The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(25)

Another of Andy’s attempts at accommodation didn’t work out so well. In a 1963 episode called “A Black Day for Mayberry,” a top-secret gold shipment passes through Mayberry en route to Fort Knox. Two U.S. Treasury agents come to town, on the lookout for a crook who has designs on the gold. For one of the agent roles, Andy cast an old friend. I could sense that Andy was both happy to see his friend and a little anxious. During rehearsals, Andy was not his usual relaxed, wisecracking self. His eyes were full of concern rather than their usual sparkle.

Opie was in the scene with the Treasury agents, so I was on set when they did the master shot, in which the agents sit on wooden chairs in the Mayberry courthouse, waiting to meet with the sheriff. Everything went smoothly to that point. Then the crew repositioned the cameras for a closer shot on Andy’s friend, who would explain the case and describe the suspect. In the first take, the actor fumbled his lines. No big deal. Bob Sweeney, the director, simply called for another take, and the makeup people attended to the actor’s brow.

I sat right next to the camera during the second take, which went disturbingly wrong. Andy’s friend began the agent’s speech, performing it reasonably well at first. But then it drifted off course into something . . . personal, not having to do with the character or the episode. It was instead an apologetic monologue, delivered with a pained expression. He rambled on about Andy’s success and his own personal and professional frustration. Then he broke into sobs.

Bob Sweeney whispered “Cut” to the camera operator. We were no longer rolling, and for a moment, no one knew quite what to do. Then Andy’s friend literally slid off the chair he was sitting in and fell to the floor, curling up in a fetal position and bawling uncontrollably. Andy rushed to his friend’s side, and, with Bob’s help, got him back upright and loosened his tie. Then they gently walked him off the set.

Later, Andy told everyone that his friend had been struggling with emotional and psychiatric issues. He had hoped that giving his buddy a part on the show would help in the man’s recovery. Alas, it seemed to have had the opposite effect. This incident marked the first time I was conscious of mental illness and its toll. I’ve carried the image of that actor’s anguished, helpless face with me ever since. I drew upon my memory of him more than thirty years later when I made the film A Beautiful Mind. The film stars Russell Crowe as John Nash, a real-life mathematician and Nobel laureate whose schizophrenia led to his institutionalization. When we filmed scenes depicting Nash’s mental unraveling, I innately understood not only his suffering but that of those who bore witness to it. I recalled the visceral fear and panic that rippled through the set that day back in the 1960s, the disruptive impact it had on a roomful of people who couldn’t fathom what they were seeing. These recollections influenced my approach to Nash’s story.

Dad was a help to me in processing what had happened. Fortunately, he was on set that day, giving me someone to turn to after witnessing the man’s breakdown. His presence also benefited The Andy Griffith Show, because they had a good actor on the premises who could immediately be pressed into service. Dad put on a suit of Andy’s and learned the character’s lines. We reshot the scene. Dad nailed it, and his close-up speech, too. But there were uncharacteristically few laughs that day. Everyone was shaken. This jarring introduction to the toll that our pressure-filled line of work could have on fragile people has stayed with me.


THE CRITICS NEVER much cared for us. “The Andy Griffith Show appears to be only mildly entertaining,” said the New York Times in October 1960, our first month on the air. And that was one of the friendlier reviews we received.

But we were a ratings hit from the get-go. We finished at number four in the Nielsen rankings that season and never looked back, a top-ten program for all eight seasons of the program’s life. Mayberry struck a chord. It was sweet without being hokey and funny without being farcical. In Andy Taylor, the sheriff without a gun, America found the gentle authority figure that it craved—an easygoing fellow with a humorously imperfect but ultimately viable approach to crisis management.

I’ve since come to believe that Sheldon Leonard’s experience working with Frank Capra must have informed our show, since, tonally, it’s the closest a sitcom ever got to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and It’s a Wonderful Life. I brought this up to Andy years later and he said that the subject of Capra never came up in his discussions with Sheldon. But I witnessed these great triangular conversations between Andy, Sheldon, and Aaron Ruben, who was brilliant in his own right—he had written for Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Phil Silvers—and they were like alchemy: out of the mix of these three sensibilities, one southern-rural and two urban-Jewish, came TV gold.

Andy, like all of us, learned on the job. He later said that he played Andy Taylor too broadly that first season, still steeped in the rubelike southerners he had played in the past. He progressively dialed down Sheriff Andy’s theatrics and turned himself into the show’s straight man and voice of reason. Me? I was a sponge, absorbing the intricacies of how television was made by observing all the different craftsmen at work. I regarded the set with a sense of mystery and excitement. What did all these people do? How did the camera actually work? Why did they have to change lenses all the time? What were the sets made of? Who painted them and made them look real?

In the Renaissance era, the artisan class put its children to work as apprentices young, enlisting their help to create devotional frescoes and sculptures. The kids started out at age five or six, cleaning brushes and tools, and slowly took on greater responsibilities as they began to better understand the craft, which in turn fostered a better understanding of the artistry involved. That parallels my trajectory on The Andy Griffith Show, as I gradually figured out how and why television worked.