Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (24 page)

In the final scene, Andy serenades Helen on his guitar. Then, a second voice chimes in, and the camera pulls back to reveal Barney, who has joined the newlyweds in their honeymoon suite.

Viewers loved it. Yet, casting the beloved comedy partners in the
R.F.D.
pilot “may not have been too smart,” a
Los Angeles Times
reviewer noted. Seeing Andy and Don together again only reminded viewers of “the perfect comedy chemistry existing between these two,” who wouldn't visit Mayberry together again for another eighteen years.

Ron Howard would move on to a short-lived series called
The Smith Family
, opposite Henry Fonda, and thence to
American Graffiti
and
Happy Days.
Aneta Corsaut would return for one more
R.F.D.
episode, “Andy's Baby.” Jim Nabors was through with Mayberry; but George “Goober” Lindsey, Jack “Howard” Dodson, and Frances “Bee” Bavier all would make a career of
Mayberry R.F.D.
, remaining as regulars more or less until its cancellation in 1971.

These years were uncharacteristically slow for both Andy and Don, and they spent many idle hours together, alone and with their children. Andy grumbled about the new
Mayberry
. “We saw a lot of him during this period,” Tom Knotts recalled. “And I remember him talking about how much he just hated that show. Hated it.”

Nonetheless, Andy became close friends with his Mayberry successor. He and Ken Berry lived in the same neighborhood, within easy reach of their mutual manager, Dick Linke. One night, Andy and Ken ventured out with George Lindsey and Jack Dodson to see Merle Haggard perform at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. “Each of us had a quart of whiskey and a quart of chaser,” George Lindsey recalled. “I went out and bought everybody aviator caps, with goggles, and we all wore those. We had a big, white limousine take us to the theater, and then we just raised hell. Before it was over, we got onstage with Merle, and I bet he just wanted to kill us. Andy was always bigger than life and always laughed longer and screamed louder than anybody I've ever known, and this time he wasn't alone.”

Suddenly liberated from the punishing schedule of television and halfway through his forties, Andy finally had time for the classic trappings of a midlife crisis. He purchased a beige-carpeted motor home and a small fleet of dirt bikes. Thus equipped, Andy would summon Ken, Jack Dodson, and Lee Greenway (the banjo-playing makeup man) and head for the desert. “We'd go out to those many thousands of acres out by Palmdale, and they would go hunting,” Ken recalled. “And I'd sit in the camper because I don't like to hunt. And afterwards, we'd get on these motorcycles and ride all over the place and laugh and have a great time.”

Don did not join the excursions. Andy liked to whoop and holler and get wild. Don wasn't about to climb on a dirt bike. “Andy's more of a man's man,” he would say.

The desert provided a fitting metaphor for Andy's career prospects in fall 1968. Even before his first Universal film hit theaters, the studio showed signs of panic. A squib in the October 10
Los Angeles Times
announced that Andy would be reuniting with Don in a forthcoming Universal picture titled
Me and My Shadow
, with the winning team of Fritzell and Greenbaum supplying the screenplay. Just a few months earlier, the Universal executives had promised to make Andy into another Jimmy Stewart. Now, they seemed to think Andy could not carry a movie by himself. They wanted to revive the comedy duo, a proven hit.

Andy told Dick Linke he wanted out. His five-year, ten-picture deal with Universal would end after a single film.

• • •

January 1969 found Don back in Morgantown, where Elsie Knotts, his mother, lay in a h hospital ward. The front page of the
Dominion-News
daily paper from January 23 pictures Don, Elsie, and Don's daughter, Karen, joined by Sid Knotts, Don's rough-hewn older brother, all smiling for the camera. Don patted his mother on the hand and said, “Here's the gal who got me started.”

Don was summoned back to Morgantown in spring; Elsie was dying. The thought of her passing was more than Don could bear. He found her comatose and sat at her bedside, calling, “Mother? Mother?” over and over, until finally she voiced a faint “Mmm-hmm.” She knew he was there. Don lingered for a few moments, then rose and bolted from the hospital room, never to return.

Elsie died on April 3. Don could not summon the strength to attend his mother's funeral.

