Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (34 page)

“Wow,” Andy said, then paused. “Really.
Thank you
for telling me that.” His voice swelled with emotion. “That's
wonderful
. Thank you . . . thank you . . .”

It meant everything to Andy. To him, heaven was real, a place he hoped to go, and he wanted more than anything else to see Don there when he arrived. Now, he had reason for hope.

Andy telephoned his daughter, Dixie. Their conversation “was about making sure that I was at peace with certain aspects of my life, and he shared with me his peace that he had found,” she recalled. “It felt very much like he was imparting to me wisdom to carry forward. Because of the nature, because of the context of the conversation, I knew, I just knew that was the last time I was going to talk to him. He told me he loved me; I told him I loved him.”

Andy spoke to Jim Nabors. Jim was startled at the frailty in Andy's voice. “Goll dang,” Jim told Andy, “you sound old.”

Andy shot back, “Well, I'm eighty-six!”

On July 2, Andy fell suddenly, gravely ill. Tests later showed he had suffered a silent heart attack. For some reason, he elected not to go to the hospital. Instead, he summoned the small entourage of locals who remained close to the reclusive Griffiths. They included John Wilson, the former Manteo mayor who had designed Andy's new home; Billy Parker, John's partner; and Calvin Gibbs, the contractor who had built the home, and who served as a Barney Fife–styled companion to Andy in his final years. Cindi was summoned from her winter retreat in the Florida Keys and arrived after midnight.

Andy knew he was dying. He instructed Calvin on the terms of his burial and said, “Bless you, Calvin. I love you.” They were his final words. Then Andy settled into a pained sleep. He awoke early the next morning, rose from bed, and sat in his wheelchair. That was where Cindi found him, unresponsive, around 7:00 a.m. She telephoned 911.

Four and a half hours later, Andy Griffith's body was in the ground.

In death, as in life, Andy shrouded himself and his loved ones in privacy. He had told Calvin to bury him immediately, before the paparazzi could storm Roanoke Island to capture his remains on film. The ever-loyal denizens of Dare County did their part: the sheriff grounded helicopters, to keep camera crews away from the Griffith estate. The hectic timetable meant that only a few of Andy's local friends could attend the makeshift service. His lone surviving child could not.

“Apparently that was his wish,” Dixie recalled. “He didn't want a funeral. He didn't want a circus. He didn't want a media frenzy. And that was an unfortunate circumstance. How do I gather the girls and get on a plane and go? But I understand if that was his wish, and I have to be respectful of what he wanted.”

Andy had never won an Emmy, an Oscar, or a Tony. Yet, he had attained a celebrity that transcended those honors. Like Lucille Ball or Johnny Carson, Andy had connected with American society to its core.
The Andy Griffith Show
had shaped popular culture. His teleplays had taught America something about itself—about the virtues of friends and family and a savored life. The program had attracted devotees as disparate as J. D. Salinger, John Waters, and Dolly Parton. President Barack Obama praised Andy as “beloved by generations of fans and revered by entertainers who followed in his footsteps.”

In September, Ron Howard delivered an elegant eulogy to Andy at the 2012 Emmy Awards, saying, “Andy's legacy of excellence, accessibility, and range puts him in the pantheon. But, dang, if he didn't make it look powerful easy while he was going about it. Didn't he?”

On the same broadcast, actors Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul re-created the opening scene of
The
Andy Griffith
Show
in character as violent meth dealers from the celebrated television morality play
Breaking Bad
. The moment underscored the innocence and idealism of the era that had spawned the
Griffith Show
. At the close of the skit, the men pulled handguns from beneath their hazmat suits and shot Deputy Fife in the chest.

A few months later, Andy was inexplicably omitted from the “In Memoriam” tribute reel at the Oscars. An NBC affiliate in Cleveland responded by airing two hours of
Matlock
in place of its usual Thursday lineup, in protest.

In the end, whether he wanted one or not, Andy Griffith would have his memorial.

One September weekend, nearly three months after Andy's death, tens of thousands of Mayberry faithful journeyed to Mount Airy for the twenty-third annual Mayberry Days, now an ambitious three-day undertaking. At 10:00 a.m. Friday, the stage of the Blackmon Amphitheatre filled with an ensemble of Mayberry royalty: character impersonators, descendants of dead cast members, and a few frail souls who once played actual parts on Andy's show. Here was Karen Knotts, with her father's saucer eyes; and George Lindsey Jr., who struck a passing resemblance to his father when he planted a beanie on his head; and a Don Knotts surrogate, with a few extra pounds on his frame and no magic in his eyes. No one dared impersonate Andy. Maggie Peterson Mancuso, the former Charlene Darling, offered consolation to a community in mourning. Over the past year, the town had lost not just Andy but also George “Goober” Lindsey and Doug “Darling” Dillard. “We'll always have them in our heart,” Charlene Darling said, “and they're smiling down on us now.”

