5.
Andy Takes a Deputy
INSIDE THE Last Chance Saloon, on the set of Destry Rides Again, Andy Griffith mulled his future. At thirty-three, Andy sensed he was on a downward trajectory. In the New York and Hollywood of the 1950s, one flop could sink a promising career. Andy wasn’t likely to get another crack at a leading film role after Onionhead, and now his Broadway currency was in decline.
Andy had yet one more card to play: television. Though well entrenched by 1959, television was nonetheless viewed as the least desirable option for a performer—an actor’s Last Chance Saloon. “I’d always been afraid of it,” Andy recalled, “because I figured if you strike out there, that’s it.”
Andy and his manager, Dick Linke, set up a meeting with Abe Lastfogel at William Morris. Andy told him, “Mr. Lastfogel, I’ve struck out in movies and now on Broadway, and I don’t want to go back to nightclubs, so maybe I’d better try television.” Lastfogel went to see Sheldon Leonard, the powerful producer of television’s Danny Thomas Show. He asked if Sheldon knew of Andy. Sheldon replied, “Yeah, he did a record, a funny record.” Lastfogel said, “He’d like to do television. Can you think of something for him?”
It didn’t take Sheldon Leonard long to respond. “Thinking of something for a personality is the easiest part,” he recalled. “Andy Griffith, country boy. What’s the show going to be? He’s going to be a country boy.”
One winter night in 1959, Sheldon traveled to New York, where Andy was in a 472-show run of Destry, to see him backstage.
“I was told that a man named Sheldon Leonard would come to see me one night,” Andy recalled. “A little time went by and I didn’t think much more about it. And one night, after the show and curtain calls—which didn’t take very long—I passed the stage door on my way to my dressing room. There was a man standing there smiling. I kind of smiled back and went on. I thought I had seen him before—maybe playing heavies in movies.”
Born in 1907, Sheldon Leonard Bershad attended Syracuse on scholarship and attained a modest fame playing bad guys in a string of films, characters with such names as Pretty Willie, Lippy Harris, and Jumbo Schneider. Most infamously, Sheldon played Nick, the hard-hearted barkeep in It’s a Wonderful Life who hurls Jimmy Stewart into the snow. By the late 1950s, Sheldon had tired of acting and ascended into management, serving as both producer and director of the Danny Thomas vehicle Make Room for Daddy. The program would remain on the air for eleven years, one of television’s longest-running sitcoms. Tall, dark, and handsome, Sheldon demonstrated a brilliant mastery of the television medium and an uncanny ability to match personalities to shows.
Sheldon escorted Andy out to Forty-Fifth Street. “We went to his favorite bar on Eighth Avenue and sat and had a beer and a sandwich, and I told him the idea we had, which was to make him sheriff of a small town,” Sheldon recalled.
The conversation spawned a series of meetings between the two men and Dick Linke at the elegant Hotel St. Moritz. At the first meeting, Andy listened intently, said little, and left uncommitted. Sheldon was impressed: Most actors would jump at the chance to star in their own show. At the second meeting, Andy sat and nodded politely. But then he broke his silence, raised his voice in an exaggerated Carolina drawl, and set about probing the producer on everything from the program’s financing to its artistic direction. Sheldon was stunned; Dick Linke just smiled.
At the third meeting, Sheldon and Andy shook hands on The Andy Griffith Show. When the contracts were signed, Sheldon asked Andy, “Why all this advance rigmarole?” Andy replied, “Jest wanted to know who I wuz dealing with.”
To Sheldon, the entire challenge of television lay in finding a personality to build a show around; once he found his personality, the show would write itself. And Sheldon knew he could write a show for Andy. He plotted to insert Andy into a small town and surround him with characters to whom he could react; Sheldon felt that Andy’s gift lay in the unsung art of reactive comedy. He envisioned Andy as a broadly comedic bumpkin, not unlike Andy’s Will Stockdale character in No Time for Sergeants.