Elsie had been Don's first fan, his greatest supporter during the long, hard journey from West Virginia to New York. Elsie had protected Don from his demon father, his bellicose brothers, and all the other perils lurking in the dark corners of his Morgantown home. After Don had found fame on
The Andy Griffith Show
, Elsie would sometimes furrow her brows and tell her son, “Everybody wants to know why you don't do your ventriloquism anymore.” Don would spend the rest of his days looking for someone to replace her.

Spring 1969 saw the release of Andy's
Angel in My Pocket
, and summer brought Don's
The Love God?
Both garnered mostly positive reviews; the
Los Angeles Times
called Don's film one of the “funniest and most pertinent pictures to come out of Universal in years,” and the same critic hailed Andy's movie as the best Fritzell-Greenbaum story to date. Yet, neither feature did much at the box office. That was particularly bad news for Andy, who hadn't had a hit film since
No Time for Sergeants
,
two decades earlier.

The Love God?
“received an M rating,” for mature content, under the new MPAA system, an ill omen. “Even though the sexual revolution was in full swing and people were taking their clothes off right and left in movies, people apparently didn't want to see me in anything but clean family pictures,” Don recalled. Universal struggled to book
The Love God?

“I went to the theater with him,” son Tom Knotts recalled. “And we went in and the manager took us back to his office. And we looked, and there were, like, three people. And he was so embarrassed to have to tell Dad that practically no one was going.”

Don, exhausted from work and grief-stricken at the passing of his mother, traveled alone to Waikiki and fell in with a group of hippies, who deemed him a loser and thus sufficiently antiestablishment to merit their respect. He swam with them in the ocean, according to a
TV Guide
account, hacking off the pant legs of a $300 suit; when he emerged, a girl cried, “Who needs pot? I can blow my mind just looking at his shins!”

Don's personal life had become decidedly more complex. In 1968, Kay Knotts relocated to Round Mountain, a lumber town in Northern California. Their son, Tom, moved north with Kay. Karen, thirteen at the time, remained with her father. Don rented a house in the swanky coastal enclave of Pacific Palisades. The next year, he rented another home in Beverly Hills, where he remained until a windfall enabled him to buy one.

Sunni Walton, a singer-actress-impressionist from San Francisco, was Don's major romantic companion in the years after Lynn Paul. Sunni sang in nine languages and did voice-overs in commercials and animated films. She landed a bit part in
The Love God
?
The romance lasted two years and was a much calmer relationship than Don had known with the fiery Lynn. He thought Sunni beautiful, and he loved her red hair. But they had little in common.

CBS offered Don a chance to bounce back from
The Love God?
with a one-hour variety special,
Don Knotts' Nice Clean, Decent, Wholesome Hour.
The special aired on April 3, 1970, with a guest appearance from Andy. It was a hit, and network producers took note.

Don started work on his fifth and final Universal movie,
How to Frame a Figg.
He collaborated with producer Ed Montagne and several writers on the script, which cast Don as Hollis Figg, a dim-witted town accountant who “flunked French because it hurt his sinuses”; Don himself was plagued by sinus trouble. When Hollis discovers money is missing, corrupt town officials try to pin their misdeeds on him. Hollis sets things right with the aid of a room-size computer named LEO, in homage to HAL from Stanley Kubrick's
2001
film of two years past.

Once again, Don is surrounded by a bevy of beauties. Yvonne Craig, a voluptuous dancer-actress who played Batgirl in the 1960s
Batman
series, is dispatched by the crooks to seduce Hollis. For the obligatory nice-girl counterpoint, the producers chose Elaine Joyce, a Hungarian-American beauty who was married to Broadway star Bobby Van.

Elaine Joyce Pinchot began her career as a teenage actress. She did one episode of the
Griffith Show
—as a “fast” girl, sought out by Andy for a revenge date after a fight with Helen. “I just had this scene with Andy in the car where I tried to kiss him,” she recalled; later, in the town diner, her character asks for a root beer float and coos, “They make me bubbly all over.” Elaine was twenty-one and Andy was forty; the whole thing struck her as unsavory.

