in your head, you can see he steamrolls, sometimes, right through someone's answer.”

Joel Steiger, a young television writer, joined
Matlock
as a producer. Like Dean Hargrove, Joel deeply admired Andy, especially for
A Face in the Crowd
, a film that had aged well. “There are those people who believe that Andy's performance in that movie is one of the greatest sustained performances ever given in a movie,” Joel said.

Matlock
aired at 8:00 p.m. Tuesday nights, opposite ABC's
Who's the Boss?
and
Growing Pains
, both top-ten shows in the 1986–87 season. “Our job was to come in a strong second,” Joel recalled. “And we did it, forever. We knew almost immediately that this show was going to be successful and was going to continue.”

Andy's new show would end its first season tied for fifteenth in the Nielsen ratings, and it would place fourteenth the following year.

Success on
Matlock
allowed Andy to finally escape the rut of the previous eighteen years, hustling from job to job and enduring lengthy spells of no work at all. Andy credited Dean Hargrove with turning his career around; the producer now found himself the subject of almost unhealthy adoration from his star. “He was enormously appreciative,” Dean recalled, “because his career at that point was pretty moribund. This series was really bringing him back to life.”

Matlock
animated Andy's tired frame. A few months into production, he threw off the leg braces he'd worn for three years. “They squeaked, and the soundmen could hear them,” he joked.

Two decades earlier, producers of
The Andy Griffith Show
had labored to find the right love interest for their star. Now, on
Matlock
, they struggled to find Andy's character a suitable daughter. Lori Lethin had played attorney Charlene Matlock in the pilot, only to be replaced by Linda Purl in the next episode. A year later, Linda was gone. Season two of
Matlock
opened in London and featured yet another female lead: Nancy Stafford, a seasoned actress and former Miss Florida. This time, producers tried a different tack: Nancy's character would be Ben Matlock's protégé, but not his daughter.

“He was always, always singing,” Nancy recalled of Andy. “You could hear him walk out of the makeup trailer onto the soundstage, humming. And he'd walk back into his trailer, and he was singing. I think one of the things I learned from him was just a great affection for the work. He was happiest, I think, when he was working.”

At first, Andy had little or no say in the
Matlock
scripts. In time, though, Andy's confidence grew and he began to assert himself on the set. Andy's writing had lifted the quality of
The Andy Griffith Show
;
here, finally, was a chance for him to flex his artistic ambitions on another character he loved.

But a lot had changed in the two decades since
Griffith
; by the late 1980s, television networks wielded enormous influence on the direction of successful shows. To a much greater extent, scriptwriting was executed by formula and overseen by men and women with business degrees.

“When I was doing the
Griffith Show
, the network was only your host,” Andy recalled. “They came down once a year to say hello. . . . When the network gained control and they put all these children in these offices, it all went to hell then.” He added wistfully, “It was all so easy in the early days. It was just Sheldon and Aaron and me and Don.”

On the
Griffith Show
, Andy was accustomed to rewriting lines he didn't like
.
Now, Andy found that the balance of power had shifted. And he found himself clashing with Dean Hargrove, the man who had rekindled his career.

Dean was a seasoned television mystery writer; Andy was not. Dean was happy to allow his star to tinker with his character's mannerisms and to craft the occasional joke. He would not let Andy alter the course of a story.

“His ideas of comedy were unparalleled,” Dean recalled. “When it had to do more with the plot, the mystery, that was when we'd tend to stay with what we had. It would be like trying to pull the threads out of a sweater.”

Andy harbored enormous ambitions for
Matlock
, and he shared them with Don. He envisioned Ben Matlock as a sort of antihero, more complex than Andy Taylor, vain, uncultured, cheap, and vaguely unlikable. He imagined Matlock struggling with alcohol addiction, getting thrown out of court, tossed into jail. He wanted Matlock to jam with Atlanta bluesmen.

Andy approached Dean—and later, Joel—with hundreds of ideas for
Matlock
. Some they liked; most they didn't. Andy would always argue his case, and sometimes he would yell. Dean would stand there and take it, the very picture of propriety, until Andy had said his piece. Then Dean would calmly proceed with the show. In one of the more heated exchanges, Dean rejected one of Andy's suggestions with “I don't think that's right for the show.” Andy shot back, “That's because you don't know anything about comedy, Dean!”

It was Andy who imbued
Matlock
with humor. Over its nine-year run,
Matlock
became an increasingly whimsical series, with the formality of early episodes giving way to a looser, warmer, more Southern style. The humor was often subtle: a raised eyebrow or gentle groan when Matlock heard something he didn't like, or a drawn-out “Noooo,” just like Barney Fife used to do it. Ben Matlock didn't make viewers laugh: He made them smile.

“He loved to invent bits,” Nancy Stafford recalled. “The shoe-shining bit was his, and the hot-dog-eating bit was his. And after he'd invented these bits and they'd show up in the script, he'd do this very fake but quite dramatic act of complaining, right as we were shooting a scene: ‘Why did I invent this? Why do I have to eat another hot dog?' The very bits that became his character's most lovable quirks—and that Andy created—he would disparage them when he was on the set.”

