When it comes to classic TV, author Daniel de Vise admits that his knowledge is fairly limited — unless you're talking about The Andy Griffith Show. Or, more specifically, Andy Griffith, Daniel's late-brother-in-law, Don Knotts, and the bond that connected those two men for most of their lives. And it's not because Daniel is someone whose life is completely wrapped up in a 60-year-old TV show (not that there would be anything wrong with that), it's just that he's been a little busy doing other things.
In a storied and multi-award-winning career that includes stints at The Washington Post and Miami Herald, as well as a team Pulitzer Prize, he counts among books he's written the dual biography Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show. It was the writing of that book that required him to do a deep dive into all things Mayberry, forcing him to consider the show's enduring nature.
Daniel de Vise
"For many people in America, our families have been here for a few generations," he offers, "and if you go back a hundred years or so, our ancestors were living in small-town Americana, if not on a farm. My father was born in Belgium and doesn't have that heritage and people who are immigrants or children of immigrants might not have that heritage. But if you had kin in the United States in the '30s or the '20s or the teens, more likely than not they were on a farm or in a little town. And that's what the connection is with The Andy Griffith Show. These two guys, Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, built that show around their shared memories of small-town Americana.
"Andy," Daniel continues, "is from North Caroline and Don's from West Virginia, and there's almost a literal one-to-one correspondence between Mayberry and Mount Airy, North Caroline, where Andy was born. But the show is also informed heavily by Don's hilarious stories he would tell of his own childhood in Morgantown and, maybe even more so, these farms across the border in rural Pennsylvania. That's the show. And that's the connection for the audience. It's why I think almost anybody in this country who has any of that in their background can connect to it."
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Given everything going on in the world today, in some ways it seems that the connection with a place like Mayberry is actually getting stronger. On that front, Daniel was approached by somebody writing a doctorate who wanted to know how he thought the people of Mayberry would have dealt with the pandemic everyone is experiencing. "What occurred to me," he laughs, "is that they didn't have to handle heavy dystopian Battlestar Galactica-style themes. My answer is that we know for a fact that The Andy Griffith Show did not get into civil rights, which was a huge issue in the 1960s when it was actually filmed, and they didn't get into any of the huge, heavy societal issues that were going on at that time. Instead, they reached into the past, back into the '30s and, again, small-town Americans."
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"I can say," he adds, "that when this whole thing broke out, my wife and I found great solace in watching episodes of that show. It just seemed natural to do so. Like, 'This will calm us down.' I think at one point we were alternating between that and the original Bob Newhart Show, which is very calm, classic comedic television from the '70s set in Chicago, where I'm from. Let's face it, the beginning of a pandemic is not the time to be watching Battlestar Galactica or The Dogs of War. It's time to calm yourself with herbal tea type television, and there's no better than The Andy Griffith Show."
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Daniel de Vise
Having decided to write Andy & Don, one has to wonder what sort of revelations he made about these two men. "I knew more than the average fan going into this book, because I knew Don well, his wife was my sister-in-law and because he was my brother-in-law," he explains. "And I knew more about Andy because of that connection, though not as much as I knew about Don. So I knew a lot of what to expect when I sketched out their stories, though there were plenty of revelations. Both of them had three marriages each and both of them struggled with fidelity at times. Andy had a temper, which maybe manifested itself more behind the scenes and not necessarily on the set."
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In Don's case, he struggled with some addiction in his lifetime," Daniel elaborates, "though by the standards of big Hollywood celebrities — Elvis or a big actor — I'd say they were pretty tame. They both had a weakness for dating costars and that kind of thing, and Andy had a long term extramarital relationship with Aneta Corsaut, who played Helen Crump on the show. That was something I hadn't read anywhere else and I didn't include it just for salaciousness, but rather because I saw it as a major love relationship in his life, just like his love relationship with Barbara, his first wife."
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It's probably pretty safe to say that the majority of Andy Griffith Show fans — the diehards — simply aren't interested in hearing about more salacious aspects of the behind the scenes history, forcing Daniel to sometimes having to walk a fine line. "I belong to a few Facebook groups with thousands of members," he notes, "and every so often somebody will tag my name and newcomers say, 'Hey, I've heard about this book Andy & Don. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it tabloid? What does it say about the men? Is it going to burst my bubble?' And invariably somebody rises to my defense and says, 'You won't look at the two men exactly the same after you read it, but when I read it, I walked away with all the more admiration for their accomplishments as actors, as comedians and even more impressed with the show.'"
