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

finally captured a good performance that September in Greensboro, at a convention of the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance company.
    Orville released the 45 rpm record on November 14, 1953, on Colonial Records, a tiny Chapel Hill imprint. Side A was the football sketch, which Orville titled “What It Was, Was Football.” Side B was the Romeo and Juliet sketch. Both were credited to “Deacon Andy Griffith.”
    They agreed to split the profits. Before long, Orville’s record had sold fifty thousand copies, and “Deacon” Andy Griffith was in heavy rotation.

3.
    The Bumpkins Take Broadway
    D ON K NOTTS lay in bed in the tiny hotel room above Times Square and wondered whether his wife’s first night in Manhattan might be her last. Thump, thump, thump, went the wall, shuddering from the weight of one body heaving against another in passion, like a sweaty human battering ram. How long could the wall endure this? How long could Kay?
    In the service, Don had watched men have sex with each other. But sweet little Kay, the preacher’s daughter, seemed so innocent. Now, on this cold January night in 1949, they lay in a fleabag hotel, trying to ignore the horrible noises bleeding across the shabby partition. Don imagined Kay asking herself, “What in God’s name have we gotten ourselves into?”
    Matters improved the next day. The Knottses rented a room at Ninety-Ninth Street and Broadway. Kay took a secretarial job with Celanese Corporation, a chemical company, for thirty-three dollars a week. Don claimed the twenty-dollar weekly allotment to which he was entitled through the military’s 52-20 Club, which guaranteed unemployed servicemen a meager living for up to fifty-two weeks. Don would remain on the dole for only two weeks.
    â€œWe would go to a place; the cheapest thing on the menu was spaghetti and meatballs, but it was a white-tablecloth thing,” Kay recalled. “And every week we would eat okay until it got to be Thursday, and then it was slim pickings. They had those Automats, where you could eat for forty cents.”
    Every morning, Don hit the streets to “make the rounds,” visiting theatrical agents and trolling for work. After a few weeks, he was clearly getting nowhere. Spent and frustrated, he confessed to Kay, “I don’t know how to get into show business.” She replied, “Why don’t you look up Lanny Ross?”
    Lanny had come backstage after one of the Stars and Gripes performances overseas and invited Don to look him up in peacetime. Now, in 1949, Lanny was back in New York, hosting a radio show on the powerful Mutual Broadcasting System from station WOR. Taking Lanny up on his offer seemed a long shot to Don, but Kay thought he should at least try. So, Don wrote Lanny a letter. Much to Don’s surprise, he received an immediate reply.
    Lanny happily adopted Don as a cause. “He introduced me all around, telling all his people how talented he thought I was,” Don recalled. “And he gave me a shot on his radio show.” Don couldn’t believe his good fortune.
    Lanny had plenty reasons to help Don. One was the powerful bond of fraternity that linked servicemen after the war. Another was Don’s prodigious talent, which seemed plain to everyone—save, perhaps, Don himself. A third was Don’s manner. Suppliant and self-effacing, Don radiated a complaisant submissiveness when in the company of other men, triggering the same protective impulse as a wagging tail on a stray dog. People wanted to help him.
    In his radio debut, Don performed the monologue Lanny had seen him do in the South Pacific, depicting “a sportscaster calling a football game who gets excited and mixes up his words, like, ‘They’re going back to their puddle. I mean, their huddle,’ ” Don recalled. Both he and Andy effectively launched their broadcast careers with skits about football.
    Lanny sent Don to William