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

decade.
    In fall 1947, Andy prepared to audition for a production of Haydn’s Seasons by the Chapel Hill Choral Club. A classmate asked him, “Have you heard Bobby Edwards sing? Now, there’s a voice!”
    Andy considered, then answered, “I don’t know him.”
    â€œYou really don’t know Bobby Edwards.” Bobby was short for Barbara.
    Barbara Bray Edwards came from the Carolina town of Troy. Her father was the superintendent of schools; her mother, Dixie, was a doctor’s daughter. “They were a genteel southern-eastern North Carolina family,” recalled Robert Edwards King, Barbara’s nephew. They were prominent in their town, and Barbara, artistic and pretty, left Troy with abundant promise.
    Barbara brought her crystalline soprano to Chapel Hill after completing her degree at Converse College in South Carolina. She wanted to begin graduate work and to explore the fertile arts scene.
    â€œBarbara Edwards was a sweetheart,” recalled Carl Perry, a classmate who befriended the young couple and acted with them in a campus production of The Mikado. “Her voice was clear as a bell.”
    One day, a friend pointed Bobby out to Andy. He glimpsed her only from behind: a receding form clad in a matching sweater and skirt, topped with a sweep of rich brown hair tamed into a long bob. A few days later, he saw her almond eyes and her sculpted cheekbones. And he heard her sing.
    â€œThey were doing the Haydn Seasons and they needed a soprano,” Barbara recalled. “So I went in all full of spirit. And Andy was standing behind a baby-grand piano, and I shook hands with Andy, and I don’t know, something just happened. So then I sang my little audition. And it just so happened that Andy had waited out in the foyer. I had to say something. So I asked him for a match.”
    He asked her to coffee. Three days later, he asked her to marry him.
    In summer 1946, Andy had considered auditioning for The Lost Colony , the long-running outdoor drama that reenacts the founding and mysterious disappearance of the first English settlement in North America. Set on the Carolina shore, the production offered a chance for Andy to continue his dramatic studies through the summer. But he decided against it. “They paid only twenty-five dollars, and I figured I couldn’t do that and stay in school,” Andy recalled. So, Andy reluctantly returned to Mount Airy and worked in the furniture factory with his father, earning forty dollars a week. This was one of Andy’s few encounters with genuine toil, and he hated every minute of it.
    The next summer, Andy and Barbara drove to Manteo to join The Lost Colony . Andy had never seen the ocean. He was spellbound. In time, Andy would forsake Mount Airy and make Manteo his home.
    The actors lived in repurposed naval buildings left over from the war. They rode to the theater on an old school bus. “We had our own swimming hole, our own volleyball, our own eating place, our own beer joint, everything,” Andy recalled.
    Andy and Barbara were cast into small roles at first. “My dad started out playing a red soldier for the queen,” Dixie Griffith recalled. Andy wore tights. When he overheard two women discussing his spindly legs, he took to padding them with newspaper or cotton wadding. By 1949, Andy was playing Sir Walter Raleigh and Barbara was playing Eleanor Dare, mother of the first child born in North America to English parents. Andy and Barbara began to appear together on Lost Colony postcards and program covers.
    Barbara remained, to this point, the star of the Griffith family. Andy later conceded he wouldn’t have won a lead role without his wife, who persuaded The Lost Colony director to promote him. But Andy, too, had found his calling. Back on campus, he missed classes and ignored homework whenever he was in a production; in Andy’s mind, his career had already begun.
    As a theatrical performer, Andy