People Magazine Report
March 4th, 1985
So suburban perfect were the Cleavers on CBS and ABC from 1957 - 1963, that American’s desperately needed to destroy the myth. Rumors abounded that Jerry Mathers had been killed in Vietnam, that Ken Osmond had become pornstar John Holmes, that Tony Dow had married Barbara Billingsley, hit TV mom. In truth all four are still acting most recently in Still the Beaver, a weekly reprise that has won high rating on Disney’s cable channel.
Jerry Mathers - He did spend 6 years in the Air National Guard but never made it overseas. After getting a philosophy degree from Berkeley, Mathers worked as a bank loan officer, real estate salesman, and radio talk show host. Before turning into acting, he appeared with Tony Dow, still a close friend in a dinner theatre production of So Long, Stanley and in the 1983 TV Movie, Still the Beaver, in which his character now grown faced, the traumas of adulthood. That led to the cable series.
Mathers, 36, lives outside Los Angeles with his second wife. A theatrical press agent and their 3 kids. Like his Beaver co-stars, he earned nothing from the original shows.
Hugh Beaumont - after a stroke left him partially paralyzed in 1972, he stayed close to his Minneapolis homeland to Katherine, his wife of 40 years. In 1982, he went to Munich to visit his son Eric, A psychology professor. A heart attack killed him during the trip.
Barbara Billingsley - Now a widow with 2 kids and 3 grandkids, Billingsley went from Beaver to the lecture circuit as an expert on motherhood. Though she appeared in the movie Airplane as the woman who spoke jive and recently in Come Blow your Horn in dinner theatres, she knows which role she will be remembered for. Muses Billingsley, who’s in her 60’s, can’t imagine what her life would be like without Beaver.
Ken Osmond - The Cleaver’s smarmy neighbor quit acting to start a helicopter service in Los Angeles. When his chopper crashed in 1966, putting him out of business, Osmond joined the LAPD. "All I wanted to do when I was a kid was be a policeman or Cowboy" says Ken, 41, "and I never passed the test for cowboy." While on patrol in 1980, he was shot 3 times but was saved by his bullet proof best and his belt buckle. On medical leave from the force, he is waiting a pension hearing.
Tony Dow - After Beaver went off the air, Dow waited for the offers to come rolling in. He wound up doing soaps and studying film at UCLA. Eventually, he turned to sculpting, then started a construction company. "Something has to fill the empty time," he said of that decision. Dow, now 39 and married for the second time, is only too happy to appear in Still the Beaver, but has misgivings about what the sitcom did to his career. "Even if I play a murderer" he said, "People say, Gee, you’re just like Wally.
Another W.A.S.P. suburban family gentle sitcom wherein the father always wore cardigan sweaters and the mother tidied up an already neat and affluent home. It was indeed a genre and many carbon copies where to come before the golden age ended. Nevertheless, Leave It To Beaver was a cut above the average. It's closest counterpart was Father Knows Best which was arguably, something of a female-oriented show. Betty, for instance, was brainy and independent and had to deal with those traits which were somewhat untypical of the 1950's woman.
Leave It To Beaver, on the other hand, can be seen as a sustained treatment of male relationships -- father and son, brother to brother and the challenge of accommodating to rather than merely surviving 1950's stereotypes. It was a very preachy show, with Ward Cleaver, the father, dispensing lectures to this sons. Usually they were hard to argue against - if you were a kid yourself watching the program and dealt with the consequences of one's actions.
The situations then in Beaver sitcoms were themes universal to childhood rather than contrived outrageous predicaments. In the warm cast were Jerry Mathers as Theodore Beaver Cleaver, Tony Dow as his older brother Wally and Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley as the parents. Also appearing were Ken Osmond as the all-time stereotyped snotty teenager Eddie Haskell, Frank Bank as Wally's friend Lumpy and Richard Deacon as his father, Fred Rutherford and Burt Mustin as Gus, the local fire chief.
Mathers and Dow left the acting profession after Beaver but were lured back for stage performances and in the mid 1980's as stars of the reunion, Still the Beaver, a TV movie and later, on Disney and Turner Cable Systems, a full fledged series again. Hugh Beaumont had died, Wally had become a lawyer and Beaver's wife had left him. The new version was indeed a 1980's update of the somewhat blander 50's but the new Beaver movie featured original series as appropriate and irrefutable as always.
