The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(19)

Many years later, when I was a young adult, Andy told me that playing Lonesome Rhodes had been a harrowing experience for him. Kazan was a brilliant director, he said, but he had manipulated and provoked Andy to summon his darkest, ugliest thoughts and impulses, and the process about wrecked him. “I don’t ever want to do that again,” Andy said. “I like to laugh when I’m working.”

Andy had his pick of dramatic roles after A Face in the Crowd, but he chose not to go down that path—the psychological toll had been too high. To some degree, Andy said, Mayberry and the benevolent Sheriff Andy Taylor were a conscious response to Lonesome Rhodes, embodiments of rural America at its best.

In Sheldon Leonard’s office, Dad and I also met a man named Aaron Ruben, another producer, who was to function as The Andy Griffith Show’s showrunner, the person who oversees the program on a day-to-day basis. Nominally, this meeting was my audition, but I think they had already decided upon casting me. All I remember is that I was small enough to stand without crouching underneath Aaron’s wooden desk, a sight that made Aaron break into a wide smile. This moment would turn into a fond memory—as the years passed and each new season began, I would measure my growth by lining myself up against Aaron’s desk.

There was more good news: The Andy Griffith Show was a virtual lock for CBS’s fall 1960 lineup. Unusually for the TV business, we wouldn’t be shooting a pilot. Rather, there would be a special episode of The Danny Thomas Show near the end of the 1959–1960 season in which Andy and Opie Taylor were introduced. (In the industry, this is known as a “back-door pilot.”)

We shot this episode in early 1960. Andy was only thirty-four years old when I met him but seemed much older, if still a hell of a lot younger than Bert Lahr. He was a big, craggy-looking man with a thicket of dark brown hair, a booming speaking voice, and a method actor’s intensity. He was proud of his roots in humble Mount Airy, North Carolina, a small town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Mayberry was an idealized version of Mount Airy as Andy remembered it. He was not coy about this. The show was to take place in the 1960s, and Sheriff Andy Taylor drove a brand-new Ford Galaxie police car. But Andy, born in 1926, consciously set out to evoke the atmosphere of his youth in the 1930s and 1940s. People are nostalgic for The Andy Griffith Show now, but it’s important to realize that even then, it was an evocation of a bygone era, and an idealized evocation at that. A little over a decade later, I would be at the center of a similar phenomenon when I played Richie Cunningham on Happy Days. Maybe it was my red hair, or the set of my jaw, or the way my otherwise regionless accent had the slightest touch of my parents’ Oklahoma twang. Somehow, I was born to be bygone.

Andy was also keen to counteract Hollywood’s prevailing stereotypes of southerners. He was no fan of such contemporaneous “southern” TV programs as The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, in which men were mushmouthed hayseeds and girls were buxom sexpots. He described these programs, pejoratively, as “burlesque.”

“The South is plenty funny as it is without playing it like Li’l Abner,” he would say. Andy was proud of where he came from, spending his summers without ever putting his shoes on and living in a town where his neighbors looked out for him whether they were family or not. One of his major motivations for the sitcom was to portray his world with humanity and depth, and without the usual grotesquerie.

As a matter of fact, that tension was at the heart of our Danny Thomas Show episode. Danny Williams, Thomas’s TV alter ego, runs a stop sign in the fictional town of Mayberry and gets pulled over by the sheriff, Andy’s character. Too stubborn and patronizing to accept a ticket for a moving violation, Williams decides he would rather sit in the town jail than capitulate. He literally says to Andy, “Go buy yourself a comb and rake the hay seed out of your hair!”

My debut scene as Opie, before a live studio audience, doubled as the moment in which Danny’s attitude toward Andy starts to soften, when he sees how good a father Andy is to his boy. We wouldn’t have a studio audience once we started The Andy Griffith Show in earnest, but in this case, we were playing by Danny’s rules. I was too young to be fearful of performing before the audience. The property master gave me a toy turtle to hold, a cheap thing made of tin, with little legs that swiveled back and forth. The director told me to cup my hands around it as I ran in, so that the camera wouldn’t pick up how fake the toy looked.

The premise was that I was distraught that my pet turtle, Wilford, was dead; some lady had accidentally stepped on him in the ice cream parlor. This was an opportunity to establish that Andy was a widower and Opie a boy without a mother. “We just have to learn to live with our sorrows, boy,” Andy gently advised me. “I learned that when you was just a leee-tle bitty speck of a baby, when I lost your ma—just like you lost Wilford here.”

“You did?” I said. “Who stepped on Ma?”

In retrospect, this was a pretty twisted joke to feed to a five-year-old. But I landed the punch line and got the big payoff laugh.

That year is a blur for me. Our Danny Thomas Show episode aired on February 15, 1960. General Foods, the sponsor of that program, immediately committed to sponsoring ours. Two weeks later, I celebrated my sixth birthday. Next thing I knew, it was late summer and I was walking barefoot down a dirt path in L.A.’s Franklin Canyon Park with Andy at my side and a fishing pole on my shoulder. We were filming the soon-to-be-iconic credit sequence of The Andy Griffith Show. I had not yet heard the show’s catchy, finger-snappin’ theme tune, “The Fishin’ Hole,” whose lead melody was whistled by one of its composers, Earle Hagen. I was focused on my task: to pick up a rock and throw it into the water.