15.

Death in Mayberry

DON KNOTTS entered the autumn of life with newfound respect for his body, a man intent on cheating death. He had kicked sleeping pills, drinking, smoking, and bad living. He swam daily and galloped up stairs to reach his exclusive Beverly Hills gym. He dined on vegetables and fish. Sometimes, dinner was little more than a fruit plate.

And then, around his eightieth birthday, Don’s doctor told him, “Your lungs scare the hell out of me.”

The Knotts family seemed cursed with bad lungs. Shadow, Don’s older brother and comedic muse, had died at thirty-one of asthma. Don’s father had expired at fifty-five of pneumonia. Richie Ferrara, a doctor and Don’s lifelong friend, believes the elder Knotts was afflicted with pulmonary fibrosis, a gradual hardening of lung tissue, perhaps Shadow had it as well. “I have a feeling there are two reasons for it,” Richie said, “a genetic condition, and the coal dust.” Morgantown is a mining town, and coal dust swirls in the wind.

Don fell from a pair of stilts once, during a performance in adolescence, and one of the wooden poles punctured a lung. As a young adult on The Steve Allen Show, Don had caught a crippling case of pneumonia.

Now, at eighty, Don had contracted pulmonary fibrosis. His doctor didn’t want him thinking about it, so he told Don he suffered from “scarring of the lungs” and never uttered a formal diagnosis. He urged Don to go right on swimming and climbing stairs. He assured Don the chronic condition would not slow him down.

In the new millennium, Don was Hollywood royalty. Back in Morgantown, in 1998, a stretch of University Avenue had been renamed Don Knotts Boulevard. A new generation of comedic actors worshipped his television roles and films. In 1999, Ron Howard brought Don to Universal Studios, where he was filming How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Ron’s star, Jim Carrey, was losing it: After spending hours each day getting in and out of his green latex Grinch makeup, “he was really miserable at work,” Ron recalled. Jim Carrey adored Don. When Don arrived, Jim squinted down from his perch at the mouth of his Grinch cave. Finally recognizing the visitor, Jim launched into “a really brilliant Don Knotts imitation, and I only wish the cameras were rolling, because here he was in the Grinch costume, doing Barney Fife,” Ron recalled. Jim spent the rest of the day with his idol.

Andy Griffith had been mostly inactive for the first half of the 2000s, living in secluded splendor on his Manteo estate. But he missed Don, and he admired his friend’s seemingly inexhaustible work ethic. In 2004, Andy persuaded wife Cindi to relocate. They purchased a new $2.4 million home in Toluca Lake, the same place Andy had lived during the Griffith years.

Soon, Andy and Don were dining together once more, squiring their lovely young wives to exclusive Beverly Hills restaurants, sometimes in the company of former Griffith producer Aaron Ruben. Andy would tell bawdy jokes and make Francey laugh. That would make Don jealous: the simmering artistic rivalry that had rendered Andy unable to speak of Don’s Emmys seemed to cut both ways. One night, when Francey noted how funny Andy had been at supper, Don snapped, “I’m the funny one!”

Andy delighted in Don’s company. He would shake his head and tell Francey, “Oh, I love Don. I love him so much.” Then he would laugh and say, “Ha. You’d think we were gay.”

Andy and Don would send each other comedy tapes, radio performances by Garrison Keillor or Bob and Ray. They would compare notes on contemporary television and cinema; both men were obsessed with Sling Blade, the 1996 Billy Bob Thornton film, which explored the darker side of growing up Southern. And they talked of working together once more. Most of that talk came from Andy, who would call Don and fantasize about going out on the road together. But Don knew it was probably a pipe dream; Andy hadn’t dared a live performance in years. Don would turn to Francey and hiss, “It’s not . . . gonna . . . happen. Andy’s not . . . gonna . . . do it.” Then Don would turn back to the phone and say, “Oh, yes . . . Oh, yes . . .”

In his final years, Don was earning money and acclaim from the burgeoning industry of cartoon voice-overs, most notably in the role of Mayor Turkey Lurkey in the 2005 Disney feature Chicken Little. And he was touring the country with Tim Conway, playing the regional theater circuit.

