Posted on Sun, Apr. 18, 2004

He'll always be Beave -- and that's OK

Life after the Beaver? What with all those Vietnam rumors, Jerry Mathers is just pleased that there's life, period.

BY GLENN GARVIN

ggarvin@herald.com

Beaver lives! Despite what you might have read in the papers or even heard on The Tonight Show, Jerry Mathers, the innocent-faced but trouble-prone (''Boy, Beave, are you gonna get it!'') little kid from Leave it to Beaver, did not come home from Vietnam in a body bag.

Mathers was safely tucked away in an Air National Guard barracks in Texas that day in 1969 when another airman said, ''Hey, buddy, look at this'' and handed him a newspaper announcing that Mathers had been killed in combat.

''It went out over both the wire services, AP and UPI,'' says Mathers, who still hears himself pronounced dead with unnerving regularity by disc jockeys and trivia-game hosts. ``They had people watching the casualty lists that the Pentagon released, and somebody saw the same name as mine, or a similar name. They yanked out my bio and started putting out the story.

'To make matters worse, Shelley Winters was doing The Tonight Show that night, and she was pretty anti-war. She wanted to sing Bring The Boys Home and she introduced it by saying, `That war is killing the flower of American youth, even Beaver Cleaver!' I didn't know her and she didn't know me, but there it went.''

DEFINED BY ROLE

But to say that Mathers survived Vietnam doesn't mean that there's life after Beaver. More than four decades after it left the air, the 55-year-old Mathers still finds himself defined by a role that he played when he was 9. And that's just fine by him.

''It's odd, sure, but it's something that, obviously, has happened all my life,'' he says. ``I've adapted to it. I'm sorry for the people who are identified for something not as good. There are a lot of people in Hollywood -- I'm not going to name any because a lot of them are friends of mine -- who are known for a show or character not nearly as good as Leave it to Beaver.''

Leave it to Beaver, which aired from 1957 to 1963 on first CBS and then ABC (it debuted the same day the Russians launched their Sputnik satellite), was in many ways the prototypical television sitcom of the 1950s, set in the anonymous, lily-white suburb of Mayfield.

Ward Cleaver, the wise, kindly dad, wore cardigans and had a job downtown that was always a little vague. Wife June was a homemaker whose neck was adorned with pearls even when she was doing the laundry. And Beaver and his older brother Wally went to school and got into mild suburban mischief. When the pensive June told her husband, ''Ward, I'm worried about the Beaver'' -- as she did approximately 1.6 times per episode -- she was never talking about crack, AIDS or predatory priests.

Even so, Mathers says it's a mistake to dismiss Leave it to Beaver as a dopey Eisenhower-era daydream. Some of its comically dated elements had little to do with sociology -- Barbara Billingsley, who played June Cleaver, wore those pearls to cover an odd wrinkle on her throat, not to fulfill some weird Helen Gurley Brown concept of femininity. And for all its suburban white-bread innocence, Mathers argues, Leave it to Beaver was actually more realistic in many ways than modern family sitcoms like Roseanne or Malcolm in the Middle.

''All 234 of the Leave it to Beaver episodes were drawn from real life,'' he says. ``Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, the writers [who broke into show business writing for the old Amos 'n Andy radio show], had something like nine kids between them. And everything that happened on Leave it to Beaver was something that they knew about from real life.

``Wally and Beaver may have been composites of a lot of different kids, and some of the stuff may have been exaggerated a little bit. But it was all grounded in reality. These days, sitcom writers sit around a table, somebody suggests a situation, and then they just sit there telling jokes about it. That's how you get these wildly hallucinogenic plots. Literally anything can happen in a sitcom now, whether it's possible in real life or not.''

Leave it to Beaver, in fact, broke ground. Decades before The Wonder Years or Party of Five, it was the first family series told from the point of view of the kids and not the parents.

''It's not just the scripts,'' notes Mathers. ``The whole show is shot from a child's point of view. When Beaver meets a policeman, the scene is shot not from a high angle looking down at Beaver, but a low angle looking up at the policeman . . .

``That's what the show is about -- the innocence of a child and his progression into the adult world. Beaver is innocent, even naive. That's why he's always doing stuff Eddie Haskell [his oily, unctuous friend] suggests and then getting into trouble. Wally is sort of a transitional character; he knows the world is not perfect. And Ward and June, the parents, are sort of do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do types.''

HARD-HITTING REUNION

Leave it to Beaver left such a mark on its audience that 20 years later it returned to cable TV as The New Leave it to Beaver, featuring much of the original cast in a show far more bittersweet than most reunion programs. The hapless Beaver was divorced and out of work, Wally's family was a mess, and Eddie Haskell was a sleazy contractor on the run from the IRS. Ward Cleaver (like the actor who played him, Hugh Beaumont) had died, and the forlorn June, trying to figure out how to help her struggling children, gazed at his picture approximately 1.6 times per episode and asked aloud: ``Ward, what would you do?''

''I didn't mind that Beaver was divorced and his life wasn't going too well,'' says Mathers. ''The way I saw it, when he was off in the megalopolis, he was beaten down and frayed at the edges. But when he came back to Mayfield, he started to rebuild. . . . I don't think the show would have been a success if the Beaver had been a huge success.'' Audiences liked it enough that 108 episodes were made.

Not surprisingly, since he spent 10 years working with them, Mathers is still friendly with most of the Beaver cast, particularly Tony Dow, who played Wally, and Ken Osmond, who was Eddie Haskell.

Osmond's character was so treacherously reptilian (typical line: ''Wally, if your dumb brother tags along, I'm gonna -- Oh, good afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver! I was just telling Wallace how pleasant it would be for Theodore to accompany us to the movies'') that he's a popular-culture anti-icon.

