For over sixty years, The Andy Griffith Show has remained the gold standard of television. The show has endured thanks to the timeless tales told by Andy Griffith‘s Sheriff Andy Taylor as he keeps the peace in the town of Mayberry.
Griffith also apparently kept the peace on the show’s set, even standing up for Aunt Bee actress Frances Bavier, whom he famously did not see eye-to-eye with. Rance Howard, father of Ron “Opie” Howard, claimed that Griffith “seemed to bear some kind of resentment toward Frances;” a 2014 article in the Triad City Beat, a North Carolina publication serving the area where Baviar spent the final years of her life, reported that when Ron Howard and Griffith paid an unscheduled visit of Bavier’s house in the ’80s, she’d only speak to them through a closed front door.
But despite all of this, when speaking on the TV Academy’s Pioneers of Television series, Griffith shared the story of how he had to lay down the law with one of The Andy Griffith Show‘s producers, defending Bavier in the process.
In the lead up to shooting the first episode—what is known as the pilot, often leading to a series taking off for a full season—Griffith said that the cast went through days of rehearsal, including a table read of the episode’s script.
“After we read, [Executive producers] Danny Thomas, Sheldon Leonard and a man named Artie Sander, who wrote the pilot, yelled at one another all day. ‘I said that first, I said that an hour ago.’ You know, and a lot of profanity,” said Griffith.
This kind of behavior didn’t sit well with Andy. At the end of that first day, I asked Sheldon if I could speak to him,” he said. “I said, ‘Sheldon, if that’s what television is, I don’t think I’ll be able to take it.’”
“Sheldon was very wise,” said Griffith. “He said, ‘Andy, you have to understand something. Danny likes to yell. So we all yell. If you don’t want to yell, nobody will yell.’ And it worked out to be true. Nobody ever yelled on our show.”
Griffith said he made sure of that. The Andy Griffith Show got picked up, and during the first year of shooting, Danny Thomas paid a visit.
“[He] came down to our stage one day and Frances was doing a scene,” said Griffith. “And Frances was a delicate woman. Danny came down with a loud voice, ‘That woman’s got to do that with a lot of heart!’”
Griffith, fearing for his coworker, took a stand. “I went to Sheldon and said, ‘Keep that man off our stage.’ I don’t know how he did it, but he did it.”
From there, it was relatively smooth sailing. The Andy Griffith Show ran for eight seasons, culminating in 249 episodes. Griffith departed in 1968 to resume his film career. It wouldn’t be long until he came back to TV, finding success once again with Matlock.