To Andy, it sounded like a mishmash of tired Southern clichés and unflattering stereotypes. He particularly disliked Sheldon’s notion of casting Andy in multiple roles, playing not just the sheriff but also the town’s newspaper editor and justice of the peace, all for madcap effect. Andy thought to himself, “This will last maybe two weeks.”
Yet, Andy agreed to everything Sheldon Leonard proposed. He wasn’t investing in the show so much as the man who had proposed it.
Sheldon wanted to present the new character as a guest star in an episode of Danny Thomas. It was a consummate Hollywood deal: To film a pilot for The Andy Griffith Show, as was the custom, would have cost $50,000. Presenting it instead as an episode of Danny Thomas allowed Sheldon to sell the new show while also delivering a Danny Thomas episode at no extra cost to the sponsor, General Foods. Sheldon and Danny Thomas would own shares of the resulting Griffith Show, if one materialized, making them business partners with Andy and his manager and lining everyone’s pockets. “I didn’t realize it,” Sheldon recalled, “but I was inventing what is now called the spin-off.”I
Sheldon put Danny Thomas writer Artie Stander to work on a pilot. Andy got a week off from Destry and flew to Hollywood in January 1960 to film it. He arrived on a set buzzing about this larger-than-life actor, Kazan’s wild man, and the magical chemistry he could brew with a live audience. But when rehearsals started, it seemed that Andy had left his mojo in New York. He was as flat as stale pop. The cast and crew whispered behind his back, “What is this magic they’re talking about?” But as rehearsals progressed, Andy recalled, “I got looser and looser. And when they brought the audience in, I was on top of it, and whatever I bring happened.”
A week on the set of Danny Thomas gave Andy an eyeful of the nascent television industry, and he didn’t like what he saw. “The first day, Artie Stander, Danny Thomas, and Sheldon Leonard yelled at each other all day,” Andy recalled. Andy pulled Sheldon aside and told him, “If this is what television is, I don’t think I can handle it.” Sheldon replied, “Andy, the star dictates what the attitude will be on the set. Danny likes to yell, so we all yell. If you don’t want to yell, nobody will yell.”
The pilot, broadcast on February 15, 1960, opens with a hand-drawn sketch of Andy’s face, looking a bit like a sinister ventriloquist dummy, and a voice-over announcing, “Tonight’s special guest: Andy Griffith.” Then, the camera reveals a first glimpse of Mayberry, a modest set constructed on the Danny Thomas soundstage. The lens descends to a street, where Andy sits in his Ford Galaxie 500 squad car, escorting Danny and his family back into town. Danny has been caught running a stop sign. The story, titled “Danny Meets Andy Griffith,” invokes a 1950s New Yorker’s nightmare of driving through the rural South.
“You picked on the wrong guy this time, Clem,” Danny bristles.
“Name ain’t Clem,” Andy replies, his face cleaving into a broad grin. “It’s Andy. Andy Taylor.” On that cue, the audience breaks into polite applause.
Bits and pieces of The Andy Griffith Show are already there, but some are in the wrong places. The town drunk shambles onto the set, announces, “I’m under arrest!,” and locks himself in his cell. But he is not Otis, and he is not played by Hal Smith. Frances Bavier comes to see Andy, but she is not Aunt Bee; she is Henrietta Perkins, a widow who is behind on her taxes. Little Ronny Howard is there; but Don Knotts is not. Sheriff Taylor has no deputy.
Don and Kay spent that evening playing bridge at the home of Pat Harrington, Don’s friend and costar on The Steve Allen Show. Pat, awaiting a guest role on Danny Thomas, halted the proceedings at nine o’clock to watch that night’s episode. He switched on the set, and Don glimpsed the face of his old friend.
Andy and Don had lost touch since their time together in the cast of No Time for Sergeants, half a decade earlier. Now they were three thousand miles apart—Don in Hollywood, Andy in New York—and their correspondence had fallen off. Andy was unaware Steve Allen had been canceled. Don had no inkling Andy was working on a television show.
