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

tell you, I was just about as nervous as a person could be and still function. Pete Dixon [the scriptwriter] was in the control room, and when we went off the air, I sashayed by. He grinned at me. ‘Good’ was all he said.” Don returned home feeling physically ill. “My body ached so much from the entire experience that I thought I was coming down with the flu.”
    Don’s symptoms were anxiety made manifest. Don had performed well in his radio debut. Yet, he fully expected a phone call releasing him from the part. At the very inception of his professional career, Don already suffered from a debilitating pessimism, which combined with his natural fretfulness and budding hypochondria to yield an ensemble of physical ills. At such times, Don lay frozen in bed, sleepless and incapacitated.
    The dreaded call never came, and Don returned to the microphone two days later to broadcast the second episode, groggy but relieved.
    It was easy work, with no makeup or costumes and no need to memorize the script, which Don held in his hand as he read the part into the microphone. Don would eventually earn nearly $200 a week, which was good pay for the time.
    â€œThere was quite a technique to it, knowing how to fade yourself on and off the mike, how to match your voice to the action you were supposed to be engaged in, and keeping your eye on the director as well as your script,” Don recalled. “The director directed the entire show from the control room behind the glass, much like an orchestra conductor. Our sound effects man; our organist, who played our musical bridges on the Hammond organ; and in our case, because we were a western, our animal sound man, the man who did all the horse whinnies and dog barks and so on; all had to be woven in with precise cues from the director. The whole thing fascinated me.”
    In Don’s hands, Windy Wales soon emerged as the most colorful character in the Bobby Benson cast. A tired, old ranch hand, Windy is faithful and devoted and happily oblivious that his best days are behind him. He spins tales of derring-do, placing himself at the center of fantastic events that, if real, are well past: “Windjammer Wales, they used to call me, back in the days when I hunted whales up near the Arctic!” Clop-diddy-clop-diddy-clop-diddy-clop. “Yessiree, fellers, I’ve killed so many men the cemetery men made me a partner!”
    Don’s character was derivative, and he knew it. One day, Gabby Hayes himself came storming onto the set. “Goddamn you!” he raged. “You’ve been doing me on the radio every day and I’m sick of it!” Don stared at him in agony. Then, Gabby’s lip trembled and he burst out laughing. Don looked into the control room and saw his producers in hysterics.
    The nation’s ten-year-old boys laughed with Windy Wales, and they laughed at him. His wheezy tenor was implicitly funny, and his tough-guy bluster made Windy an easy target for mockery from both the narrator and his costars. Windy Wales was the first iteration of Don’s comedic caricature of male machismo, his first send-up of all the smirking swagger and action-hero posturing he saw in other men. Windy Wales was Don’s absurdist critique of the postwar masculine ideal. The same ironic bravura would come to define Barney Fife a decade later, and Ralph Furley after that.
    The revival worked: Bobby Benson again became a household name, at least among prepubescent boys. B-Bar-B riders formed clubs across the nation. Herbert Rice, a British immigrant who owned the show, ordered up a cornucopia of Bobby Benson merchandise and began to arrange publicity tours, dispatching Don and Ivan Cury, the twelve-year-old actor who played Bobby, to rodeos and county fairs up and down the East Coast along with a few hired hands and truckloads of collectibles.
    â€œThere were hundreds of things: Bobby Benson bikes, Bobby Benson hats, handkerchiefs, socks,