![]() ![]() Nabors as Gomer, the goofball gas station attendant. Griffith’s neurotic deputy, Barney Fife Ron Howard as his son, Opie Frances Bavier as his maiden Aunt Bee and Mr. Linke was associate producer at the time.) “The Andy Griffith Show” also featured the comic actor Don Knotts as Mr. Leonard cast him as Sheriff Taylor and named the show after him. Griffith survived his debut, and his career soared, especially when Mr. Griffith to Abe Lastfogel at the William Morris Agency, who booked him on Ed Sullivan’s television variety show, “Toast of the Town,” following a trained camel act - hardly the ideal lead-in. Griffith’s personal manager while still working for Capitol and eventually became his business partner. Griffith that called for him to receive $300 a week. They bought the rights to the record for the label for $10,000 and negotiated a contract with Mr. Linke and Hal Cook of Capitol, who had received a copy of the record separately, flew to North Carolina. Linke heard it late one night when, through a crystal-clear sky, his radio picked up the signal of a distant station in the South. Griffith narrated a football game from the perspective of a flummoxed first-time spectator. ![]() Linke was handling publicity at Capitol Records in 1953 when he became captivated by “What It Was, Was Football,” a recorded comedy routine on which Mr. ![]() “If there is ever a question about something, I will do what he wants me to do had it not been for him, I would have gone down the toilet.” Griffith told The New York Times Magazine in 1970. “He led me to agents, he personally took me to auditions,” Mr. Linke with launching and sustaining a show business career that otherwise might never have gotten gone beyond regional radio. Linke.)īut they were inseparable for nearly four decades, and Mr. (“His teeth are too close together” was how Mr. Griffith began as an unlikely pair: one a growling New Jersey-born Times Square press agent with a bevy of celebrity clients, the other a small-town Southerner skeptical of Northerners. In that movie, written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan, he played Lonesome Rhodes, a hillbilly singer who metamorphoses into a megalomaniacal television personality. Griffith, transplanted from North Carolina to New York, had breakout roles on Broadway, in “No Time for Sergeants” in 1955, and in film, in “A Face in the Crowd,” in 1957. Long before he became a television personality, Mr. Griffith starred as a homespun but deceptively savvy defense lawyer, were network television staples for 17 years. “The Andy Griffith Show” and later “Matlock,” on which Mr. Griffith’s show in the role of the bumpkin Gomer Pyle. He later did the same with the elongated “Goll-ly!” of another client, Jim Nabors, a lounge singer with a booming baritone who was introduced to a national audience on Mr. Griffith’s “’preciate it” a household phrase. Griffith indelibly as Andy Taylor, the judicious, widowed sheriff who dispensed commonsensical wisdom in the fictional town of Mayberry, N.C. He gave him entree to Broadway and Hollywood and collaborated with the producer Sheldon Leonard to create “The Andy Griffith Show,” which stamped Mr. His daughter Nanci Linke Ellis confirmed his death. Linke, the talent manager who helped transform Andy Griffith from a high school music teacher into an exemplar of folksy American small-town values on one of the most successful television shows of the convulsive 1960s, died on Wednesday at his home on the island of Hawaii. ![]()
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