A strict Howard-family policy was that one adult or the other had to be present in the house between 9 A.M. and 6 P.M. every weekday, without fail, in case the phone rang. A phone call could mean an audition or a job offer. A missed call could be the opportunity, squandered. And my thrifty parents didn’t want to waste money on an answering service whose reliability they wouldn’t trust anyway. So certain days felt like vigils, with Dad puttering around, doing his chores, but clearly waiting, waiting, waiting for the phone to ring.
RON
It was a big deal when the phone rang one day just before Christmas in 1959. Dad picked up the receiver to hear my agent, Bill Schuller, tell him that a Mr. Sheldon Leonard wanted to see me. This wasn’t about a one-day job in yet another stock-serious Playhouse 90 episode in which I played “the boy” and got killed off. No, Sheldon Leonard was developing a TV series.
Unbeknownst to me, Leonard had called Bill the day after the G.E. Theater broadcast to say he wanted to put a “hold” on me for the Griffith show he was developing, essentially guaranteeing me the role of Griffith’s son if the show was picked up. Bill explained that I was committed to Mr. O’Malley.
Leonard was unfazed. “I don’t think O’Malley is gonna go,” he said. “I’d like to put a second position on the kid.” With my father’s consent, Bill obliged the producer’s request—if Mr. O’Malley wasn’t picked up as a series, Leonard had dibs on me for his new show.
Mr. O’Malley did not go. It was too weird and whimsical, probably, for 1959 America. But what if it had? It’s one of the big what-ifs that still plays out in my brain. Suppose I had signed a long-term contract for Mr. O’Malley. It would have meant that people would have called out “Hey, Barnaby!” instead of “Hey, Opie!”
Dad and I met Mr. Leonard in his Hollywood office. A suave, dapper man who had been a busy character actor in his younger years, he had worked with the likes of Joe Mankiewicz and Frank Capra. Remember Nick the bartender in It’s a Wonderful Life, who is a kind man in Bedford Falls and a disagreeable lout in Pottersville? That was Sheldon.
I knew nothing about Andy Griffith at that point and Dad knew next to nothing. Sheldon filled us in. Andy, a tall, commanding native North Carolinian from a working-class background, had broken into show business as a comic monologist. In one of his routines, “What It Was, Was Football,” he played a rural preacher who happened upon a clearing where a football game was being played. Ignorant of the sport, he described the scene with bewilderment, as a bizarre fight between two groups of men over a “pumpkin,” with a team of “convicts” （the refs） supervising the proceedings.
The football monologue catapulted Andy into a career in radio and on Broadway. In 1957, he got his shot at film stardom, debuting in Elia Kazan’s astonishing A Face in the Crowd, written by Budd Schulberg. The movie, a dark, prescient take on American politics and mass media, is more appreciated now than it was at the time of its release. But even then, critics were mesmerized by Andy’s fiery performance as Lonesome Rhodes, a small-time radio host who, as his popularity snowballs, transforms into a lusty, egomaniacal demagogue.
Many years later, when I was a young adult, Andy told me that playing Lonesome Rhodes had been a harrowing experience for him. Kazan was a brilliant director, he said, but he had manipulated and provoked Andy to summon his darkest, ugliest thoughts and impulses, and the process about wrecked him. “I don’t ever want to do that again,” Andy said. “I like to laugh when I’m working.”
Andy had his pick of dramatic roles after A Face in the Crowd, but he chose not to go down that path—the psychological toll had been too high. To some degree, Andy said, Mayberry and the benevolent Sheriff Andy Taylor were a conscious response to Lonesome Rhodes, embodiments of rural America at its best.
In Sheldon Leonard’s office, Dad and I also met a man named Aaron Ruben, another producer, who was to function as The Andy Griffith Show’s showrunner, the person who oversees the program on a day-to-day basis. Nominally, this meeting was my audition, but I think they had already decided upon casting me. All I remember is that I was small enough to stand without crouching underneath Aaron’s wooden desk, a sight that made Aaron break into a wide smile. This moment would turn into a fond memory—as the years passed and each new season began, I would measure my growth by lining myself up against Aaron’s desk.