The Backstory: The Real Life Painful Origin of Barney Fife

Watching reruns of The Andy Griffith Show and particularly Deputy Barney Fife, to this day make you feel happy. You feel like that part of America’s past was a time of calm and safety. But for Don Knotts, the guy that played Barney Fife, life never felt calm or safe. This is how he used his pain.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Man, don't you sometimes just want to escape the upset, violence,
political bs and the stress that seems to be a
part of our everyday lives. Not to mention, of course,
the theme of most every TV and movie we watch.
A lot of us do like to go back and
binge some of the shows our parents and grandparents watched
where everything seems so calm and happy. But surprisingly, some

(00:25):
of the biggest stars of the good Old Days had
stress in their lives as well. I'm Patty Steele The
Painful Life of Barney Fife. Next on the Backstory, The
Backstory is back. I don't know about you, but sometimes
I just get tired of the end of the world dystopian,

(00:46):
violent nature of the stuff we stream on TV. Right
I just want to laugh at the goofiness and smile
at the sweetness of life. On TV of the mid
twentieth century, one of the biggest shows was The Andy
Griffith's Show, still huge in syndication. In its eight years
on TV, show was never lower than number seven in

(01:06):
the yearly ratings, and it was number one for its
last season. The only other shows to call it quits
while they were number one. I Love Lucy and Seinfeld now.
One of the reasons the show was such a huge
hit was the relationship between its biggest stars, Andy Griffith,
who played Sheriff Andy Taylor, and his deputy Barney Fife,

(01:28):
played by Don Knotts. The support and kindness between the
two was actually a reflection of their decades long friendship.
Griffith understood that he needed to be the straight man
to Knots goofball, and they supported each other in that dynamic.
But based on knotts past, it couldn't have been easy.
Don Knots was born in nineteen twenty four in the

(01:50):
small Appalachian town of Morgantown, West Virginia. It was a
typical American small town, but inside the Notts household it
was anything but. His dad, William Knots, was a struggling
farmer who suffered from severe mental illness and alcoholism. It
was miserable, and as Don grew up, his dad became

(02:11):
even more unstable. He was often violent and sometimes completely
detached from reality. At one point, the family said William
thought he was being chased by invisible enemies. He'd barricade
doors or wander the streets. Totally paranoiac for a little boy,
home just didn't feel safe. Don once said he almost

(02:32):
never spoke to his dad, and he avoided him whenever
he could. Eventually, his father was committed to a metal hospital.
He later died there when Don was still just a teenager,
but the damage of growing up around constant fear had
impacted him. On top of all that, the family was poor,
I mean really poor. Don's mom ran a boarding house

(02:55):
to survive, rending out rooms to strangers passing through town.
The house was always filled with unfamiliar adults coming and going.
For a shy, anxious kid, it was pretty overwhelming. Don
was small for his age, painfully skinny, and often sick.
Other kids teased him. Instead of playing sports or joining groups,

(03:16):
he spent most of his time alone. But this is
actually where he found his salvation. Isolation created something else
for him, imagination, and that imagination would become his escape
to cope with all the chaos in his life. Don
started doing impressions. He mimicked neighbors, teachers, and even the

(03:38):
strange guests who stayed at his mom's boarding house, and
in doing that he found something powerful. When people laughed,
his tension disappeared. For Don, laughter created safety by high school,
he had developed a character he called Windy Knots. It
was a ventriloquist act where he pretended to talk to

(03:59):
himself nervous, frantic, and totally awkward, and it was hilarious.
That nervous jittery style would later morph into the signature
comedy America fell in love with, But at the time
it was just a small, shy kid figuring out how
to survive. After graduating from high school, it was World

(04:20):
War Two and Don enlisted in the military. Of course,
the army didn't really know what to do with him.
At first. He wasn't physically strong, and he struggled with
some of the intense training. But eventually the powers that
be realized something about Don he could entertain. He was
placed in a gi variety show troupe, traveling to perform

(04:41):
comedy for American soldiers stationed overseas. For the first time
in his life, he was entertaining massive crowds, and they
loved him. His nervous energy, the same trait that used
to make him feel weak, became his greatest strength on stage.
It was his signature bit. After the war, Don moved

(05:01):
to New York City to pursue comedy not surprisingly, it
was brutal at first, tiny clubs, radio gigs, endless auditions,
but his unique style slowly got attention. By the early
nineteen sixties, he landed the role that would define his career,
Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show. Starring alongside

(05:24):
Andy Griffith. Barney Fife was anxious, insecure, high strung, and
absolutely hilarious, just like Don in real life. The character
felt real because it was rooted in the nervous kid
Don had always been. Audiences couldn't get enough of him.
He won five Emmy Awards, becoming one of TV's greatest

(05:45):
comedic actors. What's interesting is people who knew Don knots
often said something you wouldn't expect off screen. He was
still shy, still nervous, still holding on to traces of
that lonely little boy from Morgantown. For Don, comedy had
never been about fame. It had always been about survival,

(06:07):
about turning fear into laughter. Over the decades, he was
in dozens of films like the Disney comedy The Incredible
Mister Limpet and TV shows including Three's Company huge hit there,
but Barney Fife was the role everybody loved the most,
the goofy deputy who somehow always made everybody feel better,

(06:28):
and that could be why audiences connected with him so deeply,
because behind the goofiness and the laughs was something genuine.
A kid who grew up scared, awkward and unsure of himself,
but discovered that laughter could transform everything. In the little
town of Morgantown, West Virginia, a lonely little boy had

(06:48):
learned to make people laugh just to feel safe, and
decades later he would use that to become one of
the most unforgettable characters in TV history. Don Nott says
Barney five was America's favorite deputy, and every laugh carried
a piece of that insecure little boy. I hope you're
enjoying The Backstory with Patty Steele. Please leave a review

(07:11):
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have a story you'd like me to cover. On Facebook,
It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm

(07:34):
Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,
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is Doug Fraser, our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
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(07:56):
Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the
pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.