Downtown, an entire fleet of Ford Galaxie 500s had been parked along Main Street at regular intervals. The lines at Barney's Café and Opie's Candy Store snaked out their doors. Those stores were modern Mayberry replicas; Walker's Soda Fountain was the real thing, open since 1925. Andy Griffith had worked there one summer as a bicycle delivery boy, back when it was a pharmacy.

The afternoon ended with a trivia contest: What is Thelma Lou's house number? In Episode 34, who is holding a copy of the
Press Herald
with a hole in it? What is the license number on Orville Monroe's hearse?

The eventual winner, Pat Bullins of Walnut Cove, NC, answered eighteen of the twenty questions correctly. Her son Ernie had helped her train for the contest using the freeze-frame on their VCR. Her prize: a trophy cup bearing the inscription
MAYBERRY TRIVIA WORLD CHAMPION
.

All day, the line outside the Andy Griffith Museum wound around the building. At the entrance, Emmett Forrest, Andy's childhood friend, held court. Many visitors were crying. Leaning in, Emmett confided, “I have people come up to me and say, ‘Tell Andy I love him.' I don't know how I'm supposed to do that.” A few months later, Emmett himself would be dead; perhaps he delivered the messages after all.

Saturday opened with a parade down Main Street in a chilly drizzle. The North Surry High School Band tromped past, some of the musicians dressed in hillbilly garb, just behind the float carrying Little Miss Bacon Bits. The Southern Mountain Fire Cloggers danced on a flatbed to the tune of “Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad.” Out on Haymore Street, a more sporadic parade filed past the yellow frame ranch house at 711, where Andy's family once lived, opposite a water tower.

Sunday dawned with a “Gospel Tribute” to Andy, featuring the same Moravian band that had once counted Andy as a member. Four men in black suits led the crowd in some of Andy's favorite hymns: “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “I'll Fly Away,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” One of the preachers lifted his voice to sing the Lord's Prayer, and a few in the crowd raised their open palms toward heaven.

Back in town, a shopkeeper did a brisk business selling a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Andy in his shirt and tie, and Barney in his salt-and-pepper suit, both men kicking back on wicker chairs and laughing together above the legend
HEAVEN'S FRONT PORCH
.

The shirt captured the moment better than any speech, or any statue. While Andy Griffith and Don Knotts came from different towns, pursued largely separate careers, and amassed many artistic credits alone, it seemed inevitable that history would ultimately remember them together, two names to be uttered in one breath.

The Andy Griffith Show
is Andy's greatest legacy, and Don's
.
The program endures, in the end, as a monument to their friendship. A half century on, it seems clear that the
Griffith Show
was not really about a father and his son, nor a widower and his aunt. It was about a sheriff and his deputy. The bond between Andy and Barney was the essence of Mayberry. Whenever the sheriff raced around town to clean up his deputy's messes, or to redeem his failures, we saw the comical lengths to which one friend might go to protect another. Whenever Andy gazed lovingly at his diminutive costar, or Don tortured Andy with his big bug eyes and tried a dozen different ways to crack him up, we saw the depth of the friendship that lay so plainly behind the performance.

We can only hope Andy and Don are together now, beneath the setting sun, lazily plotting a walk into town to fetch a bottle of pop.

Acknowledgments

I
FIRST MET
Don Knotts at Walt Disney World. The year was probably 1992, and Don was in Florida for a promotional tour. (Forgive me: I was there as a brother-in-law, not a reporter, and I took no notes.) Don was in a relationship with Francey, beloved sister of my wife, Sophie. We were there mainly so the sisters could reconnect, and I don't suppose it had occurred to either Sophie or me what it meant to visit Disney World with Don Knotts.

Don, you see, was like Elvis. People mobbed him whenever he and Francey set forth from their penthouse suite at the Disney hotel. Grandparents from Phoenix, young couples from Atlanta, teenagers from Fort Lauderdale—everyone recognized him, everyone approached him, everyone wanted a piece of him. Thousands of smiles greeted us at every turn, along with seemingly endless requests for an autograph, or a conversation, or a hug. Tiny children would stop and point and cry, “Mr. Limpet!” The dimensions of his celebrity were staggering. How could this man get from one end of a room to the other?

Later that year, we moved to California, and Don became a fixture at holiday gatherings, sitting quietly in the corner of my mother-in-law's living room, smiling benignly as the family pageant played out around him. Here, oddly, Don was invisible, and Sophie would periodically prod me to walk over and talk to him. I would approach Don sheepishly and invoke my interview skills. “I'd love to hear the story of how you created the Nervous Man,” I would say, although I had heard it before; or, “Tell me again how you broke into radio.” Then Don would straighten up, clear his throat, and raise his raspy but instantly recognizable voice.

He still sounded a bit like Barney Fife, but an entirely different brain labored behind those eyes: serious, intelligent, contemplative, calm. Don was Barney at his most relaxed, chuckling with Andy on the front porch and sharing some serene meditation on the day's events.

