When I was growing up there, the house seemed big enough to accommodate everything I wanted to do in it, to meet my imagination halfway. Out back, there was a little sunken courtyard of cracked concrete where I used to play handball against one side of the house, and up a short flight of stairs, an apron of lawn trimmed with zinnias and snapdragons, and up another flight of stairs, the pool and deck that my parents built for us (neither of them could swim), and above that, a tangled hillside of ice plant and wild mustard and leggy purple weeds. There was a sturdy lemon tree that my mom used to send me to, for our nightly iced tea. For a relatively small house, it had a lot of odd little cabinets, built-in bookshelves, unexpected nooks, and deceptively large, mothball-scented closets. It was an excellent house for playing hide-and-seek or for staking out secret reading places. Sitting atop the built-in bookshelf next to a window in my bedroom closet with Jane Eyre and a box of Pop-Tarts by my side was the height of luxury for me when I was a preteen. I once reached down into the empty space behind the drawer of my built-in desk and found a yellowing stash of love letters to the teenage girl who’d lived there before me.
Studio City was a regular middle-class suburb, except that so many of the people who lived there worked in what we called “the business.” It wasn’t a neighborhood where you’d find a map to the stars’ homes, though. This was a community of humble, working showbiz types. Our neighbors included stuntmen, TV directors, and cameramen, and a guy who wrote scripts for the TV series Get Smart. (He’d give us the scripts they’d already shot, and David would stage productions of them in our backyard, once selling an astonishing number of overpriced tickets to people who must have been hoping that Lyle or some other professional actors would turn up in the cast. No such luck, it was just my scrawny cousins and I playing international men and women of mystery.) Across the street lived Thurl Ravenscroft, the voice of Tony the Tiger on the Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes commercials. (Kids were always wheedling him to “do the voice.” He never would.) Down the street was the house of Marty Milner, the blond actor who starred in Route 66 and later in Adam-12, iconic TV shows “about two regular guys in a car,” as the Wikipedia entry on Milner aptly puts it. (He also played the jazz musician who falls for Burt Lancaster’s sister in The Sweet Smell of Success.)
We did not live extravagantly in Studio City—no lavish parties, no expensive jewelry for my mom, no vacations abroad, no nannies or babysitters (other than my grandparents), just the one car (a station wagon). But there was enough money to send my brothers to the fancy all-boys prep school across the street (my sister and I went to the perfectly good public schools) and later to put all four of us through college (albeit on three University of California tuitions, a bargain in those days). My father’s acting earned him just over $19,000 in 1963, which doesn’t sound like much until you realize that only 5 percent of American families had an income over $15,000 that year and the median family income was $6,200. In 1965, his earnings from TV shows and plays (no movies) jumped to $35,000 (and we splurged on a new Mercury station wagon for $4,800). That year, though, was the kind of fluke that freelancers sometimes get lucky with; his earnings settled back down to $20,000 the following year.
The new medium of television had been very good to Lyle, and he made a smooth transition to it—especially once he stopped drinking. Since he’d always been at ease onstage, he was more comfortable than some of his movie-made colleagues with live TV, especially the live drama that was a mainstay of early 1950s broadcasting. Lyle still liked to be at the bright, buzzy center of the culture, an officially designated funmaker. And TV, the powerful novelty that was meant to bring families home and together after the separations and dispersals of war, certainly felt like the centerpiece of the entertainment industry in the 1950s. Lyle was content now with character parts. “You can’t go on forever doing leads,” he told the columnist Erskine Johnson in 1951. “Being a character man is better. You don’t have to watch your waistline. You don’t have to worry about whether you’re a handsome guy or not. What a relief!” Fellow actors who still tried to be “dashing and irresistible” at fifty and over were “foolish. Audiences aren’t going to continue to accept them.” If this smacks of making a virtue of necessity, it’s still sort of touching to see him so gamely trying to do so. In any case, he found plentiful character roles on TV—those bankers and “Docs” on the westerns, the police commissioners and psychiatrists on the mysteries.