Andy was no prima donna, but he was a man of routine, and his producers knew better than to tamper with it. “Andy was very fond of peanut butter,” Dean Hargrove recalled. The crew would set out peanut butter and apples for Andy. “And he would get distressed sometimes because people who were not part of the crew would come on and eat the peanut butter and the apples. Andy was a hawk-eye on it, too.”

When he was down, Andy could be dour and petty. But when he was on top, Andy was the picture of magnanimity, lavishing favors—and parts—on his friends. As the
Matlock
franchise prospered, Andy began to import bits of Mayberry into
Matlock.
Betty “Thelma Lou” Lynn turned up as Matlock's secretary. Aneta “Helen Crump” Corsaut, Andy's former paramour, played a judge, as did
Griffith
writer Everett Greenbaum. Bob Sweeney, the beloved
Griffith
director, took the helm on two 1987 episodes. Andy even asked the producers to hire Aaron Ruben, the brilliant writer-producer from
Griffith
, to pen some jokes.

What Andy wanted most of all, though, was to work with his best friend. In 1988, before the start of
Matlock
's third season, Andy approached Joel Steiger and said, “I'd like to put Don on the show.”

Don had been out of movies and television for most of 1985 and 1986. Like Andy, Don was fending off rumors of ill health—in his case, a debilitating case of macular degeneration. His fortunes turned, though, not long after the Mayberry reunion, when Don got a call from a pair of former
Three's Company
writers
.
They were looking to insert him into another established series.

But
What a Country!
was no
Three's Company
. It was, instead, a modestly successful sitcom, set in a night school for immigrants and staged as a vehicle for Russian comic Yakov Smirnoff, whose catchphrase supplied its title. It was funny but derivative; the ensemble-of-goofballs formula had borne more fruit on
Taxi
and
Night Court
, and the classroom-of-goofballs scenario had worked better on
Welcome Back, Kotter.

Don entered the production in midseason as the new principal of a school that seems to have only a single classroom, filled with ethnic stereotypes: the fiery Latina, the demure Asian American, the impoverished Indian American, and so forth. “You have something on your head,” the Indian student says of Don's toupee as his character enters the class. “It looks like a little cap made of hair.”

What a Country!
would be canceled after a single season. But the production would launch a more enduring relationship between Don and a production assistant on the show.

Francey Yarborough, a beautiful, kind-hearted actress, had settled in Hollywood to pursue improvisational comedy. In early 1987, she was hired on
What a Country!
Her main job was to help Don learn his lines. She was in her twenties, and he was entering his sixties; yet, they were kindred spirits.

“We had an instant rapport,” Francey recalled. “I was living kind of a goofy life, and so was he. We would just talk and talk and talk. He loved hearing stories about my family. He had a crazy family; I had a crazy family. He liked the nuances of people.”

Don and Francey started going out to La Scala in Beverly Hills, trading stories and making each other laugh. After a few months, they were a couple. Francey moved into Don's Century City condo, a sort of
Love God
–styled bachelor pad to which Don had decamped after his divorce from Loralee.

“He was like a kid living in a big apartment,” Francey recalled. “My first reaction to him was that he was so vulnerable. I'd never met someone so vulnerable.”

By the time he met Francey, Don was leading a largely nocturnal existence, drinking too much and eating too little. He smoked to excess, stayed up too late, and found sleep only with the aid of pills. Yet, soon after he met Francey, Don abruptly stopped smoking. “One day he heard a wheeze,” Francey recalled, “and he dropped his cigarette and never looked back.”

It would take a much bigger scare, several years later, to drive Don away from the other vices.

Don's dimming vision made it harder for him to drive safely, and he found it increasingly difficult to read scripts. With his talents in less demand, Don filled his time with commercials and live theater. He could sell out a regional playhouse with ease, and Francey would often join him onstage. Don was doing
Last of the Red Hot Lovers
in Traverse City, Michigan, when Andy telephoned. “I've been watching the old shows,” Andy said, “and I miss you and all the fun we had. It would be so nice if you would come on the show sometime.”

Andy had called Don several times before, saying he was thinking of writing him into the show. Don didn't think Andy was serious; usually, it came to naught. But this time, Andy said he wanted to talk business. “And I realized then that he really meant business,” Don recalled.

Joel Steiger, who was taking over day-to-day business on
Matlock
, watched the creeping “Mayberry-ization” with growing unease. Andy seemed intent on re-creating his greatest television success on
Matlock
, even if it imperiled the success of his comeback.

“He wanted to put Don on the show,” Joel recalled. “I didn't know how we were going to use him, because Don as a character could really only be Andy's friend. So the question became, how do you work him into the script without compromising everything you're doing when you use him? We came to the conclusion that we would not use him in every episode. And we'd use him as a friend who stopped by the office, and stuff like that. . . . I didn't want to rip the show apart just to have Don in it.”

NBC called a press conference to announce the reunion. “Don Knotts is the best comic actor I ever met,” Andy said, beaming, “and I play straight for him better than any man in America.”

Don appears at Ben Matlock's window in the season-three opener, “The Lemon,” as Les Calhoun, self-described King of Plastics, a man who found prosperity by making “those little loops on your sneakers.”