Andy had a wonderful facility for getting everyone, actors and writers alike, to up their game for the cause. If he worried that our energy was flagging or that a scene wasn’t coming together as it should, he summoned Carl and Ethel. Carl and Ethel were an imaginary couple watching at home, commenting on the show in real time as we filmed. Carl, who sounded like a cranky relation of Andy’s back in Mount Airy, would butt in to say, “Well, Ethel, I think we can turn this off. It doesn’t make any damned sense!” Or “Well, Ethel, I’ve been waitin’ twenty minutes to laugh at somethin’。 Shoot, I’m gonna go get me somethin’ to eat!” Poor Ethel was never given the chance to speak. She just mutely endured Carl’s rants about the slack moments in certain Andy Griffith Show episodes.
Carl （and Ethel） proved an effective means to get the writers cracking, working on the fly to sharpen jokes and scenes. Invariably, these rewrites paid off, improving the episode we were shooting. And Andy was not above calling himself out when his own material lacked punch. One day, he leaped up after we had completed a read-through to pitch a comedy idea that he had just come up with, acting it out in front of us. For all his enthusiasm, our reaction was tepid. Andy shook his head and said, “I should’ve known not to break my own rule: never, ever stand up and move around to pitch a joke. Because it’s a loooonggg walk back to your chair if it dies.” That got a laugh.
A perk of working on a series, as opposed to my earlier, à la carte experiences with TV employment, was the amount of hang time on the set. It fostered a sense of family, in that we all really got to know one another. Andy turned our downtime into a talk show of sorts, feeding prompts to the various members of the cast. He egged on Don Knotts, three years older than Andy and a World War II veteran, to tell stories of his time in the South Pacific. Don told us he had performed as a ventriloquist for the Special Services, in a G.I. revue called Stars and Gripes. At some point, Don said, he grew sick of being upstaged by his own dummy, whose name was Danny “Hooch” Matador, and he tossed Hooch overboard into the drink. Don claimed that, as the ship sailed away, the dummy could be heard gargling his angry protests through mouthfuls of seawater.
Howard McNear regaled us with stories of his life in vaudeville and the U.S. Army Air Corps. Crucially, Andy included my father in these conversations, too—“Rance, your turn!” It speaks volumes of Andy that he considered my father a member of the Mayberry crew, not merely Ronny Howard’s guardian. Dad’s rural bona fides didn’t hurt. We were unique among TV programs in that we had a lot of actors from that kind of background: Andy, Don, and the esteemed Pyle cousins, Gomer and Goober, whose portrayers, Jim Nabors and George Lindsey, came from relatively small towns in Alabama.
I later heard stories of friction between Andy and Frances Bavier, though I never saw anything of the sort. My picture of Frances is of an elegant, urbane woman who simply chose to stay out of the fray. She put on a slight southern accent to play Aunt Bee but she spoke completely differently in real life, like the conservatory-trained New Yorker she was. She generally spent her breaks reading the New York Times and doing the crossword puzzle, with a thin, lady’s-brand cigarette between her fingers.
As our storytellers went, Andy was the most uninhibited. I was mildly scandalized when he told everyone that he had been rendered sterile by a bout of mumps in his teens, so he and his wife had adopted their children. His candor was laudable, but the very subject of sterility was a new one to my virgin ears. I sort of understood what Andy meant from the context of the story, but Dad preemptively took the opportunity to explain the concept in greater detail in the car ride home that day. He explained that lots of people of his and Andy’s generation came down with the mumps, but he was lucky not to have had a case as bad as Andy’s.
“I’m glad you weren’t sterile, Dad,” I said, brimming with sincerity.
“Well, me too, Ronny. I feel very lucky about that.”
Don Knotts fascinated me to no end. He was the least like the character he played, the high-strung, forever nervous Barney Fife. It’s hard for most people even to picture Don as a normal human being, because the two characters for which he is best known, Barney and Mr. Furley from Three’s Company, are absurd in the extreme. Off camera, though, Don was reserved and self-effacing. Whereas Andy was essentially playing a version of himself, Barney Fife was someone who Don had to become. I’d watch this amazing metamorphosis take place before my eyes, much as when Bert Lahr turned it on for Mr. O’Malley.