Now, as Don beheld Andy on Pat Harrington’s television set, it struck him that there might be a place for him in Mayberry. A part on Andy’s new show might just rekindle Don’s career—and their friendship.
The next day, Don telephoned Andy in New York. “Listen,” he said, “don’t you think Sheriff Andy Taylor ought to have a deputy?”
A long pause followed.
In that silence, Andy must have weighed the pros and cons of adding his friend to the Griffith production. Don’s comic talent would unquestionably elevate the show. The two men had already proved how well they could play off each other. Besides, Andy loved having Don around. If there was a downside, perhaps it was the danger that Don’s comic star might one day outshine Andy’s own. Dean Martin had watched this happen with Jerry Lewis, all the critics ignoring the straight man and lavishing praise on his funnier partner. Yet, Andy loathed the hayseed part that had been assigned him in Sheldon Leonard’s pilot. He cringed at the thought of portraying another simpering Southern stereotype, trolling for yucks with a gap-toothed grin and scenery-shredding pratfalls. With a deputy, especially a wide-eyed, manic comedic dervish such as Don—why, maybe then Andy could reshape Sheriff Andy Taylor into something palatable, something enduring.
Andy’s voice crackled back onto the line: “That’s a hell of an idea! I didn’t know you were out of a job.”
“Yes, Steve was canceled.”
“Lord! Call Sheldon Leonard.”
Don did. Andy telephoned Sheldon, too, and told him he wanted Don. Thus, barely a week after the pilot aired, Don found himself walking into Sheldon’s office on the Desilu lot. Don had a sheaf of old scripts tucked under his arm, a ruse to create the impression he was brimming with offers rather than conspicuously unemployed.
Sheldon was savvy. He played it cool, acting as if Don had to convince him a deputy in Mayberry was a good idea. In an hour-long meeting, Don recalled, Sheldon “prodded me with questions about what I thought this deputy character should be like.” Don had “no preconceived ideas,” but he knew he didn’t want another reincarnation of his Nervous Man, any more than Andy wanted to ape Will Stockdale. The character of Barney Fife took his surname from Fife Street, back in Morgantown. Don envisioned playing him as a grown man with the mentality of a nine-year-old boy, given to flights of Tom Sawyer fancy and prone to wear his emotions plainly on his face.
There was no formal audition. Sheldon dismissed Don coolly, telling the fretful actor that his idea “would be taken under advisement.” Decades later, Sheldon recalled that his original thought was to hire Don for a single episode.
He kept Don waiting for three agonizing weeks. Don filmed his final Steve Allen Show in the interim. He was now officially out of work. He sat by the phone. Finally, Sherwin Bash, Don’s manager, called to relay the offer: the part was his. Don nearly fainted with delight. “I had a good feeling about this,” he recalled. “I had a real good feeling, even before it started.”
However fateful the casting, Don Knotts wasn’t the first or even the second actor hired to populate Mayberry.
Sheldon Leonard’s first impulse was to give Andy a son. Ronny Howard was the progeny of Rance and Jean Howard, New York actors who had met in college. Ronny was born while Rance served in the air force, touring the country and entertaining the troops. “Backstage, Jean would have Ron in a bassinet or in her arms,” Rance recalled. By age two, Ronny was attending his parents’ rehearsals and performances. One day, Rance discovered Ronny had an uncanny talent to learn lines, apparently by osmosis, as the boy could neither read nor write. Father and son began to entertain friends by reciting scenes from the play Mister Roberts from memory.
In fall 1959, five-year-old Ronny was cast in a television pilot called “Mr. O’Malley.” Hosted by Ronald Reagan as part of the series General Electric Theater, “Mr. O’Malley” was based on the intellectual comic strip Barnaby and meant to launch a comedy-fantasy series about five-year-old Barnaby (Ronny) and his fairy godfather.
