Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (5 page)

2.

Laugh, Lest Ye Cry

C
ARL AND
Geneva Griffith lived on the wrong side of Mount Airy, North Carolina—the south side, below the Mount Airy and Eastern Railroad tracks. The neighborhood was home to the hosiery mills that employed the town's working-class women and the furniture mills that employed many of the men, including Carl. The north side of Mount Airy housed the men who owned those mills, and the children who would inherit them. In north Mount Airy, many of the streets were named for trees. In south Mount Airy, they were named for industries: Factory Street, Depot Street, Granite Street.

The birth registry says Andy Samuel Griffith was born on June 7, 1926. In later life, Andy apparently adopted a new birth date, June 1. He said he learned his parents had stalled in reporting the birth because “Mama wasn't quite ready with a name.” When she finally found one, it was a nickname—Andy, not Andrew. A working-class name for a working-class boy.

Young Andy had a shock of blond hair and a strawberry birthmark on the back of his head, traits for which classmates would later tease him. His first home was a converted barn on South Street shared with Geneva's sister and her husband. Andy's crib was a repurposed bureau drawer. Carl Griffith was a skilled carpenter, but jobs were scarce, so the family hopscotched from one relative's home to another, living with Geneva's mother in Ohio, then rejoining her sister in Mount Airy, before amassing the savings to purchase a three-room house on Haymore Street. The house cost eight hundred dollars. The toilet sat on the back porch. Andy slept on a straw bed in the kitchen, an arrangement upon which he could later compare notes with Don.

Carl Griffith finally landed a steady job with the Mount Airy Chair Company, building dining-room furniture with a band saw. It didn't pay particularly well; then again, the Griffiths didn't need much money. Andy was an only child, and Carl's income was split just three ways. Andy ate well. Geneva pampered him and sewed his clothes. Some of Andy's boyhood friends felt like pups in a litter by comparison.

“It seemed like he had everything,” recalled J. B. Childress, a childhood friend. “My family, I was one of eight, and we were extremely poor.”

On the playground, Andy's socioeconomic status became a liability. He wasn't like other neighborhood boys. They ran wild, stayed out late, and came home with skinned knees and torn clothes that no one cared to mend. Andy (or Ange, as he was affectionately known, even then) went home early, avoided running in the streets, seldom got dirty, and invariably emerged from his house looking clean. He was too shy to skinny-dip with the other boys at the local swimming hole.

This reflected the influence of Geneva Griffith. “She didn't really care for him being out that late,” recalled Garnett Steele, another boyhood friend who was himself the youngest of ten. “He had a certain time he had to be home.”

It didn't help that Andy was naturally clumsy. “He was a big boy,” Garnett recalled. “He could hit you hard in football, but he wasn't an athlete. He wasn't good with catching a ball. Almost like having all thumbs.”

Andy's gawkishness, coupled with his unmistakable aura of mama's boy, made him a target. “He would put himself into positions that made him vulnerable,” Garnett recalled.

“We picked on him a little bit,” J. B. Childress recalled. “He seemed to be spoiled. Even I—I didn't realize it was wrong to do at the time—I can remember him riding his bicycle, and I stuck out my foot and almost wrecked him.”

Time and again, in later life, Andy would frame his childhood as a ceaseless battle against bullies. “The other fellas—and worse, the girls—used to laugh at me,” he recalled. “Not
with
me, mind you, but
at
me. My mama made me wear long underwear, and when we had to change in the gym, the other guys would double over in hysterics. It finally got so I'd dress in the shower or toilet where they couldn't see me. . . . I was an awful shy, scraggly, homely kid, and I'd fall over imaginary objects and trip myself up with my own big feet. I wanted to belong like the rest of the kids, but I was too embarrassed to express myself or my needs. I don't even think I knew what my needs were. There were times when I thought I just wanted to die.”

Andy would forgive his mother for dressing him funny. He would not so easily forgive his friends and classmates for taking note. “I felt second-class all the time,” Andy recalled. “I think I was driven to do the things I did so I could get out of Mount Airy.”

Andy's first appearance before an audience, in the third grade, would fade over time into an enigmatic tale, sometimes recounted as an episode of humiliation, other times as a moment of triumph.

