Dad was a help to me in processing what had happened. Fortunately, he was on set that day, giving me someone to turn to after witnessing the man’s breakdown. His presence also benefited The Andy Griffith Show, because they had a good actor on the premises who could immediately be pressed into service. Dad put on a suit of Andy’s and learned the character’s lines. We reshot the scene. Dad nailed it, and his close-up speech, too. But there were uncharacteristically few laughs that day. Everyone was shaken. This jarring introduction to the toll that our pressure-filled line of work could have on fragile people has stayed with me.
THE CRITICS NEVER much cared for us. “The Andy Griffith Show appears to be only mildly entertaining,” said the New York Times in October 1960, our first month on the air. And that was one of the friendlier reviews we received.
But we were a ratings hit from the get-go. We finished at number four in the Nielsen rankings that season and never looked back, a top-ten program for all eight seasons of the program’s life. Mayberry struck a chord. It was sweet without being hokey and funny without being farcical. In Andy Taylor, the sheriff without a gun, America found the gentle authority figure that it craved—an easygoing fellow with a humorously imperfect but ultimately viable approach to crisis management.
I’ve since come to believe that Sheldon Leonard’s experience working with Frank Capra must have informed our show, since, tonally, it’s the closest a sitcom ever got to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and It’s a Wonderful Life. I brought this up to Andy years later and he said that the subject of Capra never came up in his discussions with Sheldon. But I witnessed these great triangular conversations between Andy, Sheldon, and Aaron Ruben, who was brilliant in his own right—he had written for Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Phil Silvers—and they were like alchemy: out of the mix of these three sensibilities, one southern-rural and two urban-Jewish, came TV gold.
Andy, like all of us, learned on the job. He later said that he played Andy Taylor too broadly that first season, still steeped in the rubelike southerners he had played in the past. He progressively dialed down Sheriff Andy’s theatrics and turned himself into the show’s straight man and voice of reason. Me? I was a sponge, absorbing the intricacies of how television was made by observing all the different craftsmen at work. I regarded the set with a sense of mystery and excitement. What did all these people do? How did the camera actually work? Why did they have to change lenses all the time? What were the sets made of? Who painted them and made them look real?
In the Renaissance era, the artisan class put its children to work as apprentices young, enlisting their help to create devotional frescoes and sculptures. The kids started out at age five or six, cleaning brushes and tools, and slowly took on greater responsibilities as they began to better understand the craft, which in turn fostered a better understanding of the artistry involved. That parallels my trajectory on The Andy Griffith Show, as I gradually figured out how and why television worked.
Howard Morris took notice of my curiosity. A frenetic comic actor, Howard had a recurring role on the show as Ernest T. Bass, the fast-talking, perpetually unshaven mountain man who always greeted Andy and Barney by saying “Howdy-do to you and you!” Howard was an outlier among the cast, a Jewish guy from the Bronx who had been one of the repertory players on Your Show of Shows alongside Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, and Imogene Coca. But the very fact that he had worked with such TV legends meant that his words carried weight. Howard observed me observing and offered up some pro tips.
One day he saw me squinting at a row of reflector boards, the large, flat cards that redirect light onto the actors’ faces. “Are those shiny boards hurting your eyes, Ronny?” he asked.
Wilting in the heat and barely able to see, I weakly nodded yes. “Good,” he said. “If a TV actor is in a little pain, it means they’re right on their mark!”
Howard then asked me how old I was. “Ten,” I said.
“I noticed the way your eyes follow the camera when shots are being set up. And the way you pay attention to all the back-and-forth during rehearsals, whether it involves Opie or not. Ronny, I bet you’re gonna be a director when you grow up,” he said.