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Truth be told, he says, maybe the reader doesn't want to know the real guy behind the character; maybe they'd rather just think of Andy, Barney and the others as their characters. "I'm friends with Terry Collins who wrote the only Andy Griffith biography out there, The Andy Griffith Story, which was a huge resource for me. Terry told the whole story about Andy at the time and I'm struggling to think of any book other than that one that existed before my book that got into the real Andy and the real Don. Nothing that told the whole story, so I guess in a way Andy & Don is the one place that has everything known about the real guys up to this point."
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To some this may seem like a strange comparison, but over the years William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, who worked together for three years on the original Star Trek television series and then in six feature films, threw around the phrase best friends regarding each other. But dig a little deeper and you find that it wasn't exactly true. Given that, is "best friends" the appropriate term for Andy and Don? "That's a really good question," opines Daniel. "I think by the end of their lives they mutually regarded each other as best friends, if not each other's best friend. Andy and Don both felt that way about each other. I think maybe at earlier times in their lives, as they drifted in and out of association with each other, that the closeness of their relationship might have ebbed and flowed a little bit. I want to say that the years they were together in Hollywood working on the show, they were intensely close all the time."
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Daniel adds, "That's what I call a Hollywood friendship, just being together on the set hour after hour after hour. And just like anybody who's ever gone to college or have gone to war with somebody, that really bonds you. As they drifted into separate projects in the '70s and '80s … if I grabbed Don on the set of Three's Company and said, 'How close are you really to Andy?', I don't know what he would have said. Maybe, 'Oh, we're dear friends,' but they might've been out of touch at certain times. But, especially when Matlock happened, and as The Andy Griffith Show attained the stature of an iconic piece of American popular culture heritage, in a way it was their destiny to be best friends, like, 'Hey, we're Don and friggin Andy!' By their autumn years, each had this enormous respect for their friendship and for what they meant to each other and what their friendship had meant to that show."
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He emphasizes that keeping the subject of their friendship front and center was on his mind through the entire writing process of the book. "I kept asking myself, what does it mean that they have this Hollywood friendship? And what does it mean that they were really close early on and they were really close and had this kind of boot camp sort of relationship? A lot of older guys often barely have any friends, but these two definitely had a powerful friendship. It was enough to fill this book, so I guess that's all I need to say." Not exactly.
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Daniel de Vise
Looking back to the formative days of that friendship, he points out that both had more or less made a pilgrimage to New York in order to launch their careers. "By the time they met," Daniel says, "they were both Southern guys in New York and there weren't a lot of Southern guys in New York, at least not on the theater, television and radio scene. That, right there, set them apart. I believe they both tried out for this play No Time for Sergeants and Andy, through his own machinations and great ambition, landed the main role in that play. It was a huge success; sort of like a Hamilton of the 1950s. It was a bestselling book that became a Broadway play and a movie."
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"Don landed a much smaller role in it, but they met in rehearsals and hit it off immediately and I picture them as remaining contact buddies who would get together and gossip and drink and drink and gossip throughout that decade. Andy does a couple of films, one of which is a dramatic role in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd. That's followed by the movie version of No Time for Sergeants, then a lesser film called Onionhead, followed by the musical Destry Rides Again. By that point he's not bankable in plays or movies, so he goes into television. In 1960, that was considered a retreat, but the first thing he thinks of is, 'Well, I'm going to do a show that's kind of based on the character from No Time for Sergeants.'"
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"Andy was probably playing it close to the vest that he was going to be doing this show. Don saw that episode of Danny Thomas when he was playing bridge with Pat Harrington — television's Schneider from One Day at a Time — and says, 'Holy crap, that's Andy!' And then he calls him and suggests himself for Andy Taylor's deputy and Andy thinks it's a great idea. The rest is history, because the connection between them was instant. You know, in the play No Time for Sergeants, they only had one or two scenes with each other, but they were so powerful together. They had an immediate kind of comedic duo sort of chemistry even then, which is why Don gets hired to do the film as well. There's like one guy from the play who's still alive that I interviewed and he said, 'Oh, yeah, those two guys … that scene just crackled.' And by the time they got together for the Griffith Show, surely Don understood — and I'm sure Andy did too — that they had the makings of a brilliant comedy team like a Martin and Lewis. You can almost look at the scenes they do together, as I do throughout the book separate from the show itself, as the work of a great comedy duo."
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Universal Pictures
That duo seemed to come to an end five seasons into The Andy Griffith Show when Don decided to accept Universal Picture's offer of a five-film contract. Reflects Daniel, "Since my subjects were deceased, I couldn't get inside their heads about what happened. From interviewing other people who worked with them, such as their managers, and also reading what both of them had recalled about that sequence of events, here's what I think happened: The show was slotted to go for five seasons. I don't think many television shows assume they're going to go longer than that, and by the time they entered Season 5, Don was actively pursuing a film career. He was basically ironing out a film contract just so he'd have something to do after the Griffith show."