Andy's grammar school held regular Friday assemblies and encouraged students to perform. One Friday, Andy had a mind to sing a song. He told a classmate named Albert McKnight, “I'll get up to sing if you will.” Albert agreed. When the time came, Andy stood; Albert did not. Andy looked down at his classmate, saw a smirk on his face, and realized he'd been had.

“I don't know why I didn't sit back down,” he recalled years later. “I walked up there on that stage. Center stage. Never said a word. My hair was as white as it is now. And I sang ‘Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet,' twice. Once slow, once fast, with my hands behind me swaying around.” The audience exploded in cruel laughter.

That Friday afternoon was surely the low point in young Andy Griffith's life. Or was it a turning point? Sometimes, when Andy told the same story, he gave it a happy ending.

“I don't know to this day what made me do it,” Andy said in another retelling. “I guess I was just plumb tired of being made a fool of. But I marched up to the stage and started reciting the poem we'd learned.” (In this version of the story, the song has become a verse.) “In between the lines, I'd make little comments of my own on what I thought of the poem and the person who wrote it, and they started laughing. I found out I could get them to laugh, or listen, whenever I wanted them to. What an experience, that great sea of laughter. From that time on, no one kidded me because they knew I could whip them verbally. And, most important, I knew it.”

This much is certain: Humor delivered Andy from the strictures of his Mount Airy childhood. For a boy who lacked money and athletic prowess—in a community that prized little else—laughter became a currency all its own.

“I did it as a matter of self-protection,” he recalled. “All the time I was training myself, although I didn't know it.”

The Griffith home lay half a mile south of the Rockford Street Grammar School. Andy's childhood played out along Rockford Street: He would walk up past Spring Street in the morning for class, then walk back home to Haymore Street for lunch, then back to school. After the final bell, Andy might retreat to Mrs. Allred's cow pasture on Granite Street for an aromatic game of football among the cow pies. Then, perhaps, down to Broad Street to congregate with the other boys on Garnett Steele's front porch, then out into the streets to play kick the can until nightfall.

Andy and his friends were no strangers to high jinks. One Halloween night, Garnett recalled, the boys skated up and down the streets of Mount Airy letting air out of car tires. As they went to work on one vehicle, the owner climbed out, produced a hand pump, and demanded that the boys reinflate the tires. The pumping occupied the rest of the evening. When Garnett retold the story in an episode of
This Is Your Life
, Andy claimed not to remember it. “He was a person who didn't want anything to take away from him, from his prestige, if you know what I mean,” Garnett recalled.

On wet days, Andy and Garnett would retreat into Andy's basement. There, the boys had built an entire city in miniature from blocks and scraps, a poor man's model train set. Andy's daughter, Dixie, suspects the work paid homage to Andy's father, the master carpenter.

The household of Carl Lee and Geneva “Nannie” Griffith was “a very pleasant one to be around,” Garnett recalled. Carl, thirty-one at Andy's birth, was “much younger than most of the dads back then,” Garnett says. Carl and his only child spent a lot of time together. Andy would go to the furniture factory after school to work alongside Carl. Then, they would walk home together. “And we'd be just draggin' along,” Andy recalled. “Finally, Dad would say, ‘We'd better hurry up. We're gonna miss
The Lone Ranger.
' So we'd sit together by the radio.”

When the Lone Ranger called, “Hi-yo, Silver, away!” Carl would cry, “Whoooeee!” That whoop was Carl's signature. “If something really astounded him, or if he saw a really pretty woman, he'd do a whole-body take, go ‘Whoooeee!'—and he'd walk out of the room and come back and do it again,” Andy recalled.

Andy picked up many of his father's exaggerated Southern mannerisms and his rustic humor. Carl, more than anyone else, was the wellspring of Andy's wit.

