SMH Home
Home   >   Obituaries   >   Article  

Jed was new to Hollywood, but Buddy wasn't

July 12 2003

Buddy Ebsen, Actor 1908-2003

Buddy Ebsen, a gangly and personable Ziegfeld song-and-dance man in the late 1920s who gained lasting fame on television as Davy Crockett's sidekick, a hillbilly in Beverly Hills and an ageing private eye, has died aged 95.

For nine seasons, starting in 1962, the lanky Ebsen was the canny Jed Clampett, head of the backwoods family in The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most popular television series of the 1960s.

This sugary fantasy depicted a clash between the values of the Ozark Hills in Missouri and those of sophisticated Hollywood following the discovery of oil on the Clampett farm. With his honey-and-chewing-tobacco drawl, Ebsen's Jed Clampett would insist on retaining his old battered hat, and enthuse about an ideal diet of "coons' innards" and "buzzard pie". The plots had little variety. Jed's beautiful daughter Elly May never found a husband and his dumb nephew Jethro never won a girl; Granny, who refused to accept that the South had lost the Civil War, never went home again.

Although the critics hated the series, it became a firm favourite around the world, prompting such cornier spin-offs as Petticoat Junction and Green Acres.

Then Ebsen became the protagonist of another successful CBS television series, Barnaby Jones, a laconic private investigator in late-and-getting-later middle age whose shrewdness was cloaked in nonchalance. The one-hour show began in early 1973 and ran continuously from 1974 to 1980, with many more seasons after that in reruns.

Ebsen started his career in vaudeville and nightclubs, then advanced to the stage and films. In Hollywood he gained particular recognition in the 1930s with his flamboyant dancing and singing of At the Codfish Ball with Shirley Temple in Captain January and by gamely battling malaria in Yellow Jack. His other '30s film hits included Broadway Melody of 1936, Born to Dance, and The Girl of the Golden West.

He was originally signed to play the Scarecrow in the MGM classic The Wizard of Oz. But in a late casting switch, Ray Bolger pushed him out of the part, and Ebsen was recast as the Tin Woodman. After weeks of rehearsal, however, a severe allergy to the aluminum-based makeup forced him to relinquish that part to Jack Haley.

In 1938 MGM offered him a seven-year contract, starting at $2,000 a week, but requiring him to give the studio absolute control over his career. The independent Ebsen rejected that provision. As a result MGM blackballed him throughout the industry and his film career went into eclipse for nearly 20 years, until Walt Disney hired him as a character actor in the mid-1950s to play Georgie Russell, the sidekick of Davy Crockett (portrayed by Fess Parker) on television and in films.

Ebsen survived those lean years by performing on stage, mostly on the road. "I probably enjoyed show business most when I was doing plays like The Male Animal and Good Night, Ladies, when people would lay down their money and laugh and you'd see them walk out happy," he said in 1965.

"The one flaw in this," he said of The Beverly Hillbillies, even though the series enjoyed great popularity, "is that you can't hear the people laughing."

Buddy Ebsen was named Christian Rudolph Ebsen jnr at his birth on April 2, 1908, in Belleville, Illinois. Ten years later his father, who owned a dancing school, moved the family to Orlando, Florida. Ebsen took premedical courses at Rollins College and the University of Florida, but a collapse of the state's land boom forced him to leave school in 1928 and to pursue a career as a dancer in New York with his younger sister, Vilma. The pair won parts in the chorus of Whoopee and as featured dancers in Flying Colors and Ziegfeld Follies of 1934 and went on to success in Hollywood.

In World War II, Ebsen served in the Coast Guard as the executive officer on the USS Pocatello, a submarine chaser in the North Pacific. In his free time he wrote sketches and staged variety shows and musicals. He met a fellow lieutenant, Nancy Wolcott, and they were married in 1945. They had four daughters and a son. He also had two daughters from his first marriage. Both marriages ended in divorce. In 1985 he married Dorothy Knotts, and is survived by her, six of his children and six grandchildren.

Ebsen's later movie performances included Audrey Hepburn's poignant, abandoned husband in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and a steely old cowpoke in Mail Order Bride (1964).

He excelled in many television plays and wrote or partly wrote songs like Whispering Pines and Squeezin' Polka. He also wrote plays that were performed in regional theatres.

His television series Barnaby Jones had a deeply loyal following, including 30 New York business executives, aged 55 to 70, who met for lunch every Wednesday for years at a Rockefeller Centre restaurant and later viewed the show's reruns together. A major reason for their loyalty, they agreed, was that Barnaby Jones was an old man doing a young man's job, inspiring them not to retire at 65.

Acting aside, Ebsen savoured life on his 15-hectare ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, was an expert sailor who skippered his 35-foot catamaran, Polynesian Concept, to victory in major races and founded and headed a company that built ocean-going catamarans.

Ebsen's long-running television series made him a multimillionaire, but in the 1980s he appeared regularly in a new adventure series, Matt Houston, as a former intelligence agent and uncle of the protagonist, a wealthy investigator. Asked in 1984 why he had returned to the rigours of a weekly show, he replied: "I'm used to getting up at dawn and going to the studio to be with my pals on the set. It's my lifestyle, and I wouldn't trade it for any other."

The New York Times, The Telegraph, London




More Obituaries

The honest face of a clean cop

She put modern American artists on the map

At UN he was the inspector's inspector

To the end, 'Big Jim' insisted it was all lies

Centre stage, even in the audience

Outspoken journo married Freddie Ayer twice

An all-round success - on a borrowed bat

Segundo's secret: keep it simple

A film star, yes, but his forte was their screening

Master of playing the eccentrics

Cambridge to the bush, with love

Service? What's the matter with you? Eat already

Jungle hell failed to stop heroic POW

Jed was new to Hollywood, but Buddy wasn't

He put vision into television news