3.

The Bumpkins Take Broadway

DON KNOTTS lay in bed in the tiny hotel room above Times Square and wondered whether his wife’s first night in Manhattan might be her last. Thump, thump, thump, went the wall, shuddering from the weight of one body heaving against another in passion, like a sweaty human battering ram. How long could the wall endure this? How long could Kay?

In the service, Don had watched men have sex with each other. But sweet little Kay, the preacher’s daughter, seemed so innocent. Now, on this cold January night in 1949, they lay in a fleabag hotel, trying to ignore the horrible noises bleeding across the shabby partition. Don imagined Kay asking herself, “What in God’s name have we gotten ourselves into?”

Matters improved the next day. The Knottses rented a room at Ninety-Ninth Street and Broadway. Kay took a secretarial job with Celanese Corporation, a chemical company, for thirty-three dollars a week. Don claimed the twenty-dollar weekly allotment to which he was entitled through the military’s 52-20 Club, which guaranteed unemployed servicemen a meager living for up to fifty-two weeks. Don would remain on the dole for only two weeks.

“We would go to a place; the cheapest thing on the menu was spaghetti and meatballs, but it was a white-tablecloth thing,” Kay recalled. “And every week we would eat okay until it got to be Thursday, and then it was slim pickings. They had those Automats, where you could eat for forty cents.”

Every morning, Don hit the streets to “make the rounds,” visiting theatrical agents and trolling for work. After a few weeks, he was clearly getting nowhere. Spent and frustrated, he confessed to Kay, “I don’t know how to get into show business.” She replied, “Why don’t you look up Lanny Ross?”

Lanny had come backstage after one of the Stars and Gripes performances overseas and invited Don to look him up in peacetime. Now, in 1949, Lanny was back in New York, hosting a radio show on the powerful Mutual Broadcasting System from station WOR. Taking Lanny up on his offer seemed a long shot to Don, but Kay thought he should at least try. So, Don wrote Lanny a letter. Much to Don’s surprise, he received an immediate reply.

Lanny happily adopted Don as a cause. “He introduced me all around, telling all his people how talented he thought I was,” Don recalled. “And he gave me a shot on his radio show.” Don couldn’t believe his good fortune.

Lanny had plenty reasons to help Don. One was the powerful bond of fraternity that linked servicemen after the war. Another was Don’s prodigious talent, which seemed plain to everyone—save, perhaps, Don himself. A third was Don’s manner. Suppliant and self-effacing, Don radiated a complaisant submissiveness when in the company of other men, triggering the same protective impulse as a wagging tail on a stray dog. People wanted to help him.

In his radio debut, Don performed the monologue Lanny had seen him do in the South Pacific, depicting “a sportscaster calling a football game who gets excited and mixes up his words, like, ‘They’re going back to their puddle. I mean, their huddle,’ ” Don recalled. Both he and Andy effectively launched their broadcast careers with skits about football.

Lanny sent Don to William Morris, and soon Don was booked onto the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. Arthur Godfrey was a star-maker, and his Talent Scouts was simulcast on radio and television, giving Don, in 1949, his first on-screen appearance.

New York was amid a vaudeville revival, so the William Morris agents dispatched Don to try out his stand-up act in variety shows at theaters in the outer boroughs. When Don arrived at his first engagement, in the Bronx, the booking agent told him to leave his music with the pit band. Don said he had no music.

“No play-on music, no play-off music?” the agent snarled.

“No, sir.”

The agent scowled. “Well, give me one of your eight-by-ten pictures to put out front.”

“I, uh . . . I don’t have any eight-by-ten pictures.”

“What?” the agent screamed. “You’ve got no pictures? Listen, you do ten minutes and get off, you hear me? Not one minute more!”

The booker stormed off. Later, Don heard the man telling someone, “The kid’s got no pictures. He’s got no music. What kind of an act is that?”

Yet, Don’s act drew riotous laughs in the Bronx. Emboldened, Don sought a booking in Manhattan. He got a gig at the Jefferson Theatre on Fourteenth Street in the East Village, where agents went to scout new acts.