The same month Chicken Little hit theaters, November 2005, Don reprised the role of lecherous landlord Ralph Furley in a brief cameo on That ’70s Show. It would be his final on-screen performance.

As the year wore on, Don’s lungs deteriorated further. He canceled a public appearance in Morgantown—something Don never did—and he started begging off gatherings with old friends. By Thanksgiving, Don was gasping for air. Within weeks, the wind seemed to have drained from his lungs. He could no longer climb stairs or even walk to the store without panting for breath.

Doctors found a tumor. Don had lung cancer.

Don asked the doctor, “Are you telling me there’s no cure?” The question alarmed Francey because there is essentially no cure for lung cancer. “When we left, I felt we’d heard the worst news we could have heard, and Don seemed not to care,” Francey recalled. “He said, ‘I’m not going to die soon.’ He was in denial. People say that’s the first stage of death.”

Don started chemotherapy, and for a while it seemed that he improved. His outlook remained improbably sanguine. He and Francey would lunch at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City, and they made regular forays to the library to borrow books on tape. Francey brought him some favorite programs to watch. Don was an Anglophile. He loved the crime writer P. D. James and old episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs and Fawlty Towers. Francey would print out editorials from the New York Times and read them to Don.

Don told almost no one of his illness, lest news should leak to the tabloids. Don still wanted to work, and a sick actor could not get work. He didn’t tell his children he was dying. He didn’t tell Andy.

Late in 2005, Don dragged himself into a recording booth to lend his voice to Air Buddies, a direct-to-video Disney movie about talking dogs. Francey was horrified at Don’s insistence on working. When she couldn’t dissuade him, she appealed to Sherwin Bash, his manager, saying, “I don’t think he’s up for this.” Sherwin couldn’t stop Don. Francey tried to accept his decision with stoicism. “Don wants to die onstage,” she told herself, “and that isn’t any worse than dying in a hospital bed.”

Air Buddies would be Don’s final role.

Don and Francey went out with Andy and Cindi on Cindi’s birthday, a few weeks before Christmas. They met at La Dolce Vita in Beverly Hills, a place where stars could dine unmolested. Andy noticed Don’s labored breathing. When the party rose to leave, he could plainly see his friend was gasping for breath. Later, Andy telephoned. Francey answered. Andy said, “Something is wrong.” Cindi joined Andy on the phone and told Francey that Don needed to see a doctor. Francey bit her tongue. “He’s seen the doctor,” she told them, “and he has this condition, and we’re doing things for it.”

Even as his lungs weakened, Don insisted on keeping up appearances. When he and Francey went out to a holiday party, Don beseeched her to hide his oxygen canister in some bushes outside the home. Later that evening, Don walked across a room and began struggling for breath. Francey told him, “I have to go out and get the oxygen.” He looked at her with big, frightened eyes and hissed, “Don’t do it!” Don would sooner have died than let people see him breathing canned oxygen.

The agony continued when Andy telephoned to arrange a visit on Christmas. Don replied, “It’s not a good time; I don’t think I can fit it in.” He didn’t want Andy to see him sucking oxygen from a mask. Francey feared she and Don would pass his last Christmas alone. She told Don, “I’m going to have to tell Andy. Don’t worry about it, he’ll understand.”

Francey telephoned Andy. She told him that Don was having lung trouble, and that he was reluctant to tell anyone or be seen with his breathing aids. She said nothing of cancer.

Francey put Don on the phone. Andy told Don, “Look, I have my little scooter that I sometimes drive around the house. I don’t like people to see me on my scooter. I’ll have my scooter, and you’ll have your oxygen.” Andy laughed. Don laughed. “We’re going to get through this,” Andy said. After Don put down the phone, he seemed immeasurably relieved.

Andy and Don met at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills a few days before Christmas to dine at the Belvedere, a five-diamond restaurant. Andy brought Dixie, his daughter, and her children. Francey brought the dreaded oxygen canister in her purse, but Don wouldn’t need it. Andy and Don told the old stories, about No Time for Sergeants and the Griffith Show. They talked of the work Don was doing, and of the work Andy wanted to do, and of working together again one day. “It was a beautiful thing to watch,” Dixie recalled. “You could feel the love between the two men.”

But Don looked frail. And when Dixie and her children stood to leave, Don remained seated. “Don wanted us to leave before him so we didn’t see the trouble he was having,” Andy recalled later.

