Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (9 page)

He landed a few small parts on television dramas, such as a 1953 spot on
Robert Montgomery Presents
, but he could make no headway in comedies. He telephoned
The Jackie Gleason Show
. “I'd love to do your show,” he told the gruff man on the line. “I'm a comedian.” After a lengthy silence, the voice shot back, “We got a comedian.”

But Don's talent and his winsome personality were about to pay another dividend. Charles Irving, who portrayed ranch foreman Tex Mason on the B-Bar-B,
was navigating his own migration to television. In 1953, Irving helped Don land a part on one of the new television soaps,
Search for Tomorrow
. Don later termed it the only serious dramatic role of his television career. He played a neurotic janitor named Wilbur, who spoke to no one but his sister, Rose, portrayed by a young Lee Grant.

“He played a nebbish,” Lee recalled. “And he looked like a nebbish. And he was sweet. And he didn't have a chance to be funny, because he was supposed to be dying or something. . . . It was so silly. And we were silly together, because neither of us knew what we were doing.”

Daily rehearsals began at 8:00 a.m. The show aired at 12:45 and ended at 1:00, a fifteen-minute broadcast modeled on the format of radio. The schedule left Don time to race over to the Mutual Broadcasting studio for the afternoon broadcast of
Bobby Benson
. One role called for Don to act chiefly with his expressive face, in the manner of a silent film. The other exploited only his emotive voice. Don seemed equally skilled at both.

Wilbur was scripted to appear in only two or three episodes of the soap. But Don played the part so well that Wilbur returned to the program sporadically for two years. Once again, he couldn't believe his good fortune.

“He didn't have to speak,” recalled Kay, Don's wife. “And so he didn't have to learn any lines. He loved it.”

To this growing repertoire of characters, Don now added a new persona, one that would define his career. The Nervous Man came to Don in a dream; he awoke just as it ended and jotted down some notes. In the dream, a speaker delivers a speech at a civic-club dinner on ladies' night. He feels out of place. He is shaking with fear, and he stammers, stumbles, and apologizes as he speaks. The dream combined two memories.

“Several months earlier, I had attended a luncheon during which one of the speakers was so nervous, his hands were shaking visibly,” Don recalled. “He rattled the paper his notes were written on, and when he attempted a drink of water, he proceeded to spill it all over himself. It was a painful thing to watch, but at the same time, amusing.”

The second memory concerned Robert Benchley, a comedic actor whose celebrated short film “The Treasurer's Report” had apparently found its way to Morgantown. Benchley's public speaker sits in palpable agony, a dozen pained expressions playing across his face as he strangles his cloth napkin and twiddles his thumbs. Then he speaks: “I am reminded of a story that probably all of you have heard. It seems there were these two Irishmen walking down the street. And they came to a, um, I should have said in the first place that the, uh, store belonging to the Irishman, the first Irishman, the first fellow's store . . .”

Don's sketch combined the fluster and unease of Benchley with the palpable terror of the fretful luncheon speaker. Don's character coughs and sputters and clears his throat. His speech, when it comes, veers from one faux pas to the next: “[Y]ou ladies would probably complain less if we stopped kidding you so much, calling you nicknames. For instance, Tom there, our president—hi, Tom—is always calling his wife, Claudia—hi, Claude—is always calling her the Old Woman. I happen to know that Claude is only forty-two. Well, that is, what I meant is, she's not nearly as old as she looks. . . .”

The darting saucer eyes, the pursed lips, the shuddering hands, the knotted brow, the quaking, overcaffeinated voice: Don's comedic persona took wing in that scribbled sketch.

Don was ecstatic. To that point in his career, he felt that his every performance had been derivative. Here, finally, was a character pulled from Don's own mind.

Don set up an audition at the Blue Angel, a nightclub on East Fifty-Fifth Street with quilted walls. The owner watched the routine in silence, sitting alone in the middle of the long, narrow room. When it was over, Don recalled, the owner pronounced it “the most boring thing he'd ever seen.” Don went home, crestfallen, and tucked the routine back into his subconscious, presumably for good.

