Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (6 page)

Mickey was betting the boy wouldn't lug a trombone two miles across Mount Airy on his bicycle. But there he was the next Wednesday, with his bicycle, his trombone, and “enthusiasm for life in quantity enough for half a dozen boys,” Mickey recalled.

The pastor sent Andy home with a lesson. Andy brought it back the next week and played it perfectly. So it went, week after week. Finally, Mickey asked Andy where he found time for so much practice. Andy said he was getting up at five in the morning.

Playing and singing with the Moravians, Andy said, “was the turning point in my life. Because, you see, we didn't have money. I was not athletic and I wasn't a good student, so I was kind of nobody. So when I started all this music business . . . I became a little somebody then.”

The Griffiths joined the Moravian church. When Andy sang or played his horn, his insecurities dissolved. Mount Airy audiences began to glimpse a jubilant, wild-eyed, larger-than-life Andy Griffith.

North and south Mount Airy, rich and poor, converged on Mount Airy High. Andy arrived there as an anonymous member of the class of 1944. In Andy's sophomore year, a teacher selected him to take the lead in a school production called
Major Nose
, another homage to the ubiquitous radio talent show
Major Bowes
. Andy played Major Nose.

It was a breakthrough, and Andy credited his English teacher, Miss Haymore. She “was the kind they used to make movies about,” he recalled. “She encouraged me to go all out for music, if that was what I wanted. She got me to understand that I was really doing something pleasurable, not only for other people but for myself.”

At Mount Airy High, Andy found his first love: Angie Marshall, captain of the girls' basketball team. For three years, they were an item on campus. “All the younger students loved to watch as he turned on the school water fountain for her,” recalled Eleanor Powell, a classmate.

Otherwise, Andy remained largely invisible at Mount Airy High, and not entirely by choice. He held a string of after-school jobs to help support his family. “In the afternoon, when I was going to football practice, Andy was bagging groceries in the Piggly Wiggly,” recalled classmate Robert Merritt.

At the very end of his high school career, Andy finally made an impression. For the senior class banquet, the school tapped local talent; the war effort precluded hiring out-of-towners. “So we lined up people to read a poem or play a piano,” Robert Merritt recalled. One of them was Andy Griffith, who came to the stage and sang “Long Ago and Far Away,” a popular tune in its day.

“And what I remember,” Robert recalled, “was a voice at the back of the room: ‘Golly, old Ange can sing!' We didn't know.”

The next fall, Andy Griffith entered the University of North Carolina. He was the first in his family to attend college. He planned to enter the ministry.

Andy and his family had been deeply involved in church for years, first with the Baptists and then the Moravians. The Baptist preacher would sometimes point to Andy and tell a church visitor, only partly in jest, “This is our new minister.” But according to boyhood friend Garnett Steele, Andy's heart was never really in it; he looked to seminary study partly as a way to evade military service.

“He stood on my front porch,” Garnett recalled. “My brother had just come back from Guadalcanal and Espiritu Santo in World War Two, and that was in 1944. And he said, ‘Andy, when are you going into the service?' ” Andy coolly replied, “I'm not going into the service.” He never elaborated. By 1944, the army required all men of eighteen to register for the draft. Many of Andy's friends, including Emmett Forrest and Robert Merritt, eventually served. Ministerial study would provide Andy an exemption.

Andy turned eighteen just before he enrolled in college. He dutifully registered for selective service and underwent the customary medical evaluation. According to Garnett, the tests turned up a herniated disk in Andy's lower back, an undetected injury from age thirteen, when clumsy Andy had fallen from a tire swing in Emmett Forrest's yard.

Suddenly, Andy found himself free from military service—and from the need to become a minister.

Andy's own accounts of the era make no mention of military service or avoidance thereof. He said he switched college majors following a simple change of heart. “My major was sociology, and I hated it,” he recalled. “And I was living right by the music department.” He said he joined various university bands and glee clubs and choral societies “and everything else I could get in.” Finally, he approached the Moravian bishop and asked, “Can I major in music and still be a minister?” The bishop said no. “So I went back and thought about it and prayed about it for two weeks. And then I went back and said, ‘I'm going to major in music.' ” The bishop replied, “You'll never serve God by singing light opera.”