“I walked onstage at the Jefferson with all the confidence in the world,” Don recalled, “but after about two minutes, I realized I was in Trouble City. . . . These people had seen it all, and I’m sure they knew the punch lines to every one of my jokes. Five minutes went by and I had heard not one laugh. I was beginning to break out in a cold sweat. Finally, one guy in the balcony laughed, and I said, ‘Thanks, Dad!’ ”

That was the end of Don’s vaudeville career. He quit William Morris in humiliation and resolved never again to attempt stand-up, convinced it was “not my strong suit.” Once again, Don seemed to sell himself short. The agents told Don he simply needed new material; he hadn’t written anything of note since his army days. But Don would not be swayed. In the meager weeks that followed, surely the low ebb of his adult artistic career, Don took a job stuffing envelopes. “I’ll say this,” he recalled decades later. “It beat the hell out of plucking chickens in Raese’s grocery.”

Don’s confidence had abandoned him, but not his ambition. He continued to make the rounds, haunting the agencies and casting offices and popping in to visit Lanny Ross. Don’s persistence soon bore fruit. Peter Dixon, Lanny’s writer, asked Don one day if he could do “the voice of an old-timer like, say, Gabby Hayes.” Gabby was the quintessential geriatric cowboy sidekick, cast alongside Roy Rogers and John Wayne in films such as Tall in the Saddle and Heldorado to spout authentic frontier gibberish.

Dixon was assembling a revival of the Bobby Benson show, a radio series that had reaped a massive following in the 1930s. It was the stuff of juvenile fantasy: Bobby is an orphan who inherits a Texas cattle ranch and a gang of colorful sidekicks, including foreman Tex Mason, a “red Indian” called Harka, and an Irishman named . . . Irish. Rounding out the cast is old-timer Windy Wales. Together, they fight off cattle thieves and outwit escaped cons.

Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders took to the air in 1949 as a summer replacement series on the Mutual Broadcasting System, home to The Shadow and Major League Baseball. Radio was still king in those days, two years before the debut of I Love Lucy. Bobby Benson was slated for 5:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a thirty-minute segment timed to catch young boys between homework and dinner. Don played Windy Wales.

“That first Tuesday afternoon, I found myself at the microphone with a cast of veteran radio actors,” Don recalled. “Let me tell you, I was just about as nervous as a person could be and still function. Pete Dixon [the scriptwriter] was in the control room, and when we went off the air, I sashayed by. He grinned at me. ‘Good’ was all he said.” Don returned home feeling physically ill. “My body ached so much from the entire experience that I thought I was coming down with the flu.”

Don’s symptoms were anxiety made manifest. Don had performed well in his radio debut. Yet, he fully expected a phone call releasing him from the part. At the very inception of his professional career, Don already suffered from a debilitating pessimism, which combined with his natural fretfulness and budding hypochondria to yield an ensemble of physical ills. At such times, Don lay frozen in bed, sleepless and incapacitated.

The dreaded call never came, and Don returned to the microphone two days later to broadcast the second episode, groggy but relieved.

It was easy work, with no makeup or costumes and no need to memorize the script, which Don held in his hand as he read the part into the microphone. Don would eventually earn nearly $200 a week, which was good pay for the time.

“There was quite a technique to it, knowing how to fade yourself on and off the mike, how to match your voice to the action you were supposed to be engaged in, and keeping your eye on the director as well as your script,” Don recalled. “The director directed the entire show from the control room behind the glass, much like an orchestra conductor. Our sound effects man; our organist, who played our musical bridges on the Hammond organ; and in our case, because we were a western, our animal sound man, the man who did all the horse whinnies and dog barks and so on; all had to be woven in with precise cues from the director. The whole thing fascinated me.”

In Don’s hands, Windy Wales soon emerged as the most colorful character in the Bobby Benson cast. A tired, old ranch hand, Windy is faithful and devoted and happily oblivious that his best days are behind him. He spins tales of derring-do, placing himself at the center of fantastic events that, if real, are well past: “Windjammer Wales, they used to call me, back in the days when I hunted whales up near the Arctic!” Clop-diddy-clop-diddy-clop-diddy-clop. “Yessiree, fellers, I’ve killed so many men the cemetery men made me a partner!”

Don’s character was derivative, and he knew it. One day, Gabby Hayes himself came storming onto the set. “Goddamn you!” he raged. “You’ve been doing me on the radio every day and I’m sick of it!” Don stared at him in agony. Then, Gabby’s lip trembled and he burst out laughing. Don looked into the control room and saw his producers in hysterics.

The nation’s ten-year-old boys laughed with Windy Wales, and they laughed at him. His wheezy tenor was implicitly funny, and his tough-guy bluster made Windy an easy target for mockery from both the narrator and his costars. Windy Wales was the first iteration of Don’s comedic caricature of male machismo, his first send-up of all the smirking swagger and action-hero posturing he saw in other men. Windy Wales was Don’s absurdist critique of the postwar masculine ideal. The same ironic bravura would come to define Barney Fife a decade later, and Ralph Furley after that.

