Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (22 page)

“We talked about it,” Kay Knotts recalled. “Every Thursday, we had a date.”

But by this time, Don was firmly ensconced with Lynn Paul, and it was she who accompanied him on his publicity tour for
Mr. Chicken
. During that trip, Don learned from a news account that Kay had filed for divorce. She agreed to a $338,400 settlement, finalized in March, and decamped with Tom and Karen to the Brentwood home. Don moved into the Sunset Marquis, a haven for actors in West Hollywood. He got the kids on the weekends.

“He would take us out on Saturday to the movies,” son Tom recalled. “We would play charades; he was really good at charades.” For Sunday dinner, Don would take the kids to Ships Coffee Shop in Westwood; Don hated the place, Tom recalled, but the children loved it.

Don would take the children to Toluca Lake periodically to visit Andy, whose children were close in age to Don's own. “They would sit there as grown-ups, talking, while we were swimming,” Tom Knotts recalled. “And they talked a lot on the phone. And he'd call him Ange, I remember that.”

Andy and Don still loved to navigate Hollywood together. In early 1966, they guest-starred on the short-lived
Sammy Davis Jr. Show
. Each day on the set, Andy recalled, Sammy would gather his entourage and head out to lunch. “Don and I would just go off by ourselves.” One day, Sammy returned from lunch with his retinue and found the two friends. He told them, “I think I get it. You guys don't need anybody else. You've got each other.”

Now approaching its seventh season,
The Andy
Griffith Show
marched on. The acting remained professional, the writing capable, and the direction consistent, and the program never fell from Nielsen's top ten; yet, few in the ensemble could escape the feeling that Mayberry was merely going through the motions.

“I think, for Andy, the show was never the same after Don left,” Ron Howard recalled. “He didn't have that partner. The absolute foundation of the show, and why it endures, is Andy-Barney. And, yes, the feeling of what Mayberry was. But without the comedy that they generated, I don't think the show ever would have endured.”

The Desilu set remained a familial place. Andy still played music with Lee Greenway, his makeup man, and he still staged elaborate practical jokes, taking particular delight in harassing his costars during nap time. Once Andy had played these pranks on Don. Now, he targeted poor George Lindsey, a man far more sensitive than his on-screen character, and less indulgent. Once, Andy and loyal accomplice Lee sneaked into George's dressing room while he was sleeping and filled it with duck entrails from one of their hunting trips. “I didn't laugh at all,” George recalled, “which naturally made it all the funnier for them.”

But Andy's mood darkened perceptibly in the final years of the
Griffith Show.
Without Don there to buoy his spirits, Andy laughed less. And when he wasn't laughing, he was often brooding. The cast and crew didn't fear Andy's temper—it never flared, at least not when he was at work. But they came to fear his silence.

“Most of us were deathly afraid of Andy,” George Lindsey recalled. “We were all scared to make a move. If Andy thought something was funny, then it was funny to us. He literally controlled every aspect of that show. So we were always trying to please him, or at least I was. Every Monday night, Andy would call you if he liked the show and your performance. So I waited for the call. If it didn't come, I absolutely dreaded going in to work on Tuesday morning.”

On May 22, the
Griffith Show
earned its fourth Emmy Award. The award again went to Don, who had appeared in all of two episodes that season. “Would you believe this?” Don asked the Hollywood Palladium audience. It was hard to tell whether the award was more a salute to Don or a swipe at Andy, whose program had failed to earn even a nomination in any other category. “It must be presumed that Don Knotts himself felt a little awkward,”
The Hollywood Reporter
opined.

In spring and summer of 1966, Andy made a series of decisions that would assure him a future beyond his show. He paid a visit to the Mount Airy home of his childhood and arranged to move his parents to California, where he built them a house a few miles from his own. They brought only a few pieces of furniture that Carl Griffith had built with his own hands. A few days after they arrived, Carl telephoned and told Andy his mother was crying. She wanted her old bed from Mount Airy. Andy had it shipped.

