No place like 'home'

On the drive home from the Los Angeles airport, there was a particular billboard along La Cienega Boulevard that always gave Betty Lynn a chuckle. "This Ain't Mayberry!" it declared.

As if she needed a reminder of that fact, the West Hollywood home where Lynn had lived since 1950 was broken into twice last year.

"That made it for me," the 81-year-old actress says. "I just was too frightened to stay. So I thought, I've got to find some place I feel safe."

When she reflected on what safe meant to her - and what "home" meant, for that matter - one place stood out. And life imitated art.

The woman who played Thelma Lou on "The Andy Griffith Show" moved more than 2,100 miles to Mount Airy - Griffith's hometown in Mount Airy, N.C., and one of the inspirations for the fictional Mayberry.

Lynn knows this ain't Mayberry either. It never existed, really. But she figures this picturesque town in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains is about as close to Mayberry as she's going to get. In this life, anyway.

"There's no place like it, unless it's heaven," she said.

Despite a career that spanned more than a half century and saw her starring opposite such luminaries as Bette Davis and Natalie Wood, Lynn remains best known for her turn as Deputy Barney Fife's steady girl.

Though she was in just 25 episodes and made her final appearance 41 years ago, Lynn continues to be adored by legions of Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club members and sought after by nostalgia seekers. Like other veterans of a show whose scripts have been used in college courses and Sunday school lessons, she has basked in Mayberry's benign afterglow.

Nowhere does that reflected light shine brighter than in Mount Airy.

Griffith has long insisted that Mayberry wasn't based on his hometown, despite references to real Mount Airy people, businesses - such as the Snappy Lunch, which still serves a mean pork-chop sandwich on Main Street - and local landmarks like Pilot Mountain. But don't bother telling that to the chamber of commerce.

Check local phone listings and you'll find no fewer than three dozen businesses with "Mayberry" in their names. There's Mayberry on Main, the Mayberry Five & Dime, a Mayberry Kountry Kitchen - even a Mayberry Septic Pumping Service.

Griffith rarely makes an appearance here these days. But walk along the picture-perfect Main Street lined with late 19th- and early 20th-century brick storefronts, and loudspeakers playing vintage Griffith comedy sketches fill the air with his unmistakable homespun twang.

For Betty Ann Lynn, the road to Mayberry was a roundabout one.

The daughter of a trained singer, she began acting on radio and fine-tuning her lyric soprano voice in supper clubs at age 14 in her native Kansas City, Mo. At 18, Lynn signed up for the USO Camp Shows and entertained troops in the China-Burma-India theater in the final months of World War II.

After the war, she was "discovered" in a Broadway production of "Park Avenue" and signed by Darryl F. Zanuck of Twentieth Century-Fox.

With her freckles and bright-red hair, she was cast in a series of girl-next-door roles. Even acid-quilled Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper couldn't find anything nasty to write about "the cute redhead."

"Remember Betty Lynn, bobby-sox baby sitter in 'Sitting Pretty'?" Hopper wrote in a June 1948 "Looking at Hollywood" column. "She is playing the same sort of role with Bette Davis in 'June Bride.' Betty had to get a high school technical adviser to show her how to blow bubble gum."

Studio propaganda, Lynn says.

During the next decade, she played a series of daughters: Loretta Young's in "Mother is a Freshman" ; Fred MacMurray and Maureen O'Hara's in "Father was a Fullback" ; Clifton Webb's oldest in "Cheaper by the Dozen."

She was on hiatus from Disney's "Texas John Slaughter" show when she got the call to read for the part of Don Knotts' girlfriend. Disney dropped the Western series, but Barney turned out to be a steady date. Lynn was paid $250 a day, or about $500 an episode. When she had her agent ask for a $50 raise, she was told, "We can replace you."

When Knotts left the show in 1966 to pursue a film career, producers offered to give Thelma Lou a hairdressing salon and another story line. But without Barney, she says, "I didn't think Thelma Lou made much sense." So after five years, she left Mayberry.

Lynn went on to play a series of small, dead-end parts - including Griffith's secretary in five episodes of "Matlock."

In 1990, she played her final dramatic role - as a nun in the short-lived police series "Shades of LA."