John Stanley

Remembering A Buddy Named Ebsen

Buddy Ebsen as Barnaby Jones ...in a photo signed to Mrs. Stanley

Buddy sailed through life,
steering a happy course

He loved words and music and for 49 years of his well-lived life he tinkered with bringing them harmoniously together. Along the way he sold a song here, a melody there and had songs recorded by Jo Stafford, Harry James and country singer Tex Williams. He even wrote title lyrics for a few movies, such as "Mail Order Bride" (1964), in which he also starred, and "Behave Yourself" (1951), starring a then-hot romantic team, Farley Granger and Shelley Winters.

But nobody ever wanted to think of tranquil, sagacious, easy-going Buddy Ebsen, the pure essence of countrified Americana and homespun chivalry, as a lyricst. He would always be best remembered to the world as Jed Clampett of "The Beverly Hillbillies," a bubbling crude that gushed successfully for nine years on CBS, or as Barnaby Jones, an aging private eye--in his own words a "foxy grandpa"--who outwitted crooks for another seven seasons on CBS. Or as coon-skinned Georgie Russel, packing a long rifle at the side of Fess Parker's ole Davy Crockett and crying out "Give 'em what fer, Davy!" in the hit Walt Disney adventure series that ran on TV in the mid-1950s.

These were the images running through the heads of most folks when word broke on July 6 that ole Buddy had succumbed to pneumonia at the age of 95 in Torrance, CA.

But I had a very special memory of Buddy (born Christian Rudolph Ebsen) that was a little more specialized. Suddenly, I was remembering the day he paid me a visit in the spring of 1981 when I was still cranking out entertainment yarns for the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Datebook.

He came around to the editorial office to tell me that he and his long-time collaborator Zeke Manners had just finished writing 18 new songs and that he was about to introduce those songs in a musical-comedy play he was bringing to the Golden Gate, "Turn to the Right." Not only that, but he was the producer of the blasted thing. I guess I blinked or looked dubious because he gave me a "don't-you-believe-me?" look that settled me down to asking some serious questions.

Buddy got real serious too and then I could see this just wasn't any project he was associated with, but was something mighty special--and as close-fitting to him as Fess Parker's coonskin cap.

Growing up time for Buddy was spent around Orlando, Fla., where his dad ran a dancing school. When he was 18 his mother, determined all her kids were going to be exposed to gobs of culture, bought a $10.50 ticket for a series of tent shows put on by old Jim Redpath of the Chattaqua Circuit. When it came Buddy's turn to use the ducat (the family couldn't afford tickets for everybody), he saw his first play ever--the comedy "Turn to the Right."

This is how he remembered it back in 1981, as vivid and alive in his mind as if it was happening all over again, back there in '26.

"I came out of that tent in a spin," Ebsen told me. "I was glowing. I had a sense of well-being I'd never felt before. There was a goodness about the world. I thought it was a hilarious play, about two loveable ex-cons--a safecracker and a pickpocket--who wanted to show the ropes to a young convict who's been framed and is just getting out of prison. The young boy stands outside the prison gates and the guard asks him where he's going. The boy says, 'I'm going up the river to the first bend and turn to the right.' And off the lad goes into the makings of a new life."

Two years earlier, he told me, those memories were nostalgically burning in his mind when he had a strange compulsion to see the play again and relive those moments of his teenhood. But it hadn't been performed in years. It had become totally lost in the void of forgotten plays, and he spent several months tracking down the rights. "I figured the only way I'd ever see it again was to produce it myself. So I flipped open my checkbook . . . "

Before Ebsen bought the rights, "Turn to the Right" had a checkered career as a show, being passed over by one set of investors after another, but becoming a critics' favorite when it finally was produced on stage in 1916. It ran for two years on Broadway, earning more than $1 million--an amazing sum for its time. MGM bought film rights for $250,000 the highest sum ever paid for a stage property until then. But it didn't do well on the screen, even with a big budget and director Rex Ingram (Valentino's "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse") in charge.

"It was never popular in theaters and there are no existing prints that I can dig up today," Ebsen told me.

Ebsen decided a revival of the show would work best if he turned it into a musical comedy, so he teamed up with pal Zeke Manners to compose a musical score. (Ebsen got to know Manners when the veteran entertainer sued CBS for stealing the name of his old country band, The Beverly Hillbillies, and sticking it on Ebsen's hit TV series in 1962.)

"That's when me and Zeke became real good friends," Ebsen recalled. "So, we started writing some songs together."