In July, Andy got the movie deal he had always wanted. He and manager Dick Linke signed a five-year, ten-picture contract with Universal, the same studio that employed Don. Andy's contract called for twice as many movies as Don's, with the first reportedly set for the very next year. In August, a squib in the
Los Angeles Times
announced Andy had also signed a lucrative deal with CBS, extending his
Griffith Show
for two more seasons and promising annual specials for three years after that. In interviews, Andy began mapping out an exit from Mayberry.

“Eight years is long enough,” Andy told the
Chicago Tribune
in November. “People might get tired watching it, for one thing. Another is that stories get awfully hard to find, and I'm afraid we might start to compromise.”

They already had. Though the
Griffith Show
still reached 31 million Americans, the writers were running short of ideas, and it showed. In one season-seven story, the townspeople are shocked when Aunt Bee purchases a blond wig. One week in season eight, Andy gets the flu. Would viewers soon be watching him mow his lawn?

Andy had dropped hints that the
Griffith Show
might introduce a new character to Mayberry; not another deputy, but someone to join the gang of feckless goofs outside the barbershop and to pester Andy at the sheriff's office.

One night, Andy and Barbara saw a Eugene O'Neill play called
Hughie
. Andy went backstage after the performance and “just raved about it,” recalled Jack Dodson, a mild-mannered Pennsylvanian who had performed the two-man play alongside Jason Robards. Encouraged, Jack went to meet with the
Griffith
casting director, Ruth Burch. She swiftly showed him the door. Puzzled, Jack had his agent call the studio and recount Jack's meeting with Andy. Someone relayed the story to Andy, who replied, “I don't know who the hell you're talking about.” Jack urged his agent to try again. An assistant again approached Andy, who repeated, “I've never heard of the son of a bitch.”

That night, Andy and Barbara attended the Julie Christie picture,
Darling
. On the way home, Andy grumbled, “You know, that picture stank. The best acting we've seen in a long time was that play with those two guys in it.” Then it hit him: “Oh, jeez, that's who that was.” Andy made it up to Jack by hiring him.

Jack Dodson joined the
Griffith
company as Howard Sprague, a mustachioed milquetoast who lives with his mother. Developmentally stunted, like Barney, Howard nonetheless possesses an ensemble of neuroses all his own. He is a prototypical nerd—bookish, intelligent, and sufficiently responsible to carry out the duties of county clerk, yet emotionally inept and uneasy both with women and manly men. Whereas Don had played Barney like a nine- or ten-year-old boy, Jack Dodson drew upon memories of himself as a gawky adolescent in creating Howard Sprague. He was the most entertaining character to enter Mayberry since Gomer Pyle, with the possible exception of Goober, who forever dwelt in the shadow of his more successful cousin.

Like other
Griffith
regulars before him, Jack Dodson had to earn a permanent place in Mayberry. “My first year on the show, I didn't have a parking space,” he recalled. “It was the number one show on the air, and I had to go out every two hours and put money in the meter.”

Howard won the hearts of Mayberry devotees with the November 1966 episode “Big Fish in a Small Town,” one of the strongest stories of the program's final years. Andy and his friends mobilize for an annual fishing contest, dreaming of hooking Old Sam, a giant silver carp that has become town legend. Howard has never fished but yearns to join the outing. When no one will have him, Andy—ever the protector of his friends—warily consents. Howard shows up at Andy's home looking like a mannequin from a tackle shop. “Are you going to the moon?” Andy asks.

It is Howard, of course, who catches the storied fish. There is talk of serving up Old Sam at a town fish fry. But in the end, it is essential to the fundamental permanence of Mayberry that the venerable ichthyoid be returned to the lake whence he came.

“A fish is a fish, Floyd,” Andy protests.

“No, he isn't,” Floyd replies sagely. “Not once he's given a name.”

With both Barney and Gomer gone, Jack Dodson helped desperate
Griffith
writers create conflicts for Andy. But no one who remained in Mayberry did pathos quite like Don Knotts. So, in January, viewers were treated to “A Visit to Barney Fife,” another guest spot for Don. Andy goes to visit Barney, now implausibly ensconced as a detective with the Raleigh police. Barney tries to persuade Andy he is one of the guys, but the spell is broken when another detective hollers, “Fife! We're out of paper towels in the men's room!” Once again, Barney has been subjugated by bullies; his desk is a repurposed telephone booth. Domestically, Barney has graduated from living at the Y to rooming in a grim boardinghouse, a nod, perhaps, to Don's threadbare childhood.

