10.

Andy and Barney, Phfftt

THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW continued to imitate life. Season five opened with a batch of story lines mining themes of reflection, restlessness, and departure, amid persistent chatter around Hollywood that the program might be drawing to a close.

The Griffith writers presumed they were producing an ephemeral product and thus didn’t trouble themselves much with narrative continuity. Consider: The episode “Citizen’s Arrest,” in season four, had opened with Andy and Barney reminiscing about the deputy’s ten years on the job. Now, in season five, “Barney’s Physical” opened with Barney chagrined that Andy had forgotten his anniversary—his fifth. “Spend five years in a place,” he fumes, “it’s like nobody even noticed.”

The season’s seventh episode, “Man in the Middle,” explored how much easier Andy and Barney found it to navigate their own friendship than to consort with the opposite sex, a lesson surely inspired by their real-life relationships with increasingly estranged spouses. The story opens with Thelma Lou and Barney having a fight. They patch things up, but the dispute spawns more arguments. Thelma Lou winds up angry at Andy, and then at Helen. Andy feels compelled to side with Helen—and that puts him in conflict with Barney, his best friend. Reflecting on their contretemps, Barney recites an adage borrowed from the Gospel of John, one that neatly captures the spirit of his off-camera friendship with Andy: “So deep a friendship hath one man for another that no female caress shall ever tear it asunder.” Then Barney deadpans, “Boy, the guy that wrote that must’ve been some kind of a nut.”

Aneta Corsaut, Andy’s on-screen girlfriend, owed her presence on the Griffith Show at least partly to Jim Fritzell. He was a respected writer in Sheldon Leonard’s stable and was dating Aneta when she auditioned for the role of Helen Crump. Jim was a wordsmith, and Aneta would often sit with him as he worked. With his goatee, Coke-bottle glasses, and close-shaved head, Jim would never be mistaken for an actor. And now, his beautiful girlfriend was dwelling among actors. Before long, one of them began spending more and more time with Jim and Aneta in the writing room.

Soon, Andy was paying regular visits to Aneta’s bungalow after work. Andy “was coming over every other day and hanging around with her in the late afternoon,” recalled Jesse Corsaut, Aneta’s brother, who would drive down from Monterey Bay to visit. “He’d come in, have a drink, and just sit around and chitchat,” acting “exactly the way he appeared on the screen, except that he wasn’t silly.”

Now Aneta had two boyfriends, Andy and Jim, and she seemed unable to choose between them. Instead, Jesse recalled, “She kept them both going.”

It wasn’t Andy’s first affair with a Griffith costar. He had told Don of at least one other: Joanna Moore, the Georgia beauty and future mother of Tatum O’Neal, cast in four episodes at the start of season three as a potential girlfriend for the television sheriff.

On-screen, Andy’s double dates at the diner with Helen, Barney, and Thelma Lou had become routine on the Griffith Show. Offscreen, Andy and Don would make excuses to their spouses and head out for a considerably more upscale double date at some Hollywood bistro with their real-life girlfriends, Andy with Aneta, Don with Lynn Paul, a fiery brunette who worked for Andy’s manager, Dick Linke.I

Aneta admired Don’s work, but the two never grew close, and Aneta later conceded she never felt entirely comfortable around him. In a sense, Aneta competed with Don for Andy’s affections.

One evening, members of the Griffith crew unleashed a practical joke on Andy and Aneta: a young crewman donned a waiter’s uniform and delivered dinner to the couple’s love nest at a Hollywood hotel. Andy was furious. “They were trying to really keep it on the down low and they didn’t think anybody knew—but everybody knew,” said Bridget Sweeney, daughter of director Bob Sweeney.

Aneta was a Greenwich Village bohemian at heart. Her home “was always a horrible mess,” brother Jesse recalled, not least because of the injudicious quantity of dogs and cats with which the young actress surrounded herself. “She would never clean it up. Aneta would stay up until two or three every night reading mystery stories, and then she’d sleep till noon. And then she’d spend two or three hours putting on makeup, and then she’d look great.”

