I'VE GONE HOME BEAVER: IN MEMORY OF BARBARA BILLINGSLEY

It is quite true that one of her most famous lines as “June Bronson Cleaver” in Leave it to Beaver was indeed, “What is all the commotion out here? I’m breading cutlets.”

Actress Barbara Billingsley died on 16 October, 2010 at the age of 94.

At the time that Leave it to Beaver aired first on CBS then ABC TV, featuring Ms. Billingsley in top billing

Donna Reed played a mother in The Donna Reed Show
Harriet Hilliard portrayed a mother in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
Jane Wyman portrayed a mother in Father Knows Best
Shirley Booth portrayed a mother-feature housekeeper and Whitney Blake portrayed a mother in Hazel
June Lockhart portrayed a mother in Lassie.
Mary Tyler Moore portrayed a mother in The Dick Van Dyke Show.

At the time, audiences gave Billingsley the least attention. Nowadays 50 years later, her “June Cleaver” and Mary Tyler Moore’s “Laurie Petrie” still get lucrative rerun rating attention. But who follows Father Knows Best anymore?

At this point, the writer should disclose his biases on the subject of 1950s comedy programs.

In my opinion, these are the best programs of the period:

The Jack Benny Program

Your Show of Shows / Sid Caesar’s Hour

I Love Lucy

The Jackie Gleason Show / The Honeymooners. In the 1960s, I would list the first four years of The Jackie Gleason American Scene Magazine

You”ll Never Get Rich / The Phil Silvers Show

Leave it to Beaver

The Red Skelton Show, while very good, I do not list here in the 1950s because I think it became even better in the 1960s as The Red Skelton Hour.

Billingsley had a minor acting career before series creator/producers Joe Connolly and Bob Mosher cast her as June Cleaver in 1956. They cast Billingsley and Mathers in the first pilot. The husband and older brother and older brother’s friend went through two sets of casting before the producers found the magic combination of the Reverend Hugh Beaumont, Wally Dow, and Ken Osmond in the second pilot.

Billingsley performed roles in TV and movies after the first series and after the second series as well, notably the jive talking passenger in Airplane! and as a member of the Welcome Wagon Committee of TV moms in that memorable 1995 episode of Roseanne that also featured Patricia Crowley, Isabel Sanford and June Lockhart. Billingsley played straight woman of the bunch. June Cleaver did not like the language in Roseanne.

Referring to her years in CBS’s Lassie, June Lockhart got a huge laugh when she observed without missing a beat, “Those bastards told me that “June” was too long a name for a TV show. The dog got all the good lines; I merely interpreted. And then I got shot into outer space with the annoying Dr. Smith and that damned robot.”

It was Billingsley’s performances as “June Cleaver” in the first Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963) and in the second series Still the Beaver / The New Leave it to Beaver (1983 - 1989) that made her immortal in TV reruns and DVDs.

June Cleaver was beautiful to start. She was usually brunette, though in 1961 she went through a blond period. In some episodes, she had attended college long enough for her purposes; in other episodes she had known Ward Cleaver for ages before their marriage. The series had occasional uncles and aunts but no grandparents, so the audience focused on the parents and the two boys.

Veteran writers Joe Connolly and Bob Mosher created LitB, the story of the Cleaver family, an upper-middle class mother-father-two sons family unit living in Mayfield, probably in Ohio. Tony Dow, one of the cutest and most natural boy actors of that generation, portrayed the oldest son “Wally.” Jerry Mathers portrayed the younger son “Theodore.” Mathers was at best a good actor, but he projected regular boy anxiety amid the horrors of 1950s-1960s conventionality skillfully.

