Mayberry -- and who among us is not an honorary citizen? -- was a sad place on July 4, with the announcement of Andy Griffith’s passing. Ask anyone who’s seen Griffith’s searing performance in A Face in the Crowd: this was a man with major acting chops, not simply a folksy guy with a cornpone accent. Yes, A Face in the Crowd presents Griffith once again as a Southern good ol’ boy, a Will Rogers type who wins a national audience with his guitar-picking and his down-home wit. But in this Elia Kazan film (from Budd Schulberg’s story), Griffith’s salt-of-the-earth appeal proves deceptive. As he rises to fame and fortune, he evolves into a monster.
It’s a great performance, but of course the reason Andy Griffith’s death made headlines is because of the eight seasons he spent in our living rooms as Mayberry’s Sheriff Andy Taylor. Though The Andy Griffith Show had little impact overseas, it was one of America’s top-rated shows throughout its run. Why was a sitcom about lovable small-town eccentrics so popular? It helps to remember that the show made its debut in 1960, when the United States was going through huge and often painful changes. As Michael Farkash wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, the show “was what many Americans wanted America to be in the troubled early days of racial activism and the Vietnam War. Mayberry was a place to hide from the real world, if only for a half-hour at a time.”
Those who worked on The Andy Griffith Show speak of the atmosphere on its set as a kind of refuge too. In 2001, while researching the career of Ron Howard, I spoke to Keith Thibodeaux. Known professionally as Richard Keith, he played Little Ricky on I Love Lucy from 1956 through 1957. After I Love Lucy ended in the wake of the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz split, Keith was hired to fill the occasional role of Opie’s school pal, Johnny Paul Jason. The two series were both shot at Desilu Studios, but the mood could not have been more different. I Love Lucy had featured volatile personalities, and there was added pressure in the fact that it was taped before a live audience. In Keith’s words, The Andy Griffith Show “had the liberty to be a little bit more laid back. In the makeup department room they would be playing checkers and chess and strumming the guitar. Andy would be back there singing old songs from North Carolina. It was that kind of a downhome set. And myself being a southern boy, it was like going back home for me.”
This relaxed approach did not mean that cast and crew were lackadaisical about the task at hand. In this, as in so much else, Andy Griffith set the tone. He prized efficiency, though he had made clear from the get-go that Hollywood hysteria was not his style. Ron Howard (whose memorial tribute to his TV dad is well worth reading) has called Griffith’s balance between dedication and joy a model for his own on-set behavior: “There was a lot of laughter on the set, and at the same time, hand in hand with that laughter, was very good work being done on a consistent basis. Anything less than 100 percent effort would just never fly —- not because he would start yelling, but because simply that wasn’t the way we worked on the show . . . . There was a feeling of, ‘Hey, here’s what we’re doing, and therefore it’s important. People are gonna watch it. It represents us and let’s do it right.’”
