Andy Griffith
(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 51)
some 750 e-mails and 1,000 calls. Guests
choose one of three rooms (Andy’s,
Opie’s, or Aunt Bee’s) and often wander the house, admiring artifacts that
remind them of the show. When they
see the elixir bottle on the piano, visitors frequently break into “Toot Toot
Tootsie”: “That’s what Aunt Bee sang
when she got tiddly,” says Marsha.
“We’ve had people come in and,
honestly, they have wept,” Marsha con-
tinues. “Everybody wants to get back to
Mayberry. It was simpler, it was slower,
it was friendlier. The world was not
the scary place it is now.”
THE NEWLY EXPANDED Andy Griffith
Museum, which reopened in Novem-
ber 2009, is housed in a Mount Airy
building next to the Andy Griffith Play-
house, formerly the elementary school
where a young Andy first appeared on
stage. Here I meet Emmett Forrest, a
retired electric-company administrator
who owns most of what’s on display.
After I admire a seersucker suit worn
by Otis, the Mayberry town tippler,
and an advertisement for Andy Griffith
Country Ham, Emmett steers me to an
old black-and-white photo of school
kids. He points to himself, then to a fel-
low with large ears. (That’s Andy.) I ask
Emmett if Andy was a good student. He
thinks for a moment. “Mediocre,” Em-
mett replies. Was Andy popular? “Oh,
yeah, but no more popular than anyone
else. He was an average young man.”
This averageness may be part of
Andy’s appeal. It’s paradoxical—Andy
averageness is vastly above-average.
Andy projects averageness the way
Bogart projects cool, or Meg Ryan proj-
ects a frisky sexiness.
MOUNT AIRY MANAGES a neat trick: it’s
very fake, yet very real. The black-and-white squad cars that take tourists on
driving tours are fake, but this is the
place that imbued Andy Griffith with
the values he enshrined in Mayberry.
Much the same can be said of the
man himself. He’s acting on screen—we
all know he’s acting—but the sincerity
seems real. He puts people at ease. “I
don’t know if he works to do that, but
I suspect not,” says Marc Fienberg,
who directed Andy in the 2008 film
Play the Game. “It’s just Andy Griffith—someone genuine and straightforward.” He’s Andy Griffith, starring
Andy Griffith.
The one person I thought could give
me insight into Andy Griffith’s popu-
larity was, of course, Andy Griffith. I
sent him letters, called his manager,
and asked several people to intervene
Betty moved into a Mount Airy apart-
ment with a view of the Blue Ridge
Mountains. “It’s peaceful and gorgeous
and I watch the mountains every day
and that makes me happy,” she says. “I
can thank Andy for that.”
Betty suspects that Mayberry’s ap-
peal is linked to a restless search for
sanctuary in times of foreclosures, ter-
rorism, and, yes, crime: her wallet was
recently stolen at a Mount Airy shop-
ping center. “We’re all scared to death,”
she says. “We need some place to hold
on to.” Andy Griffith and Mayberry
offer a solid boulder amid a turbulent
river, a person and place where we can
recalibrate our lives.
Wayne Curtis lives in New Orleans and is
a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