Elaine knew Don only from his characters. “The guy smoked, he drank, he was into women,” she recalled. “And I was, like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.' I thought he was really the character he played, this terrified, self-conscious guy.”

The two became close. Bobby Van, Elaine's husband, “was doing movies someplace. I was always free,” she recalled. “We would go, and we would talk, and he would tell me about his life, his family, his mother, who he adored.”

Don told Elaine about his past girlfriends, and about his housekeeper, who looked after daughter Karen as if she were her own; and about his daily ritual of eating half a cantaloupe, “because his mother told him he'd live to be ninety-five if he did that.” He told her about his children, particularly Karen, who was gently pressing him to help her become an actress. “He was worried about Karen all the time,” Elaine recalled, “worried that she would always be a recovering actress.”

And Don told Elaine of his current girlfriends. One was B.J., his secretary. The other was Loralee Czuchna, a young USC student he'd met on a blind date.

Don liked women, and not just for romance. He often seemed more at ease with female than male costars—Andy was the notable exception. After enduring years of abuse from men in his youth, Don “picked his male friends very carefully and sparsely,” Loralee recalled. Friendship came more easily with women “because he just felt more comfortable. Women liked him, and he could talk to them.” From romantic partners, Don craved emotional support. He wanted to be loved; he also wanted to be mothered. He wanted another Elsie.

Shortly after Don completed work on
Figg
, he got a call from his manager, Sherwin Bash. Mort Werner, programming chief at NBC, wanted to talk to Don about launching a variety series on the momentum generated by his CBS special. Don was reluctant. “Look,” he told Werner over drinks, “I spent six months gathering the material for that show. Coming up with a script for a variety hour every week is an entirely different story.” But Werner persisted, offering Don an unfathomable $5.5 million for a single season. It was the biggest deal of Don's life.

At the close of the 1960s, Andy Griffith's telephone wasn't ringing. He did some TV guest spots and spent three months with his family at his Manteo estate, bored and brooding. “I'm not a fisherman, I'm not a carpenter, I'm not a hunter. There was nothing to do,” he told a
Chicago Tribune
columnist. “I am emotionally not a person who can be unemployed.”

In spring 1970, without Andy's knowledge, manager Dick Linke met with CBS executives and told them Andy might be ready to return to television. “I knew he was unhappy,” Dick confided later to a
TV Guide
reporter. “And I knew a completely new series, different from the old image, would be like plasma for him.” The CBS brass were suspicious: Would Andy really come back? Dick assured them, “Nobody knows Andy Griffith better than Dick Linke. For a million dollars, he'll reconsider.”

The executives “were so enthralled at the idea of getting Andy back,” Dick boasted later, “that they offered us one of the most fantastic deals in the history of television. They signed us for a half-hour weekly series even though we had no script, not even a format in mind. They were willing to take Andy in
anything
. We could have given them a dirty picture if we'd wanted to. And with not one word on paper, we got a contract for five years at three and half million dollars a year.”

Dick conveyed the offer to Andy. “I don't want you to be a family-picture star,” he told Dick. “No money in that anymore.” Soon, Andy was meeting with his old writer-producer, Aaron Ruben, to map out a return to television. “School is where it is today,” Aaron told Andy, and Andy agreed. They plotted a series that would posit Andy as headmaster of a small private school. Andy would reshape his Lincolnesque sheriff persona into that of a sage educator, more articulate than Andy Taylor, and more outspoken.

Now, both Andy and Don had sweet television deals. Both would soon run aground.

The premise for
Headmaster
fed Andy's fantasy of reinventing himself as a Southern Henry Fonda. He would populate his new program with noble speeches on America's Vietnam-era moral crisis. Neither he nor his entourage seemed to comprehend that Andy had already done this, far more effectively, as the soft-spoken Andy Taylor.

To give Andy's new character more gravitas, the producers looked for a woman of East Coast refinement to play his wife. They found Claudette Nevins, a Broadway actress with Shakespearean elocution.

“Andy was interested in broadening his scope and changing his image,” she recalled. “He wanted to be known for something other than comedy.
A Face in the Crowd
was a spectacular piece of work; I think he wanted to get back to something like that.”