On Christmas Day, Don and Francey hosted the children, Karen and Tom. Don looked deathly, yet forbade Francey to tell them of his illness. When Francey protested, Don replied, “I’m not going to die anytime soon.”

Shortly after the New Year, Don sank into delirium and entered Cedars-Sinai hospital. “He didn’t want a soul to come in,” Francey recalled. But Don finally agreed to tell his children he had cancer. Karen and Tom arrived at the hospital. Francey swore them to secrecy.

During his two-week stay on the pulmonary ward, Don grew more lucid and was finally able to speak. Once, he opened his eyes, trained them on Francey and Karen, and said, “I’m waiting for the great wizard in the sky to take me away.” Don was not one for spiritual pronouncements. Was he talking about God and the hereafter, or simply having a laugh? Neither listener was quite sure.

Don was sent home with a round-the-clock nurse. A few weeks later, on February 23, a sensor attached to his finger triggered an alarm, signaling that his lungs were no longer furnishing enough oxygen to his body. In the ambulance, his heart stopped, then it started again. He slipped into a coma. He had still told no one outside his family, apart from his manager, that he was dying.

From the hospital room, Francey telephoned Andy. Andy raced to the hospital. Francey called Tom Poston, Don’s old friend from the Steve Allen days, and held the phone to Don’s ear so Tom could say good-bye. She telephoned Richie Ferrara. Francey feared Don’s old friends didn’t grasp the finality of the moment. She told Richie, “You have to listen to me: This is it. He’s not going to make it through the night.” Francey held the phone to Don’s ear. Richie told Don, “Keep it up. You’ve got things to do yet.” While Richie spoke, Don’s body visibly responded.

Kay, Don’s first wife, was summoned to the phone, and again someone held the receiver to Don’s ear so she could say a few words.

Andy arrived at the UCLA Medical Center. Francey and Karen left the room so Andy could speak to Don alone. Andy took Don’s hand. He said, “Jess, breathe. You gotta make this. You gotta pull through. Breathe.” Don’s chest heaved. Andy said, “That’s a boy. Keep breathing.” Andy told Don he loved him.

Then Andy departed, leaving Karen and Francey with Don in the hospital room. “They were really just keeping him alive at that point,” Francey recalled, “waiting for everybody to say good-bye,” including son Tom, who was flying in from San Francisco.

Don had written in his will that he was not to be sustained artificially. Doctors unplugged the machines. Don Knotts died at 11:00 p.m. on February 24, 2006, a Friday, with Francey, Karen, and Tom embracing him.

The Los Angeles Times wrote that Don had, in his later years, attained the stature of “lodestar for younger comic actors. The new generation came to appreciate his highly physical brand of acting that, at its best, was in the tradition of silent-film greats such as Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Harold Lloyd.” The New York Times hailed Don as “a high-status comic who played low-status roles. Actors who worked with him almost universally deferred to him as a comedic grandmaster,” yet his characters inevitably found themselves the butt of jokes.

Andy appeared on the Today show and said, “I lost my best friend.”

Later, Andy spoke by telephone to Dixie, his daughter. He said he was worried that Don, comatose in his hospital bed, might not have heard Andy’s final words. Dixie, who worked with the dying, reassured her father: Don had heard. “I think it was really important to my dad for Don to know he was there,” she recalled.

More than that, Andy yearned to know whether his best friend had accepted God and gone to heaven. He knew the Bible-thumpers back in West Virginia had spooked Don, had given him nightmares, had ultimately chased him away from organized religion. Don and Andy didn’t talk much about God, but Andy sensed Don’s position on faith was agnostic at best. Alas, Don had died before Andy could ask. Now he dearly hoped to see Don in the hereafter.

The funeral was set for March 6 at Pierce Brothers in Westwood, a small, storybook campus of graves and greenery set among the towers of steel and glass on Wilshire Boulevard. Don’s casket, dusky-blue enamel decorated with silver dancing fish in homage to Mr. Limpet, was set against a towering rock wall. Andy, Tim Conway, and Tom Poston gathered with Don’s less celebrated friends and relations inside Chapel of the Palms, a faux-Japanese pavilion.