Andy couldn’t get enough of Aneta. Eventually, he proposed, even though he was already married. He popped the question at least once and possibly two or three times, Aneta hinted in later years. She turned him down. Her outlook on marriage seemed to mirror that of Helen Crump, who prized career over domestic bliss. “She didn’t want to marry anyone,” Jesse recalled. “She wanted to keep her personal freedom. And then [Andy] became pretty sore at her.”

Andy would have to settle for marrying Helen Crump, in the glare of studio lights, on a spin-off of the Griffith Show. But he and Aneta would remain a couple for years, and friends for life. “That was true love,” recalled Ronnie Schell, Andy’s longtime friend. “They were closer than anyone knew.”

Themes of impermanence and departure surface again in “Good-bye, Sheriff Taylor,” broadcast November 23. The story has Andy contemplating leaving Mayberry for a job in the big city.

Barney is incredulous. “Leave Mayberry?” he cries. “Partners all these years, then just like that, phfftt?”

Andy replies, “I told you there might come a time when I’d be movin’ on.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you meant anything like quittin’. I thought you just meant dyin’.”

Andy labors to explain. “I’ve been sheriff for twelve years. Twelve years. Ev’rybody needs a change.”

By fall of 1964, after four years on the Griffith Show, Don Knotts was looking for a change. His stock as an entertainer stood at an all-time high. He was a three-time Emmy winner—the only member of the Griffith cast to have even been nominated for an Emmy—and probably the most celebrated television sidekick since Art Carney in The Honeymooners. (The parallel didn’t end there. Art, like Don, took home Emmy after Emmy for his supporting role, while Jackie Gleason, like Andy, was overlooked in his starring role.) Almost everyone on the Desilu lot concurred in that view—with one notable exception. Sheldon Leonard, executive producer of Griffith, tended to speak of Don as if he were expendable, an interchangeable piece in an ensemble puzzle.

Don earned not quite $100,000 a year, chump change for a television icon. Once, early in his tenure, Don had approached the producers for a raise. They had bristled: Who the f—- do you think you are? Do you think you’re the star of the show or something? Andy wasn’t present at the negotiation and may never have learned what transpired.

But everyone knew Don deserved a better deal. As the fifth season began, Don began quietly negotiating an exit from Mayberry.

One Sunday evening, midway through season five, Dick Linke arranged a meeting with leaders of the William Morris Agency and told them, “I have an idea how to keep Andy Griffith.”

Andy had no intention of continuing his namesake show beyond the fifth year, despite its soaring ratings. But Dick encouraged the agents: “Anytime you want to make it so palatable they can’t turn it down, get ’em a huge sum of money.” Abe Lastfogel asked Dick what kind of sum he had in mind. Dick replied, “a million dollars. I can tell you right now, he’s gonna take it.” Abe told Dick the figure sounded “very ambitious.” Dick replied, “Well, if you want to keep him on the air, that’s the only way I can think of.”

The network agreed. Dick called Andy into his office. “Andy, I know you don’t want to go beyond five years. But I don’t think you’re gonna want to turn this down.”

Andy perked up. “What is it, Dick?”

“How would you like to make a million dollars a year to stay on the show?”

Andy paused. “My goodness,” he exhaled finally. “A man can’t turn that down.”

The next step was to approach Don. Both friends had always treated the show as a five-year endeavor, and Andy knew Don was casting about for other work.

By this time Don had met with various studio heads and had collected “some pretty attractive television offers,” he recalled. But his dearest hope was to progress from television into film. Don always sought to make his mother happy. Elsie loved to collect movie-star autographs. Perhaps one day she would ask for his.

Don met with Lew Wasserman, head of Universal Studios. Wasserman had seen The Incredible Mr. Limpet and “was very impressed with the picture,” Don recalled. “He told me that if Disney had made it and promoted it the way they do, it would have been a blockbuster.”

Wasserman offered Don a five-picture contract. “He said he wanted to build my name in family motion-picture comedies. He offered me free rein. He said I could pick my own screenwriters and decide on my own pictures.”

Shortly after that meeting, Andy approached Don and told him he had decided to carry on with The Andy Griffith Show. Don was shocked. He hadn’t yet signed a contract with Universal, but he and Lew Wasserman had made a verbal agreement, and to Don, a deal was a deal.