“He simply adored his father,” recalled Dixie, Andy's daughter. “It feels to me that his work ethic and his perseverance and those things were a result, in a sense, of his father's work ethic and perseverance, and his determination, and getting up and doing the grind. He had a great deal of respect for his father, and what he did, and how he did it. Granddaddy would have these little looks and little nods and little idiosyncrasies. And Daddy, he'd say, ‘This is how Granddaddy used to do it.' ”

Andy grew up in a deceptively matriarchal society. Half the women seemed to hold jobs in the hosiery mills; the other half ran large households. The fathers of Mount Airy, by contrast, were comparatively shiftless. “A lot of the men, like my daddy, stayed drunk all the time,” J. B. Childress recalled. “The ones who were sober worked in furniture mills.”

Carl Griffith wasn't a drunk, but he drank, and he may well have been an alcoholic. Later in life, Andy told Don of his heavily inebriated father wobbling into the room one night as the younger Griffith poured a drink and telling his son, “Ah need to have a talk with you about yer drinkin',” before passing out cold on the floor himself.

Yet, Carl was always a hard worker. Andy claimed his father had gone to work at age twelve to offset his own father's gambling.

While Andy adored his father, his relationship with Geneva was more complex. She sometimes seemed to manipulate Andy like a puppet, sewing his clothes, dictating his comings and goings, and locking him indoors at the first sign of dark or chill. She ruled the Griffith home.

“This'll tell you as much about my mother as you need to know,” Andy once told an interviewer. Andy and his parents were sitting in a restaurant with the principals of
The Andy Griffith Show
. A waiter spilled something on Geneva's suit. “Oh, she just went crazy,” Andy recalled. “Finally she said, ‘Carl, why couldn't you have been setting here?' That's my mother.”

Geneva Nunn Griffith came from Patrick County, Virginia, twenty miles east of Mount Airy in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a place sparsely populated to this day. To the Griffith home she brought a tradition of spirited mountain jam sessions. “They used to have what they call play parties, dances,” Andy recalled. “The Nunns, they all played, fiddle or something.”

Andy was veritably surrounded by music. A steady pulse of country-western hits blared from the family's Majestic radio. Sunday mornings were filled with hand-clapping, head-swaying gospel at Haymore Baptist Church, where Andy would take careful note of the fire-and-brimstone sermons. The Griffiths spent many summer evenings swept up in the sweaty delirium of tent revivals, led by a procession of self-styled Elmer Gantrys.

Andy wanted to make music of his own. “I looked at the Spiegel catalog, day after day,” he recalled. “And they had two pages of musical instruments, and I was just staring at those instruments every day, every day, every day.”

When Geneva had errands to run, she would send Andy down to Main Street with a few coins in his pocket for an afternoon's entertainment. In winter 1941, Andy saw a film called
Birth of the Blues—
a misnomer, as the picture actually chronicles the advent of jazz. Andy was smitten with the stylings of Weldon Leo “Jack” Teagarden, the Big T, a man sometimes cited as father of the jazz trombone. “He took the bell off that trombone and played with a glass on the end of the slide,” Andy recalled. Years later, Andy would invite Big T to play a town councilman in an episode of
The Andy Griffith Show
.

Andy took a job sweeping out Mount Airy High School. Though he was only fifteen, he lied and said he was sixteen, the minimum age for employment under Franklin Roosevelt's National Youth Administration. He began putting down six dollars a month toward a thirty-three-dollar trombone. Five and a half months later, the horn was his.

He didn't know quite what to do with it. Mount Airy High School had no band. A foreman at Carl Griffith's furniture factory told Carl to look up Ed Mickey, the minister at the local Moravian church. The Moravians, one of the oldest and smallest Protestant denominations, were known for their brass bands.

One afternoon, Andy pedaled his bicycle to Grace Moravian Church on North Main Street and found Edward T. Mickey Jr., the young pastor, sitting on the steps.

Mickey looked up. “Sitting astride his bicycle was a rawboned boy of sixteen with curly, blond hair,” he recalled.

“You the teacher here?” Andy asked.

Yes, the pastor replied.

“You teach horn?”

Yes, Mickey replied guardedly.

“You teach me? I'll pay you.”

“I can't take pay for this.” Why, Mickey asked, did Andy want to play a horn?

“So I can lead a swing band.”

The disdainful pastor could not dissuade the eager boy. “Well, come again next Wednesday and bring your horn. We'll see what we can do.”