Connolly and Mosher closely supervised every episodes with few assistants. Nowadays, shows change producers regularly and have long lists of executive producers, producers, producers in charge of production, line producers. Today, the work Connolly and Mosher did for the six seasons of LitB looks positively herculean. In the first three season, they also wrote a majority of episodes. Their credit memorably read

Created, produced and written
under the supervision of
JOE CONNOLLY
and BOB MOSHER

They were just about the only TV producers I can remember who received such a grandiose credit, but they deserved it. They carefully made sure that the kids sounded and acted like real kids. As a result the utterly cool, athletic, understated, and popular Wally and his popular but anxious little brother Theodore were perhaps the most realistic children of television in that period. They used the slang popular at the time. In 1962, the Cleavers had this linguistic discussion at the breakfast table over bacon and eggs:

Wally: [discussing a boys club Eddie wants the two of them to join to become popular guys] “Eddie says they are the craziest.”

June: “Craziest??”

Wally: “Oh, that doesn’t mean squirrel-ly. It means they are really cool guys.” [The Cleaver boys were among the first TV users of the durable slang expression]

Ward: “You know, when I was a youngster and we said crazy, we meant crazy.”

June “How backward.”

Theodore: “Boy, Mom – in the olden days I bet you said something like neat, huh didn’t you Mom?”

June: thinking it over between bites of breakfast. “Well, no. I think we said keen.”

Theodore incredulous: “Keen?? They don’t even say that on Dobie Gillis anymore.”

The pilot episode of LitB got involved in one of the most acrimonious censorship confrontations in the history of 1950s TV, though Billingsley herself did not appear in the controversial scene. The boys have secreted a pet alligator into the house and in a scene they hide it in their private bathroom toilet tank. The censors threw a collective cow. In the 1950s sitcom characters did not have bodily function let alone bathrooms with toilets. Connolly and Mosher went head to head with the censors, arguing that it was natural for boys to hide an alligator in a toilet tank and besides, it wasn’t like we were observing a kid on or in front of a toilet using it for obvious purposes. (That had to wait for The Waltons in 1972.) The censors relented; Leave it to Beaver had the first toilet tank on network sitcom TV.

Speaking of the bathroom, LitB was unusual in that the boy’s bathroom figured into plots quite often and appeared on screen regularly. In the second season, after Ward punishes Beaver for a major carnival fling with stolen money, he and Theodore have this unusually frank exchange for 1958, while June looks on with comments after:

Ward: “You had better go up to your bedroom and wait there until Larry comes.”

Theodore: “Yes Sir. But Dad, can I go to the bathroom first?” [a 1958 euphemism for a bodily function need]

Ward: “Yes, of course.”

Theodore: “Thanks. I feel sort of sick.”

It was in complete keeping with Connolly and Mosher’s insistence on reality since a little boy after a major binge at a carnival will have to unload his tummy or BM the first thing when he gets home.

Speaking of Beaver’s first best friend, Larry Mondello (who threw up at Beaver’s house in one episode) — the boys’ friends sometimes treated them shabbily and vise versa, though LitB was one of the first TV series to show boys dancing together multiple times, and its depiction of Beaver’s relationship with his best boy friend "Gilbert Bates" constitutes one of the first bromances in the history of TV boy bonding. Wally’s relationship with Eddie Haskell also constitutes one of the most complex male bonding relationship ever put on TV. “He’s a rat,” Wally observed about Eddie after one of his ghastly escapades, “but he’s my best friend.”

LitB got the psychology of boys nearly always right on the nose. It’s an achievement rarely equaled in American TV where most kids appear as wise guy props for comedy stars to sparkle against.

LitB’s parent characters supported the boys as characters, which is one of only a few instances in American television where the series came from the viewpoint of children, not adults. It also was a good bellweather of real slang in California at that time.

June firmly believed in the three square meal principle cooked mostly from scratch, and without a microwave, though once in the first series she did admit to buying and using TV dinners. The family ate two meals together a day on plates with silverware, which nowadays seems utterly quaint.

In the 234 episodes of the first LitB, the number of time Beaver exhibited interest in girls – “gurls” he pronounced them with the same sort inflection he might use to pronounce something found on the sole of his shoe – we can list on the fingers of both hands. Wally showed interest in girls friends from the first season, though in the first two season his relationship world centered on his boy friends Eddie, Chester, and Tooey – and sports and guy stuff. Hormones hit Beaver in the series’ second to last episode. A number of times in the series Beaver said that he would not marry a girl, and the writers probably meant it to be ironic funny. However, Theodore probably should have stuck with that observation considering that he got divorced at the beginning of the second LitB.