The revival worked: Bobby Benson again became a household name, at least among prepubescent boys. B-Bar-B riders formed clubs across the nation. Herbert Rice, a British immigrant who owned the show, ordered up a cornucopia of Bobby Benson merchandise and began to arrange publicity tours, dispatching Don and Ivan Cury, the twelve-year-old actor who played Bobby, to rodeos and county fairs up and down the East Coast along with a few hired hands and truckloads of collectibles.

“There were hundreds of things: Bobby Benson bikes, Bobby Benson hats, handkerchiefs, socks, gloves, flashlights, everything,” Ivan recalled. “They would get a lot of money. We would get nothing.”

In spring 1950, the success of Bobby Benson spawned a local television program, shot at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-Second Street and broadcast live on the brand-new WOR television station. The broadcast prominently featured Windy Wales, signaling the character’s rising currency with the Cracker Jack set. At the end of some broadcasts, no doubt to the delight of Manhattan parents, the station gave away a pony.

In one early television episode, Bobby and the gang are trapped in a bunkhouse by the bad guys. As Ivan Cury recalled, the director cut back and forth between live shots of the imperiled friends and a recorded loop of horses galloping through dust, with Tex Mason shouting, “Watch out!” and “Keep your head down!” Bobby and his friends hatch a plan to light a fire and create a smoke screen, providing cover to escape the bad guys. The crew had rounded up some crude smoke bombs; TV was still in its infancy, and visual effects were not yet an exact science.

“They set off a smoke bomb in the studio, and Don was at the door, and there was not much smoke coming in,” Ivan recalled. Don began flapping the door open and shut to fan the smoke, which then engulfed the studio. “I couldn’t see Don standing next to me,” Ivan recalled. “Somebody came in and grabbed me by the arm and took me over to the next set.”

The adjoining set was staged for the pony giveaway. The cameras rolled. “And this pony was hysterical, because of all the smoke,” Ivan recalled. “Well, this pony couldn’t bear it, and so it defecated and urinated at the same time, big, loud, and close to me. Don and the sound guys were hysterical with laughter. The guy on the boom fell off the boom.”

By 1951, Ivan Cury’s voice was changing and the Mutual radio network began searching for a new Bobby Benson. By the time Clive Rice, Ivan’s replacement, joined the cast, Bobby Benson was a hit. The producers upgraded from the cheesy Hammond organ to a prerecorded score played by an actual orchestra. The promotional tours continued, with Clive replacing Ivan as the public face of Bobby Benson. Don and Clive traveled in a Boeing Stratocruiser emblazoned with the Bobby Benson logo.

Don and Clive played to huge crowds, but Don loathed the journeys, and he was becoming increasingly paranoid about his health. “He had quite a collection of medications when he was on the road,” Clive recalled. “I can remember seeing, for the first time in my life, one of those throat-spray things. He had one of those, and he had this collection of pills he had to take for one reason or another. . . . He was very conscious of anyone who had a cold.” Don would fret daily about his health for the next five decades.

Don’s Bobby Benson duties occupied about four hours of his day, from his arrival at the studio after lunch to the conclusion of the daily broadcast at five thirty. Don was free every morning. He spent those hours making the rounds, visiting casting offices, trolling for parts, and trying to make his mark on television. There was little money to be made, but “everything was up for grabs,” and Don sensed opportunity.

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.

Andy and Barbara used the $5,000 advance to repay their debts. They took an apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. Dick and Andy started work together on January 4. As they crisscrossed Manhattan, Dick noticed Andy had a charming Southern habit of saying “I ’preciate it” at every chance. After he’d heard it twenty times or so, he told Andy, “Hey, do me a favor. Say that all the time. When you autograph pictures, write, ‘I ’preciate it.’ And someday, that’ll be a household word.”

Dick smothered Andy with attention. “Dick told me where to live, where to buy food,” Andy recalled later. “He didn’t suggest; he told me. He led me to agents; he personally took me to auditions.” For most of a decade, Andy had depended on Barbara for counsel. Now, Dick delivered an ultimatum: “Either I’m going to have to make the decisions, or Barbara is.” Andy considered and made his choice, telling his wife, “Well, Barbara, I won’t be asking you any more what you think.” Barbara graciously yielded to Dick, and the Griffiths and Linkes became dear friends. Yet, the power shift marked a turning point in both relationships.