The decidedly secular affair was led by a Unitarian minister; that all-embracing faith seemed the right choice. Though not religious himself, Don knew that other people—Andy in particular—would want a service. He had always regretted avoiding his own mother’s funeral.

Andy was concerned at what the Unitarian might say. The minister called Andy and sketched out his carefully worded sermon. He asked if Andy had a problem. Andy replied, “Well, you know, I do believe that Don is going to be in heaven, and you’re not going to say that.”

Francey arranged for Andy himself to speak at the service. Andy stepped forward and spoke, his voice choked with emotion. “It’s hard for me to say anything,” he began. Andy then told the story of Jesus and the penitent thief. As Jesus hung on the cross, a condemned man beside him asked Jesus to “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus replied, “I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise.”

Andy’s voice rose and slowed as he concluded, summoning the fire of his Preacher-and-the-Bear sermons back in North Carolina: “And I take comfort because I know that Don . . . is . . . in . . . paradise!” Then, his body quaking, Andy left the podium. As he exited, Andy’s voice burst forth from the chapel’s public address system, singing the hymn “Precious Memories” from one of his gospel albums.

Don was buried at Westwood Memorial Park, near the graves of Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, and Truman Capote. Frail Andy insisted on bearing Don’s coffin. Francey summoned several strong men to help him.

A memorial service was held May 4 at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, with an all-star guest list, a chocolate fountain, and an ice sculpture of Mr. Limpet. Ron Howard opened the three-hour ceremony. Andy followed. His face veritably glowed with love, and emotion no longer strangled his voice.

“I’ll tell you something I believe,” Andy said. “I’m Christian, but I believe there’s a place for all of us in God’s kingdom. I know when it comes my time, I’ll see Don again with our Lord.”

Joan Staley, Don’s costar in The Ghost and Mister Chicken, heard Andy’s words. “And I remember it hitting me: He really loved him. He really loved him.”

Andy’s dream of living out his final years in the company of Don had died with his friend. Now, he told Cindi, he wanted out of LA—even though the Griffiths had barely settled into their new home. “With Don gone, I’m ready to go back to North Carolina,” he told friends. By year’s end, Andy and Cindi had left California.

The Griffith diaspora had lost its beloved Barney, and talk soon turned to the quest for a fitting tribute. Shortly after the memorial, a plan was announced. Two fans from Mount Airy, Andy’s hometown, would commission a life-size bronze statue of Deputy Fife. They would donate it to the city once they had raised the necessary funds.

A statue of Andy Griffith already sat in Mount Airy, outside the Andy Griffith Playhouse. Commissioned by the cable network TV Land and installed in 2004, the monument depicted Andy and Opie holding hands and walking with their fishing poles, above the inscription A SIMPLER TIME, A SWEETER PLACE.

Don’s death underscored his absence from that memorial. The statue backers thought it fitting that Barney should stand near Andy and Opie in front of the playhouse, or maybe down on Main Street, directing traffic into eternity. “Mayberry without Barney Fife just wouldn’t be the same,” said Tom Hellebrand, a local restaurateur. His partner on the project, Neal Shelton, made his living restoring Ford Galaxie 500 sedans for the Mount Airy tourist circuit.

Francey, immersed in Don’s memorial, knew nothing of the statue until she was blindsided one day by a call from Andy, who sounded hysterical. “They’re trying to turn Don into Bob’s Big Boy,” he cried.

Andy said he feared the men planned the Barney statue as a glorified sandwich board to drum up sales for their respective businesses, not as a simple, altruistic tribute. Andy wanted the statue nipped in the bud. But he himself didn’t dare get involved, for fear his reluctance might be read the wrong way.

Andy seemed swept up in a familiar tempest of powerful emotions: protectiveness of the Mayberry brand mixed with possessiveness of his hometown and simple egotism. For half a century, Andy had scorned Mount Airy. Now, he was fighting to protect his primacy there. Erecting a statue of Don, Andy said, “would be an absolute shot in my eye.”

There seemed no basis for Andy’s mistrust of the statue promoters. Yet, in early June, the two men were told they could not proceed. CBS Corp., which had granted permission for the statue, now revoked it. Company officials said the project was dead because it lacked the blessing of the Don Knotts estate—Francey. In a series of increasingly desperate phone calls, Andy had persuaded her to oppose the statue. If someone wanted to build a memorial to Don, Andy said, it should go in his own hometown of Morgantown. Mount Airy belonged to Andy.

