The right place to bee.

• Author: Bailey, Bill
• Position: North Carolina's towns

The actress who played Andy's aunt came to Siler City looking for Mayberry. She found a real small town.

Frances Bavier was still Aunt Bee when she first set eyes on Siler City. That was in December 1963, and the New York-born actress had come to Durham to lose weight on the rice diet at Duke Medical Center. A receptionist who was from the Chatham County town told her: "Y'all come."

She did, later telling a reporter, "I feel in love with North Carolina."

James L. Brewer, who sold her the house she bought nine years later, recalls how she sat in his mother's living room during her first stay, basking in the warmth of his family's celebration of Christmas: "One of my kids got to sit in her lap."

On The Andy Griffith Show, Siler City was just down the road from Mayberry. It was where Aunt Bee would go shopping. In 1972, she moved to the real Siler City, four years after the last episode had been aired. But its eight-year run on CBS and its after-life in syndication had turned Aunt Bee into an icon: everyman's mom.

"I, like a child, came here looking for a fairyland," she once said of the place she picked for her retirement.

After she moved into the 17-room house she bought, literally mail-order from a photograph Brewer sent her, both she and her fairyland began to lose their charm. "Everybody was real excited," Brewer recalls, "but she had a habit of turning people off real quick."

Sometimes with good reason. Neighbors recall waking up to see fans peering in her windows. Bus loads of tourists tried to stop by to visit. Charities pestered her to make guest appearances. "In real life, she was quite different from the part she played," Siler City Mayor Earl Fitts remembers. "She was an individual who was very private."

Little by little, Frances Bavier withdrew from Siler City and the world. "They don't know me," she once said. "Their life experiences are different from mine. And I'm always looked at as someone who has money." She avoided people, going to the grocery store, for instance, just before it closed. "People decided if that's the way she wanted it to be, well, we'd leave her alone," Brewer says.

Anyone who got inside her house the last few years before she died in 1989 found a bedridden recluse who cared about her 15 cats, public television and little else.

Frances Bavier, who spent much of her career in California, came to Siler City looking for the town she fell in love with on a Hollywood set. She found Small Town, U.S.A., and shut her door to it, once even refusing to admit Ron Howard (Opie), who came to introduce her to his son.

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