Frances Bavier spent eight seasons as the warmest woman in Mayberry, the aunt who kept a pie cooling on the sill and a light on for Andy and Opie. Off camera, the story was more complicated. She and Andy Griffith never quite found their footing with each other, and after The Andy Griffith Show ended in 1968, the two drifted apart like most former co-stars do.
Then, in the last year of her life, Bavier picked up the phone and called him. Her words, which Griffith later repeated on television, say more about the woman behind Aunt Bee than any episode ever did.
How Did a New York Stage Actress End Up in Mayberry?
Bavier was born on December 14, 1902, in a brownstone on Gramercy Park in New York City, and she came to television by way of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Broadway stage. That training is part of why she never wanted Aunt Bee to be glamorous.
In the 1960 episode of The Danny Thomas Show that served as the pilot, she played a widow with an odd little problem. “Frances on the pilot played just a lady in town who … was still paying rent on a tuxedo that her husband was buried in,” Griffith remembered on CNN’s Larry King Live in 2003. “And she scored so heavy that Sheldon then hired her to play Aunt Bee.” She was so perfect, he added, “that people thought she was Aunt Bee.”
For a while, the role gave her something she said she had always wanted. “No one ever adopted me before,” she told the Hartford Courant in 1961, in an interview MeTV recently revisited. “I started out playing an aunt to a little boy I had not known. And now I feel like a member of the family.” Young Ron Howard, she said, even climbed into her lap to invite her over to swing with him, a moment as tender as anything on a show where Opie had no mother. In 1967 the part won her an Emmy. So why do the men she worked with remember her so differently?
Why Was Aunt Bee So Hard to Know Off Camera?
The people who worked with her almost always started with the word “professional,” and then described how far she stood from everyone else. Producer Sheldon Leonard told author Richard Kelly she was “a rather remote lady” who “was not part of the general hijinks that centered upon Andy on the set.”
Ron Howard saw the same thing as a boy. “Frances very much kept to herself,” he told the Archive of American Television in 2006, according to Showbiz Cheat Sheet. She was “extremely professional,” he said, “but I don’t think she ever felt a part of what these boys were up to and their shenanigans.”
Griffith himself later acknowledged that the two of them sometimes clashed, and co-workers learned to tread carefully. Neal Brower, a historian of the show, told UPI in 1989 that when her feelings were hurt she would call in sick, and everyone knew something had upset her. Once the cameras stopped for good, she went looking for a Mayberry of her own.
What Was Waiting for Her in Siler City?
In the early 1970s, Bavier left California for Siler City, North Carolina, one of the few real towns ever mentioned on the show. According to UPI, she bought a 20-room house there sight unseen. “I fell in love with North Carolina, all the pretty roads and the trees,” she said, as Remind has recounted.
She grew more private every year, and the fans knocking on her door only drove her further inside. She shared the big house with her cats, and the Los Angeles Times later counted 14 of them. When the cast reunited for the 1986 TV movie Return to Mayberry, Aunt Bee appeared only as a gravestone, where Andy laid a flower.
In late 1989, with her heart failing, she was admitted to Chatham County Hospital in Siler City, and fans sent hundreds of cards. According to a UPI report at the time, she told the hospital’s administrator she would see no visitors except three people: Andy Griffith, Don Knotts and Ron Howard. “She wanted to be Frances Bavier, citizen, and not Aunt Bee,” the administrator, Roger Harrell, explained. By then, she had already reached out to one of those three herself.
What Did Frances Bavier Tell Andy Griffith on That Last Call?
Griffith told the story more than once. On Larry King Live, he said Bavier had telephoned him about four months before she died and apologized for having been “difficult” during the years they made the show. In a 1996 interview for The Nashville Network, reported by the Associated Press in the Deseret News, he shared her exact words.
“She said, ‘I’m sorry we didn’t get along better,'” Griffith recalled. His answer was gentle. “We got along fine,” he said. “It’s just that she didn’t feel like it a lot of times.” She had called, he said, because she wanted to say goodbye. “That’s some experience,” Griffith added.
Frances Bavier died in Siler City on December 6, 1989, at 86, eight days short of her 87th birthday. She left a $100,000 trust whose interest pays a Christmas bonus to the Siler City police, and neighbors keep her grave at Oakwood Cemetery tidy. Griffith died on July 3, 2012, also at 86. Don Knotts died in 2006, which leaves Ron Howard, now 72, as the only one of the three she asked for who is still with us, and one of the last Andy Griffith Show cast members still alive.
Her tall headstone carries her name and, below it, “Aunt Bee.” Under that is the line “To live in the hearts of those left behind is not to die.” Read after that phone call, it sounds meant as much for the people she worked beside for eight years as for the fans who never stopped writing.