And the next-door neighbors/best friends like Joe Randolph, the character he played on the Ozzie and Harriet show. We got to live our suburban idyll in large part because my father was enacting another one on TV. In 1956, he landed a continuing role on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a role he played for ten of the show’s fourteen years on television. On the 1950s family sitcom, the parents’ (and kids’) best friends were often the neighbors. That was an integral part of the ideal of living they represented: the pal next door you could organize a golf outing with at a moment’s notice. You didn’t have to leave community behind when you moved from the city; it was there in abundance and ready for play.
Around the same time, my brother Steve discovered that he had a hankering to act, too, and my parents decided to let him try. He was talented and a quick study. And he was all-American cute, with his wheat-blond hair, blue eyes, and square little jaw. From the time he was nine till he was fourteen, he got a lot of work, on The Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, and Lassie (he was once bitten by the dog trained to play the “fighting Lassie”—I hate to reveal this, but Lassie was played by more than one collie). He played Dick Clark’s ward in the one movie Clark ever made, a sensitive teen movie called Because They’re Young, with Tuesday Weld as one of the sensitive teens. But his longest-running role was on the family comedy Leave It to Beaver, where he played Gilbert Bates, the friend of Beaver Cleaver’s who was most likely to get him into hot water. Not that it was ever that hot—tepid, more like it. The classic Gilbert maneuver was to get Beaver to pledge they’d both make faces in their fifth-grade class picture, then not make a face himself, and leave Beaver to mar the photo and take the punishment. Or Gilbert might, as he did in another episode, egg the Beaver into starting a lawn-mowing enterprise, then back out and leave Beaver to do all the work. Or he might talk Beaver and another friend into buying a burro, then renege on his promise to keep the burro at his house part of the time, when his mother gets steamed about it.
No two shows projected the ideal of the 1950s American family as indelibly as Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver did. You could throw in Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show, too, but it was Ozzie and Harriet that became common shorthand for a certain kind of family—the male-breadwinner, stay-at-home-mom, white, suburban kind. And when that norm began to be undermined—by the 1960s counterculture, by feminism, by an increase in the number of working mothers, of divorce, and of single-parent-headed households—both its critics and its defenders latched on to the convenient symbolism of the sitcom, producing articles and speeches with titles like “Ozzie and Harriet Don’t Live Here Anymore.”
June Cleaver, the mother in the Cleaver household, who famously wore pumps and pearls while she did the housework, came to epitomize the 1950s homemaker who was supposed to combine fastidious devotion to a clean and orderly household with an impeccably maintained femininity. Type “June Cleaver” into your Amazon search engine and you’ll find recent books with titles like Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juice Box: Cut Yourself Some Slack (and Still Raise Great Kids) in the Age of Extreme Parenting (I like that marketing-friendly “and still raise great kids”); Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America; and even I Killed June Cleaver: Modern Moms Shatter the Myth of Perfect Parenting. As of this writing, it has been nearly fifty years since Leave It to Beaver went off the air (though it did survive in reruns long after), and we’re still invoking June Cleaver as the paragon of a certain kind of oppressive domestic perfectionism.
No wonder, then, tha
t when my brother Steve emerged as a student radical at Wesleyan University in the late 1960s, a leader of the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and a guy who romanced brainy East Coast feminists, he was embarrassed enough about the Beaver years to sort of . . . never mention them. Still, he was going to school with a lot of kids who’d grown up with 1950s TV. It was a testament to the purchase Beaver Cleaver had on the baby boomer subconscious that when a false rumor started to the effect that Jerry Mathers, the actor who played the Beaver, had been killed in Vietnam, it simply would not go away. Even in those easier-to-hide years before Google, there was really no escaping from a televised past, collective or personal. In 1968, Steve was speaking at a New England town meeting against the Vietnam War, along with other SDS members and representatives of the Black Panthers, when someone in the audience stood up and asked, “Hey, weren’t you Gilbert on Leave It to Beaver?” As Steve recalled in an article he wrote for California magazine, “All heads onstage turned to stare at me. One Panther from Newark lowered his shades to get a better look. I felt like an imposter—an alleged college radical exposed as a child sitcom actor.” Another time, when Steve had been urging fellow Wesleyan students to go out on strike against the war, he arrived on campus one morning to see a big hand-painted sign that read “GEE, BEAV, I DON’T KNOW,” an oft-repeated phrase from the show. Back then, when he contemplated his dad’s run on Ozzie and Harriet and his own on Beaver, Steve sometimes thought that if “our roles as sidekicks in the ultimate suburban fantasies didn’t exactly qualify as war crimes,” still “culturally and aesthetically . . . we had a lot to atone for.”