Ebsen and Manners went on to fashion a new book of lyrics and music. And that's what he was ready to open at the Orpheum Theater on San Francisco's Market Street when he paid me that visit.

I had to be honest with Buddy that day. Hell, I liked him too much. Anybody would have liked Buddy, listening to his enthusiasm and sincerity for an old play he wanted to see again, to bring alive that old feeling of being young again.

But there were the realities of producing an old chestnut. Maybe it would get roasted on an open fire with the critics all gathered around. And maybe the money in the play, which just happened to be entirely Buddy's, might get burned up alongside those chestnuts.

"Yeah, I hear you," said Buddy, but he only smiled again. "That's why they have horse races. We'll cross our fingers and wait and see what happens." The look on his face said he was going to be a winner.

Well, as old Bob Burns from Arkansas would say, I got to tell you the truth about what happened to the folks.

Buddy Ebsen, bless his heart even when things go bad, got burned mightily by "Turn to the Right." The play opened Feb. 18, 1981 at the Orpheum with Jan Clayton starring, and closed soon after. The San Francisco critics unaminously panned it. Just didn't pan it, but hated it with the kind of vitrolic passion only drama critics can bring to their writing. It failed for all the reasons you might suspect. An old-fashioned idea is still an old-fashioned idea no matter how many new songs or production numbers you create. No matter how much love you can put into a play, that doesn't mean it's going to be loved by everybody else. And Buddy would later tell me he had learned a bitter lesson from "Turn to the Right." Over the phone he said a few weeks later, "You won't be seeing me turn in that direction again real soon." To the best of my knowledge, I don't think Buddy ever again flipped open his checkbook to become a theatrical producer.

Well, so much for "Turn to the Right." I want to get back to Buddy because us talking and drinking together and having some fun wasn't over yet. Not by any kind of a long shot.

At that time I was hosting a TV show called "Creature Features" over in Oakland, at Channel 2, back when it was an independent station and not a Fox affiliate, as it is today. And Buddy was invited to be my guest. I asked him if he would join me in spoofing the series with a short promotion spot to run on the air during the week. Being a creative spirit who could never pass up a challenge to contribute to tomfoolery on tape, he immediately agreed and we worked out a 30-second bit that went like this:

I'm standing against the wall of my studio set when suddenly Buddy rushes up to my side and sticks a long-barreled .38 revolver into my face. "Get 'em up!" he orders, as if he knows I'm a mass murderer and has enough goods to have me convicted. I throw my hands into the air. "Buddy Ebsen!" I cry. "No, no," he says, "Barnaby Jones!" Then he shouts: "And you're under arrest." My eyes bulge. "Under arrest? What for?" Buddy/Barnaby smiles wryly: "For posing as a TV host. Now get up against that wall." That's followed by a voiceover Buddy cut that same day in the control room: "It's a crime what John Stanley gets away with every Saturday night on 'Creature Features.'"

Together we watched the playback in the studio and laughed our heads off. "I love it," Buddy told me, "when I can spoof myself and make a fool of you."

When that was done and our interview about "Turn to the Right" was on tape, we retired to the Clift Hotel in downtown San Francisco for some dinner and some serious drinking. No sooner were we seated than damned if he didn't start telling me about the time back in 1942 when he had been eating some of his dinners at the Clift. In the same room where we were now. Not only eating in '42, but drinking a lot of Daiquiris, because there was a bartender there who knew how to make "the best damn Daiquiri I had ever had."

Buddy had been in town that year appearing in a musical-comedy, "Good Night, Ladies," at the Curran Theater. And that's why he had chosen to return there for dinner. "I wanted to see what the place looked like. I had such a damn good time here back in '42.

"They don't float a little ice on top like they did in '42," he explained, staring down at his Daiquiri. A moment later the maitre'd came to the table to tell Ebsen he had been there in '42 when Ebsen came in to drink. They laughed together. Buddy leaned back to reminisce: "Remember the night I put away seven boilermakers while in the presence of a naval officer? I signed a piece of paper and woke up the next morning in the Coast Guard. They trained me to sink submarines, and my crew was the only one to qualify on the firing line with a direct hit, but they sent us to the North Pacific where there were no Jap subs and I spent the rest of the damn war on a frigate, taking down weather reports and watching gooney birds fly to and fro. I was never so humiliated in my life."

