Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (7 page)

After “five years and two summers,” as he put it, Andy finally finished college. It was spring of 1949. Andy and Barbara set their wedding for August 22, closing a nearly two-year courtship. It was a Monday, Andy's day off from
The Lost Colony
. The couple traveled to Norfolk and chose a rust silk afternoon frock for Barbara and a navy suit for Andy. The ceremony was held at Fort Raleigh, the national park, in a log-cabin chapel.

“I remember helping pick the flowers and helping decorate the church,” said William Ivey Long, whose parents were close to Andy and Barbara. “I remember my father making punch and little sandwiches.” There was talk that Barbara's folks were “fancy,” William recalled, and “everyone wanted it to look as elegant a wedding as possible.”

Andy was Moravian; Barbara was Baptist. They were married by a Methodist minister in a facsimile of an Anglican church. Someone played “Ave Maria” on a vibraharp. No one still living seems to recall how this denominational smorgasbord came about, but it suited eclectic Andy, who started life a Baptist, converted to Moravianism, and would later embrace the Methodist faith.

Andy and Barbara Griffith settled into a rented house outside Chapel Hill. “They lived way out in the country,” recalled William Ivey Long. “They didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing. They had a well. Everyone was poor. We shared food.”

On Saturday mornings, Barbara would travel to William's house, where she and Mary Long, William's mother, would give each other Toni home-permanent hair treatments. William's father would prepare a vat of vegetable soup and pour it into quart jars to feed both families for the week. William would sometimes deliver the soup to the Griffith mailbox. One time, in what can only be termed an Opie moment, William opened the box to find a bird's nest inside. Andy had put it there to “shake me up,” William recalled.

Andy had no permanent job awaiting him as an entertainer, so he took a teacher training course and signed a contract in fall 1949 to teach music at the high school in Goldsboro, in eastern North Carolina. Clifton Britton, stage manager at
The Lost Colony
, ran the drama department there and was trying to build it into a regional powerhouse against long odds.

“They only had six hundred students,” Andy recalled. “He had three hundred of them in his drama department. He won every prize there was. He hired me to come up there as his assistant, teaching drama. The reason I was there was to build up the choral music department so he could put on musical plays. . . . He did every major production that the university would do. He would use students; he would use townspeople.”

The job put Andy and Barbara an hour's drive from Raleigh, epicenter of the North Carolina theater scene.

At Goldsboro High, Andy revealed a talent for recruiting students into music study, and soon he had a full roster. But Andy wasn't much of a teacher. “I don't know how to just sit down and talk about one thing,” Andy recalled. His cigarette craving would build till the end of class, when Andy would race his students out the door.

In summer, Andy and Barbara returned to Manteo and rejoined the pursuit of their passion. By 1951, they were stars of
The Lost Colony
, the most glamorous couple among its lead actors. Andy and Barbara struck up enduring friendships. “Every night after the show, we'd be partying,” recalled George Vassos, a lifelong friend of Andy's. “As soon as it would end, we'd head out for the beer parlor. We'd go out there and drink and dance.”

Andy formed a particularly close bond with a
Lost Colony
player named Ainslie Pryor. Ainslie managed the Raleigh Little Theatre, a community playhouse at the center of the Raleigh dramatic scene. He was another director, like Foster Fitz-Simons at the university, who thought Andy had something special.

In February 1952, a publicity man heard the Griffiths sing and invited them to audition at the Paper Mill Playhouse, a regional theater in northern New Jersey with an outsize reputation owing to its locale, a short train ride from Broadway. The Griffiths had never been that far north, but they made the trip, feeling very much like country mice.

At the audition, Andy and Barbara lined up with more than two hundred others. Barbara sang “In the Still of the Night,” and Andy sang “Dancing in the Dark.” They did not get the parts. An auditioner told Andy his voice was “overbrilliant, almost painfully so.” Andy could have shrugged off the advice; the auditions were a long shot in the first place. But Andy decided, then and there, to halt his singing career. He would make a living being funny. “Singing had always frightened me, anyway,” he recalled.