Between
Bobby Benson
and
Search for Tomorrow
, Don's schedule was growing increasingly hectic. His soap-opera talents kept Wilbur alive far longer than Don had expected. (Lee Grant was not so lucky: Sponsors fired her over alleged communist sympathies. Two other actresses stepped in to play Wilbur's sister.) Meanwhile, Don's radio voicings on
Bobby Benson
proved so popular that the producers created a spin-off program called
Songs of the B-Bar-B
, which eventually expanded from five minutes to a full half hour. By 1955, the spin-off had moved to television, and Don found himself in a scramble.

“My day went something like this,” Don recalled. “I would arrive at the studio for
Search for Tomorrow
at eight a.m., off the air at one, then lunch, then off to rehearse for
Bobby Benson
. Then grab a cab to the television station, where Jim McMenemy”—
Songs of the B-Bar-B
's writer-director—“would read me the tall tale I was to tell while I was changing into my cowboy costume. I would more or less memorize it as he told it. Off the air at eight p.m., then dinner, then take the subway home to learn the lines for the next day's
Search for Tomorrow
.”

Don and Kay's first child, Karen, had arrived in April 1954. In 1955, to lighten his load, Don quit the television version of
Bobby Benson
, leaving him the radio show and the soap opera. Not long after,
Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders
was canceled, a casualty of the waning radio era. Around the same time, Wilbur was eased out of
Search for Tomorrow
. And, just like that, Don was unemployed.

Joblessness bred desperation. “The nest egg was dwindling rapidly,” Don recalled, “and there wasn't a job in sight. My spirits were sagging, and with the responsibility of a family now, I was, for the first time, beginning to feel I would have to throw in the towel.”

Between visits to casting agencies, Don would rest his feet at Cromwell's Drugstore, nestled inside the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, a notorious actor hangout. Don's stoolmates included Tony Randall, later of television's
Odd Couple
, and Jonathan Winters, then a young, wild warm-up comic. Another of Don's cronies was Frank Behrens, a struggling television actor. One day, Don was pondering his fate over coffee at Cromwell's when Frank happened by and asked, “Have you looked into that
No Time for Sergeants
thing?”

Don replied, “What the hell's a
No Time for Sergeants
thing?”

“You haven't read about it? It's a new play. Maurice Evans is going to produce it on Broadway. They're looking for Southern types. It ought to be right down your alley. Here.” Frank pointed to an article about the new production in a trade paper. “I think this is the last day they're seeing people.”

Don scanned the article. “You're right!” he cried. “They stop seeing people at five p.m. today, and Maurice Evan's office is clear down in Greenwich Village.”

Don looked at his watch. It was four thirty. He leaped from his chair, dashed out of the restaurant, and ducked into a subway station.

Don arrived at the office of Maurice Evans at five o'clock. His production was adapting a bestselling book by Mac Hyman, a Georgian who had crafted a novel from his experiences as a Southerner in the military. Evans was not a Southerner but a British-born thespian who had brought the first full-length
Hamlet
to the modern American stage—although contemporary readers will more likely remember him as Dr. Zaius in the postapocalyptic film
Planet of the Apes
.

Don ran to the desk. “I'm sorry,” said the man behind it, “but I'm afraid you're a little too late. Mr. Rogers isn't seeing any more people.” Emmett Rogers was Maurice Evans's companion and the play's associate producer.

“Please?” Don begged.

The man rose and entered the casting room. He returned with a forlorn look. “I'm sorry.”

Don was near tears, his face a mask of raw sorrow. He turned and slumped toward the stairs.

He was about to take his first step down when the receptionist called him back. “You looked so sad, I went back and pleaded.”

Once again, Don's puppy-dog charm had elicited an outpouring of human compassion, this time from a total stranger.

Don was ushered into the casting room. Emmett Rogers “greeted me abruptly,” Don recalled, “and I had the feeling he was going to give me the bum's rush, so I started spitting out my credits as fast as I could, being careful to drawl as much as possible.”

It worked. “All right,” Rogers said finally, “we're reading people Monday morning at the Alvin Theatre.”

Don read
No Time for Sergeants
over the weekend. The narrator was one Will Stockdale, a backwoods Georgian, whose isolated family and country values represent a sort of last stand for rural America against assimilation into the wartime machinery of a mechanized society. The book plants this simple, guileless individual within the jaded bureaucracy of the military. The military tries to break him; instead, he breaks it. Don took particular interest in the part of Ben Whitledge, a smaller, smarter sidekick to Will. It seemed a natural fit.

