Elinor Donahue is 88 years old, but she’s still talking about one of her first TV boyfriends — Andy Taylor, the aw-shucks local sheriff on The Andy Griffith Show.
Ellie Walker, Mayberry’s first lady pharmacist, was Taylor’s initial romantic interest on the show. Their courtship wasn’t meant to be, however. Despite signing a three-year contract to romance the town’s most eligible bachelor, Donahue only filmed 11 episodes before deciding to move on to greener sitcom pastures.
Donahue wasn’t an inexperienced comedy ingenue. She’d already starred for several seasons as the oldest daughter, Betty, on Father Knows Best before heading to Mayberry. But it was her first part playing an adult, and Donahue admits she wasn’t ready. “To be honest, I felt like a bird out of a nest. I didn’t feel like I had all my feathers yet, and I didn’t feel capable. It was the strangest feeling,” she told Women’s World. “I had a three-year contract for that show, but at the end of the first year, I asked to be let out of my contract, because I didn’t feel that I was playing the role properly. I just didn’t feel right about it.”
Griffith put the blame on himself and his writers. “We never knew how to write for women,” he says in The Andy Griffith Show Book. “We never did know, and because of my peculiar nature, and my personal relationships with women, and the difficulty that I’ve always had with them, it became even more difficult for us to write for women.”
As for Donahue in particular? “We were so lucky to get her, we thought,” said Griffith. “Well, she didn’t work out at all. It wasn’t her fault. It was our fault.”
When Donahue asked to be released from her contract, Griffith was happy to set her free, mostly because he had no idea what to do with her character.
The Andy Griffith Show struggled with Sheriff Taylor’s many love interests for the entire run of the show. “Andy, you have to realize, is not really a lady’s man,” said his manager, Richard Linke. “If you’ll notice, he rarely kissed anybody in the series, and only rarely did he hold Helen Crump. He never did a real kiss.”
Donahue knew all about it. While Griffith insisted that his staff didn’t know how to write for women, she knew something else was the root of the problem. “I didn’t think there was any real chemistry there,” she told Woman’s World. It wasn’t personal. In subsequent seasons, when the show brought in more potential girlfriends for the sheriff, the chemistry wasn’t there either.
Finally, Aneta Corsaut, who played school teacher Helen Crump, arrived on the scene. “I have since read they had a hot and heavy thing going,” Donahue said. “He was able to relate to her.” A little too much relating, perhaps — Griffith proposed marriage to Corsaut while he was still wed to someone else. As he said, Griffith had a “peculiar nature” when it came to women.
Donahue went on to roles in The Odd Couple and Star Trek, with no regrets about leaving Mayberry in her rear-view mirror. “I was just not a happy camper,” she said, “and there was no point in my trying to continue with it.”