Sheldon saw the pilot, and he liked Ronny. He met with Rance and told him he wanted Ronny to play Andy Griffith’s son on his new show. The boy would be named Opie, after the Southern bandleader Opie Cates, a favorite of Andy’s. Ronny was bound to the Mr. O’Malley show by CBS. That didn’t seem to bother Sheldon. He told Rance, “The show will not sell.” Rance asked why. “Because the show is fantasy,” Sheldon said, “and fantasy is not selling on TV now.” The two men agreed to a contingency plan: If Mr. O’Malley sold, Ronny was free to do it. If it didn’t, he would do the Griffith Show. “And of course, Sheldon was right,” Rance recalled. Mr. O’Malley didn’t sell.
The second permanent addition to Mayberry, Frances Bavier, was a product of Columbia University and a veteran of stage and screen, endowed with a dignified air and a transatlantic finishing-school accent. Her manner was haughty and patrician from the day she walked into the Forty-Eighth Street Theatre in New York, fresh out of acting school in 1925, and announced to director Howard Lindsay, “I’m a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.”
“Get her a chair!” the director cried, feigning awe. “We’ll write a special part for her!” Oddly enough, they did. Frances made her Broadway debut in the farce The Poor Nut. Better parts followed. Then she was cast as a grandmother in the Broadway hit On Borrowed Time while still in her thirties, and her career trajectory changed. Frances evolved from ingenue to matron and amassed many screen and television credits.
On-screen, Andy, Opie, and the future Aunt Bee melted hearts. General Foods, sponsor of Danny Thomas, purchased the series before the pilot had even aired. They loved it for its Americana appeal, for Andy’s broad grin, and for the budding magic of Mayberry.
Griffith was budgeted for thirty-two episodes at $58,000 apiece, or about $1.8 million for its first full season. Dick Linke, Andy’s manager, knew that he and his client weren’t big names in Hollywood; all of Dick’s career, and most of Andy’s, had played out in New York. For either man to wield real clout on the Griffith Show, both would need to ante up. Dick approached Bank of America and borrowed several hundred thousand dollars, enough to make Andy half owner of the show and to give them, together, a majority stake. The remaining shares would go to Sheldon Leonard and Danny Thomas. Griffith’s ownership interest would give him a measure of artistic control. In time, the arrangement would also make Andy and Dick wealthy men.
Don Knotts had no ownership stake in the Griffith Show. Instead, the producers signed him to a single season, and then to a five-year contract, at a starting salary of $1,250 an episode, or about $35,000 a year. “I worked out this terrible deal for him, where he ended up making no money in five years,” lamented Sherwin Bash, Don’s manager. The producers lowballed Don, playing on his insecurity and concealing their eagerness to sign him. Still, it was good money for a television actor in 1960, and Don bore none of the risk that Andy assumed by investing in the series.
Andy took ten days off the Destry production, claiming a back injury. Sheldon Leonard descended on Andy’s home in Westchester County with two writers in tow. Together, they developed a half dozen story lines that would become the first episodes of the Griffith Show. The plots betrayed the group’s artistic and commercial ambitions.
One story, “The New Housekeeper,” felt like a retooled pilot, with Andy coaxing a reluctant Opie to accept Aunt Bee as a matronly surrogate for his dead mother. Another, “The Guitar Player,” set the stage for much singing and dancing to come. But the most fateful of these half-baked ideas was “The Manhunt,” the first teleplay written to spotlight Deputy Barney Fife.
Everyone attending the meeting at the Griffith home that day sensed what they might have in Don, a man who could set off paroxysms of laughter before he even opened his mouth. His piercing, saucer eyes evoked the mute expressiveness of the great silent-film stars. His gangly frame, wiry but fragile, diminutive and stooped, seemed somehow trapped between adolescence and old age. His face was a canvas of raw emotion, so expressive it was almost painful to look upon. But no one at the meeting yet knew what Don would do with the part he had created for himself.
