Don Knotts’ financial feud with Andy Griffith: The real reason Barney left Mayberry?
Why did Knotts leave for Hollywood?
Working with friends can be a tricky situation. How do you not let business matters affect those relationships? There’s no way for us to simply turn off one side of our brains to separate how we feel about somebody’s work from how we know them elsewhere. It’s impossible. Your best friend in the whole world could make life miserable by doing a lousy job at work. Or worse, what if they do such a great job that they start questioning the hierarchy, and take a critical look at how much money you make?
Don Knotts played Barney Fife for five seasons of The Andy Griffith Show. The classic reason given for his departure always has to do with Knotts seeking a career in the movies. He’d have to leave Mayberry for Hollywood, and so his time on the show came to an end.
But, allegedly, this was only part of the story.
The “Barney goes to Hollywood” piece of the puzzle is easy to corroborate because of Knotts’ public success on the big screen in the following decades. Movies like The Ghost and Mr. Chicken and The Reluctant Astronauts were effective vehicles, translating Knotts’ small-screen persona for the big screen. The gambit paid off, and Knotts raised his profile further into the seventies and beyond, eventually creating a lucrative cinematic partnership with Tim Conway.
However, while Knotts undisputedly left Mayberry for Hollywood, there may have been more to the picture than simple ambition. A little bit of digging unveils that money could’ve been a driving factor in the decision. It wasn’t just a matter of how much money Knotts could make in Hollywood. Apparently, he may have left because of how little he made on The Andy Griffith Show.
Shrewd business dealings gave Griffith the upper hand on his show from the get-go. Yes, it was his name in the title, but he was also a big financial player in the game as well. In Daniel de Visé’s book Andy and Don, the author lays out the economic ins and outs of the show’s early days. Knowing that his client didn’t have very much Hollywood clout, Griffith’s manager, Dick Linke secured the actor a majority ownership in the show. The money at stake allowed Griffith creative control, more than making up for his lacking résumé. The risk was all on the show’s title star. Luckily for Griffith, the reward was his as well.
By contrast, Knotts did not have any financial stake in the program. Instead, he was given a salary, like any other actor in any other television show. In author Richard Kelly’s The Andy Griffith Show Book, Knotts’ financial arrangement is made clear by his manager, Sherwin Bash.
“I worked out this terrible deal for [Don Knotts], where he ended up making no money in five years,” said Bash.
Knotts only made about $1,250 an episode. That’s roughly $35,000 a year. While it was a decent enough salary for a TV actor at the time, it was a paltry sum when compared to the money Griffith made from the show.
According to de Visé, Griffith and Knotts met after the conclusion of the show’s fifth season. Knotts allegedly asked for a bigger slice of the pie, and Griffith misunderstood what he meant. While an agreement was never met, and Knotts left the show forever, the two actors remained friends and collaborators, with Knotts appearing later in Matlock.
