The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(28)

I often found myself alongside Andy and Don in one of Lee Greenway’s makeup chairs, tissues tucked into my collar, while Andy described to Don at high volume his latest session with his shrink: “He started talking about latent homosexuality! I don’t think I qualify for that one, but I don’t know. What about you, Don?”

Andy was definitely the more forthright about personal stuff like this. Don would eagerly get into a back-and-forth with him if the conversation turned to subjects like tax shelters, which interested them both because the top marginal tax rate in those days, for which they newly qualified, was a whopping 91 percent.

But Don would just quietly nod when Andy declared, within earshot of the whole cast, “My psychiatrist told me that probably the reason I work so damned hard on this show is that I don’t want to go home to my wife. And you know what, Don? I think he’s right.”

Andy wasn’t saying these things to get laughs. As his marriage to Barbara was unraveling, I saw him endure genuine pain. He came back from Christmas break one season with his hand all taped up. He was blunt about what happened: “I got drunk, I got mad, and I put my fist through a door.”


OF THE TWO Pyles, Gomer and Goober, I was closer to the latter, or, rather, the man who played him, George Lindsey. George was a tall man and an athlete who took me under his wing when he saw that I was getting into sports, baseball and basketball especially. He threw me batting practice and played games of H-O-R-S-E with me under the hoop that had been nailed up on the inside of the Stage 1 door. Thanks in part to George’s tutelage, I became a good-enough shooter to tie for first at a Burbank Parks Department free-throw contest, where I made forty-seven out of fifty shots.

I wasn’t as close with Jim Nabors, though he was an extremely nice man. It took me until the ’80s, when we did the Return to Mayberry reunion film, for me to discover that Jim was not just this friendly “Gollee!” goofball but a worldly, intelligent guy with whom I would enjoy having conversations. When I was a kid, though, Mom became friends with Jim. He adored her company and considered her a confidante, almost a second mother, though she had only two years on him.

In the workplace, Jim, while private about his private life, was not closeted. He didn’t pretend to date women or insist he wasn’t gay. Mom explained this to me when I grew a little older, in my post-Opie years: everyone in the cast knew the deal about Jim’s sexuality, but it went uncommented upon—a Hollywood version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

The crew, unfortunately, was not as enlightened. Listening to their on-set chatter, I heard a word I didn’t know: homo. That’s what they called Jim behind his back, and not with any hint of kindness. Something about this word didn’t feel right.

“Dad,” I said one day, “what is a ‘homo’?”

He instantly understood the context. And he offered his usual plainspoken response. “Jim is attracted to men instead of women,” Dad said. “And they call that homosexuality.”

The definition was framed this narrowly, only as it related to Jim, really. I didn’t yet understand that there were gay people all around me, and all across the world. But this was my introduction to the very concept of queerness. Mayberry was a small town, but for those of us who actually spent our days there, it contained the whole of human experience.





7


Hot Lights, Real Tears


RON


I struggled a bit in elementary school. I’d rate myself academically as having been barely average. I later figured out, when my own kids were having some difficulties here and there, that I had what would today be diagnosed as learning disabilities. Mrs. Barton proved a boon in this respect; I responded well to one-on-one tutoring. But in the 1960s, my public-school teachers’ diagnosis was pretty much “Well, he’s a C student, but at least he’s well-behaved.” I flailed sometimes. Cursive, for example, did not come easily to me. But do you know what kicked me into gear to figure it out once and for all? Having to sign autographs.

Near the end of The Andy Griffith Show’s first season, TV Guide convened a bunch of child and teen stars to pose for a photo shoot in the swimming pool of the grand Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. There were about twenty of us in total in our bathing suits: I waded near the front, in the shallow end. Jay North was also there, along with Rusty Hamer and Angela Cartwright from The Danny Thomas Show, Jon Provost from Lassie, and, for sex appeal, some older actors like the twins Dack and Dirk Rambo, who were starring on The New Loretta Young Show, and Donna Douglas, who played Ellie Mae Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. (The term “teen” was used loosely: the Rambos were in their early twenties, and Douglas was around thirty.)

This was my first taste of Hollywood glamour, and the perks and perils it held. I’d never experienced the excitement of fans, gawkers, and paparazzi, calling out our names. But it was daunting to have kids thrusting pieces of paper and pens at me, asking for my signature.

Johnny Crawford, who played Chuck Connors’s boy, Mark, confidently obliged everyone who wanted his autograph, which made sense—he was in his midteens. But I was still in first grade. I was sweating it out self-consciously, doing my best to sign my name for a fan in my slow, rudimentary scrawl—R . . . O . . .—when he grew impatient and just ripped the piece of paper right out of my hands. “There’s the Beav!” he said, making a beeline for Jerry Mathers, who was six years older than me and consequently could write a whole lot faster.