One more key role was yet to be cast. As executive producer, Sheldon Leonard would oversee the entire project, but not the day-to-day management of actors, locations, and scripts. For that, he needed a line producer. He approached Aaron Ruben.
Born to Polish Jews in Chicago, Aaron Ruben emerged as a gifted comedy writer, and he wrote for the best, first on radio with Burns and Allen and Milton Berle, then on television with Phil Silvers and Sid Caesar. Over time, Aaron would contribute more than any other single person, save perhaps Andy and Don, to the words and images that elevated the Griffith Show above the run-of-the-mill television program in the first half of the 1960s.
Aaron met with Sheldon Leonard, who told him, “Television isn’t a director’s medium, television is a producer’s medium.” The most important ingredient is the script, Sheldon said, and you need someone in charge of that script. Aaron was hooked.
Aaron Ruben went to meet Andy Griffith at his home in Rye, New York, and was surprised when Andy did not invite him inside. They settled onto the steps of Andy’s back porch. Andy asked, “Ya hunt much?” Aaron replied, “Hunt?! I’ve never hunted in my life.” But then talk turned to Andy’s show, and they found common ground. Andy and Aaron (and, later, Don) would be friends for life.
After the turbulent week in Hollywood filming his pilot, Andy knew a few things he would do differently on The Andy Griffith Show. Andy wanted his own soundstage to be productive but relaxed. He envisioned cast and crew functioning like an extended family: exchanging gifts at Christmas, eating lunch together at the commissary, playing music in the dressing rooms, even staging the occasional practical joke. And he couldn’t wait to share those moments with Don.
The Andy Griffith Show would be shot with a single camera, like a movie, the scenes filmed out of sequence and without an audience. The format guaranteed the production would focus on character, story, and human interaction. That was how Andy wanted it. Most situation comedies of the day, including Danny Thomas, were filmed with three cameras before a live studio audience. That format generated a natural laugh track and a wonderful chemistry between audience and performers, who fed on the energy in the room. But the actors played for laughs, an impulse that could distract actors and writers from building character and plot. “I hate those three-camera shows,” Andy once said. “You can work on values all week, and the minute you bring two hundred people in, all your values go out the window.”
Filming a one-camera comedy in 1960 meant sweetening it with a laugh track. Andy was uneasy with the laugh track. His concern may have come from Don, who believed the laugh track had killed The Steve Allen Show. Andy persuaded the Griffith producers to try an experiment: screen a filmed episode before a live audience, record the laughter, and add it to the tape before broadcast. A few early Griffith episodes were broadcast with “live” laugh tracks before the network pulled the plug on Andy’s costly experiment. He and the producers reached a sort of compromise: Griffith would use a laugh track, but sparingly.
The Griffith Show would be shot at Desilu Studios, the production company founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and responsible for many of the best television programs of the 1950s and 1960s, including I Love Lucy, but also Star Trek, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and My Three Sons. The lot was called the Motion Picture Center and sat on Cahuenga Boulevard near Melrose, a white art deco compound with an arch of overlapping concrete rectangles stretching above the main driveway. Its soundstages were notoriously leaky; “Don and I used to do scenes when it rained, and it would often rain in between us,” Andy recalled.
The sets for the first Griffith episodes were “few and simple,” Griffith scholar Richard Kelly writes: the courthouse, where most interior shots were filmed; the living room, kitchen, and porch of the Taylor home; the barbershop; the mayor’s office; and the inside of the filling station. Exteriors were mostly shot on a back lot half an hour away in Culver City named Forty Acres. It had first been used by Cecil DeMille on his silent films of the 1920s and had provided the backdrop for the classics King Kong and Gone with the Wind.