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"In the meantime, Griffith was doing so well and what I was told is that if you had a Top 10 show, you just don't just let it go off the air. Not in the 1960s. So they eventually approached Andy and said, 'Let's keep this going.' And he said okay, probably with some reluctance, because he was artistically restless, but they offered him something like a million dollars — which was a lot of money back then. He approached Don and I think they met at Andy's house to hash it out. Andy invited Don to stay on beyond the fifth season, but Don had this film deal which he felt was better than being second banana on a TV show. My understanding is that Don told Andy he might stay if he could have a partial ownership of the show; I think he was being paid about a hundred thousand a year. That just didn't work out, so Don walked."
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Daniel de Vise
Although they parted ways from the show, it wasn't very long before Andy and Don were back together as buddies. Points out Daniel, "We know for a fact that the two of them collaborated wholeheartedly on Don's first Universal film, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Andy hung out with them in the writing cabin and got drunk with them and contributed a lot. It was almost like an extended Andy Griffith Show episode. It has all that warmth and love of the show circa '64 and '65. Meanwhile, I think the Griffith show becomes a shell of itself after the fifth season. Andy looks sort of bereft, he looks bored, he looks cranky and unfulfilled both in terms of the dwindling artistry of the show and also in terms of his buddy not being there anymore. There are still some good episodes, but, to paraphrase BB King, the thrill is gone."
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As frequently happens with actors on a successful show, it isn't long before the grass on the other side of the fence starts looking real fancy and they want out. Don left for movies, Andy ended the show in '68 wanting to do other things (and evolving the series into Mayberry RFD). Did they regret their decisions? "I learned so much in writing this book," says Daniel. "I'm sure you'll recognize what I'm about to say: so many actors who become famous in a role, many of them never again have another role that's as big as it is. It's rare that you get a character like a Timothy Olyphant who does a Deadwood and then does Justified. Those are few and far between. To have a comeback is amazing and rare. At the same time, I'm looking at the glass half full, because Andy has this brilliant comeback with Matlock in the 1980s. And Don has a very respectful run as well in about five-year increments."
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Daniel de Vise
"He did five years on the Griffith Show, he did roughly five years of very successful little, low budget Universal films. They were all good films that made money. He has about a five year run of Disney films and a five year run on Three's Company. So I think both of them really had a tremendous run as Hollywood stars having that many second chances. And with Andy it took him a while, but he finally had that Matlock comeback, making some very interesting movies and TV movies along the way. I mean, we're talking about a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient; he's a major, major talent, but it just took him a long time to find his mojo again. But he did. And Don eventually joined him in a recurring role."
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There's no denying that Andy and Don had their initial mojo on The Andy Griffith Show and that the show absolutely lives on, yet it somehow doesn't get the recognition that it deserves. Concurs Daniel, "The show does amazingly well in streaming, but I make this argument over and over in my book that you look at these lists of all time greatest TV shows and it doesn't get nearly the respect that it deserves. Recently Variety or The Hollywood Reporter did a pretty definitive Top 100 TV Shows of All Time list. They surveyed a whole bunch of people and I'm not sure the Griffith Show was even there. It might have something to do with the fact that The Andy Griffith Show was never quite the toast of either Hollywood or New York when it was on the air. It was consistently passed over for artistic recognition. It would always get beaten out for the award by The Dick Van Dyke Show — except for Don, who won five Emmys."
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Daniel de Vise
His observation is that The Andy Griffith Show was more or less in the blind spot of most critics back then and that even to this day people don't recognize what a brilliant series it was. "Maybe because it's Americana and flyover states and people just don't care about stuff that happens between New York and L.A.," Daniel suggests. "I don't know what it is, but the show's accomplishments essentially speak for themselves. If you put something in a time capsule to show future generations on Mars what Americana is, you put in a disc of The Andy Griffith Show."
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In what could be perceived as another strange comparison, in a sense Andy and Don were like John Lennon and Paul McCartney: each brilliant on their own, but capable of magic when they came together. "There was no other comic duo like them," offers Daniel. "They were magical and iconic and definitive. The things they did have aged really well. Even if you compare them to one of the all time greats like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, I think Andy and Don's work together works as well 60 years later as any of other great comedy duos. Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis — you name it. In a way, because the show is so huge and has this huge fandom, they're overlooked as a comedy team. But there's no doubt that they were greater than the sum of their parts."
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"You know, I was just listening to Paul McCartney on an interview," he closes, "and he was saying what a freaking magical coincidence that he and John Lennon wound up in the same band. You know, two of the greatest songwriters there are. And with Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, it's kind of a similar, amazing, wonderful happenstance that they met in New York and became friends and just colossal talents together."
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