I remember thinking that night that this gentle, white-haired fella, who was about to turn 73, seemed to have a photographic memory that enabled him to recall all the names, dates and incidents of a fabulous career that had begun when he tucked $26.65 into his jeans and went to New York. He knew only the basic rudiments of dancing, but it was enough. After a period making milkshakes at Penn Station' Long Island Concourse, his first show was in 1928's "Whoopee" with Eddie Cantor. Buddy's sister, Vilma, had also learned something about dancing from their dad and so she teamed up with Buddy for awhile.

The fabulous time that followed included some good years at MGM. He danced through his first roles on screen ("Broadway Melody of 1936" and "Born to Dance") only to find himself opposite Shirley Temple his third time out, in "Captain January." "Well," he admitted to me that night, putting down more Daiquiris, "some of my early films were the worst ever made."

But he got really enthusiastic talking about his Republic-studio westerns with Rex Allen in the early 1950s, in which he played the sidekick to the cowboy star in such oaters as "Silver City Bonanza," "The Rodeo King and the Senorita" and "Utah Wagon Trail." His slapsticky characters bore such names as Homer Oglethorpe, Gabe Horne, Happy Hooper and Snooper Trent.

He didn't argue with me a bit when I told him I thought one of his best roles was the dirt farmer, Willie Crawford, in the 1956 Robert Wagner war movie "Between Heaven and Hell."

"Yep," he said, "that was a good old one, and Hugo Friedhofer's music almost won him the Oscar. It shoulda. It was a great war-movie score."

And he talked a little about the TV series that never gets mentioned, "Northwest Passage," in which he played a buckskin-clad Indian fighter named Hunk Marriner.

He got to talking about World War II again and told me that when he got back from the Pacific in 1945 he starred in Oscar Hammerstein's "Show Boat" opposite Jan Clayton, the same veteran of TV's "Lassie" who starred in his ill-fated "Turn to the Right" stage musical.

Well, he told me, things hadn't gone so well after the war. "Hollywood had stopped making musicals by the '50s and everyone thought I was nothin' more than the cute half of a has-been brother-sister dance team." He went through some "terrible periods of depression" but was strongly supported through this difficult time by Nancy, a SPAR whom he had met and married while still in the Coast Guard. (The marriage would create seven children.)

"Finally," he said, "I landed some decent parts and found myself back in the limelight with the 'Davy Crockett' business. In fact, Walt Disney hired me to play Davy. And then this movie about giant mutant ants came out, called 'Them,' and in it was this unknown named Fess Parker. And the next thing I knew, I was second banana playin' Georgie Russel, and Fess was in the leading role. But, hey, that's Hollywood--and we got along okay."

He claimed he hadn't been hurt, because "the next thing I knew, I was Jed Clampett. That whole hillbilly thing was so crazy it was irresistible. We all knew it would be instant death or a long run. I guess we did in the neighborhood of 300 shows. It was a license to steal, it was so easy for me. When I look back on my life, it seems like everything important or moving was connected to either boats or show business. My best friends are from these worlds. I've owned my own boats since 1936, when I came out to MGM to do 'Broadway Melody of 1936.' Nowadays I float a 37-foot catamaran.
"The water means a lot to me. It's better than any doctor or injection a doctor could give me. Everything's in its place. There's no pain, no anxiety. After you've sailed safely from Newport Beach [his home in 1981] to Oceanside through heavy seas, your drink tastes better, you have a true sense of accomplishment."

Retirement didn't exist in his lexicon. "That word, retirement, is the reason for the mess we're in. In the old days white-bearded ones were respected for their wisdom. They controlled the tribe or the clan. Today, if you're over 65, they want to shut you off, just when you're smart enough to come up with some of the answers. Today everything big and new is good and everything old and small is bad."

It's time, he continued, "for us to re-examine our discarded values. So many people are mysteriously unhappy but don't know why. I think it's a loss of innocence. Kids nowadays are pushed into advanced sexual experiences and then they say 'What else have you got?' They pollute their bodies with overdoses and they forget about the intoxication of a beautiful sunrise or sunset. They should be enjoying their eyesight instead of taking it for granted. Or looking at colors. There are so many things we've forgotten because we're engrossed in progress . . . but progress to what? To where? The destruction of mankind? You can look inside yourself and see your own world and solve your own problems if you try hard enough."

As if it would somehow solve all the problems running through his mind, Buddy ordered one final rounds of Daiquiris for both of us and began to sing a song from "Turn to the Right":

"Life's a brand-new ball game every day,
It doesn't matter how you blew it yesterday.
Just last night you had a broken heart
Every dawn will bring a brand-new start
If you'll just forget the past was dark
Go to bat and knock that ball right out of the park
You'll do okay in that brand-new ball game today."

©2003 by John Stanley.

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