Andy told Don, “We’ve got a new deal to offer you,” and tendered his friend a small stake in the Griffith Show—probably a few percent.II Andy and Dick Linke, by contrast, owned more than half the show between them. “What do you think?”

“Sorry, Andy. I’ve already committed.”

And that is the end of the story, as Andy and Don told it.

But according to Sherwin Bash, Don’s manager, the full account is more nuanced.

Sherwin never doubted the Griffith Show would continue past five years. Even as press reports forecast its impending demise, Sherwin assumed fate—or, more likely, sponsors—would intervene.

“When it got down to the fifth year, Andy was playing the game,” Sherwin recalled. “Nobody ever believed that The Andy Griffith Show wouldn’t continue.”

Sherwin knew Don wanted to make movies. Television operated on a fall-to-spring calendar, which left Don free in the summer; low-budget comedies, in that era, took only a month to shoot. “So, we negotiated a tentative deal with Universal to make movies,” he recalled.

Sherwin planned to approach the Griffith producers about extending Don’s tenure, but they preemptively approached him, offering a new contract and “a big raise,” probably to $5,000 an episode, or about $150,000 a year. Sherwin relayed the offer to Don, who said, “I want to talk to Andy personally.”

Don later reported back to Sherwin: he and Andy had talked, and Don didn’t want Sherwin to proceed.

Don never elaborated. Then again, Don and Andy operated differently from most television actors. “In the fifty years I was in the business, I don’t think I was ever involved with another performer who had that kind of a relationship with somebody he was working for,” Sherwin recalled. Don “was really an employee of the show, but he had a different feeling about Andy. Don was older, but Andy was like his older brother. It was much closer than I realized all those years. I don’t think that Don and Andy quote ‘had a meeting.’ They didn’t have that kind of relationship.”

Sherwin says he finally learned what had transpired four decades later, at Don’s 2006 memorial service. There, Sherwin told Andy of his disappointment that Don had rebuffed the offer to continue on the show.

Andy told Sherwin it wasn’t quite so simple. At the fateful meeting, Don had told Andy he was ready to continue on the Griffith Show—if he could be Andy’s partner.

“What’s wrong with that?” Sherwin asked.

Andy replied, “I wasn’t going to share the ownership of the show fifty-fifty with him. It was my show.”

Sherwin was stunned. “Did Don ever say fifty-fifty, or did he say he wanted a share? Did you ever explore that he might have been thrilled to have ten percent, or some other small amount?”

Andy shook his head.

According to Sherwin, the negotiation failed out of simple miscommunication. When Don asked to be Andy’s partner, Andy assumed Don wanted half of Andy’s share, or a quarter stake in the show. Sherwin believes what Don really wanted was a fair share: something larger than 3 or 4 percent, surely, but smaller than 25. With the help of a negotiator, such as Sherwin, the two men might have settled the math. But Andy and Don wanted to handle the negotiations between themselves, as friends.

In an interview late in life, Andy seemed to corroborate Sherwin’s account, but with a significant variation. Andy said Don came to his home and told him, “Andy, if you’ll be partners with me, I’ll stay.” But in this version, Don proposed a theatrical partnership, like that of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Andy said he turned it down: “Don, I’m afraid, because people become partners and they lose their friendship a lot of times, and I’m afraid that might happen to us.”

Perhaps Andy confused one conversation with another. Late in life, Don recalled that he indeed asked Andy around this time to consider forming a permanent comedy partnership. “I had asked Andy if we could team up for good,” Don once told Larry King, “but he was too good an actor to want to do that. And he shouldn’t have, and he didn’t.”

It’s stirring to imagine what might have come of that partnership.

“If they’d been twenty years earlier,” Ron Howard mused, “they would’ve been Abbott and Costello or something. They would’ve been Laurel and Hardy.”

As news leaked of Don’s impending departure, no one sounded entirely sanguine about the Griffith Show’s future. The New York Times opined, “Just where the Griffith show goes from here is not certain.” Andy seemed to agree, telling the Times columnist, “The character I play is not one who gets into trouble by himself. So the show must introduce some new characters who either get themselves into trouble or get me in trouble—or else we won’t have any story.”

