Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show by Daniel de Vise

Moravian church. But Andy soon found himself crippled by feelings of inadequacy, a new manifestation of the old fears that had dogged him in grammar school. Back in Mount Airy, Andy had felt second-class. Now, he felt like a fraud.
    â€œI had a wonderful time—and a horrible time—in Chapel Hill,” Andy recalled. “I went through every day hoping, just hoping, they wouldn’t find out how little I knew, but sometimes they did. I failed Political Science Forty-One twice. . . . I guess that was the only record I ever broke at Chapel Hill.”
    One night, as he passed Memorial Hall, Andy glimpsed a poster advertising auditions for a production of The Gondoliers . “I didn’t even know who Gilbert and Sullivan were,” Andy recalled. “Anyway, I decided to go over there, and I sang a terrible old song, called ‘Shepherd, See Thy Horse’s Flowing Mane.’ ” The next day, Andy found he had won a part. From then on, he recalled, “They did a Gilbert and Sullivan almost every year, and I played the comedy lead in all of them.”
    When he was onstage, Andy’s fears would evaporate. He knew he could act. Others knew it, too. Foster Fitz-Simons, the Carolina dramatist who directed Andy’s university debut, was perhaps the first to recognize the young actor’s sway over an audience. Foster invited his wife, actress Marion Fitz-Simons, to a rehearsal. As they watched Andy, Foster told her, “He’s got something. I don’t know what it is, but he’s got something.”
    Foster Fitz-Simons led the Carolina Playmakers, the university’s resident repertory company. The director taught Andy and the other players to “tell what you know; write what you know.” He encouraged them to craft folk dramas about “universal truths heard in the kitchen,” recalled William Ivey Long, a Broadway costume designer who grew up as a family friend to the Griffiths. It was in Fitz-Simons’s acting classes, William says, that Andy developed a theatrical persona based upon himself, “the ultimate aw-shucks farm boy.”
    Andy took a job busing tables on campus for “breakfast and eight dollars a week: five dollars for tuition and three dollars to live on, more or less,” Andy recalled after his success. “I was a lot thinner in those days than I am now.” A voice teacher offered Andy free lessons if he would maintain the sheet music for the glee club. Andy became its president. He appeared in that capacity in a photograph for the university yearbook of 1947, wearing a pompadour and looking a bit like an irritable rockabilly singer.
    Andy caught a bigger break when he learned that the old back injury—for which he briefly wore a back brace—qualified him for a program that supported indigent students with disabilities. It paid his tuition. Andy became a dorm manager, a job that covered his rooming costs. He collected laundry for another two dollars a week.
    Though Andy’s life now centered on Chapel Hill, he returned home on occasion to perform with the Mount Airy Operetta Club, the sort of earnest small-town ensemble Andy would lovingly mock later in The Andy Griffith Show. Locals remember the afternoon of November 11, 1946, when the company lulled hundreds of Mount Airy schoolchildren to sleep with a matinee performance of The Bartered Bride . Suddenly, the male lead unleashed a piercing yodel; the vibrations triggered a massive spring-coiled window shade, which flapped up to the ceiling like a startled flock of birds. The children exploded in laughter. Andy, already a shrewd judge of his audience, followed their lead, reviving the moribund performance with slapstick and ad-libbed high jinks. In his final scene, Andy leaped onto the back of another actor and rode him piggyback off the stage. The children laughed and clapped. Andy waved back. It would be his last public appearance in Mount Airy for more than a