I met Andy Griffith just once, at Don's funeral, in 2006. Andy was old and frail, but his face still shone with that unmistakable glow of celebrity. When his time came to speak, Andy didn't just speak: he testified. Andy's body shook as he summoned that big, booming voice. “And ah take comfort,” he quaked, “because ah know that Don . . . is . . . in . . .
paradise
!” At that moment, Andy's love for Don all but knocked us out of our chairs.

In fall 2012, shortly after Andy's death, I set out to write something about their historic friendship. I took my family down to Mount Airy, North Carolina, for the annual Mayberry Days festival, and I brought two yellow legal pads. I filled them up with all the sights and sounds of an event that felt like a big memorial service for Andy. We returned home, and I set about interviewing everyone I could find who had ever been close to Andy or Don. The project quickly grew too big for an article, and I pitched it as a book.

This manuscript came together between fall 2012 and spring 2014, and I continued to collect interviews and ephemera through the end of the year. I amassed a cubic foot of articles about my subjects from newspapers, magazines, and wire services, purchased and read every significant book on Andy or Don or
The Andy Griffith Show
,
scanned dozens of memoirs for pertinent chapters, and tracked down every lengthy interview I could find, including the impressive collection at the Archive of American Television. My main subjects were dead, but I found and interviewed every living soul who would talk to me about their lives:
Griffith Show
costars Ron Howard, Jim Nabors, Betty Lynn, Elinor Donahue, and Maggie Peterson Mancuso; Don's manager, Sherwin Bash; Andy's manager, Dick Linke; Don's children, Karen and Tom Knotts; Andy's daughter, Dixie; Don's former wives, Kay and Loralee, and his widow, Francey; Don's friends, including Al Checco, John Pyles, Mary Lopez, and the late Richie Ferrara; Andy's friends and old classmates, including the late Emmett Forrest, Garnett Steele, J. B. Childress, Robert Merritt, Barbara Folger Chatham, Betsy Mills McCraw, Ed Sutphin, Robert Hurley, George Vassos, the late Carl Perry, Quentin Bell, Edward Greene, Craig Fincannon, and William Ivey Long. I also spoke to many of Andy's and Don's professional peers, some of whom had become dear friends. That group includes actors Clive Rice, Ivan Cury, Lee Grant, Earle Hyman, Tim Conway, Pat Harrington, Rance Howard, Ken Berry, Ronnie Schell, Elaine Joyce, Frank Welker, Claudette Nevins, Joan Staley, Barbara Rhoades, Lee Meriwether, Michael Brandon, Joyce DeWitt, Richard Kline, Dodie Brown, Stella Berrier, Sharon Spelman, Jamie Smith-Jackson, and Nancy Stafford; producers Dean Hargrove and Joel Steiger; directors Bruce Bilson and Peter Baldwin; and writer Sam Bobrick. I spoke to surviving relatives of key characters who had died, including Robert and Mike King, Barbara Griffith's nephews; Bridget Sweeney, daughter of
director Bob Sweeney; Kit McNear, son of actor Howard McNear; George Lindsey Jr.; and Jesse Corsaut and Jennifer Scarlott, brother and niece, respectively, of actress Aneta Corsaut. I interviewed
Griffith Show
scholars Neal Brower and Richard Kelly. I am deeply indebted to all of them for their help.

Many others provided inspiration and counsel: Karyn Marcus, Sydney Tanigawa and Molly Lindley, my wonderful editors at Simon & Schuster; Geri Thoma, my terrific agent at Writers House; John Cuthbert, director of the West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University; the Reverend Dr. Arvid Straube, who led Don's funeral service; Pat Bullins, queen of
Griffith Show
trivia; Marjorie Harrington, whose memories helped me set the scene; Charisse Gines, who put me in touch with Jim Nabors, and Jacqueline Beatty, who helped me connect with Tim Conway; Tom Hellebrand, whose statue dream may finally become reality; Jeff Gossett and Ivan Shreve, who helped me track down long-lost episodes; Beth Lancaster at Converse College, Barbara's alma mater; Troy Valos at the Norfolk Public Library; David Bushman at the Paley Center for Media; David Lombard at the CBS Photo Archive; Amy Snyder at the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History; and numerous helpful souls at the vast Library of Congress and the University of Maryland Libraries.

My reporting efforts did not always succeed. I could not reach Andy's second wife, Solica; Andy's widow, Cindi, politely declined interview requests. Some sources died before I could speak to them. Others, including the wonderful Richie Ferrara and the loyal Emmett Forrest, died before we could finish our conversations. I heard contradictory accounts of some stories and incomplete accounts of others, leaving unanswered questions that I have attempted to flag in the manuscript. Who really conceived “The Pickle Story”? Who persuaded Don to take his Nervous Man to Steve Allen? We may never know.