Betty Lynn, who played Barney’s on-screen girlfriend, was on the back lot in Culver City when Andy walked up and told her Don was leaving the show. “Whaddaya mean, he’s leaving?” she gasped.

“I was really stunned,” Betty recalled, “because I knew that would be the end of me, too.” The Griffith producers suggested various ways Thelma Lou might remain in a Mayberry without Barney: Perhaps she could open a beauty shop and be a hairdresser. “But I didn’t see that,” Betty recalled. “My whole life was for Barney.”

To others on the set, Don’s impending departure seemed a natural move. “There was no rancor,” Ron Howard recalled. “It was just a decision that [Don] had to make and that Andy understood. It always kind of felt more like an inevitable graduation than any kind of abandonment and betrayal.”

Andy himself greeted the development with customary candor. “It’s entirely impossible to replace Don,” he told columnist Vernon Scott. “I really dread the day when we make our last show together.”

Peter Baldwin, a handsome former Paramount contract player, arrived at the Desilu studios that winter to direct some memorable episodes. One of the few Griffith directors who remain alive, Peter remembers endless peals of laughter during script readings. He also recalled his surprise at seeing Andy reassign many of his funniest lines to Barney.

“Andy would get a huge laugh on some line,” Peter recalled, “and as we were going through the script on the second reading . . . he’d say, ‘Wait a minute, why don’t you give that line to Don? He’ll kill that line.’ Because Andy wanted to remain the only sane person in Mayberry. He chose to give away the big laughs, often—not just once or twice a script, but often. And it was really generous of him, because as a comic, you don’t give away the big ones.”

Andy was thinking like a producer. He knew that if he gave a funny line to Don, Don would make it funnier. And then the camera could catch a reaction from Andy, a deadpan nod or subtle furrowing of the brow, and that would get another laugh—all to the ultimate enrichment of his show.

But that relationship was about to end, and the writers on The Andy Griffith Show continued to telegraph that reality. The episode “Barney Runs for Sheriff,” broadcast February 8, 1965, again contemplates the dissolution of Mayberry. Andy entertains another job offer, this one from a company that might take him to a place called South America. “Well, what about Aunt Bee and Opie?” Barney cries. “You know they don’t speak a word of South American.

“. . . And what about her?” Barney asks, referring to Andy’s on- and off-screen girlfriend.

“Who’s her?”

“You know who’s her!”

“Now, Barney, you know how things stand between Helen and me, and if they keep going the way they have been, I expect I’d send for her.”

“Oh, you’re gonna send for her.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna send for her.”

“You gonna send for me, too?”

Barney finally persuades Andy to stay. Off-screen, Don was less successful in making the same case to his wife. The February 20 Los Angeles Times announced, in Hedda Hopper’s column, that Don and Kay Knotts had split.

“It’s not easy to keep a secret in this town,” Hedda wrote, “but Don Knotts has managed to keep the news quiet that he and his wife of fifteen years have been living under separate roofs for the past six months.” Don “blamed ‘personal problems’ for the rift but wouldn’t name them.”

By 1965, Don was deeply involved with Lynn Paul, assistant to Dick Linke, Andy’s manager. The tryst was the proximate cause for the split. “Karen heard them having really bad fights,” recalled Tom Knotts, their son. “But I never heard it, because they were having fights in the bedroom. So I never saw my parents mad at each other.” In front of the children, “they always got along really well. That was one of the good things.”

Kay decamped to an apartment in Westwood with the children, leaving Don in the Glendale family home. Their relationship remained civil, even tender. “I remember once, she was crying all night, and he came over and comforted her,” Tom recalled. “I think he really hated to leave, because he was giving up a lot. But he had issues he had to deal with.”

Meanwhile, back in Mayberry, the strain of Don’s impending exit seemed to be taking a toll.

“The Case of the Punch in the Nose,” a spring 1965 teleplay, neatly contrasts Andy’s philosophy of policing to Barney’s. Andy is Mayberry’s fixer, a man who steers every problem to its most sensible solution—even if the remedy falls outside the fine print of the law. Barney is the ultimate doctrinarian, following every regulation to the letter and oblivious to practical concerns.