The statue promoters were stunned. And they were broke. The fracas became a national story, and opinion quickly turned against the “big-city lawyers” and the Knotts estate for blocking the statue. No one seemed to realize the objection had come from Andy himself.

At the end of June 2006, Tom Hellebrand offered to donate the partially completed statue to anyone, anywhere, who could find it a home that appealed to the Knotts family. He suggested Morgantown, Don’s birthplace. Morgantown leaders loved the idea. Andy hated it. He telephoned Francey repeatedly, frantically, begging her to shut it down. He didn’t want the Barney statue going up in Morgantown, either. If there was to be a statue of Don, he told her, it should depict the man, not the deputy.

It was hard, once again, to parse Andy’s reasons, or to see how a statue of Barney Fife could possibly harm Don’s legacy. Andy seemed concerned that the statue would reduce his dear friend to a roadside caricature. But if a Barney Fife statue was such a bad idea, then why had Andy permitted a statue of Andy Taylor—the character—in Mount Airy?

As he neared the end of his life, Andy seemed to be reordering his priorities. If Manteo was his home, then Mount Airy was his legacy—a living, breathing memorial to his greatest creation. Perhaps it hadn’t dawned on Andy how badly he craved that tribute until he faced the prospect of sharing it with his best friend.

Francey had no objection to a statue of Don going up in Mount Airy or Morgantown. But she respected Andy, so she assented. In July, she and Andy issued a joint public statement: “No one cares more about Don’s image than we do. It would be wonderful to have a statue in Morgantown, W.Va., of Don Knotts as Don Knotts. But this particular image”—Don as Barney—“does not fit with our understanding of Don’s experience growing up in Morgantown.”

Tom Hellebrand sold his diner and his home and severed most of his ties to Mayberry; the half-finished statue was destroyed. In the real Mayberry, a local editorial mused, no one would lose his business and his home over “this statue thing. Maybe that’s just what happens when Sheriff Taylor isn’t around to smooth things over.” The writer didn’t know the sheriff had been the one stirring things up.

Inside of a year, an effort was under way to fund a new statue in Don’s birthplace. This design depicted Don in a suit, rather than a lawman’s uniform, with his deputy’s badge concealed coyly within a cupped palm. By the start of 2015, the project had surpassed its $50,000 fund-raising goal, and supporters had chosen a fitting location: outside the old Metropolitan Theatre, within whose seats Don had first been bitten by the acting bug.

• • •

Andy was, at seventy-six, the most famous living soul in North Carolina, the figure at the center of an $80 million tourism industry. In fall 2002, Andy prepared a triumphal return to Mount Airy for a ceremony dedicating an eleven-mile stretch of US Highway 52 in his honor. On the eve of the visit, he telephoned the Surry Arts Council.

Its director, Tanya Jones, worked inside the Andy Griffith Playhouse and had staged eleven Mayberry Days, but she had never spoken to the man. Now, Andy was on the telephone, telling Tanya he wanted to see the playhouse and meet with his old friend Emmett Forrest and stay in his old Mount Airy home.

The ceremony marked Andy’s first public appearance in Mount Airy in forty-five years. “I’m proud to be from Mount Airy,” Andy told the crowd. “I think of you often, and I won’t be such a stranger from here out.”

To that moment, Andy and his birthplace had seemed at cross-purposes. Here was an entire town laboring to define itself as the real-life Mayberry—and here was the mythical town’s creator saying it wasn’t so. “Now they think that I based the show on Mount Airy, and I’ve argued about this too long,” Andy had snapped at an interviewer in 1998. “I don’t care. Let them think what they want.”

On this day, with the townsfolk gathered at his feet, stubborn old Andy finally, grudgingly confessed the truth. “People started saying that Mayberry was based on Mount Airy,” he told the crowd with a sly grin. “It sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?”

Andy lived his final years as Carolina royalty. Fans lurked at the gates to his Manteo estate. Governors courted his favor. Locals guarded his privacy with the zeal of a palace guard. Andy spent his days drinking his coffee, reading his paper, and riding his John Deere Gator around his seventy acres of forest and sand.