Dick got Andy a meeting with Abe Lastfogel, head of the William Morris Agency. Lastfogel was one of the most powerful men in show business. But when Andy walked into the office, he recognized neither the name nor the smallish man who owned it. Lastfogel was there with his wife, Frances, and Danny Kaye, whose presence gave Andy a hint of the man’s gravitas. “They put on my record,” Andy recalled, “and I don’t remember anybody laughing at all. But when it was over, Frances leaned over to Abe and said, ‘Sign him.’ ”

The agency booked Andy onto Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town. The Capitol Records reissue of the football sketch was on its way to selling a million copies, making it one of the bestselling comedy records in history. Ed Sullivan was so taken with Andy that he wanted to book him for eighteen appearances. But Andy was untested on the national stage, and Abe Lastfogel would give Sullivan only four nights. Abe’s instinct would prove prescient.

“Deacon” Andy Griffith debuted on Toast of the Town on January 10, along with singer Dolores Gray, the Copacabana Dancers, and an act called Joyce’s Camels. Andy followed the camels. He performed the skits on both sides of the “Football” single. And he bombed, as anyone in the viewing audience could tell.

Andy could not recall his performance afterward, except that no one had laughed. To add insult to injury, Ed Sullivan scolded the comic after the broadcast for the adult theme of the “Romeo and Juliet” sketch, telling him, “Andy, don’t ever work blue.” Andy’s Toast of the Town run would end after a single night.

Nonetheless, the spot earned Andy his first national press, short items in the January 18 issues of Time and Newsweek. The latter publication pronounced him on “the verge of a big-time career.”

Undeterred, Lastfogel booked Andy at the Blue Angel, the same Fifty-Fifth Street club where Don would audition his Nervous Man routine. On the first night, the agency packed the room with celebrities and friends, including Henry Fonda and James Garner. Andy drew big laughs. But after the show, Abe Lastfogel came up and told him, “Now, I want you to go anywhere you can and learn how to entertain.” Andy was mystified—until the next night. “And the next night,” Andy recalled, “I was by myself, and I died.”

Andy did two shows a night for nearly a month, and he never recovered his mojo. After the club had emptied, Andy would walk the streets of New York, trying to figure out how his act could have gone so quickly south after the trip North. Like Don before him, Andy was learning that success back home in no way guaranteed success in New York. Both men had come to the city and bombed: their hayseed humor died in Manhattan clubs.

“He needed a lot of work,” Dick Linke recalled. “With Andy’s kind of comedy, you couldn’t put him in New York, you couldn’t put him in big cities. A Jewish comic, you put him in the Catskills, but with Andy, we had to talk about putting him down around the South and Southwest.”

Andy spent the next fifteen months on the road, in his car, working the Southern nightclub circuit. He would polish his delivery and timing with a growing repertoire of monologues that played off Northern stereotypes of Southern rubes.

He went to Miami and did a stint as resident comic for Eddy Arnold, the country singer, at the Olympia Theater. “And I scored, and I got my security back,” Andy recalled. “I got my self-confidence back. Same material. Same stuff.”

Andy went on to a two-week stand at a hotel in Atlanta, and he scored again. He worked as far west as Denver, and he ranged north from Florida to the Carolinas, earning as much as $1,500 a week. In September 1954, he returned to the University of North Carolina to perform his football sketch at halftime in an actual college football game.

Lawrence Laurent, entertainment writer for The Washington Post, later recounted seeing Andy at one of those early shows. Andy was playing the Mosque, a cavernous auditorium in Richmond, Virginia, on a bill of “hillbilly” performers that included country singer Jimmy Dean. “Deacon Andy” took the stage and performed the vaudeville tune “A Good Man is Hard to Find” with his fervent, Southern-revivalist delivery. “The effect on the audience was electric, more compelling than anything I had ever seen,” Laurent wrote. “The crowd shouted with Griffith, responded to his every gesture and lapsed into a strange, almost reverent silence” when he was finished.

Andy began to upstage more famous acts. One night, after Andy opened for Mae West, Mae’s manager approached him and told him to do a different act in the second show. Andy dug out an old folk song called “In the Pines” and revived his preacher character, sermonizing and stomping his foot. It was, if anything, funnier than what Andy had done in the first show. Mae loved it. Andy was promptly fired.

During the long, lonely hours on the road, Andy sometimes tuned in to the Mutual radio network to catch an afternoon broadcast of Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders. His favorite character was “an old man who told tall tales, named Windy Wales.”

