Sheriff Andy Taylor enjoyed a string of romances on The Andy Griffith Show. There was lady druggist Ellie Walker, skeet-shootin’ Karen Moore, rich Peggy McMillan, the Fun Girls from Mount Pilot, and most famously, Opie’s teacher Helen Crump. But none of them were destined to wear a diamond on their finger, and Andy Griffith said that was by design.
“I don’t think the show works as well in a family situation, with Andy given a wife and a house,” Griffith told the Associated Press, via MeTV. “That’s better for Lucy, Danny Thomas and the other shows where there is a headline performer: Everything revolves around him, and he controls and executes every show. In our case, we have others — Don Knotts, Aunt Bee and the boy, and there’s a balance. Andy is only incidentally in many of our shows. If we married him, it would completely change the show.”
Changing the show was the last thing Griffith wanted to do. “We’ve spent two good years doing just about the same thing, and while we’d all like to explore new areas, I don’t think we ought to change,” he explained.
There was another good reason Andy Taylor didn’t have much of a love life, according to Aneta Coursaut, the actress who played his most serious girlfriend, Helen Crump. She blames the show’s all-male writing staff in the book, Andy and Don. “They admitted that they could write for little girls and older women, but anything in between always came out sort of sweet and bland,” she said. “And actually, they were not predisposed to listen to us.”
In the first real-life meeting between Corsaut and Griffith, the actors got in a nose-to-nose argument, “standing in the middle of a road yelling at each other,” she remembered. “I don’t recall exactly what started it, or just what it was about, but it had something to do with feminism.”
The show’s writers took that real-life conflict and worked it into the Helen/Andy relationship — one that was affectionate but occasionally combative. Helen became one of the first feminists on sitcoms, a single working woman who supported herself without relying on a man for help.
While Griffith thought marrying Miss Crump would send the show in the wrong direction, he had no such reservations in real life. The actor was smitten with Corsaut, according to Andy and Don, and he actually proposed to her while he was married to someone else. She turned him down – just like on The Andy Griffith Show, marriage wasn’t in the cards.
Once the classic sitcom ended, Griffith finally relented on finding a partner for his Mayberry alter-ego. Even though Corsaut said no in real life, the two guest-starred on the spinoff Mayberry RFD, allowing Andy and Helen to finally tie the knot.