Andy's failure to serve would haunt him for the rest of his days. It was one of those topics that, decades later, Don knew not to raise. Some Mount Airy veterans wouldn't speak to him. “Some people thought he was a draft dodger,” Robert Merritt recalled. “It was a righteous, patriotic time.”

Andy dove into university life with the same jubilant energy he had brought to the Moravian church. But Andy soon found himself crippled by feelings of inadequacy, a new manifestation of the old fears that had dogged him in grammar school. Back in Mount Airy, Andy had felt second-class. Now, he felt like a fraud.

“I had a wonderful time—and a horrible time—in Chapel Hill,” Andy recalled. “I went through every day hoping, just hoping, they wouldn't find out how little I knew, but sometimes they did. I failed Political Science Forty-One twice. . . . I guess that was the only record I ever broke at Chapel Hill.”

One night, as he passed Memorial Hall, Andy glimpsed a poster advertising auditions for a production of
The Gondoliers
. “I didn't even know who Gilbert and Sullivan were,” Andy recalled. “Anyway, I decided to go over there, and I sang a terrible old song, called ‘Shepherd, See Thy Horse's Flowing Mane.' ” The next day, Andy found he had won a part. From then on, he recalled, “They did a Gilbert and Sullivan almost every year, and I played the comedy lead in all of them.”

When he was onstage, Andy's fears would evaporate. He knew he could act. Others knew it, too. Foster Fitz-Simons, the Carolina dramatist who directed Andy's university debut, was perhaps the first to recognize the young actor's sway over an audience. Foster invited his wife, actress Marion Fitz-Simons, to a rehearsal. As they watched Andy, Foster told her, “He's got something. I don't know what it is, but he's got something.”

Foster Fitz-Simons led the Carolina Playmakers, the university's resident repertory company. The director taught Andy and the other players to “tell what you know; write what you know.” He encouraged them to craft folk dramas about “universal truths heard in the kitchen,” recalled William Ivey Long, a Broadway costume designer who grew up as a family friend to the Griffiths. It was in Fitz-Simons's acting classes, William says, that Andy developed a theatrical persona based upon himself, “the ultimate aw-shucks farm boy.”

Andy took a job busing tables on campus for “breakfast and eight dollars a week: five dollars for tuition and three dollars to live on, more or less,” Andy recalled after his success. “I was a lot thinner in those days than I am now.” A voice teacher offered Andy free lessons if he would maintain the sheet music for the glee club. Andy became its president. He appeared in that capacity in a photograph for the university yearbook of 1947, wearing a pompadour and looking a bit like an irritable rockabilly singer.

Andy caught a bigger break when he learned that the old back injury—for which he briefly wore a back brace—qualified him for a program that supported indigent students with disabilities. It paid his tuition. Andy became a dorm manager, a job that covered his rooming costs. He collected laundry for another two dollars a week.

Though Andy's life now centered on Chapel Hill, he returned home on occasion to perform with the Mount Airy Operetta Club, the sort of earnest small-town ensemble Andy would lovingly mock later in
The Andy
Griffith Show.
Locals remember the afternoon of November 11, 1946, when the company lulled hundreds of Mount Airy schoolchildren to sleep with a matinee performance of
The Bartered Bride
. Suddenly, the male lead unleashed a piercing yodel; the vibrations triggered a massive spring-coiled window shade, which flapped up to the ceiling like a startled flock of birds. The children exploded in laughter. Andy, already a shrewd judge of his audience, followed their lead, reviving the moribund performance with slapstick and ad-libbed high jinks. In his final scene, Andy leaped onto the back of another actor and rode him piggyback off the stage. The children laughed and clapped. Andy waved back. It would be his last public appearance in Mount Airy for more than a decade.

In fall 1947, Andy prepared to audition for a production of Haydn's
Seasons
by the Chapel Hill Choral Club. A classmate asked him, “Have you heard Bobby Edwards sing? Now, there's a voice!”

Andy considered, then answered, “I don't know him.”