Ainslie Pryor and his wife came up to meet the Griffiths, offering succor and a gin-soaked tour of New York. On the train ride home, Ainslie told Andy of a show he was preparing to stage, called
The Drunkard
. It was a melodrama, and Ainslie needed oleo acts, brief skits to distract the audience while the scenery was changed. Andy had some ideas.

Off
The
Lost Colony
stage, Andy continued his experiments with skit-based comedy and vaudeville. When
The
Lost Colony
curtain fell on Saturday nights, the colonial actors would decamp to the local Shriners club to stage a weekly program of song, dance, and laughs, with Andy as master of ceremonies. The audience was a rowdy mix of
Lost Colony
cast and crew and local townsfolk.

George Vassos would sing the standards “Early Autumn” and “Stormy Weather” with three other men drawn from a local church choir. Barbara would sing folk songs and Andy would accompany her on guitar. Andy would stage his monologues. But the centerpiece of the show was Andy's preacher act. Written with Ainslie, Andy's sometime collaborator, the sketch began with a processional and a string of off-color announcements: “The deacons wish that whoever keeps writing ‘Meet me in the basement' on the back of the hymn books would cut it out, because everybody that goes down there tracks mud all over the church.”
Then, Andy would launch into a backwoods sermon, telling the singsong story of the Preacher and the Bear:

O Lord, didn't you deliver Daniel from the lion's den

Also deliver Jonah from the belly of the whale and then

The Hebrew children from the fiery furnace, the good book do declare

O Lord, if you can't help me, for goodness' sake don't help that bear!

Gradually, Andy's ambitions for the late-night vaudeville act would eclipse his interest in
The Lost Colony
.

It occurred to Andy one night to build a skit around the most famous lines from
Hamlet
. But he wasn't sure quite how to do it; “just doing it with a Southern accent didn't seem funny,” he recalled. Besides, Andy had never read
Hamlet
. He called Bob Armstrong, his university buddy and
Lost Colony
costar. Bob came over and walked Andy through the play. Andy wrote down the names of the characters and committed the story to memory. He crafted a monologue, performed it the next Saturday, and drew huge laughs. “The idea was that I was selling these books, five great tragedies by this fella named William Shakespeare who lived over in the old country,” Andy recalled.

Andy didn't write down his skits, but a version of the
Hamlet
sketch survives on record:

And it's a pretty good show. And the moral of it is, though, I reckon, if you was to ever kill a fellah and then marry his wife, I'd be extra careful not to tell my stepson.

Andy had learned to poke fun at his own intellectual limitations, to laugh at his rough edges and his hick heritage—in short, to mock the very qualities that fed his deepest insecurities. He soon learned that those foibles were not his alone. The Shriner audience howled.

“He talked just like we did,” recalled Robert Edwards King, nephew of Barbara Griffith. “That's the way we are. We laugh about that stuff.”

In spring 1952, Andy gave his notice at Goldsboro High School, over the objections of the principal, who told him, “You're never gonna make any money running around the country.” The Griffiths moved back to Chapel Hill, rented a house for eighty-five dollars a month, and began to channel their ambitions into a traveling variety show.

Andy's first impulse was to head straight for Miami and the regional nightclub scene there. Barbara proposed a more practical alternative: They would play the local Rotary Club circuit, driving around the state and performing at any civic function that would have them. If they were good, someone would eventually invite them to New York.

Andy cashed out his $300 in accumulated teacher retirement pay, borrowed $1,000 more, bought a used station wagon, and printed up flyers. He and Barbara lived, for a time, not much better than starving artists. Their parents—Barbara's, in particular—fretted for their future. Andy was giving up a comfortable teaching career. “I really think our families thought we were slightly crazy,” Barbara recalled. But Andy was determined, and no one in the family tried to stop him.

“Unique entertainment for your group with Andy and Barbara Griffith,” the couple promised in a trifold brochure. “No occasion too small, no job too big. Andy and Barbara Griffith offer one of the most unusual and entertaining programs to be found today. Their act is as versatile as it is warm and appealing to every type of audience.”