In this narrative, Barney stumbles upon a minor assault case from two decades earlier and notes it is unsolved. Over Andy’s strenuous objections, Barney reopens the case. He approaches the men involved, Floyd the barber and a neighboring shopkeeper named Charlie. Charlie says Floyd punched him in the nose. Floyd denies it. Barney rushes off to investigate further. His interrogations begin to stir things up; soon, noses are being punched all over Mayberry. Barney tells Andy the nose punching is “not our fault.” Andy hollers back, “No, it’s not our fault. It’s your fault! You started the whole blamed thing.”

Barney protests, “You mean because I was trying to get to the bottom of a case? Because I was pursuing my duty as a police officer? Because I was trying to be neat and orderly—”

“Aww, shut up,” Andy yells—and for the first time in all his dealings with his deputy, his voice rings with real hostility.

The April 24 issue of TV Guide served notice to the broader viewing public of the coming changes on the Griffith Show. The story, headlined “Trouble in Mayberry,” hypothesized that the program’s very success had begun “to unravel the close-knit world of Mayberry.” First, Gomer Pyle had jumped ship to the Marines. Now the magazine was eulogizing Barney Fife.

“There was good old pie-bakin’ Aunt Bee, and Taylor’s all-American son Opie,” the story said. “But the real humor derived to a large extent from the relationship between solid, twinkly-eyed old Andy and his overly efficient, slightly paranoid deputy. . .” Clearly, a powerful friendship informed that onscreen rapport, imbuing every Andy-Barney scene with sparkle and warmth. As one colleague observed, “It’s hard to tell, even on the show, where one stops and the other begins.”

The report theorized that Don took displeasure in seeing Jim Nabors decamp to his own series while Don remained in Mayberry. Don denied it. Yet, now Don was leaving, and Andy was staying. The TV Guide reporter tracked Andy down in his Desilu lair. He found the actor scowling over a script in his dressing room. Why, he asked, was Andy carrying on with the show? Andy replied without lifting his head from the page. “Didn’t get any good film offers, that’s why.”

Andy wanted to do movies, just as Don did; but he wanted to do serious movies, movies like A Face in the Crowd; and in 1965, no such roles were forthcoming.

Griffith producers cast around for a potential replacement for Don. A series of talented comedians paraded through Mayberry in the final weeks of season five, including Don Rickles as a traveling salesman and Jerry Van Dyke, brother of the famous Dick, as the “Banjo-Playing Deputy.” Jerry’s character tells Andy he was born in Morgantown, a gentle nod to Don.

Don’s final appearance on the Griffith Show came in a comparatively anonymous episode titled “Opie Flunks Arithmetic.” Barney is reduced to a fringe character, the same space he’d occupied on his first Griffith episode, five years earlier.

It was customary for Griffith episodes to end inside the sheriff’s office, with Andy and Barney reflecting on the day’s events or unfurling a handwritten skit. At the close of this story, as Andy and Barney chat, Helen Crump walks in, seats herself rather provocatively on Andy’s desk, and breaks up their conversation. She and Andy exchange glances. With an odd quaver in his voice, the sheriff asks Barney to step into the other room to fetch Helen a cup of coffee. Andy knows it is the last line he will speak to Barney. When Barney returns, Andy and Helen are gone.

Andy stood behind the camera and watched Don shoot his final scene. Then, cast and crew gathered for their customary wrap party on the soundstage. Don was presented with a gold Swiss watch. On the back was a large number 5 and the inscription “See, we thought we’d put 5 on it because you’ve been here 5 years.” Floyd the barber had uttered that line when Barney was presented with a stainless-steel watch by his Mayberry friends at the start of the season, in the episode “Barney’s Physical.”

After a time, Andy looked up and saw the stage was empty, except for Don. “They’re gone,” Andy said to Don. “We might as well go, too.”

They walked to their cars.

Andy said, “Well, call me sometime.”

Don replied, “Okay.”


I. Don consistently described Lynn as Dick Linke’s assistant. Fifty years later, Dick remembered Lynn but could not recall if she was his employee.

II. In a 1966 interview, Don claimed he’d been offered a 10percent stake in the series. Privately, he cited a much smaller figure.