Becoming Thelma Lou--My Journey to Hollywood, Mayberry, and Beyond by Betty Lynn

Author:Betty Lynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BearManor Media
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

BEWARE OF FAKE ID AT MAYBERRY UNION HIGH: Peggy McCay and Andy Griffith as briefly reunited high school sweethearts in “Class Reunion,” a 1963 episode of The Andy Griffith Show. Photo courtesy of TAGSRWC Archives.

I thought, Whoa. Well, O.K. then.

I told my mother about all the confusion with Peggy and her reaction to meeting me. Mother said, “I don’t see a resemblance.”

I said, “Well, everybody else seems to.”

One day not long after that, I was at NBC’s Burbank studios doing Matinee Theater. I was in the ladies’ room, and in came Peggy. She and I both did several episodes of Matinee Theater in the mid-1950s—more than two dozen, in my case—but we had never worked together. Anyway, she hurried about her business in the ladies’ room and was ready to get out as fast as possible, but I stopped her. I said, “Peggy, come over here, and let’s look in the mirror and see what people see.”

She came over, and we looked at ourselves and each other in the mirror. Both of us concluded that we didn’t really look alike. She was more delicate than I was. She was tinier and everything. I was taller. She was more petite. There was something that people saw, but I never saw it.

Peggy was a truly nice person and very well respected for her talent and professionalism in the industry. Nevertheless, I sensed that there continued to be some tension about me on her part. I felt her uneasiness might be getting in the way of our friendship. I wanted to get to the bottom of why that was, so I invited her to lunch.

I thought I knew what might be part of the problem. I told Peggy that an actor told me that she had told him that I had followed her from New York to Los Angeles. Also, before that, maybe I had gone to New York and was inadvertently stepping on her potential roles there.

I assured Peggy that I had not been trying to follow in her footsteps and that, actually, I had come to Los Angeles under contract with Fox before she ever came to L.A. I told her, “I did movies long before I did television.” It was true that I went to New York after she was already there, but it would have been hard for that not to have been the case, because Peggy was born there, and she was only about a year younger than I was.

When I told Peggy all of that, she said, “Oh. I didn’t realize.” She didn’t know anything about my earlier career at all. She knew that we kept showing up in the same places, and she just thought that I was copying whatever career moves she was making. She really had it in for me, but she got over it once she understood the actual history of my career.

Years later, I persuaded Peggy to do some of the Hollywood autograph shows. I called her, and she enjoyed going. Largely

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.