Andy and Don by Daniel de Visé

Author:Daniel de Visé
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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I. Don consistently described Lynn as Dick Linke’s assistant. Fifty years later, Dick remembered Lynn but could not recall if she was his employee.

II. In a 1966 interview, Don claimed he’d been offered a 10 percent stake in the series. Privately, he cited a much smaller figure.

11.

The Color Years

TO VIEWERS who tuned in for The Andy Griffith Show on September 13, 1965, it must have seemed as if Mayberry had somehow slipped clear into the next decade during the summer hiatus. Suddenly, the town fishing hole was rendered in full color: green pine trees, white boulders, shimmering olive-black water. Andy’s gabardine sheriff’s uniform was khaki, just as one might have expected. But Opie’s hair was shockingly, almost iridescently orange. The comforting voice-over announcement was gone; and where, just a few months earlier, Opie had stood only as high as the buckle of Andy’s belt, now he reached the sheriff’s breast pocket.

The season-six opener, “Opie’s Job,” was surreal. No explanation was offered for Opie’s hair color, a revelation with vaguely unsettling genetic implications. And no account was given for the absence of Barney Fife. Viewers had learned, in the final episode of season five, that Andy’s deputy was “away”—and that, it seemed, was that. The unexplained departure of such a major figure from a long-established television program would be almost unthinkable today; imagine Kramer simply vanishing from Seinfeld’s apartment building one autumn. But the television industry treated audiences differently in the 1960s. Characters came and went. So, too, did the actors who portrayed them. Good-bye, Dick York; hello, Dick Sargent.

An odd sort of ontological crisis gripped The Andy Griffith Show in its sixth season. Characters appeared and disappeared, arriving without introduction and departing without fanfare; the reassuring permanence of Mayberry and its inhabitants was gone. Lost, too, was the magical time-capsule realism of years past. Before, the doings of Floyd the barber and Goober the mechanic had seemed natural; now, they looked forced. Andy’s hapless costars would be placed on a sidewalk bench like props, to frame the sheriff and exchange dialogue that now sounded like lines from a script. The jokes were often flaccid, the smiles strained. And the color camera had an odd effect on Mayberry itself, rendering the town eerily, unnaturally clean. The Culver City exteriors now had a depopulated look, while the Desilu interiors looked almost like . . . sets.

The program still had its tender moments, particularly those shared between Andy and Opie; but the “slight thread of insanity” that had set Griffith apart was irretrievably gone. Beneath his makeup, Andy Griffith looked grumpy, forlorn, weary, a man performing by rote, mourning an unspoken loss.

The Griffith entourage minimized Barney’s exit with the press, who viewed it as a potentially fatal blow. Years later, after Don’s death, Andy conceded the truth to Larry King: “I missed him. I missed him so dreadfully, I can’t begin to tell you. When Don left, the show lost its heart. It stayed on for three more years and was, in fact, number one for the whole year, the last year that it was on.

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