Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (33 page)

The decidedly secular affair was led by a Unitarian minister; that all-embracing faith seemed the right choice. Though not religious himself, Don knew that other people—Andy in particular—would want a service. He had always regretted avoiding his own mother's funeral.

Andy was concerned at what the Unitarian might say. The minister called Andy and sketched out his carefully worded sermon. He asked if Andy had a problem. Andy replied, “Well, you know, I do believe that Don is going to be in heaven, and you're not going to say that.”

Francey arranged for Andy himself to speak at the service. Andy stepped forward and spoke, his voice choked with emotion. “It's hard for me to say anything,” he began. Andy then told the story of Jesus and the penitent thief. As Jesus hung on the cross, a condemned man beside him asked Jesus to “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus replied, “I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise.”

Andy's voice rose and slowed as he concluded, summoning the fire of his Preacher-and-the-Bear sermons back in North Carolina: “And I take comfort because I know that Don . . . is . . . in . . .
paradise
!” Then, his body quaking, Andy left the podium. As he exited, Andy's voice burst forth from the chapel's public address system, singing the hymn “Precious Memories” from one of his gospel albums.

Don was buried at Westwood Memorial Park, near the graves of Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, and Truman Capote. Frail Andy insisted on bearing Don's coffin. Francey summoned several strong men to help him.

A memorial service was held May 4 at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, with an all-star guest list, a chocolate fountain, and an ice sculpture of Mr. Limpet. Ron Howard opened the three-hour ceremony. Andy followed. His face veritably glowed with love, and emotion no longer strangled his voice.

“I'll tell you something I believe,” Andy said. “I'm Christian, but I believe there's a place for all of us in God's kingdom. I know when it comes my time, I'll see Don again with our Lord.”

Joan Staley, Don's costar in
The Ghost and Mister Chicken
, heard Andy's words. “And I remember it hitting me:
He really loved him. He really loved him.
”

Andy's dream of living out his final years in the company of Don had died with his friend. Now, he told Cindi, he wanted out of LA—even though the Griffiths had barely settled into their new home. “With Don gone, I'm ready to go back to North Carolina,” he told friends. By year's end, Andy and Cindi had left California.

The
Griffith
diaspora had lost its beloved Barney, and talk soon turned to the quest for a fitting tribute. Shortly after the memorial, a plan was announced. Two fans from Mount Airy, Andy's hometown, would commission a life-size bronze statue of Deputy Fife. They would donate it to the city once they had raised the necessary funds.

A statue of Andy Griffith already sat in Mount Airy, outside the Andy Griffith Playhouse. Commissioned by the cable network TV Land and installed in 2004, the monument depicted Andy and Opie holding hands and walking with their fishing poles, above the inscription
A SIMPLER TIME, A SWEETER PLACE
.

Don's death underscored his absence from that memorial. The statue backers thought it fitting that Barney should stand near Andy and Opie in front of the playhouse, or maybe down on Main Street, directing traffic into eternity. “Mayberry without Barney Fife just wouldn't be the same,” said Tom Hellebrand, a local restaurateur. His partner on the project, Neal Shelton, made his living restoring Ford Galaxie 500 sedans for the Mount Airy tourist circuit.

Francey, immersed in Don's memorial, knew nothing of the statue until she was blindsided one day by a call from Andy, who sounded hysterical. “They're trying to turn Don into Bob's Big Boy,” he cried.

Andy said he feared the men planned the Barney statue as a glorified sandwich board to drum up sales for their respective businesses, not as a simple, altruistic tribute. Andy wanted the statue nipped in the bud. But he himself didn't dare get involved, for fear his reluctance might be read the wrong way.

Andy seemed swept up in a familiar tempest of powerful emotions: protectiveness of the Mayberry brand mixed with possessiveness of his hometown and simple egotism. For half a century, Andy had scorned Mount Airy. Now, he was fighting to protect his primacy there. Erecting a statue of Don, Andy said, “would be an absolute shot in my eye.”

There seemed no basis for Andy's mistrust of the statue promoters. Yet, in early June, the two men were told they could not proceed. CBS Corp., which had granted permission for the statue, now revoked it. Company officials said the project was dead because it lacked the blessing of the Don Knotts estate—Francey. In a series of increasingly desperate phone calls, Andy had persuaded her to oppose the statue. If someone wanted to build a memorial to Don, Andy said, it should go in his own hometown of Morgantown. Mount Airy belonged to Andy.

