Despite her good-hearted image on screen, cast members of “The Andy Griffith Show” often remember Frances (Aunt Bee) Bavier as difficult, temperamental and somewhat cold.

Griffith himself said, “There was just something about me she did not like.”

In an interview, when Ron (Opie) Howard was pressed as to the stories of discord with her on the set, all he would say was “I just don’t think she enjoyed being around children that much.”

She was born to an affluent lifestyle in the heart of New York. Thinking she might become a teacher after attending Columbia University, she found she loved acting more. She began her career as an actress on Broadway, and took her acting very seriously, actually too seriously.

After 15 years of the weekly television series grind she’d had it with the Business of Show, one of the reasons why Bavier moved — alone at age 70 — all the way across the continent to Siler City, NC where her biggest fan operated a family furniture store, hoping to discover the small-town goodness that she herself had come to represent in the minds of middle America.

Construction on her massive home — including the basement and porches, it’s about 9,000 square feet — began in 1951. It was designed by a Greensboro architect named J.J. Croft Jr., who designed a few others along the same street in that tiny section of Siler City.

But what began as an immersion into Americana quickly disintegrated into what can best be described as an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

On Saturday mornings, school buses pulled up in front of her split-level brick home on West Elk Street to unleash the Cub Scouts with instructions: “Go find your Aunt Bee!”

There were neighbors peering through her windows at all hours of the day expecting her to be in character, a role she despised.

The few townsfolk she grew close to insisted on calling her “Aunt Bee.” Irritating, but she had to have some friends.

A visit to the town center meant all eyes casting judgment, the ladies at the beauty parlor never forgave her for not joining one of their churches.

The house seemed to be too large for her to keep up with. Small wonder that, by the 1980s, the former television star was living out of her back bedroom, curtains pulled tight, with 14 devoted kitties for company.

In 1986, three years after she’d stopped venturing out in public, Griffith and Howard made a surprise visit to Siler City’s reclusive cat lady.

Bavier refused to allow her decade-long coworkers inside, speaking to them only momentarily through the closed front door. This was after declining repeatedly to be part of their Mayberry reunion movie.

The rest of the home declined,suffered from things like the cats climbing and shredding her drapes, dust, and the horrid smell of the use of the basement bathroom shower as their litter box.

Her car, a dented green Studebaker she drove in the show, was found unused in her garage, complete with the cats’ shedding fur caked on the upholstery.

It is said, it was parked in 1983 after one of her last trips to the grocery store. The tag and registration were still frozen in time with the ‘83 license plate on the back of her beloved car.

Right before her death, she sent Andy a letter apologizing for her uptight behavior, and for her making a hostile work environment.

She had no family or any close friends at the time of her death, so her cats ran the neighborhood and became feral, her house and car were auctioned off, and her money went to charities.

When she died in 1989, Bavier funneled most of her $700,000 estate into an annuity that, to this day, pays out a yearly Christmas bonus to every Siler City police officer.

But her true legacy began gestating not long after she was laid to rest at Oakwood Cemetery. When her home was donated to a local hospital, Bavier’s cats scampered for the countryside, causing one hell of a population explosion that is only now, decades later, beginning to subside.

Ask any Chatham County, NC veterinarian. They were all too familiar with someone bringing in “one of Aunt Bee’s cats.”

☆☆☆☆☆

IN GOD WE TRUST

Loralyn ‘Dodie’ & Jack Dennis

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