Still, Don could be drawn out. Andy adored him. No one could make him laugh more than Don could. In fact, as much as Andy sometimes called upon Carl and Ethel to liven things up when he felt we all needed a fire lit under us, he also nudged Don when he needed a personal pick-me-up. Andy was a religious man, and his usual approach was to start singing an old-time hymn in a deep, low bass: “When we allll get to heaven . . .”
Without fail, Don would pick up on Andy’s intent and come in with a high, yawping falsetto, engaging Andy in a gospel call-and-response.
ANDY: When we all
DON: WHEN WE AWL!
ANDY: Get to heaven
DON: GET TA HEAV’N!
Don would take it from there, screeching, “What a day of rejoicing that will BEEEEE!!!” It killed every time. He had us all in stitches, but no one more than Andy, who doubled over, crying tears of laughter.
THE ANDY GRIFFITH Show’s success was so huge and immediate that I had an up-close look at how fame and money affected people. It started with the cars getting nicer in the Desilu Cahuenga lot. Andy collected antique cars and was stunned when someone gave him a Model T Ford as a gift and the Ford Motor Company itself bestowed a new car upon him for driving a Galaxie on the show. “Now that I’m rich, people are giving me cars!” he exclaimed. “That’s real nice ’n’ all, but where the hell were they when I was dirt poor?”
Don became a Cadillac man, buying a new one every year. Frances splashed out on a Studebaker in 1961. Being a frugal, sensible person, she kept it for the remainder of the program’s run, parking it in the space next to ours.
Sometimes, the adult conversations I overheard at work were more adult-adult, stuff that wasn’t meant for my ears but wasn’t censored. The cast was too accustomed to having little Ronny around. Andy and Don maintained an ongoing conversation about how they had essentially won the lottery but weren’t necessarily the happier for it. Both of them were in troubled marriages whose issues predated our show—Don got divorced from his wife, Kathryn, in 1964, and Andy finally split up with his wife, Barbara, in 1972. And both men were visiting psychotherapists to work through their stuff.
I often found myself alongside Andy and Don in one of Lee Greenway’s makeup chairs, tissues tucked into my collar, while Andy described to Don at high volume his latest session with his shrink: “He started talking about latent homosexuality! I don’t think I qualify for that one, but I don’t know. What about you, Don?”
Andy was definitely the more forthright about personal stuff like this. Don would eagerly get into a back-and-forth with him if the conversation turned to subjects like tax shelters, which interested them both because the top marginal tax rate in those days, for which they newly qualified, was a whopping 91 percent.
But Don would just quietly nod when Andy declared, within earshot of the whole cast, “My psychiatrist told me that probably the reason I work so damned hard on this show is that I don’t want to go home to my wife. And you know what, Don? I think he’s right.”
Andy wasn’t saying these things to get laughs. As his marriage to Barbara was unraveling, I saw him endure genuine pain. He came back from Christmas break one season with his hand all taped up. He was blunt about what happened: “I got drunk, I got mad, and I put my fist through a door.”
OF THE TWO Pyles, Gomer and Goober, I was closer to the latter, or, rather, the man who played him, George Lindsey. George was a tall man and an athlete who took me under his wing when he saw that I was getting into sports, baseball and basketball especially. He threw me batting practice and played games of H-O-R-S-E with me under the hoop that had been nailed up on the inside of the Stage 1 door. Thanks in part to George’s tutelage, I became a good-enough shooter to tie for first at a Burbank Parks Department free-throw contest, where I made forty-seven out of fifty shots.
I wasn’t as close with Jim Nabors, though he was an extremely nice man. It took me until the ’80s, when we did the Return to Mayberry reunion film, for me to discover that Jim was not just this friendly “Gollee!” goofball but a worldly, intelligent guy with whom I would enjoy having conversations. When I was a kid, though, Mom became friends with Jim. He adored her company and considered her a confidante, almost a second mother, though she had only two years on him.