Well, maybe. But watching a bunch of the episodes from both shows recently (like so many things—maybe everything eventually—they are available on DVD with Bonus Features), I was inclined to give them more of a break. Ozzie and Harriet is indeed remarkably bland and corny. But let me give it credit for a few things, besides, that is, supporting my family, and allowing my parents the lagniappe of a late-in-life fourth child—me—for I was born during the middle of my father’s well-paid Ozzie and Harriet run.
Ozzie and Harriet was the first program on TV to show a married couple sharing the same bed—a breakthrough at a time when it still wasn’t common even in the movies. It launched the career of Ricky Nelson, the guitar-playing, dreamy-looking younger Nelson son, a performer with some real rockabilly chops, even though he had to keep them pretty tame when he sang on the show. Incorporating Rick’s emergence as a rock musician into the series made it seem like it was possible to rock a little without smashing the family. In some ways, this was a conservative message. “Rather than fracturing domesticity,” writes media scholar Lynn Spigel, teen idols like Ricky Nelson “seemed to repair it by bringing the new youth culture, with its threatening Elvis Presleys and Little Richards, into a domestic world where children sang the latest hits under the watchful eyes of their parents.” This image did not seem particularly true to the 1960s, when families tended to be generationally divided in their musical tastes. But it nicely anticipated the era we’re living in now, when boomer and Gen X parents send their kids off to rock ’n’ roll camp. Ozzie and Harriet lying in bed swaying awkwardly but enthusiastically along as Ricky sings “Hello Mary Lou” on television reminds me more than I’m quite comfortable admitting of my own helpless enthusiasm for my kids’ indie rock band.
At times you can even see that Ozzie and Harriet was a template for shows like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yes, as many a wiseacre has pointed out, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (the show’s full title) was a misnomer, since nothing ever really happened on the show. But nothing really happens on many modern sitcoms, and many of them are fueled, as Ozzie and Harriet was, by the half-childlike, half-philosophical riffing of a perpetually irked, perpetually befuddled male lead. His children are alternately amused and embarrassed by him, and his sensible wife shakes her head and deftly extracts him from the jams he’s gotten himself into. Of course, Ozzie was a gentler, more anodyne version of Larry David (or Homer Simpson, for that matter). Take the episode in which he decides not to get out of bed all day. It’s a poignantly small-scale rebellion, not least because it’s a Sunday, but of course it goes all wrong anyway. Ozzie wants to make a point about arbitrary conformity; Harriet just wants to make the bed. A parade of visitors refuses to believe he isn’t sick, and one, a lugubrious fellow from the “Cheer-Up Committee” at the Moose Lodge who calls him “Brother Nelson” and eats all his bedside snacks, puts him into a hypochondriacal funk. It’s actually quite funny.