Several months into Andy’s nightclub tour, an old friend from the North Carolina theater sent him a copy of the bestseller No Time for Sergeants. On an airplane to Denver, Andy found time to read it. The book began, “The thing was, we had gone fishing that day and Pa had wore himself out with it the way he usually did when he went fishing. I mean he went at it pretty hard and called the fish all sorts of names. . . .”

Andy was intrigued. Will Stockdale’s satirical observations of military rigmarole reminded Andy of his own monologues. When he returned to New York, Andy went straight to Abe Lastfogel’s office at William Morris. He told him, “If there’s ever anything that I can play, this is it.” Andy sent a copy of the book to Dick and conveyed the same message.

No Time for Sergeants was a hot property, and the rights had already been sold. But Andy would not give up. This was the role he’d been born to play.

Andy telephoned the author, Mac Hyman. Mac coughed up the name of his literary agent. Andy found the agent and stormed into his office. The agent tried to let Andy down easy: “Andy, you have to know that this is a number one bestseller and it’s been on the bestseller list ten, fifteen weeks. It’s gonna be a play and a movie and a television show.”

The meeting gave Andy the edge he needed. No one in New York seemed to know about the television production, which was being staged by the storied Theatre Guild for broadcast March 15, 1955, on The United States Steel Hour. There was still time for Andy to read for Will Stockdale. Andy was the first actor to arrive at the audition.

Alas, Andy had spent the previous year honing his stand-up comedy skills, to the detriment of his acting. His audition fell flat. “I didn’t read well because I didn’t know how to read,” he recalled. Andy pleaded with the producers: “I’m a talker, not a reader.” They were unmoved. Andy retreated to the waiting room, his mind racing: How could he salvage the role of his life?

For want of another plan, Andy struck up a conversation with a random woman in the waiting room, hoping to draw attention to himself. She took the bait, asking Andy, “What do you do?”

“I work nightclubs.”

“You sing?”

“No, I talk.”

“What do you talk about?”

“Oh, Shakespeare, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, opera, ballet.”

“Hamlet? Do you read it?”

“No, I tell it.”

“Well, how does it start?”

Andy took the cue: “I went to see a play right here lately. It was one of those classical plays. It was wrote by a fella named William Shakespeare, who lived in the old country a while back. It’s called Hamlet. And it was named after this young boy Hamlet that appeared in the play, and it was pretty good, except they don’t speak as good English as we do. . . .”

One by one, actors, executives, and secretaries filed into the room to hear Andy’s monologue. “It sounds like a bad B movie, but it happened,” Andy recalled. “As I went along, each of them would go out and get somebody else.”

The random woman was Armina Marshall, a director of both the Theatre Guild and the Steel Hour. When Andy had finished, she took him by the hand and led him to Alex Segal, the director. She told him, “I have Will Stockdale.”

The United States Steel Hour broadcast was nothing more than a televised play, filmed on a stage with theatrical sets before a live audience. When it commenced, Andy was terrified, just like on Ed Sullivan’s stage and at the Blue Angel. But when Andy began to speak, the audience responded, first with smiles, then with chuckles, then with laughter. Andy fed on the reaction. His terror fell away and his frozen body thawed.

The teleplay opens with Andy seated alone on a chair. “Howdy, I’m Will Stockdale,” he says, his intense gaze and broad smile warming the camera. “I’m fixin’ to tell you some of the things that happened to me in the draft.” He produces a Jew’s harp and commences to play, then to sing: “Whoa, mule, you kicking mule / Whoa, mule, I say / Well, I ain’t got time to kiss you now / My mule’s run away. . . .”

The viewing audience that night included Maurice Evans, who was to direct the play on Broadway. Maurice had found his Will Stockdale.

That September, inside the Alvin Theatre, Andy and Don sat down at a table together for the first time for the inaugural script read-through. They had yet to meet. Don was “as nervous as a cat,” he recalled, “but I couldn’t get over how good Andy Griffith was. . . . When we finished, I was certain of two things: this play was going to be a hit, and a lot of people were going to know who Andy Griffith was.”

On the first day of rehearsals, Andy stood in the wings and watched as “this thin little man came out.” It was Don. “He was a young fella then, but he put on an old voice and introduced Will Stockdale.” Andy couldn’t place the man, but he recognized the voice.

On the second day of rehearsals, Don wandered out the stage door and found Andy sitting on a fire hydrant. Andy was whittling. Don didn’t think he had ever seen an actor whittle.

“Excuse me,” Andy said. “Are you Windy Wales?”