The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(20)
This was a more complicated operation than you would think. Franklin Canyon Park was, and still is, the site of one of the major reservoirs from which the city of Los Angeles draws its drinking water. The rules for filming there were strict: I was only allowed three takes to throw the rock. The prop department had three rocks ready to go, carefully cleaned so that their presence in the lake would not affect the potability of the water.
We observed a similar protocol when we did fishing scenes for the show. A prop man would put a live catfish on the hook, and an L.A. Department of Water & Power regulator was present to monitor Andy and me as we dipped the fish into the lake and then quickly pulled them out as if we had just caught them. Like the precleaned rocks, these were special TV fish—stunt fish, if you will.
The problem with doing the credit sequence, which we discovered on the first take, was that my skinny little arm was not powerful enough to get that rock into the water. So, for the second take, they came up with a new plan. I moved my arm as if I was throwing Rock #2, but the prop master, Reggie Smith, who was strategically hidden behind a tree, tossed the actual prop rock from off camera. Reggie’s throw completed my action, resulting in a picturesque splash in just the right part of the frame. That’s the take that you see when you watch any episode from Season One. We didn’t do a third take—it’s TV, baby, we had it in the can, time to move on!
For me, that day in Franklin Canyon provided yet another lesson in the wizardly craft of creating moving-picture illusions—they turned a six-year-old suburban tenderfoot into a sturdy country boy who could hurl a rock sixty feet!
SOME FAMILIES MOVE to a new neighborhood to be near a good school. We moved from Burbank to Hollywood to be near a good studio. Once CBS placed an order for a full season of The Andy Griffith Show, thirty-two episodes in all, Mom and Dad decided that it would be best for us to relocate to a home closer to my workplace.
The town of Mayberry was really three places: Franklin Canyon Park, where we did our fishing scenes; the old RKO Forty Acres backlot in Culver City, where we filmed most of our exteriors; and, most frequently of all, Desilu Studios Cahuenga, where our interior scenes in the Taylor house and the sheriff’s office were filmed. This studio was the smallest facility in the constellation of studios owned by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball’s production company, Desilu. It had no backlot, just eight soundstages, some offices, and a commissary that was called Hal’s Diner. But in the ’60s, that little complex was a hive of popular television: we coexisted there with, to name just a few shows, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Jack Benny Program, Hogan’s Heroes, That Girl, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., and I, Spy.
My parents found a two-bedroom bungalow on North Cahuenga Boulevard. It was a weird place to live, a mixed-use neighborhood with warehouses, stores, and not a whole lot of neighbors. There was no grass anywhere, and all we had for a backyard was a patch of dirt. But it was only half a block from Desilu Cahuenga. And, perhaps to make up for the lack of suburban creature comforts, Mom and Dad got us a dog—a Weimaraner who, like our last dog, was named Gulliver.
On my first regular day of work in September 1960, my dad took my hand, just as if he was taking me to school, and we walked from our house to Desilu—half a block north and then just around the corner to the back gate on Lillian Way. Inside, arrayed around a table, were the producers, Sheldon and Aaron; the director, Bob Sweeney; Andy himself; and my other costars-to-be, Don Knotts and Frances Bavier.
Don, like Andy, was a southerner; he was born and raised in West Virginia. He and Andy had worked together before, in both the Broadway and movie versions of a popular military comedy called No Time for Sergeants, and hit it off. Apparently Don saw our appearance on Danny Thomas’s show and instantly understood what it was that Andy was trying to achieve. So he called Andy and said, “Don’t you think your sheriff could use a deputy?” Thus was born Barney Fife, the deputy so incompetent with firearms that Sheriff Taylor allows him to carry just one bullet in his shirt pocket.
Frances, a woman in her late fifties, was from New York City—like Mom, she had trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She had appeared in the Danny Thomas pseudo-pilot as a flummoxed Mayberry resident named Henrietta Perkins and had demonstrated a facility for playing a prim straight woman, kind of like Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers movies. Now she was going to play Andy’s spinster relative Aunt Bee, who was to become our family’s housekeeper and Opie’s de facto nanny. That was the plot of our first episode, in fact: the Taylors’ previous housekeeper, a young woman named Rose, was leaving to get married, and Opie had to overcome his attachment to Rose and his objections to Aunt Bee.
Dad and I joined this august group of seasoned show-business veterans at the table, me to Dad’s right, my head barely clearing the table, my legs swinging above the floor. In TV, we call the first read-through of a script a table reading. This was a misnomer where I was concerned—I couldn’t read, at least not beyond the preschool, board-book level. I watched as my father took out a pen and drew brackets around every line in the script that began with the word OPIE. Whenever Opie’s turn came, he, rather than I, read these lines aloud, allowing me to learn my lines by ear.
SOMETHING REALLY IMPORTANT happened that day that I didn’t know about until decades later. During a break, as the cast gathered in a little courtyard at Desilu to smoke, Dad pulled Andy aside and asked him for a word.