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

the stage and performed the vaudeville tune “A Good Man is Hard to Find” with his fervent, Southern-revivalist delivery. “The effect on the audience was electric, more compelling than anything I had ever seen,” Laurent wrote. “The crowd shouted with Griffith, responded to his every gesture and lapsed into a strange, almost reverent silence” when he was finished.
    Andy began to upstage more famous acts. One night, after Andy opened for Mae West, Mae’s manager approached him and told him to do a different act in the second show. Andy dug out an old folk song called “In the Pines” and revived his preacher character, sermonizing and stomping his foot. It was, if anything, funnier than what Andy had done in the first show. Mae loved it. Andy was promptly fired.
    During the long, lonely hours on the road, Andy sometimes tuned in to the Mutual radio network to catch an afternoon broadcast of Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders. His favorite character was “an old man who told tall tales, named Windy Wales.”
    Several months into Andy’s nightclub tour, an old friend from the North Carolina theater sent him a copy of the bestseller No Time for Sergeants . On an airplane to Denver, Andy found time to read it. The book began, “The thing was, we had gone fishing that day and Pa had wore himself out with it the way he usually did when he went fishing. I mean he went at it pretty hard and called the fish all sorts of names. . . .”
    Andy was intrigued. Will Stockdale’s satirical observations of military rigmarole reminded Andy of his own monologues. When he returned to New York, Andy went straight to Abe Lastfogel’s office at William Morris. He told him, “If there’s ever anything that I can play, this is it.” Andy sent a copy of the book to Dick and conveyed the same message.
    No Time for Sergeants was a hot property, and the rights had already been sold. But Andy would not give up. This was the role he’d been born to play.
    Andy telephoned the author, Mac Hyman. Mac coughed up the name of his literary agent. Andy found the agent and stormed into his office. The agent tried to let Andy down easy: “Andy, you have to know that this is a number one bestseller and it’s been on the bestseller list ten, fifteen weeks. It’s gonna be a play and a movie and a television show.”
    The meeting gave Andy the edge he needed. No one in New York seemed to know about the television production, which was being staged by the storied Theatre Guild for broadcast March 15, 1955, on The United States Steel Hour . There was still time for Andy to read for Will Stockdale. Andy was the first actor to arrive at the audition.
    Alas, Andy had spent the previous year honing his stand-up comedy skills, to the detriment of his acting. His audition fell flat. “I didn’t read well because I didn’t know how to read,” he recalled. Andy pleaded with the producers: “I’m a talker, not a reader.” They were unmoved. Andy retreated to the waiting room, his mind racing: How could he salvage the role of his life?
    For want of another plan, Andy struck up a conversation with a random woman in the waiting room, hoping to draw attention to himself. She took the bait, asking Andy, “What do you do?”
    â€œI work nightclubs.”
    â€œYou sing?”
    â€œNo, I talk.”
    â€œWhat do you talk about?”
    â€œOh, Shakespeare, Hamlet , Romeo and Juliet , opera, ballet.”
    â€œ Hamlet? Do you read it?”
    â€œNo, I tell it.”
    â€œWell, how does it start?”
    Andy took the cue: “I went to see a play right here lately. It was one of those classical plays. It was wrote by a fella named William Shakespeare, who lived in the old country a while back. It’s called Hamlet . And it was named after this young boy Hamlet that appeared in the play, and it was pretty good, except they don’t