As for Leave It to Beaver, well, the pace seems slow by contemporary standards and the places where we’re cued to laugh by the laugh track never seem quite right—a phenomenon that began to strike my twelve-year-old daughter and me as funny in its own right when we’d watched enough episodes in a row. One setup that always gets the big hahas is when Beaver and his brother, Wally, use some kind of contemporary kid lingo at the dinner table—refer to somebody, for instance, as a “creep,” an all-purpose put-down that seems to mean something more like “weird”—and their parents, Ward and June, cock an eyebrow at each other as if to say, Aren’t we tolerant to let them express themselves this way? Also, evidently real rib-ticklers for 1950s audiences and not so much for us: the many occasions when Beaver or other pre-adolescent kids on the show express utter amazement at the idea that they would ever like a girl. Actually, the way girls their age are usually presented on the show—prissy, with hair curled and sprayed into immobility like their moms’, and clad in stiffly starched dresses—you can hardly blame Beaver and his pals.
But there are charming moments, too, especially in the relationship between Beaver and his teenage brother, with whom he shares a room. My daughter and I both found at least some of the situations quite, as they say, relatable. They were the sorts of predicaments of ordinary family life and childhood friendship that never go away: kids losing things and pretending they didn’t; friends who try to get you to cheat or who form alliances with your other friends behind your back; the frustration elicited by a smarmy guy like Eddie Haskell who impresses adults but harasses kids when the adults aren’t there to see; the many and intricate ways your parents and teachers can embarrass you. At times, I found myself kind of keen to discover how Ward was going to handle this or that dilemma on the home front. Surprisingly, it usually was Ward, not June, who did the heavy parenting, and it turned out I wasn’t above taking tips from Beaver’s dad.
If you watch The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver assuming that the traditional families they showcase will be predicated on male domination, it turns out to be a little more complicated than that. More than one commentator has pointed out that the fathers in these shows, presumably the breadwinners, display identities that are remarkably detached from their work and subsumed in their fatherhood. Ward Cleaver seems to arrive home at about four-thirty every day, maybe five—it’s still daylight and the boys have just gotten home from school. Though he mentions “the office” now and again, he rarely talks to his wife about anything going on there, and never seems to bring work home. If he isn’t discussing the boys with June, or dispensing advice to the boys themselves, he’s usually reading a newspaper. Ozzie, as more than one wag has pointed out, does not appear to have a job at all. (The comedian Bob Newhart once speculated that perhaps Ozzie was a bookie—he spent an awful lot of time on the phone and seemed to be in a position to support a pleasant lifestyle.) This was a reflection partly of the family sitcom’s traditional emphasis on relationships, partly of the reality that men really did work shorter days in the 1950s, and partly of a new cultural preoccupation with fatherhood.
As social historians such as Stephanie Coontz and Elaine Tyler May have shown in recent years, the “traditional” 1950s family was actually a rather novel formation. It was the product of new trends: the sudden postwar drop in the age for marriage and motherhood and the educational attainment of women vis-à-vis men, a
long with sharp declines in divorce and in the proportion of people who’d never been married. People were marrying younger, living together longer, and having their children earlier and closer together. “The legendary family of the 1950s—was not, as common wisdom tells us, the last gasp of traditional family life with deep roots in the past,” writes May. “Rather it was the first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members’ personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life.” Nothing quite makes the point about the social place of divorce in late 1950s America like the episode of Leave It to Beaver in which Beaver’s friend from camp, a cute little fellow named Chopper, comes to visit for the weekend. When June learns that Chopper’s parents are divorced and his father is remarried, she worries that he’s too “sophisticated” a companion for Beaver, who has “never known someone with two sets of parents before.” Wally gets a laugh with the line “Heck, I know all about divorces and stuff. I go to the movies.” And poor Chopper is called home early by his mother, who’s “got the weepies again.”
Sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best were at once reflections of and advertisements for the new family model. And perhaps for a new vision of fatherhood, in particular. “Fatherhood became a new badge of masculinity and meaning for the postwar man,” writes May, “and Father’s Day a holiday of major significance. Men began attending classes on marriage and family in unprecedented numbers. In 1954, Life magazine announced the ‘domestication of the American male.’ Fatherhood was important not just to give meaning to men’s lives, but to counteract the abundance of maternal care”—thus fending off the dreaded sissification of boys.
The Entertainer Page 39