The minimalist musical theme came from Hollywood composer Earle Hagen. He and the producers had been “beating our brains out for a couple of months” for an appropriate theme when Earle awoke one day “and thought, that thing ought to be simple enough to whistle. And it took me about ten minutes to write it,” he recalled. He recorded a simple, whistled demo, backed with a string bass and drums, and took it to Sheldon Leonard. Sheldon loved it. “I tell you what,” Sheldon said. “I’ll shoot Andy and Ronny walking along the lake with a couple of fishing poles over their shoulder.” Earle’s demo became the final theme. “I never whistled before in my life,” Earle recalled, “and never since.”
On the first day of production, in summer 1960, the core cast and crew of the Griffith Show drove up to the back entrance of the Desilu lot, parked along Willoughby Avenue, crossed the street to the gate, and walked past Tiny, the guard, into the concrete compound. The group gathered in a conference room to read the script for the first episode, “The New Housekeeper.” Sheldon Leonard would direct, one of only two times he oversaw a Griffith episode personally.
Don arrived looking “a little nervous,” Rance Howard recalled, possessed by the same paralytic first-day angst that had vexed him in most of his previous jobs. He was buoyed, though, to know that he would be working on a calm one-camera production, not a torturous live shoot. And he sensed great talent gathered around him. Andy asserted himself immediately as the group’s benevolent leader. Don recalled it later as “one of the most delightful days of my life.”
The next Monday, the crew drove up into Franklin Canyon, above Beverly Hills, to a bucolic spot with a reservoir that supplied water to the city, populated with the sort of indeterminate flora that could just as easily be North Carolina as California. Assistant Director Bruce Bilson shouted, “Roll it!” The crew filmed the scene Sheldon Leonard had ordered up to accompany Earle Hagen’s theme music. The twenty-second sequence called for Andy and Opie to amble along a dirt road, and for Opie to lob a rock into the water.
“They came walking down the road,” Bruce Bilson recalled, “and the kid threw a rock in the lake, and it didn’t get in the lake. So we did another take, and the kid threw the rock, and it didn’t go in the lake. And so I said, ‘Okay, propman, get behind that bush down there, and when I say, ‘Throw it,’ throw it.’ ” Bilson shot the scene a third time. Opie underthrew again, but this time, the propman lobbed a stone into the reservoir. In the resulting shot, careful viewers will note a slight, gravity-defying lag between Opie’s throw and the consequent splash.
The canyon would serve as the backdrop for many subsequent picnics and manhunts. Andy and Barney would occasionally launch a leaky rowboat into the reservoir and fish—a delicate undertaking, given that they were rowing in the city’s drinking water.
Andy, Don, and the rest of the cast settled into something approaching the nine-to-five schedule that would typify the Griffith Show for the next eight years. The core players would gather at nine o’clock on Thursday mornings to “read down” the script for the next week’s show, as the script supervisor kept time with her stopwatch. Then, they would read the script for the following week, to give the ensemble an early feel for whether that script worked and, if it didn’t, what changes might be in order. Then, most of the cast would be dismissed. Aaron Ruben would stay behind with Andy, Don, and the directors to work on rewrites. Friday morning, new scripts would be handed out, and the cast would begin rehearsals on the soundstage. Shooting would commence at eight o’clock Monday morning and would continue through Wednesday.
The first episode filmed, “The New Housekeeper,” seems to have been written largely as a concession to the network and the sponsor, General Foods, whose representatives were eager to reaffirm the heartwarming backstory set up in the pilot. The episode established Andy as a winsome widower, introduced Aunt Bee as his matronly housekeeper, and posited a tender relationship between Andy and Opie. “The New Housekeeper” also illustrated what the program might have become without Don. Andy dominates, reprising the exaggerated drawl of his Hamlet days and generally playing the buffoon.
Ron Howard later recounted his first impression of Barney Fife: “Andy and this man were talking very quietly. Andy was a lot bigger than that fellow. And they were talking, and I couldn’t really hear much, but I started watching. All of a sudden, this very quiet man, Don Knotts, became a complete bundle of nerves. Cameras were rolling. I think he was tapping his pocket and saluting and knocking his hat off. . . . I remember turning to my dad and saying something like ‘Is that man crazy?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no. He’s a very funny actor.’ ”
Don made the most of his first real scene, a ninety-second exchange in the sheriff’s driveway, saying with a stiff salute, “Deputy Barney Fife reporting, sir, with an important message.”