Don had kept working because he could not bear to turn down a job. Andy, by contrast, seemed to keep working in a ceaseless quest to prove himself—to finally earn some artistic recognition, and to undo past mistakes in a brilliant but scattershot career.

Now, like Don before him, Andy was enjoying a sort of autumnal comeback. It started with Waitress, an art-house project that Andy took on around the time of Don’s death, inspired by his old friend’s dogged work ethic. He was cast as Joe, the crotchety owner of a diner that employed Keri Russell, the film’s lovelorn protagonist.

Andy’s labors in Waitress reminded him faintly of his work five decades earlier with Elia Kazan. Adrienne Shelly, the director—later to be strangled by a construction worker in her Greenwich Village apartment—extracted a superior performance from Andy. She was a director who gave actual direction, and Andy listened. “Be firm,” she would tell him, over and over, until Andy would explode, “I’m trying!” Then Adrienne would smile: “That way.”

When Andy spoke his last line, Adrienne Shelly embraced him and the entire company applauded. To Andy, it felt a bit like opening night on No Time for Sergeants, fifty years earlier.

Waitress was released in 2007. For the first time in what seemed forever, Andy’s dramatic work drew serious note. The Wall Street Journal opined, “This comic virtuoso is as commanding as ever, but with a new dimension of restraint.”

Ron and Rance Howard telephoned separately to tell Andy how good he was. Interviewers called, too, and for once Andy answered the phone. They had no idea how he savored the attention.

Andy Griffith had earned almost no formal recognition for either his comedy or his acting. Most of the awards on his résumé were trivial, such as a 2003 Single Dad of the Year honor from TV Land. He hadn’t won even one Emmy, let alone five. Yet, in Andy’s final years, Hollywood finally seemed to be coming round to the idea that he was one of the greats. “At age 81, Andy Griffith has been discovered,” one reporter wrote.

In 2009, Andy starred in the independent feature Play the Game, cast as a lonely widower who transforms into a retirement-home lothario. Andy, ribald as ever, reveled in the sexually charged dialogue. It would be his final role.

The statue debacle seemed an ancient memory when, in September 2009, Andy’s friends in Mount Airy cut the ribbon on the Andy Griffith Museum. Owned by the city and housed within the same complex as the Andy Griffith Playhouse, the twenty-five-hundred-square-foot museum gave a permanent home to Griffith memorabilia collected by Emmett Forrest, Andy’s lifelong friend, who had amassed the items over the decades. Andy would sometimes show up at Emmett’s door with bits of flotsam Emmett had spotted in Andy’s garage months or years earlier. Andy did not attend the opening.

Andy’s health was in steady decline. In summer 2000, he had survived a heart attack, quadruple bypass surgery, and the customary “Brave Last Stand” headlines in the tabloids. In the final years of Andy’s life, he and Cindi pulled away from several of their old friends, and the Griffiths became progressively harder to reach. Their social circle grew steadily smaller. Few people set foot inside the Griffith home apart from those who provided goods or services to the household.

Quentin Bell had been one of Andy’s closest friends in the years before he met Cindi. Quentin’s property lay right next door, and the Griffith Labradors often wandered over to Quentin’s yard. “So I would see Cindi and Andy,” Quentin recalled. “But it was never like I came into his house for a drink or anything. Andy didn’t drink at the end, I don’t think.” In March 2012, Andy and Cindi unexpectedly invited Quentin and his wife over for lunch. Andy gave Quentin a tour of his palatial new home, built a short distance from the older, smaller residence that Andy and Barbara had shared. The new Griffith dwelling was several years old, but Quentin had never really seen it. Andy showed Quentin his Moravian Bible and drove his old friend up and down the sand hills on his beloved Gator. Quentin would never see Andy again.

June 1, 2012, was Andy’s eighty-sixth birthday. He treated himself to a glass of champagne. Francey Yarborough Knotts telephoned to wish him well and was surprised when Andy himself picked up the phone. Andy wanted to talk about Don. Francey and Andy had spoken many times since Don had died, and Andy mostly avoided discussing him, “like he felt he shouldn’t be bringing up the past,” Francey recalled. On this day, though, Andy held forth about Don’s films, his stand-up routines, his radio voices—all the things Don was so good at. Andy kept talking, and something in his voice gave Francey the feeling that Andy might not have long to live. It occurred to her, suddenly, to tell Andy about Don’s cryptic remark from his hospital bed, on that day shortly before he died, about waiting “for the great wizard in the sky to take me away.”

