Read Online Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show by Daniel de Vise - Free Book Online

students; he would use townspeople.”
    The job put Andy and Barbara an hour’s drive from Raleigh, epicenter of the North Carolina theater scene.
    At Goldsboro High, Andy revealed a talent for recruiting students into music study, and soon he had a full roster. But Andy wasn’t much of a teacher. “I don’t know how to just sit down and talk about one thing,” Andy recalled. His cigarette craving would build till the end of class, when Andy would race his students out the door.
    In summer, Andy and Barbara returned to Manteo and rejoined the pursuit of their passion. By 1951, they were stars of The Lost Colony , the most glamorous couple among its lead actors. Andy and Barbara struck up enduring friendships. “Every night after the show, we’d be partying,” recalled George Vassos, a lifelong friend of Andy’s. “As soon as it would end, we’d head out for the beer parlor. We’d go out there and drink and dance.”
    Andy formed a particularly close bond with a Lost Colony player named Ainslie Pryor. Ainslie managed the Raleigh Little Theatre, a community playhouse at the center of the Raleigh dramatic scene. He was another director, like Foster Fitz-Simons at the university, who thought Andy had something special.
    In February 1952, a publicity man heard the Griffiths sing and invited them to audition at the Paper Mill Playhouse, a regional theater in northern New Jersey with an outsize reputation owing to its locale, a short train ride from Broadway. The Griffiths had never been that far north, but they made the trip, feeling very much like country mice.
    At the audition, Andy and Barbara lined up with more than two hundred others. Barbara sang “In the Still of the Night,” and Andy sang “Dancing in the Dark.” They did not get the parts. An auditioner told Andy his voice was “overbrilliant, almost painfully so.” Andy could have shrugged off the advice; the auditions were a long shot in the first place. But Andy decided, then and there, to halt his singing career. He would make a living being funny. “Singing had always frightened me, anyway,” he recalled.
    Ainslie Pryor and his wife came up to meet the Griffiths, offering succor and a gin-soaked tour of New York. On the train ride home, Ainslie told Andy of a show he was preparing to stage, called The Drunkard . It was a melodrama, and Ainslie needed oleo acts, brief skits to distract the audience while the scenery was changed. Andy had some ideas.
    Off The Lost Colony stage, Andy continued his experiments with skit-based comedy and vaudeville. When The Lost Colony curtain fell on Saturday nights, the colonial actors would decamp to the local Shriners club to stage a weekly program of song, dance, and laughs, with Andy as master of ceremonies. The audience was a rowdy mix of Lost Colony cast and crew and local townsfolk.
    George Vassos would sing the standards “Early Autumn” and “Stormy Weather” with three other men drawn from a local church choir. Barbara would sing folk songs and Andy would accompany her on guitar. Andy would stage his monologues. But the centerpiece of the show was Andy’s preacher act. Written with Ainslie, Andy’s sometime collaborator, the sketch began with a processional and a string of off-color announcements: “The deacons wish that whoever keeps writing ‘Meet me in the basement’ on the back of the hymn books would cut it out, because everybody that goes down there tracks mud all over the church.”Then, Andy would launch into a backwoods sermon, telling the singsong story of the Preacher and the Bear:
    O Lord, didn’t you deliver Daniel from the lion’s den
    Also deliver Jonah from the belly of the whale and then
    The Hebrew children from the fiery furnace, the good book do declare
    O Lord, if you can’t help me, for goodness’ sake don’t help that bear!
    Gradually, Andy’s ambitions for