June Cleaver was a stay at home mom and quite domestic. Obsessive compulsive almost. In the last two seasons, she was practically a caricature of herself. It is quite true that a couple of times in the later season, she vacuumed in a good dress and high heals. She wore a string of pearls to hide a rather obvious pit in her throat. In the earlier seasons, she was somewhat sardonic along with the domestic angle. She did wear slacks a few times to do yard work or go camping.

When Beaver let a homeless man into the house, he took a bath in the master bathroom and stole one of Ward’s suits. June held up his old ratty suit by her fingertips and said matter-of- factly, “Apparently Beaver was not entertaining Noel Coward.”

She was terribly self aware and self conscious of what her neighbors would think of her family.

A study of all the episodes of the series, shows June was stay-at-home, unliberated, apolitical, but not a perfect domestic goddess. She sometimes got short tempered with her sons, she sometimes made mistakes. She struggled with Beaver when he became a teenager in 1963. She was the straight woman for the sons’ adorably funny comments and for her husband’s sardonic observations. Her husband Ward Cleaver, portrayed by the Reverend Hugh Beaumont dispensed sound advise, sardonic humor, and sometimes made big mistakes with his sons. He was man enough to admit it to his sons. Contrary to the October 2010 news reports, he did not smoke a pipe in the series.

In one memorable late episode:

Ward: “I came downstairs to look for my pipe.”

June: “You don’t have a pipe.”

Ward: “I guess that’s why I didn’t find it.”

She got to play straight woman to Ward’s intensely boring work colleague "Fred Rutherford" portrayed by Richard Deacon:

June: “Why, hello Fred. Come right on in here.”

Fred: “Thank you June, but my business is with the Lord of the manner.”

June played straight woman to her son’s boy friends, notably Wally’s unctuous playmate “Eddie Haskell” – always super polite in a passive aggressive sort of way to adults, always teasing and tormenting younger kids. Who can ever forget the inflections Ken Osmond gave such lines as “Good morning, Mrs. Cleaver. Your kitchen is so clean. My mother says it looks as if you never work in it.”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver. [observing her cooking ] “the meal smells delicious, whatever it is.”

She got to play straight woman to some of Beaver’s guys as well. Stephen Talbot, before he became a distinguished PBS documentary producer, had humorous exchanges and did she and Richard Correll. In his days before he became a sitcom director, he portrayed Beaver’s eager friend “Richard Rickover.”

Beaver to his mother: “This is my friend Richard. He’s a kid.”

At one point after their sons had endured some ghastly misadventure with their boys, June said in complete seriousness:

June: “You know Ward, it would be wonderful if we could select some nice boys to be Wally and Beaver’s friends.”

Ward: without missing a beat: “Yes, and they probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them.”

The second LitB series (1983 - 1989) , sometimes called Still the Beaver and other times entitled the New Leave it to Beaver, featured mature Billingsley, and grown-up Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers again. A widowed grand-matriarch, she became a sort of grandmother nurturer matriarch of the extended family. Both sons and both sets of grandchildren lived within her home’s block. In that series the writers were less careful in the details and the episodes could center on adults as well as kids. June Cleaver wore slack suits sometimes, ate take out Chinese food at her dining room table, and ran for political office in Mayfield, Ohio, becoming a town council member. She nurtured her three grandsons and one granddaughter in a 1980s setting.

It is a testament to the durability of the concept that the Cleavers went through not one but two successful TV sitcoms one in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era and the other in the Reagan administration.

It says a lot about the decline of American family culture that a certain snarkiness always creepsinto media discussions of June Cleaver, the stay at home Mom who always found ways to support her boys, to keep a tidy comfortable home, a refuge from the storms of life, to keep them nurtured and healthy.

Barbara Billingsley, who with June Lockhart and Elizabeth Montgomery were my favorite TV actresses in my childhood, played the role brilliantly. Quality of writing and quality of Barbara Billingsley will always be Leave it to Beaver’s chief strengths.