Andy recalled, “She'd sing. I'd do the comedy. We'd hire a piano player for fifteen dollars. We had our own lighting system. I never used a microphone; never had one.”

Andy and Barbara collected listings of every convention or chicken dinner planned in North Carolina for the next six months. “We figured that at least one out of every hundred would have need of entertainment,” he recalled. They sent out their brochures. Offers began to trickle in.

Mike King, Barbara's nephew, went with his family to see his aunt and uncle in an early gig, at Fred Koury's Plantation Supper Club in Greensboro. “They were like a duo,” he recalled. “They would play off of each other. One would be the straight guy. . . . They were basically a team, back then.”

Around this time, J. B. Childress received a letter from his boyhood friend. Andy had read in the paper that J.B. was the new president of the local Kiwanis Club in Waynesville. “I'm trying to gain some experience in show business,” Andy wrote. “I'd like to come to Waynesville and put on a show for you and raise funds.” He offered to divide the proceeds evenly with the service club. The Kiwanis board asked J.B. about Andy. J.B. told them, “Well, nobody knows him. He couldn't draw any more people than I could, and I couldn't draw half a dozen.” J.B. politely declined.

Andy would not soon forget the slight. A few years later, when Andy was famous, J.B. sent him a letter. J.B. now belonged to the Chamber of Commerce in Charlotte, and the group was looking for a big name to headline a banquet. The organizers wanted Andy. But Andy never replied. A decade after that, Andy invited J.B. and his wife to a performance. That night, J.B. asked Andy, “Why didn't you answer my letter?” Andy smiled and replied, “J.B., why didn't you let me come to Waynesville when I needed some experience?” For the next five decades, Andy would reward loyalty in his friends and hold long and bitter grudges toward those who let him down.

Some months into their new venture, Andy and Barbara found they had a show booked for a group they'd entertained previously. “And I didn't have but one show,” Andy recalled. On the way to the gig, Andy assembled a monologue from his memories of playing sousaphone in the marching band at football games in Chapel Hill. “I don't know where it come from, nor why, but that notion came to me in the car on the way to the second job,” he recalled. The skit described a “country fella” stumbling upon a game of college football:

“And I looked down thar, and I seen five or six convicts a-runnin' up and down and a-blowin' whistles. . . . And I seen thirty-five or forty men come a-runnin' out one end of a great big outhouse down there. . . . And, friends, I seen that evenin' the awfulest fight that I have ever seen in my life!”

The observer concludes that the point of the game is for the men to run a “pumpkin” from one end of a cow pasture to the other without being knocked down or “steppin' in something.” The last bit was a nod to Andy's own scrimmages, long ago, in Mrs. Allred's cow pasture.

Or was it? Barbara once told an interviewer Andy's most famous sketch merely retold a football story Andy had heard from another man, a tale “so blue Andy wouldn't tell it to me.” She said Andy simply rewrote it, leaving out the dirty parts.

Andy and Barbara had pledged, early in their marriage, that if either found fame, the other would step back into a supporting role. By spring of 1953, the Griffiths were beginning to draw attention, and most of it was going to Andy.

One May weekend, the Raleigh Little Theatre presented a production of
Ten Nights in a Barroom
. A reviewer in the
Raleigh Times
dismissed it as “two hours of archaic dialogue, missed cues, mysterious hands, dangling sandbags,” and such. The writer said the production was salvaged only by Andy Griffith, who came on between acts to perform his new football sketch and another Shakespeare send-up, this one inspired by
Romeo and Juliet
. Andy “could have held the stage all night,” the critic wrote, “and no one would have minded.”

Andy performed his football sketch that summer at a dinner gathering. A man came running up afterward and introduced himself as Orville Campbell. He told Andy, “We've got to make a record of this!” Andy replied, “Well, Mr. Campbell, if you've got the money, I've got the time.”

Orville began to bring a microphone and a tape recorder to Andy's shows. Five times, he tried to record the sketch. Each time, Andy froze because he wasn't accustomed to the microphone. Orville finally captured a good performance that September in Greensboro, at a convention of the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance company.