“Wow,” Andy said, then paused. “Really. Thank you for telling me that.” His voice swelled with emotion. “That’s wonderful. Thank you . . . thank you . . .”

It meant everything to Andy. To him, heaven was real, a place he hoped to go, and he wanted more than anything else to see Don there when he arrived. Now, he had reason for hope.

Andy telephoned his daughter, Dixie. Their conversation “was about making sure that I was at peace with certain aspects of my life, and he shared with me his peace that he had found,” she recalled. “It felt very much like he was imparting to me wisdom to carry forward. Because of the nature, because of the context of the conversation, I knew, I just knew that was the last time I was going to talk to him. He told me he loved me; I told him I loved him.”

Andy spoke to Jim Nabors. Jim was startled at the frailty in Andy’s voice. “Goll dang,” Jim told Andy, “you sound old.”

Andy shot back, “Well, I’m eighty-six!”

On July 2, Andy fell suddenly, gravely ill. Tests later showed he had suffered a silent heart attack. For some reason, he elected not to go to the hospital. Instead, he summoned the small entourage of locals who remained close to the reclusive Griffiths. They included John Wilson, the former Manteo mayor who had designed Andy’s new home; Billy Parker, John’s partner; and Calvin Gibbs, the contractor who had built the home, and who served as a Barney Fife–styled companion to Andy in his final years. Cindi was summoned from her winter retreat in the Florida Keys and arrived after midnight.

Andy knew he was dying. He instructed Calvin on the terms of his burial and said, “Bless you, Calvin. I love you.” They were his final words. Then Andy settled into a pained sleep. He awoke early the next morning, rose from bed, and sat in his wheelchair. That was where Cindi found him, unresponsive, around 7:00 a.m. She telephoned 911.

Four and a half hours later, Andy Griffith’s body was in the ground.

In death, as in life, Andy shrouded himself and his loved ones in privacy. He had told Calvin to bury him immediately, before the paparazzi could storm Roanoke Island to capture his remains on film. The ever-loyal denizens of Dare County did their part: the sheriff grounded helicopters, to keep camera crews away from the Griffith estate. The hectic timetable meant that only a few of Andy’s local friends could attend the makeshift service. His lone surviving child could not.

“Apparently that was his wish,” Dixie recalled. “He didn’t want a funeral. He didn’t want a circus. He didn’t want a media frenzy. And that was an unfortunate circumstance. How do I gather the girls and get on a plane and go? But I understand if that was his wish, and I have to be respectful of what he wanted.”

Andy had never won an Emmy, an Oscar, or a Tony. Yet, he had attained a celebrity that transcended those honors. Like Lucille Ball or Johnny Carson, Andy had connected with American society to its core. The Andy Griffith Show had shaped popular culture. His teleplays had taught America something about itself—about the virtues of friends and family and a savored life. The program had attracted devotees as disparate as J. D. Salinger, John Waters, and Dolly Parton. President Barack Obama praised Andy as “beloved by generations of fans and revered by entertainers who followed in his footsteps.”

In September, Ron Howard delivered an elegant eulogy to Andy at the 2012 Emmy Awards, saying, “Andy’s legacy of excellence, accessibility, and range puts him in the pantheon. But, dang, if he didn’t make it look powerful easy while he was going about it. Didn’t he?”

On the same broadcast, actors Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul re-created the opening scene of The Andy Griffith Show in character as violent meth dealers from the celebrated television morality play Breaking Bad. The moment underscored the innocence and idealism of the era that had spawned the Griffith Show. At the close of the skit, the men pulled handguns from beneath their hazmat suits and shot Deputy Fife in the chest.

A few months later, Andy was inexplicably omitted from the “In Memoriam” tribute reel at the Oscars. An NBC affiliate in Cleveland responded by airing two hours of Matlock in place of its usual Thursday lineup, in protest.

