What American is there who hasn't seen The Andy Griffith Show? TAGS (as the show's diehard fans call it) is an enduring piece of Americana, its two central characters – Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife – as indelible a pair as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. While there have been a number of other books dealing with this television classic, ANDY AND DON is the surely first one to focus on the professional and personal relationship between Andy Griffith and Don Knotts. Griffith and Knotts had an enduring friendship that started when they met during the Broadway production of No Time for Sergeants in the mid-1950s. The two men immediately bonded over their shared southern backgrounds and difficult childhoods. The delightful chemistry that Andy and Don displayed on screen – worthy of the greatest comedy duos, of Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello – was based in their real-life friendship.
ANDY & DON is written by Daniel de Vise', an author and journalist who is the late Don Knotts' brother-in-law. He is a sophisticated prose stylist and has given a cogent structure to his double biography, first pursuing Andy's and Don's separate strands of narrative and then bringing them together. Don's childhood was nothing short of horrifying, with grim poverty, persistent health problems and a mentally ill father who once nearly killed him. Andy's was outwardly more comfortable, yet he too had his battles to contend with, including persistent bullying. Throughout his life Don Knotts was insecure, neurotic and anxiety-ridden, much like Barney Fife. Andy Griffith's personality was more complex, with some of Andy Taylor's magnanimity coexisting with less attractive qualities.
The most enjoyable part of the book by far is the middle portion, which chronicles the production of The Andy Griffith Show. There are some great on-set anecdotes here, as well as character sketches of the various people involved in the show (including Howard McNear, Frances Bavier, and Jim Nabors, among others). The latter portion of the book gets more and more depressing. After Don's departure from TAGS, the program steadily declined in quality (“An odd sort of ontological crisis gripped [TAGS] in its sixth season,” the author writes). It finally dissolved in 1968, giving way to the spinoff series Mayberry RFD. Neither Andy nor Don was able to rekindle the success of TAGS, though Andy made several attempts to revamp the program in different guises. Both stars were caught up in the general cultural decline of the late 1960s and 70s and took on a number of “trendy” film and television projects in order to stay active and relevant. Much of the time they struggled to find work. Eventually Andy found new success in the 1980s with Matlock, his popular courtroom drama. But for the most part, The Andy Griffith Show represented a career high that would never be recaptured.
All this is not to speak of the two men's turbulent personal lives. De Vise' does not spare us the less palatable details. Andy, as it so happens, had a violent temper and a drinking problem; both he and Don developed into great lotharios during their Hollywood years, indulging in a number of extra-marital relationships (Andy had quite a yen for “Helen Crump” actress Aneta Corsault). In fact, those who prefer to maintain an idyllic picture of Andy Griffith and Don Knotts might not enjoy parts of this book. De Vise' “spices up” his narrative with some off-color anecdotes and dialogue reconstructions containing implied profanity; these strike me as gratuitous and unnecessary.
All in all, though, this is an absorbing and interesting book that fills in the gaps in our knowledge about this great comic duo. In hindsight we can see the mid-1960s as a cultural dividing line, and TAGS - running from 1960 to '68 - straddled that line. In this connection, I was intrigued by something De Vise' writes in the introduction: “[T]he Griffith Show refused to embrace [the changes of the 1960s], or even to acknowledge them. Instead, the program trained its gaze backward, revisiting and reviving the rural Americana of the 1930s, the time of Andy's childhood in North Carolina and Don's in West Virginia.” This raises an interesting question: to what extent was TAGS a backward glance at the 1930s, and to what extent was it perfectly consonant with the early (if not the later) 1960s? De Vise' doesn't delve any further into this question, but it bears further exploration.
Finally, on a side note: it is not true, as De Vise' claims, that Otis Campbell's wife never appears on TAGS; she appears in at least three episodes that I can recall, including “A Plaque for Mayberry.”
What American is there who hasn't seen The Andy Griffith Show? TAGS (as the show's diehard fans call it) is an enduring piece of Americana, its two central characters – Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife – as indelible a pair as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. While there have been a number of other books dealing with this television classic, ANDY AND DON is the surely first one to focus on the professional and personal relationship between Andy Griffith and Don Knotts. Griffith and Knotts had an enduring friendship that started when they met during the Broadway production of No Time for Sergeants in the mid-1950s. The two men immediately bonded over their shared southern backgrounds and difficult childhoods. The delightful chemistry that Andy and Don displayed on screen – worthy of the greatest comedy duos, of Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello – was based in their real-life friendship.
ANDY & DON is written by Daniel de Vise', an author and journalist who is the late Don Knotts' brother-in-law. He is a sophisticated prose stylist and has given a cogent structure to his double biography, first pursuing Andy's and Don's separate strands of narrative and then bringing them together. Don's childhood was nothing short of horrifying, with grim poverty, persistent health problems and a mentally ill father who once nearly killed him. Andy's was outwardly more comfortable, yet he too had his battles to contend with, including persistent bullying. Throughout his life Don Knotts was insecure, neurotic and anxiety-ridden, much like Barney Fife. Andy Griffith's personality was more complex, with some of Andy Taylor's magnanimity coexisting with less attractive qualities.
The most enjoyable part of the book by far is the middle portion, which chronicles the production of The Andy Griffith Show. There are some great on-set anecdotes here, as well as character sketches of the various people involved in the show (including Howard McNear, Frances Bavier, and Jim Nabors, among others). The latter portion of the book gets more and more depressing. After Don's departure from TAGS, the program steadily declined in quality (“An odd sort of ontological crisis gripped [TAGS] in its sixth season,” the author writes). It finally dissolved in 1968, giving way to the spinoff series Mayberry RFD. Neither Andy nor Don was able to rekindle the success of TAGS, though Andy made several attempts to revamp the program in different guises. Both stars were caught up in the general cultural decline of the late 1960s and 70s and took on a number of “trendy” film and television projects in order to stay active and relevant. Much of the time they struggled to find work. Eventually Andy found new success in the 1980s with Matlock, his popular courtroom drama. But for the most part, The Andy Griffith Show represented a career high that would never be recaptured.
All this is not to speak of the two men's turbulent personal lives. De Vise' does not spare us the less palatable details. Andy, as it so happens, had a violent temper and a drinking problem; both he and Don developed into great lotharios during their Hollywood years, indulging in a number of extra-marital relationships (Andy had quite a yen for “Helen Crump” actress Aneta Corsault). In fact, those who prefer to maintain an idyllic picture of Andy Griffith and Don Knotts might not enjoy parts of this book. De Vise' “spices up” his narrative with some off-color anecdotes and dialogue reconstructions containing implied profanity; these strike me as gratuitous and unnecessary.
All in all, though, this is an absorbing and interesting book that fills in the gaps in our knowledge about this great comic duo. In hindsight we can see the mid-1960s as a cultural dividing line, and TAGS - running from 1960 to '68 - straddled that line. In this connection, I was intrigued by something De Vise' writes in the introduction: “[T]he Griffith Show refused to embrace [the changes of the 1960s], or even to acknowledge them. Instead, the program trained its gaze backward, revisiting and reviving the rural Americana of the 1930s, the time of Andy's childhood in North Carolina and Don's in West Virginia.” This raises an interesting question: to what extent was TAGS a backward glance at the 1930s, and to what extent was it perfectly consonant with the early (if not the later) 1960s? De Vise' doesn't delve any further into this question, but it bears further exploration.
Finally, on a side note: it is not true, as De Vise' claims, that Otis Campbell's wife never appears on TAGS; she appears in at least three episodes that I can recall, including “A Plaque for Mayberry.”