Nabors conveys a particular mood of attractive awkwardness, and naivete, a contagious quality of special poignancy rooted in laughter.” Nabors was discovered singing at the Horn cabaret in Santa Monica by writer-comedian Bill Dana, who booked Nabors for occasional stints on “The Steve Allen Show.” The Andy Griffin Show as the ingenuous gas station attendant Gomer Pyle, which led to his own CBS series, produced by Griffith, about Pyle’s misadventures after joining the Marines, about which the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Later attempts at a variety show did not last long, however, either on network TV or in firstrun syndication, though Nabors was a popular headliner on the Vegas-Reno nightclub circuit. The series ran for four seasons, and Nabors’ 20% cut of the syndication revenue for the popular series made him financially secure thereafter and able to pursue broader interests as a singer and comic raconteur. He was 87.His husband, Stan Cadwallader, told the AP that Nabors died on Thursday at their home in Hawaii.He brought the words “golly” and “shazam” into the vernacular as the naive, well-intentioned Pyle, a regular character on “The Andy Griffin Show” that was later the focus of spinoff “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” Pyle was a loving caricature of a Southern rube, completely out of step with the ’60s and all the more lovable for it. “And everybody has their own opinion about this and actually I’m not an activist so I’ve never gotten involved in any of this.Jim Nabors Jim Nabors, whose name is synonymous with the genial bumpkin Gomer Pyle, whom he played on TV, has died. However, don’t expect Nabors to become a leading voice in the fight for marriage equality anytime soon. Of course, the urban myth also alleged that Hudson had taken the last name of Nabors’ TV alter ego and had become “Rock Pyle.” Rumors about being gay had dogged him for years, and a popular urban myth in the ’70s was that he’d gotten secretly married to Rock Hudson. Still, Nabors remains a Red State fixture - he’s sung “Back Home Again in Indiana” before every Indy 500 race for more than 30 years - and his public confirmation of his sexual orientation is significant. I’ve never made a huge secret of it at all.” “Well, I’ve known since I was a child, so, come on. “I haven’t ever made a public spectacle of it,” he says. Nabors claims that his co-stars and colleagues have known about his sexuality for most of his career, though he’s never talked about it publicly. I’m 82 and he’s in his 60s and so we’ve been together for 38 years and I’m not ashamed of people knowing, it’s just that it was such a personal thing, I didn’t tell anybody.” And at my age, it’s probably the best thing to do. Yet when you’ve been together 38 years, I think something’s got to happen there. In a phone interview with Hawaii News Now, Nabors says, “It’s pretty obvious that we had no rights as a couple. In the early ’70s, after the five-season run of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., Nabors moved to Hawaii, where he began a relationship with Cadwallader in 1975.Ĭadwallader, now 64, was a firefighter who eventually came to work for the TV star. With his deep baritone voice, he also maintained a successful singing career for decades. Though indeed a stereotype of southern yokeldom, he only ever portrayed a benign version of a hillbilly, unlike later more sinister presentations of backwoods denizens in, say, Deliverance or Walking Tall. Always playing a lovable rube, Nabors, himself a native of Alabama, can be seen as a precursor to the hixploitation craze of the ’70s. Nabors is best known as playing good-natured but dimwitted Mayberry, North Carolina gas-station attendant Gomer Pyle throughout the ’60s, first on The Andy Griffith Show, then on its spin-off Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C, in which he enlisted in the Marines. Washington’s King County Recorders Office has not yet responded to ’s request for confirmation of the ceremony. 15 in front of a judge in a room at Seattle’s Fairmont Olympic Hotel, with a very small circle of family and friends, just weeks after same-sex marriage became legal in Washington state. A longtime resident of Hawaii, Nabors, 82, confirmed the news and gave the only interview about the nuptials to the TV show Hawaii News Now. Golly! Jim Nabors, TV’s Gomer Pyle and star of The Andy Griffith Show, has married his partner of 38 years, Stan Cadwallader.
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