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

Morris, and soon Don was booked onto the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts . Arthur Godfrey was a star-maker, and his Talent Scouts was simulcast on radio and television, giving Don, in 1949, his first on-screen appearance.
    New York was amid a vaudeville revival, so the William Morris agents dispatched Don to try out his stand-up act in variety shows at theaters in the outer boroughs. When Don arrived at his first engagement, in the Bronx, the booking agent told him to leave his music with the pit band. Don said he had no music.
    â€œNo play-on music, no play-off music?” the agent snarled.
    â€œNo, sir.”
    The agent scowled. “Well, give me one of your eight-by-ten pictures to put out front.”
    â€œI, uh . . . I don’t have any eight-by-ten pictures.”
    â€œWhat?” the agent screamed. “You’ve got no pictures? Listen, you do ten minutes and get off, you hear me? Not one minute more!”
    The booker stormed off. Later, Don heard the man telling someone, “The kid’s got no pictures. He’s got no music. What kind of an act is that?”
    Yet, Don’s act drew riotous laughs in the Bronx. Emboldened, Don sought a booking in Manhattan. He got a gig at the Jefferson Theatre on Fourteenth Street in the East Village, where agents went to scout new acts.
    â€œI walked onstage at the Jefferson with all the confidence in the world,” Don recalled, “but after about two minutes, I realized I was in Trouble City. . . . These people had seen it all, and I’m sure they knew the punch lines to every one of my jokes. Five minutes went by and I had heard not one laugh. I was beginning to break out in a cold sweat. Finally, one guy in the balcony laughed, and I said, ‘Thanks, Dad!’ ”
    That was the end of Don’s vaudeville career. He quit William Morris in humiliation and resolved never again to attempt stand-up, convinced it was “not my strong suit.” Once again, Don seemed to sell himself short. The agents told Don he simply needed new material; he hadn’t written anything of note since his army days. But Don would not be swayed. In the meager weeks that followed, surely the low ebb of his adult artistic career, Don took a job stuffing envelopes. “I’ll say this,” he recalled decades later. “It beat the hell out of plucking chickens in Raese’s grocery.”
    Don’s confidence had abandoned him, but not his ambition. He continued to make the rounds, haunting the agencies and casting offices and popping in to visit Lanny Ross. Don’s persistence soon bore fruit. Peter Dixon, Lanny’s writer, asked Don one day if he could do “the voice of an old-timer like, say, Gabby Hayes.” Gabby was the quintessential geriatric cowboy sidekick, cast alongside Roy Rogers and John Wayne in films such as Tall in the Saddle and Heldorado to spout authentic frontier gibberish.
    Dixon was assembling a revival of the Bobby Benson show, a radio series that had reaped a massive following in the 1930s. It was the stuff of juvenile fantasy: Bobby is an orphan who inherits a Texas cattle ranch and a gang of colorful sidekicks, including foreman Tex Mason, a “red Indian” called Harka, and an Irishman named . . . Irish. Rounding out the cast is old-timer Windy Wales. Together, they fight off cattle thieves and outwit escaped cons.
    Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders took to the air in 1949 as a summer replacement series on the Mutual Broadcasting System, home to The Shadow and Major League Baseball. Radio was still king in those days, two years before the debut of I Love Lucy . Bobby Benson was slated for 5:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a thirty-minute segment timed to catch young boys between homework and dinner. Don played Windy Wales.
    â€œThat first Tuesday afternoon, I found myself at the microphone with a cast of veteran radio actors,” Don recalled. “Let me