Friday, Nov. 10, 1967

Success Is a Warm Puppy

As a young 'un in Sylacauga, Ala., which is just down the road a piece from Gantts Quarry, Jim Nabors was a regular cutup. He used to play tricks with his voice by hollering down drain pipes and talking through knotholes.

And when he dressed up like a hillbilly for a high school skit, he was funnier than a bowlegged mule. But later on, after he graduated from the University of Alabama and worked for a spell in New York City as a typist, he came back with a highfalutin accent, and no body thought he was funny any more.

His mother, Mavis Pearl, straightened him out right quick. "Stop talking like a fool," she said.

Mama knew best. By talking natural-like, Nabors, as the star of CBS's Gomer Pyle -- U.S.M.C., has grown successively more popular in four seasons, and last week his show finished third, just behind The Lucy Show and Bonanza in the ratings sweepstake. He croons, too, in a big, booming baritone that, on his five bestselling albums, sounds vaguely like, well, a fellow hollering down a drainpipe. On the state-fair cir cuit, he harvests $25,000 for an appearance in which he tells a few jokes ("The tornado was so bad a hen laid the same egg twice") and does songs (She Was a T-Bone Talking Woman but She Had a Hot-Dog Heart}. In Las Vegas, he sings "You load 16 tons and what do you get? A hernia." That's good for $40,000 a week.

Nervous Cat. Nabors is both a representative and a caricature of the noble American rustic. As Gomer, a leatherneck Pfc, he wears a gee-whiz expression, spouts homilies out of a lopsided mouth and lopes around uncertainly like a plowboy stepping through a field of cow dung. He is a walking disaster area. When his drill sergeant chastises him for "taking the taxpayer's money without putting in a day's work," the hapless recruit returns part of his paycheck--and fouls up the bookkeeping system of the entire Marine Corps. Yet in the end, Gomer's goodness always wins out. He is, in short, an innocent out of step with the swinging '60s, which must explain why the Nielsens love him so.

Nabors, who offstage is only slightly less gentle than Gomer, went to Los Angeles in 1958 not to feed his ambition but to foil his asthma. He worked as an apprentice film cutter, sang on amateur nights at a club called The Horn. TV's Andy Griffith dropped by one night, liked his country-bumpkin patter between songs and offered him a walk-on role in his series. Nabors says he was as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, but Griffith assured him that "all I had to do was act like one of those fellows down home who sit around the gas pump reading comic books." Shucks, that was easy, and Nabors soon became a regular on the show. Gomer, naturally, was a spinoff. No Belchfire. Though he will make $500,000 this year, Nabors is hardly the type to go Hollywood. His fans like to think of him as "jes folks," and he knows on which side his cornbread is buttered. He lives alone in a sixroom house in unchic Studio City with a swimming pool that, by Hollywood standards, is little more than a glorified bathtub. No dual-exhaust Belchfire sports car for him; his speed is a Rambler station wagon. He leaves the wheeling and dealing to his manager, Dick Linke, a Hollywood slicker who limits Nabors to a weekly allowance of $75, pours the rest of his money into California real estate. Most recent acquisitions: a 160-acre farm near Palm Springs for $500,000, a 330-acre tract on an island near San Francisco for $300,000.

"Jim is a warm puppy," says Linke, who fully expects him to soon outearn his other top client, Andy Griffith. "I figure another year of Jim doing Gomer, then on to Broadway. Then back to Hollywood for the movies. I've got another Al Jolson on my hands. You see how in his act I got him dropping down on one knee like Jolie? He hasn't got that voice throb yet, but it's coming, it's coming."

The folks back in Sylacauga don't much cotton to that kind of talk, including Mavis Pearl. "I get tickled at her sometimes," says Nabors. "She has more money to spend than she ever had in her life, and you know what she does with it? Puts it in the bank in my name--just in case."

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