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

was the new president of the local Kiwanis Club in Waynesville. “I’m trying to gain some experience in show business,” Andy wrote. “I’d like to come to Waynesville and put on a show for you and raise funds.” He offered to divide the proceeds evenly with the service club. The Kiwanis board asked J.B. about Andy. J.B. told them, “Well, nobody knows him. He couldn’t draw any more people than I could, and I couldn’t draw half a dozen.” J.B. politely declined.
    Andy would not soon forget the slight. A few years later, when Andy was famous, J.B. sent him a letter. J.B. now belonged to the Chamber of Commerce in Charlotte, and the group was looking for a big name to headline a banquet. The organizers wanted Andy. But Andy never replied. A decade after that, Andy invited J.B. and his wife to a performance. That night, J.B. asked Andy, “Why didn’t you answer my letter?” Andy smiled and replied, “J.B., why didn’t you let me come to Waynesville when I needed some experience?” For the next five decades, Andy would reward loyalty in his friends and hold long and bitter grudges toward those who let him down.
    Some months into their new venture, Andy and Barbara found they had a show booked for a group they’d entertained previously. “And I didn’t have but one show,” Andy recalled. On the way to the gig, Andy assembled a monologue from his memories of playing sousaphone in the marching band at football games in Chapel Hill. “I don’t know where it come from, nor why, but that notion came to me in the car on the way to the second job,” he recalled. The skit described a “country fella” stumbling upon a game of college football:
    â€œAnd I looked down thar, and I seen five or six convicts a-runnin’ up and down and a-blowin’ whistles. . . . And I seen thirty-five or forty men come a-runnin’ out one end of a great big outhouse down there. . . . And, friends, I seen that evenin’ the awfulest fight that I have ever seen in my life!”
    The observer concludes that the point of the game is for the men to run a “pumpkin” from one end of a cow pasture to the other without being knocked down or “steppin’ in something.” The last bit was a nod to Andy’s own scrimmages, long ago, in Mrs. Allred’s cow pasture.
    Or was it? Barbara once told an interviewer Andy’s most famous sketch merely retold a football story Andy had heard from another man, a tale “so blue Andy wouldn’t tell it to me.” She said Andy simply rewrote it, leaving out the dirty parts.
    Andy and Barbara had pledged, early in their marriage, that if either found fame, the other would step back into a supporting role. By spring of 1953, the Griffiths were beginning to draw attention, and most of it was going to Andy.
    One May weekend, the Raleigh Little Theatre presented a production of Ten Nights in a Barroom . A reviewer in the Raleigh Times dismissed it as “two hours of archaic dialogue, missed cues, mysterious hands, dangling sandbags,” and such. The writer said the production was salvaged only by Andy Griffith, who came on between acts to perform his new football sketch and another Shakespeare send-up, this one inspired by Romeo and Juliet . Andy “could have held the stage all night,” the critic wrote, “and no one would have minded.”
    Andy performed his football sketch that summer at a dinner gathering. A man came running up afterward and introduced himself as Orville Campbell. He told Andy, “We’ve got to make a record of this!” Andy replied, “Well, Mr. Campbell, if you’ve got the money, I’ve got the time.”
    Orville began to bring a microphone and a tape recorder to Andy’s shows. Five times, he tried to record the sketch. Each time, Andy froze because he wasn’t accustomed to the microphone. Orville