“Barn,” Andy asks, “did you ever think about maybe coming back to Mayberry? . . . I mean, your job's still—open.”

Barney replies, “Well, that's awful nice of you, Ange. But I've got everything going for me here. I mean I've got a big job. I got a terrific future. Great social life.”

“You mean sitting here on the porch, listening to the radio?”

A second guest spot followed, titled “Barney Comes to Mayberry.” In its denouement, Andy and Aunt Bee sit on the porch Andy once shared with Barney.

“You know, I miss Barney,” Bee muses.

“I do, too,” Andy replies. “I guess there's just the one Barney Fife.”

If there was one lesson the
Griffith Show
producers had learned since Don's departure, that was it.

Fortunately, television viewers could see Andy and Barney together again the very next month, paired with country crooner Tennessee Ernie Ford on the CBS special
Andy Griffith's Uptown-Downtown Show
. It was still jarring to see the sheriff and his deputy shuffling across a stage in tuxedos, looking a bit like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in a Looney Tunes cartoon. But variety shows were a lucrative business in the late 1960s. Once again, the program's most successful moments reprised scenes from
The Andy Griffith Show
. In one skit, Andy and Don sit on the front porch and revive the lawman's code skit, with Don laboring to recite the opening of the Gettysburg Address.

Spring of 1967 brought the release of
The Reluctant Astronaut
, Don's second feature for Universal.
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
had returned more than $3 million on a $750,000 investment. This time, Don's shoot was lengthened to a luxurious twenty-three days. The film's premise—Don plays an astronaut who is afraid of heights—was lifted straight from the life of Jim Fritzell, the writer who could not board an elevator to the ninth floor at Universal. Don again collaborated with Jim and partner Everett Greenbaum, who again elevated a fairly ludicrous B-movie story with clever dialogue and subtle wit. NASA threw open its doors to the crew, allowing them full access to its facilities in Houston and Cape Canaveral on the promise of free publicity. Don, again complaining of a mysterious leg ailment, refused to perform the modestly acrobatic “weightless” scenes at the last moment. They were shot with harnesses, strings, and an anemic stuntman.

Sadly, few sparks flew between Don and his
Reluctant Astronaut
love interest, played by Joan Freeman, a former child star and Elvis Presley moll. The film's best bits paired Don with two other costars: Leslie Nielsen, a washed-out leading man whose autumnal comic genius had not yet flowered; and Arthur O'Connell, a seasoned character actor who played the astronaut's delusional father. It was a family movie, but adults could titter at a priceless bit with Don attempting to cut a grotesquely phallic, rocket-shaped cake.

Leslie later recalled dining with Don and his girlfriend, Lynn Paul, who ruled their relationship with such a firm hand that Leslie assumed they were married. “People kept coming up to the booth where we were dining and bothering [Don] to talk to them,” Leslie recounted. Lynn “just put out her hand and rested it on Don's arm and pushed it down so he couldn't do anything with it, and she said, ‘We are very busy eating. Would you mind? We'll see you after dinner.' And Don was just laughing.”

Don and Lynn remained a couple for about three years. It was a volatile romance. Lynn once ran over Don's suitcases with her car when he returned from a trip. Another time, during a vicious argument, she eyed Don's perpetually wounded leg with predatory glee, as if she were considering a kick. “If you do that to me,” Don hissed, “you're stepping over the line,” and she backed down. Lynn thoroughly dominated Don in social settings. He later quipped, “She was living with me. Well, it felt that way.”

One morning, Jim Nabors ran into Don at Du-par's restaurant in Studio City. They grabbed a booth and spent a few minutes catching up.

“Are you still going with Lynn?” Jim asked.

“No. We broke up.”

“What happened?”

“She kept asking me and asking me if I was going to marry her, and I said no. And the other night, we went to a play, and we're walking across the parking lot and she just grabbed me and said, ‘Are you gonna marry me?' And I told her, ‘No, I'm not.' ”