The statue promoters were stunned. And they were broke. The fracas became a national story, and opinion quickly turned against the “big-city lawyers” and the Knotts estate for blocking the statue. No one seemed to realize the objection had come from Andy himself.

At the end of June 2006, Tom Hellebrand offered to donate the partially completed statue to anyone, anywhere, who could find it a home that appealed to the Knotts family. He suggested Morgantown, Don's birthplace. Morgantown leaders loved the idea. Andy hated it. He telephoned Francey repeatedly, frantically, begging her to shut it down. He didn't want the Barney statue going up in Morgantown, either. If there was to be a statue of Don, he told her, it should depict the man, not the deputy.

It was hard, once again, to parse Andy's reasons, or to see how a statue of Barney Fife could possibly harm Don's legacy. Andy seemed concerned that the statue would reduce his dear friend to a roadside caricature. But if a Barney Fife statue was such a bad idea, then why had Andy permitted a statue of Andy Taylor—the character—in Mount Airy?

As he neared the end of his life, Andy seemed to be reordering his priorities. If Manteo was his home, then Mount Airy was his legacy—a living, breathing memorial to his greatest creation. Perhaps it hadn't dawned on Andy how badly he craved that tribute until he faced the prospect of sharing it with his best friend.

Francey had no objection to a statue of Don going up in Mount Airy or Morgantown. But she respected Andy, so she assented. In July, she and Andy issued a joint public statement: “No one cares more about Don's image than we do. It would be wonderful to have a statue in Morgantown, W.Va., of Don Knotts as Don Knotts. But this particular image”—Don as Barney—“does not fit with our understanding of Don's experience growing up in Morgantown.”

Tom Hellebrand sold his diner and his home and severed most of his ties to Mayberry; the half-finished statue was destroyed. In the real Mayberry, a local editorial mused, no one would lose his business and his home over “this statue thing. Maybe that's just what happens when Sheriff Taylor isn't around to smooth things over.” The writer didn't know the sheriff had been the one stirring things up.

Inside of a year, an effort was under way to fund a new statue in Don's birthplace. This design depicted Don in a suit, rather than a lawman's uniform, with his deputy's badge concealed coyly within a cupped palm. By the start of 2015, the project had surpassed its $50,000 fund-raising goal, and supporters had chosen a fitting location: outside the old Metropolitan Theatre, within whose seats Don had first been bitten by the acting bug.

• • •

Andy was, at seventy-six, the most famous living soul in North Carolina, the figure at the center of an $80 million tourism industry. In fall 2002, Andy prepared a triumphal return to Mount Airy for a ceremony dedicating an eleven-mile stretch of US Highway 52 in his honor. On the eve of the visit, he telephoned the Surry Arts Council.

Its director, Tanya Jones, worked inside the Andy Griffith Playhouse and had staged eleven Mayberry Days, but she had never spoken to the man. Now, Andy was on the telephone, telling Tanya he wanted to see the playhouse and meet with his old friend Emmett Forrest and stay in his old Mount Airy home.

The ceremony marked Andy's first public appearance in Mount Airy in forty-five years. “I'm proud to be from Mount Airy,” Andy told the crowd. “I think of you often, and I won't be such a stranger from here out.”

To that moment, Andy and his birthplace had seemed at cross-purposes. Here was an entire town laboring to define itself as the real-life Mayberry—and here was the mythical town's creator saying it wasn't so. “Now they think that I based the show on Mount Airy, and I've argued about this too long,” Andy had snapped at an interviewer in 1998. “I don't care. Let them think what they want.”

On this day, with the townsfolk gathered at his feet, stubborn old Andy finally, grudgingly confessed the truth. “People started saying that Mayberry was based on Mount Airy,” he told the crowd with a sly grin. “It sure sounds like it, doesn't it?”

Andy lived his final years as Carolina royalty. Fans lurked at the gates to his Manteo estate. Governors courted his favor. Locals guarded his privacy with the zeal of a palace guard. Andy spent his days drinking his coffee, reading his paper, and riding his John Deere Gator around his seventy acres of forest and sand.

Don had kept working because he could not bear to turn down a job. Andy, by contrast, seemed to keep working in a ceaseless quest to prove himself—to finally earn some artistic recognition, and to undo past mistakes in a brilliant but scattershot career.

