“Oh, golly, we laughed a lot.”Įven as a child, Ron learned an important lesson from Andy “about the spirit of collaboration, which I’ve carried with me forever,” the Oscar winning director told Closer. “He said, ‘If you do all your preparation, the rest of the day we can laugh and carry on,'” recalled Jim Nabors, whose character, Gomer Pyle, spun off into his own hit sitcom. “Andy would drop a film canister loudly onto the linoleum floor and wake Don up and just howl with laughter.” Still, when it came time to shoot a scene, Andy was all business. “Don would be exhausted, so he’d nap on a cot in the sheriff’s office,” de Visé shared. “They could talk about things like mumblety-peg, a silly old game, and seeing preachers in tents on weekends.”Ī notorious prankster, Andy would often play gags on his pal Don. After Andy found solo success in the 50s as a country bumpkin in the play and film No Time for Sergeants, “She didn’t fall so naturally into the performer’s wife role.”ĭon came from Morgantown, WV, so “they were two Southern guys with similar backgrounds, stories, and childhoods, so they were drawn to each other instantly,” de Visé said. “Everybody thought Barbara was going to be the famous one,” de Visé said. In 1949, the same year he graduated from the University of North Carolina, he married classmate Barbara Bray Edwards, and the duo hit the road with a musical-comedy act. I hated it, so I made an adjustment to control the situation,” Andy once said. He found solace by doing theater in high school. “A lot of the kids were not well-dressed, and there was a perception that Andy was a mama’s boy, so he got bullied a lot,” de Visé added. Since he was an only child, his parents could afford to dress him in clean clothes, but that was held against him. His father was a carpenter who eventually earned enough to buy a home, but Andy “grew up on the poor side of town,” said de Visé. Born in Mount Airy, NC in 1926, he slept in dresser drawers as a baby because his family didn’t have enough money for a crib. Their protectiveness was “rooted in love and fear, not any stage-parent concept of protecting their cash cows,” Ron says.Andy’s anger may have had its roots in his difficult childhood. The performer, who went on to become an acclaimed director, and his brother, actor Clint Howard, 62, with whom he cowrote The Boys, credit their parents, Rance and Jean Howard, for keeping them safe and grounded during their Hollywood upbringing. For the next take, Ron pretended for the camera and the prop master, hidden behind a tree, threw the stone for him.Īs a child growing up on the set of The Andy Griffith Show, Ron, 67, became schooled in the art of make-believe, but he also witnessed some very real adult problems, prejudices and ugliness. “My skinny little arm was not powerful enough to get that rock into the water,” Ron confesses in his new book, The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family. In reality, the famous scene was filmed at California’s Franklin Canyon Lake and little Ronny Howard, then 6, couldn’t throw very far. In the opening credits of The Andy Griffith Show, Opie Taylor picks up a stone and tosses it into the bucolic waters of Myers Lake, a fishing hole on the outskirts of Mayberry.
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