In the end, whether he wanted one or not, Andy Griffith would have his memorial.

One September weekend, nearly three months after Andy’s death, tens of thousands of Mayberry faithful journeyed to Mount Airy for the twenty-third annual Mayberry Days, now an ambitious three-day undertaking. At 10:00 a.m. Friday, the stage of the Blackmon Amphitheatre filled with an ensemble of Mayberry royalty: character impersonators, descendants of dead cast members, and a few frail souls who once played actual parts on Andy’s show. Here was Karen Knotts, with her father’s saucer eyes; and George Lindsey Jr., who struck a passing resemblance to his father when he planted a beanie on his head; and a Don Knotts surrogate, with a few extra pounds on his frame and no magic in his eyes. No one dared impersonate Andy. Maggie Peterson Mancuso, the former Charlene Darling, offered consolation to a community in mourning. Over the past year, the town had lost not just Andy but also George “Goober” Lindsey and Doug “Darling” Dillard. “We’ll always have them in our heart,” Charlene Darling said, “and they’re smiling down on us now.”

Downtown, an entire fleet of Ford Galaxie 500s had been parked along Main Street at regular intervals. The lines at Barney’s Café and Opie’s Candy Store snaked out their doors. Those stores were modern Mayberry replicas; Walker’s Soda Fountain was the real thing, open since 1925. Andy Griffith had worked there one summer as a bicycle delivery boy, back when it was a pharmacy.

The afternoon ended with a trivia contest: What is Thelma Lou’s house number? In Episode 34, who is holding a copy of the Press Herald with a hole in it? What is the license number on Orville Monroe’s hearse?

The eventual winner, Pat Bullins of Walnut Cove, NC, answered eighteen of the twenty questions correctly. Her son Ernie had helped her train for the contest using the freeze-frame on their VCR. Her prize: a trophy cup bearing the inscription MAYBERRY TRIVIA WORLD CHAMPION.

All day, the line outside the Andy Griffith Museum wound around the building. At the entrance, Emmett Forrest, Andy’s childhood friend, held court. Many visitors were crying. Leaning in, Emmett confided, “I have people come up to me and say, ‘Tell Andy I love him.’ I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that.” A few months later, Emmett himself would be dead; perhaps he delivered the messages after all.

Saturday opened with a parade down Main Street in a chilly drizzle. The North Surry High School Band tromped past, some of the musicians dressed in hillbilly garb, just behind the float carrying Little Miss Bacon Bits. The Southern Mountain Fire Cloggers danced on a flatbed to the tune of “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad.” Out on Haymore Street, a more sporadic parade filed past the yellow frame ranch house at 711, where Andy’s family once lived, opposite a water tower.

Sunday dawned with a “Gospel Tribute” to Andy, featuring the same Moravian band that had once counted Andy as a member. Four men in black suits led the crowd in some of Andy’s favorite hymns: “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” One of the preachers lifted his voice to sing the Lord’s Prayer, and a few in the crowd raised their open palms toward heaven.

Back in town, a shopkeeper did a brisk business selling a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Andy in his shirt and tie, and Barney in his salt-and-pepper suit, both men kicking back on wicker chairs and laughing together above the legend HEAVEN’S FRONT PORCH.

The shirt captured the moment better than any speech, or any statue. While Andy Griffith and Don Knotts came from different towns, pursued largely separate careers, and amassed many artistic credits alone, it seemed inevitable that history would ultimately remember them together, two names to be uttered in one breath.

The Andy Griffith Show is Andy’s greatest legacy, and Don’s. The program endures, in the end, as a monument to their friendship. A half century on, it seems clear that the Griffith Show was not really about a father and his son, nor a widower and his aunt. It was about a sheriff and his deputy. The bond between Andy and Barney was the essence of Mayberry. Whenever the sheriff raced around town to clean up his deputy’s messes, or to redeem his failures, we saw the comical lengths to which one friend might go to protect another. Whenever Andy gazed lovingly at his diminutive costar, or Don tortured Andy with his big bug eyes and tried a dozen different ways to crack him up, we saw the depth of the friendship that lay so plainly behind the performance.

We can only hope Andy and Don are together now, beneath the setting sun, lazily plotting a walk into town to fetch a bottle of pop.