“Barney, I’ve told you, you don’t have to do that.” Andy smiles. “This ain’t the army. You see, it’s just me and you.”
“Well, shucks, Andy. I want to do good on this job. Even if it’s just deliverin’ messages, I want to do it right.”
“Well, I know you do, and I admire your attitude.”
“You see, Andy, I want the folks in this town to realize that you picked me to be your deputy because . . . Well, you looked over all the candidates for the job and you judged their qualifications and their character and their ability, and you come to the fair, the just, and the honest conclusion that I was the best suited for the job. And I want to thank you, Cousin Andy.”
The exchange gave the Griffith producers a glimpse of the magic that could unfold when Andy and Don shared a scene: Barney’s almost unbearably taut delivery, the twinkle of love in Andy’s eyes, and the impeccable timing that linked the two actors. Sheldon Leonard recalled, “There was such an electricity, there was such chemistry apparent on the screen when we saw it in the dailies in the next day after we shot it, that we all looked at one another and we said, ‘Well, that’s it. Let’s get [Don] tied up, let’s make sure he’s a part of the show.’ ”
Sheldon approached Don and offered him a contract.II Don’s pay would top out at $3,500 an episode, or about $100,000 a year, in season five. He was guaranteed an appearance in ten of every thirteen episodes; soon enough, though, Don would be begging to get even a single week off.
Andy and Don thought they had a hit. But most television shows fail, and no one would know Griffith’s fate until the first episode aired that fall. By that time, at least ten episodes had been filmed. “We liked it. It was fun. It was funny. Everybody was good,” recalled Bruce Bilson, the assistant director. “But we were working in a vacuum, on two big soundstages on Cahuenga Boulevard.”
One day about six weeks into production, Andy found himself in the men’s room, standing next to a studio electrician named Frank. He hadn’t spoken to Andy once in those six weeks. Now, he turned to Andy and said, “You’ll be in the top ten in six months.”
As the premiere neared, the Griffith producers began to mull which of the filmed episodes should be first to air. The network brass chose “The New Housekeeper.” Andy and much of the creative staff preferred “The Manhunt,” the second script filmed. The reason was Barney Fife.
“The Manhunt” opens with Andy and Opie fishing in the reservoir. As they pull their rowboat to shore, Barney tears down the dirt road in his Galaxie 500 squad car.
“Sheriff. Sheriff!” Barney bellows, leaping from his patrol car. “Sheriff, you’ll never guess what’s happened! Somethin’ big!”
Andy calmly asks, “Well, what is it?”
Barney’s eyes bug out. “Biggest thing ever happened in Mayberry. Real big. Big! Big big!”
The story would win the 1962 Writers Guild Award for best comedy writing in a television series. With this episode, the first to feature Don, the cast and crew began to sense that something special was playing out in front of the Griffith camera. Whenever Andy and Don would take the stage, Don’s eyes would widen and his body would tense as he transformed into Barney, and Andy’s eyes would warm with adoration, and some primal comedic force would be unleashed. “The Manhunt” recast the Mayberry universe. It was still Andy’s show; but for the next five years, most of the laughs would go to Barney.
“By that episode,” Andy recalled later, “I knew that Don should be the comic and I should play straight for him, and that made all the difference. All the difference . . . The event of Don on this show changed the whole groundwork of it. Because every comic character that came on, we added them as fast as we could find them, and I played straight to all of them.”
By stepping back, dialing down his Will Stockdale shtick and retreating into the role of straight man, Andy Griffith brought balance to Mayberry and immortality to his program. As the production evolved and the cast grew, Andy Griffith would emerge as one of the hardest-working straight men on television, his timing and gravitas elevating the artistry not just of Don but, later, of such comedic talents as Howard “Floyd” McNear and Jim “Gomer” Nabors.
