What He Was, Was America

I don’t always mourn the death of celebrities. Too often, they are narcissists, not really people we would like to know better. I was touched by the passing of Paul Newman. I identified with him. Like me, he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the shadow of a family business. He had an overbearing, disapproving Jewish father.

Unlike me, he was extraordinarily handsome, a sculpted Michelangelo figure come to life; that smile, and those baby blues. Whether Newman could act was much disputed, but his gift to American cinema, to my American cinema, is undisputed: Cool Hand Luke. Cool Hand Luke is a film I have watched nearly a dozen times. I can quote freely from it. I won’t. And The Hustler, and Hud, to a lesser extent, and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid; and every unabashedly lowbrow role he ever played, including Slapshot—especially Slapshot.

And speaking of Jackie Gleason, I was sad when he died. It was not only because of his gifted performance in The Hustler, yet another pillar of my American cinema. It was not only because The Jackie Gleason Show, and later, The Honeymooners, were staples of my Saturday night; that along with the white wax paper packages of corned beef and corned tongue, a loaf of fresh rye, and a jar of yellow mustard my parents left on the kitchen table before they went out. It was because Gleason was a genius who used his voice, his bulging eyes and obtruding belly as perfect comic instruments. Gleason was a brash, soulful Irishman, equal parts gentleman and buffoon, who did not just wear his excesses; he flaunted them. My father, a restless, driven man, a man of excesses— food, cigarettes, and temper, to be specific—liked Jackie Gleason.

In our house, if you liked things my father liked it was good for your health. If you didn’t, you kept them to yourself. But a particular sense of humor, with a strong bent for slapstick, was one of the few things I had in common with my father, and for that I owe him a debt of gratitude. A severe man, he not only sanctioned the likes of the The Three Stooges and The Little Rascals, but introduced me and my two brothers to a panoply of American cinematic comedy, including The Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, Harold Lloyd, Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and of course the Brits, Laurel and Hardy.

And then there was Andy Griffith. In 1953 Griffith, a budding actor and comic monologist released a track called What It Was Was Football. It was high Rube, the southern protagonist recounting his first attendance at a football game. Delivered in his rawest Mount Airy, North Carolina dialect, it was a dual-edged send-up, mildly deprecating to the loveable, befuddled hayseed, but also a satire on the frenzy of college football.

I don’t know how that very monologue found its way to our home nearly a decade after it was pressed into a black vinyl 45 disk with an orange label, but it did. My father played it for me in his tiny basement office, on a white portable electric record player that looked like a child’s toy. I thought it was funny, especially the part about the Big Orange drink. But it absolutely slayed my father, who quoted the monologue pretty well, and that made it all the funnier.

Mayberry wasn’t born until 1960. By then my father was a confirmed workaholic, gone most days and nights. And my mother, for reasons I only now understand, took a frequent powder.

Between that year and 1968, I I am reasonably sure I never missed a single Andy Griffith show. Mayberry was an idyll into which I—into which all of us—could retreat for half an hour. It described a family that, lacking a mother, was more than compensated by the presence of Andy Taylor’s maiden paternal Aunt. Aunt Bee was an angelic matriarch who cooked corn bread and biscuits and fried chicken, and baked all descriptions of pies, and fussed, and clucked and tsk-tsked and tut-tutted her way around her household and her beloved charges. Aunt Bee was pure unqualified love. If she ever got angry, or in a tizzy, it was for a good reason, and somebody owed her an apology.

Sheriff Andy Taylor was a paradigm of moral rectitude; he was kind and he was fair. He was a father who did not hesitate to mock-scold his devastatingly cute son Opie if he fibbed; then he would forgive him and take him fishing. He was unflappable, a lawman who did not carry a gun. He was a loyal friend and perfect foil to the hyperkinetic Deputy Barney Fife, a dashing escort to his girlfriend Helen Crump, a good neighbor to Goober, Gomer, Howard Sprague, and Floyd, the eccentric barber in a time when the barbershop was still a Main Street institution.

Nobody ever got very angry or sad in Mayberry. Nobody ever got hurt. Nobody died. Mayberry was a place where the town drunk, Otis Campbell, could let himself into the jail to sleep it off. In the morning Aunt Bee would bring him fresh coffee and a picnic basket. Oh, there was minor trouble once in a while. Earnest T. Bass would come into town and raise a ruckus. Occasionally the Darling Family (The Dillards, a crack bluegrass group) would come down from the mountains and pick a few tunes on the back porch.

Life was slow, and it was good. In fact, it was a time in America, or at least a lot of it, when you could still leave your door unlocked at night, and your car running if you stopped into the market. Richard Nixon was not yet the president. There was no AIDS epidemic, no 911, no anthrax scare, no busted economy.

On the other hand, during the eight year run of The Andy Griffith Show, JFK, RFK, and MLK were all gunned down. The Vietnam War was raging, and American boys were dying like flies. The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. In the south, there was still segregation, murders, and lynching.

But not in Mayberry; and Mayberry was a reflecting pool for all of America. Lucky Opie; I would have given my eye-teeth for a father like Andy, and a mother/grandmother like Aunt Bee. And I, for one, am glad Mayberry and Andy Taylor were there when I needed them.

I remember fondly those times few times I laughed with my father. I miss Mayberry, and Aunt Bee, and Andy Taylor, and Andy Griffith.

I miss that America.