At 10:00 a.m. on Monday, Don arrived at the Alvin Theatre at Fifty-Second and Broadway. “I could hear my heart pounding in my ears,” he recalled. “I was determined and yet, at the same time, frightened beyond description.” Finally, Don was called to the stage and asked to read Ben Whitledge, the very part he had prepared. When he had finished, Emmett Rogers came running down the aisle. “He seemed all excited,” Don recalled. “I could tell he loved my reading.” His excitement ebbed, though, when Maurice Evans joined Rogers in the footlights.

“That was veddy good, Mr. Knotts,” Evans said, “but I'm afraid you might be just a little too tall. Ben Whitledge should be quite short.”

Awaiting a second reading, Don fretted about the “too tall” remark. He was only five eight and a half. How could he make himself shorter? In desperation, he tore the heels from his one good pair of shoes, shortening himself by an inch. Don returned to the theater and struggled to stand upright on the crippled shoes. The effort was wasted: Maurice Evans still thought Don was too tall. The producers told him he'd hear from them in a week or so.

That week seemed the longest in Don's life. “I was learning that a big part of an actor's life is waiting for the phone to ring,” he recalled. Finally, the producers called. Don had two small roles in the play. The work paid union scale, eighty-five dollars a week. Still, it was a Broadway show, and Don sensed it might be a turning point.

Maurice Evans had awarded the sidekick part of Ben Whitledge to Roddy McDowall, his fellow countryman and, a decade later, fellow ape. Roddy was actually a hair taller than Don; but, unlike Don, Roddy had made a movie with Elizabeth Taylor.

One chilly September morning, Don returned to the stage of the Alvin Theatre to read through
No Time for Sergeants
, still bitter
.

“My name is Maurice Evans,” the producer said. “You may call me Mr. E. I will work you very hard and pay you very little.” He paused for polite laughter. “Let me introduce our star, Mr. Andy Griffith.”

In the final days of 1953, Andy and Barbara Griffith left North Carolina and took a suite at the Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan. Just a few months earlier, Andy wouldn't have dreamed of moving to New York. All that changed when he met Dick Linke.

Richard O. Linke was born in Summit, New Jersey, a leafy New York suburb, the son of German immigrants. He studied journalism at Ohio University and went to work for the Associated Press at Rockefeller Center. Then he left to join a PR firm run by a former newsman, where he did press for Perry Como on
The Chesterfield Supper Club
radio show. He eventually moved into record promotion, working for the Capitol and Columbia labels and briefly running his own firm, where he handled Doris Day. In 1953, Dick was head of promotion at Capitol.

One day that fall, Dick was sitting in his New York apartment, eating breakfast at noon; it had been a late night. The radio DJ was showcasing other stations around the country. That day, the signal was coming from North Carolina, and the recording caught Dick's ear.

“. . . It was that both bunches full of them men wanted this funny-lookin' little punkin to play with. . . .”

Orville Campbell had pressed an initial five hundred copies of “What It Was, Was Football” and dispatched them to radio stations around the state. The record became a regional hit. It caught the attention of Capitol's man in North Carolina. He alerted Hal Cook, national sales manager at Capitol.

Hal was Dick's boss. Now, in different ways, each man had heard of Andy Griffith. In December, Dick and Hal flew down to Chapel Hill to meet with Andy and Orville Campbell, carrying a Capitol Records contract. When Dick walked into the meeting, Andy whispered to Orville, “His teeth are too close together.” To Andy, the slick New Yorker might as well have been Jimmy Cagney.

“And we went over every word of the contract,” Dick recalled. “They were always worried about Northerners: Were we going to take them?”

By the meeting's end, Dick had purchased “What It Was, Was Football” for $10,000, splitting the sum between Andy and Orville. Andy was now a Capitol recording artist at $300 a week. Dick also signed on as Andy's manager, though he remained a Capitol Records employee for the time. Dick and Hal felt they could trust no one else to manage Andy, the guileless country boy. During the meeting, Hal telephoned his superiors at the home office and boasted, “I have found a real Li'l Abner.” Andy swallowed his bile.