Now, like Don before him, Andy was enjoying a sort of autumnal comeback. It started with
Waitress
, an art-house project that Andy took on around the time of Don's death, inspired by his old friend's dogged work ethic. He was cast as Joe, the crotchety owner of a diner that employed Keri Russell, the film's lovelorn protagonist.

Andy's labors in
Waitress
reminded him faintly of his work five decades earlier with Elia Kazan. Adrienne Shelly, the director—later to be strangled by a construction worker in her Greenwich Village apartment—extracted a superior performance from Andy. She was a director who gave actual direction, and Andy listened. “Be firm,” she would tell him, over and over, until Andy would explode, “I'm trying!” Then Adrienne would smile: “That way.”

When Andy spoke his last line, Adrienne Shelly embraced him and the entire company applauded. To Andy, it felt a bit like opening night on
No Time for Sergeants
, fifty years earlier.

Waitress
was released in 2007. For the first time in what seemed forever, Andy's dramatic work drew serious note.
The Wall Street Journal
opined, “This comic virtuoso is as commanding as ever, but with a new dimension of restraint.”

Ron and Rance Howard telephoned separately to tell Andy how good he was. Interviewers called, too, and for once Andy answered the phone. They had no idea how he savored the attention.

Andy Griffith had earned almost no formal recognition for either his comedy or his acting. Most of the awards on his résumé were trivial, such as a 2003 Single Dad of the Year honor from TV Land. He hadn't won even one Emmy, let alone five. Yet, in Andy's final years, Hollywood finally seemed to be coming round to the idea that he was one of the greats. “At age 81, Andy Griffith has been discovered,” one reporter wrote.

In 2009, Andy starred in the independent feature
Play the Game
,
cast as a lonely widower who transforms into a retirement-home lothario. Andy, ribald as ever, reveled in the sexually charged dialogue. It would be his final role.

The statue debacle seemed an ancient memory when, in September 2009, Andy's friends in Mount Airy cut the ribbon on the Andy Griffith Museum. Owned by the city and housed within the same complex as the Andy Griffith Playhouse, the twenty-five-hundred-square-foot museum gave a permanent home to Griffith memorabilia collected by Emmett Forrest, Andy's lifelong friend, who had amassed the items over the decades. Andy would sometimes show up at Emmett's door with bits of flotsam Emmett had spotted in Andy's garage months or years earlier. Andy did not attend the opening.

Andy's health was in steady decline. In summer 2000, he had survived a heart attack, quadruple bypass surgery, and the customary “Brave Last Stand” headlines in the tabloids. In the final years of Andy's life, he and Cindi pulled away from several of their old friends, and the Griffiths became progressively harder to reach. Their social circle grew steadily smaller. Few people set foot inside the Griffith home apart from those who provided goods or services to the household.

Quentin Bell had been one of Andy's closest friends in the years before he met Cindi. Quentin's property lay right next door, and the Griffith Labradors often wandered over to Quentin's yard. “So I would see Cindi and Andy,” Quentin recalled. “But it was never like I came into his house for a drink or anything. Andy didn't drink at the end, I don't think.” In March 2012, Andy and Cindi unexpectedly invited Quentin and his wife over for lunch. Andy gave Quentin a tour of his palatial new home, built a short distance from the older, smaller residence that Andy and Barbara had shared. The new Griffith dwelling was several years old, but Quentin had never really seen it. Andy showed Quentin his Moravian Bible and drove his old friend up and down the sand hills on his beloved Gator. Quentin would never see Andy again.

June 1, 2012, was Andy's eighty-sixth birthday. He treated himself to a glass of champagne. Francey Yarborough Knotts telephoned to wish him well and was surprised when Andy himself picked up the phone. Andy wanted to talk about Don. Francey and Andy had spoken many times since Don had died, and Andy mostly avoided discussing him, “like he felt he shouldn't be bringing up the past,” Francey recalled. On this day, though, Andy held forth about Don's films, his stand-up routines, his radio voices—all the things Don was so good at. Andy kept talking, and something in his voice gave Francey the feeling that Andy might not have long to live. It occurred to her, suddenly, to tell Andy about Don's cryptic remark from his hospital bed, on that day shortly before he died, about waiting “for the great wizard in the sky to take me away.”