“You
really
don't know Bobby Edwards.” Bobby was short for Barbara.

Barbara Bray Edwards came from the Carolina town of Troy. Her father was the superintendent of schools; her mother, Dixie, was a doctor's daughter. “They were a genteel southern-eastern North Carolina family,” recalled Robert Edwards King, Barbara's nephew. They were prominent in their town, and Barbara, artistic and pretty, left Troy with abundant promise.

Barbara brought her crystalline soprano to Chapel Hill after completing her degree at Converse College in South Carolina. She wanted to begin graduate work and to explore the fertile arts scene.

“Barbara Edwards was a sweetheart,” recalled Carl Perry, a classmate who befriended the young couple and acted with them in a campus production of
The Mikado.
“Her voice was clear as a bell.”

One day, a friend pointed Bobby out to Andy. He glimpsed her only from behind: a receding form clad in a matching sweater and skirt, topped with a sweep of rich brown hair tamed into a long bob. A few days later, he saw her almond eyes and her sculpted cheekbones. And he heard her sing.

“They were doing the Haydn
Seasons
and they needed a soprano,” Barbara recalled. “So I went in all full of spirit. And Andy was standing behind a baby-grand piano, and I shook hands with Andy, and I don't know, something just happened. So then I sang my little audition. And it just so happened that Andy had waited out in the foyer. I had to say something. So I asked him for a match.”

He asked her to coffee. Three days later, he asked her to marry him.

In summer 1946, Andy had considered auditioning for
The Lost Colony
, the long-running outdoor drama that reenacts the founding and mysterious disappearance of the first English settlement in North America. Set on the Carolina shore, the production offered a chance for Andy to continue his dramatic studies through the summer. But he decided against it. “They paid only twenty-five dollars, and I figured I couldn't do that and stay in school,” Andy recalled. So, Andy reluctantly returned to Mount Airy and worked in the furniture factory with his father, earning forty dollars a week. This was one of Andy's few encounters with genuine toil, and he hated every minute of it.

The next summer, Andy and Barbara drove to Manteo to join
The Lost Colony
. Andy had never seen the ocean. He was spellbound. In time, Andy would forsake Mount Airy and make Manteo his home.

The actors lived in repurposed naval buildings left over from the war. They rode to the theater on an old school bus. “We had our own swimming hole, our own volleyball, our own eating place, our own beer joint, everything,” Andy recalled.

Andy and Barbara were cast into small roles at first. “My dad started out playing a red soldier for the queen,” Dixie Griffith recalled. Andy wore tights. When he overheard two women discussing his spindly legs, he took to padding them with newspaper or cotton wadding. By 1949, Andy was playing Sir Walter Raleigh and Barbara was playing Eleanor Dare, mother of the first child born in North America to English parents. Andy and Barbara began to appear together on
Lost Colony
postcards and program covers.

Barbara remained, to this point, the star of the Griffith family. Andy later conceded he wouldn't have won a lead role without his wife, who persuaded
The
Lost Colony
director to promote him. But Andy, too, had found his calling. Back on campus, he missed classes and ignored homework whenever he was in a production; in Andy's mind, his career had already begun.

As a theatrical performer, Andy excelled in light opera and outdoor theater. But he sensed his strongest talents lay elsewhere. Most of his fellow thespians made do with established acts. Andy began to create his own, experimenting with song and storytelling, weaving humorous stories among the songs and sometimes even between verses. It was part pop act, part comedy sketch, all suffused with Andy's skill for parodying his own hayseed heritage.

Robert Hurley, a fellow actor and singer at Chapel Hill, hadn't regarded Andy as particularly ambitious until the night Andy appeared at his dorm room to announce he had started “a little nightclub act” in the basement of the student center, where boys brought dates on Saturday nights. Andy was acting as master of ceremonies and looking for talent. He wondered whether Robert and a few others from the glee club might come by and sing. Andy had heard, and occasionally joined, the five friends when their voices rose in tight harmony on the bus to glee club concerts. At the Saturday-night performances, Andy “would play popular songs, and he would tell stories between them,” Robert recalled. “I guess that was about his first gig.”