That's not always been pleasant for Osmond, who's spent much of his life combatting rumors far more perverse than Mathers' mythical Vietnam demise. As a joke, porn star John Holmes billed himself as ''Eddie Haskell'' in several of his movies. Osmond, who had become a Los Angeles cop, was not amused, but his lawsuit went nowhere. Only slightly less uncomfortable was the rumor that Osmond was actually the goth-rock star Alice Cooper; it got started when the real Cooper, speaking metaphorically, told an interviewer he'd been ''Eddie Haskell'' growing up, and fans took it literally.

THE BEST LINES

Even so, Mathers says, Osmond still embraces his Leave it to Beaver years. ''We'll do an appearance together somewhere, and we're sitting at a table and he's just nice-guy Ken Osmond, and then we get up on stage, and all the sudden he's mean Eddie Haskell, and the insults are flying right and left,'' says Mathers. ``I think he likes it even better than I do, because it's a character he can put on or take off as he chooses. And he certainly always gets the best lines.''

The New Leave it to Beaver was Mathers' last regular TV gig. He still gets acting work, but with reality shows the toast of television, much less than he'd like. ''There's not many roles to go around right now,'' Mathers broods. ``You've got to figure that for every hour of reality television, there's something like 10 to 20 actors who didn't get to work.''

So Mathers works as a spokesman for foundations looking for cures for psoriasis and diabetes (he has both and was in South Florida last week to speak on breakthroughs in treatment for the skin disease) and makes endless appearances before groups who want to hear about Beaver. It doesn't bother him in the least.

''I've been all over the world, done things, met people, because I was the Beaver,'' he says. ``It's been wonderful for me. So I've never tried to run away from it. Not that I could.''

Even 'the Beav' might have problems growing up in 2004




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My kid says his favorite television programs are "Chappelle's Show," "South Park" and "The Simpsons." Yikes, he's been corrupted. Innocence is dead.

He's not supposed to watch any of those shows, but that's partly why they're on his favorites list, even though he's probably only seen bits and pieces of them. And it's why his eyes twinkled when he answered my question about what's good on television.

TV is mostly off limits to him anyway.

With him in middle school, I've been thinking more about how he is processing the world, and TV is just one part of that. When to put my hand in front of his eyes, and when to help him understand the world, is a constant question.

I haven't seen "South Park" or "The Simpsons" in a while, but I've been checking out Comedy Central's "Chappelle's Show" because it's fairly new and gets in some social commentary.

I like edgy stuff and comedy that has a social component to it. Dave Chappelle is juvenile sometimes, but other times he does the kind of humor Richard Pryor or Margaret Cho might; routines that make you squirm and think. But it's not usually appropriate for kids. Still, my son is at an age where kids talk about a lot of things that aren't so innocent, and I'd like to be part of those discussions.

TV can be a catalyst for conversation, and I know he's going to see and hear stuff anyway, even though we censor the tube.

My son and I watched several episodes of "Leave It to Beaver" this month, and I was surprised to find myself liking them.

We were visiting my mother in New Mexico, and one of the traditions of our visit is that my son gets to veg out and watch lots of TV. One evening we traveled up and down the list of channels looking for something a 12-year-old and his father could agree was both entertaining and appropriate.

We rejected programs that had too much kissing, too much talking or too much shooting before settling on a station that shows only oldies.

That's how we came to watch "Leave It to Beaver," which was like a vacation within a vacation. The program was simple, no complexities to tax my brain.

The Cleavers had problems to deal with in every episode, but the problems were like exercises in a math book, 1 plus 1 always equaled 2; no one ever had to deal with quantum mechanics.

Its simplicity is also why I've never thought much of the show. Its world is 100 percent white, middle class and suburban. It's not the world we live in. It trims the meat off reality, so you're left with nicely polished bones to gnaw on. There's no fat and gristle, no mess, but not much nutrition either.

I've only seen a few episodes all the way through, so maybe sometime they did deal with gender differences, racial hierarchies, teen pregnancy, substance abuse, homophobia and what would happen if June got a grease spot while cooking in her Sunday best.

Maybe the writers did try not to make it too saccharine.

In the episodes we watched, the characters weren't perfect, but their imperfections were comforting ones. June worried a bit too much whenever one of the boys was late getting home. The Beaver tried to fool his parents into thinking he'd made the basketball team when he hadn't. Stuff like that.

It had moral lessons that seemed helpful, but like some self-help books that seem wonderful in a vacuum, I doubt those lessons would be so easy to apply in the real world.

But, heck, it's a television show, and sometimes you want a break from the real world.

My son thought the program was funny, though he did say Ward seemed to be barely alive. For my part, I never had to explain anything in the show to my son.

Yes, of course, I think challenging material that generates deep discussion is good, but I don't want to be on the spot all the time. I had enough to do helping my son understand some of the relatives.

A lot of TV today would be difficult to watch with a child. Reality TV would require a lot of explaining, even to an adult. I came across one program in which a bunch of people share a house. One of the residents, who fancied himself a vampire, was drinking a sample of another resident's blood from a wine glass.

With all due respect to people who choose alternative lifestyles, that's just plain freaky. I don't need to see it.

If reality television is really what it's like out there, I'm staying home. But it isn't. There are a fair number of weird people, but reality TV gives the impression the whole species has lost its wits.

Of course, the front page of the newspaper gives the same impression sometimes. My son has questions about the news he reads and hears, about murder, war, bigotry, dishonesty.

He has questions about what he sees on the street and in school, too.

It really isn't television I'm worried about. TV is easy enough to turn off. The world outside the box doesn't have an off button, and it's the real world that's hardest to explain.

I'm not sure Ward Cleaver would be up to the task.