Mrs. Barton never allowed me to dawdle, given how tight our schedule was. If I was having trouble focusing, she would check me: “You walk in this door and this is the schoolroom, Ronny. You shut the door and pick up where you left off.” And I was never to slam the door. One day I walked into the schoolroom a little too pleased with myself. I had just gotten a big laugh doing a scene and came charging in on a performer’s high, slamming the door. On a whim, I decided to do my Popeye impression for Mrs. Barton: “I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!”
She was not amused. “I told you not to slam the door, Ronny,” she said. And then she handed down my punishment: I had to write “I will not slam the door when I come back from the set” twenty-five times on the blackboard.
I get kind of wistful when I think about Mrs. Barton now. She was someone with whom I spent every weekday for about half my childhood, but once The Andy Griffith Show was over, I never saw her again. We had an affectionate if professional relationship, and she definitely broadened my horizons. She was a worldly woman who had been married, gotten divorced, and was, as far as I know, childless. Her passion was Mexico, where she kept a house. She spoke Spanish fluently and loved the country’s culture, people, and capital, Mexico City. One lasting lesson she imparted to me, lest I ever be fooled by tourist traps, is that “Tijuana is not Mexico, Ronny!” The minute we wrapped a season and went on hiatus, she was off like a shot, zooming down the 101 to her happy place south of the border.
Mrs. Barton was a calming presence amid the inherent bustle and drama of shooting a TV show. She was serious about boundaries. She kept to her schoolroom and never watched me film a scene. Nor did she ever talk shop about the show or, later on, acknowledge its success. The only recollection I have of her acknowledging show business at all was when she let slip that “Lucille Ball is a wonderful woman and Desi Arnaz was terrible to her.”
Her firm hand in making me compartmentalize my time has paid off lifelong dividends. Those herky-jerky days of going back and forth between school and the set made me realize that I was adept at spinning plates, keeping a lot of things going at once—which is how I now spend my adulthood, usually with one picture in the shooting phase, another in prep, a few others in development, and an assortment of Imagine Entertainment projects happening on my watch.
In all our years together, Mrs. Barton got truly angry with me just once. This was in 1963, when JFK was assassinated—an event that, naturally, upset everyone at the studio, but no one more than Mrs. Barton, a devout Catholic. It was a Friday, a rehearsal day. When the news reached us that Kennedy had been shot, we all gathered around a radio, waiting to hear if the president had survived. Our somber vigil grew more so when we learned that he didn’t. The men shook their heads in disbelief, taking long drags on their cigarettes. Mrs. Barton cried.
When we came back to work the following Monday, I offhandedly remarked to Mrs. Barton that it had bugged me that I had been unable to watch my usual slate of TV shows on Saturday morning—my beloved Heckle and Jeckle cartoons and Sky King reruns—because the networks were showing nothing but news, news, news.
She rightfully upbraided me. “This is a terrible time in our country!” she said. “The president was shot, and that is much more important than cartoons!”
I RECEIVED ANOTHER kind of education entirely from spending day after day in an adult workplace. Mrs. Barton aside, The Andy Griffith Show made no concessions to the fact that a little boy was present. The crew members were salty old characters who swore like sailors and drank like fishes. Some of them dated back to the silent-movie era. All of them smoked so furiously and continuously that my eyes were always burning.
Reggie Smith, the prop guy who threw the rock for me in Franklin Canyon Park, was one such character. He lived up to his duties and was a dedicated craftsman, but he was quite often in his cups by noon. Today this pattern would raise serious concerns for his health, but in those less enlightened times, his condition was simply a source of amusement on set, something that made him kind of adorable to everyone else: “Oh, Reggie, you dropped the apple pie! C’mon, Reg!”