“To be a straight man is a wonderful position,” Andy recalled later. “You are privileged more than anyone else—to be in the scene and to watch it, too. I could watch Don Knotts and Frances and the rest with a thousand times more delight than anybody in the audience ever could, because I’m between the camera and you on most shots and I’m closer to Don’s eyes than you can ever be. There’s no more joy than that, I can tell you right now.”
Andy was always walking around the set chuckling and shaking his head over something Don had said. Don, for his part, had never worked with a better partner.
“Our timing was alike,” Don recalled. “I could almost tell when Andy was going to come in, and he said he could do the same with me. And Andy found Barney funny. I think that helped, too. I could see sometimes in Andy’s eyes that he was trying to keep from laughing, which would help me try to be even funnier. And Andy was like the ultimate straight man. He was the best you could imagine.”
Neither Andy nor Don received a writing credit on the Griffith Show. But both men made enormous contributions to the Southern-flavored scripts almost from the start. Andy insisted that Don get a seat in Aaron Ruben’s office when the Griffith elite gathered to fine-tune a coming episode. When a script had holes to be plugged, Andy would turn to Don and say, “Why don’t you see if you can write up a funny little thing to put in there.”
The collaboration would yield Andy and Barney’s first classic routine. The team was polishing the script for “Ellie Comes to Town,” which would be the fourth episode to air. As the Griffith producers reviewed the pages, Don sat in his chair and scribbled on a sheet of paper. Then he turned to Andy and said, “Hey, Andy, I just memorized the lawman’s code. Try me out.” Andy turned to Don with palpable delight and said, “Okay, Don, go ahead.” Don handed Andy the sheet of scribble, slipped into character, and asked the sheriff to test his recall of what he’d written. Aaron Ruben and the others sat mesmerized as Don led Andy through the routine, in which Barney boasts of his memory skills and then proves unable to recall a single word.
“Wanna just check me on it? I know the whole thing,” Barney tells his sheriff in the finished episode. He hands Andy the text.
“ ‘Rule number one,’ ” Andy recites. “All right. Go ahead.”
Barney sits, concentrates, knits his brows, clears his throat. A grave expression crosses his face as he looks up at Andy: “You wanna just give me the first word?”
“Okay: ‘An.’ ”
“ ‘An,’ ” Barney repeats. “ ‘An.’ ‘An’?” He looks at Andy quizzically.
“Yeah. ‘An.’ ”
“You sure?”
“I’m lookin’ right at it.”
“ ‘An.’ ‘An’ . . .” Barney sighs. “Uh, you wanna just give me the second word?”
“ ‘An officer.’ ”
“Oh, yeah. ‘An officer’ . . . ‘An officer’ . . . ‘An officer’ . . . ‘An officer’ . . . ‘An officer’ . . .” Barney sinks his head in his hands, twirls in his chair, and thuds his forehead against a coat tree.
The exchange goes on for more than two minutes, with Barney twisting his face and disheveling his hair in agony. It reaches a comic crescendo as Barney barks back the final words of the code, moments after they leave Andy’s mouth.
Most of the scene was shot with Andy and Barney reading their lines in separate takes, so Andy wouldn’t lose his composure on camera. The final seconds were shot in a single take, Andy struggling mightily to spit out his words without exploding in laughter. The camera quickly cut away to a shot of a sober Andy.
“You wanna go over it again, or you think ya got it?”
“I got it,” Barney replies.
I. Griffith was not, in fact, television’s first spin-off. The Honeymooners began as a recurring sketch on the Cavalcade of Stars, which Jackie Gleason hosted, making it a sort of spin-off. And the CBS sitcom December Bride spawned the offspring Pete and Gladys, which debuted in September 1960, one month before Griffith.
II. In a 2005 interview with Bill Dana, Don said Sheldon first offered a one-year contract, but extended it to five years “after I had been on the show about a month or so.”