Obituaries Buddy Ebsen, Television Star and Broadway Hoofer, Dead at 95 Buddy Ebsen, the folksy star of television's "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Barnaby Jones" who began his career as a popular Broadway dancer, died July 6 in Los Angeles, the New York Times reported. The cause was undisclosed. He was 95.
Mr. Ebsen's seven-decade career began in New York, when the gangly, six-foot-three actor with the laid-back delivery was cast in the chorus of the 1928 Eddie Cantor vehicle Whoopee. He danced with his sister Vilma in that and several other Broadway shows, as well as in clubs and on the vaudeville circuit.
Mr. Ebsen was successful enough to be cast in the 1934 version of the Ziegfeld Follies, where his co-stars included Fanny Brice and Eve Arden. Other shows included Flying Colors (1932) and Yokel Boy (1939).
Unlike another brother and sister act of the time, Fred and Adele Astaire, Ebsen's hoofing style was casual and loose-limbed. His long arms would windmill about, while his rubbery legs and large feet flapped and shuffled about the stage. The ingratiating impression was that of an unpretentious country hick's version of elegance. His technique was preserved in such films as "Broadway Melody of 1936," "Broadway Melody of 1938" and "Captain January," in which he provided a towering counterpart to partner Shirley Temple.
His biggest film credit, however, was the one he didn't make. Cast as the Scarecrow in the movie of "The Wizard of Oz," he agreed to switch parts with Ray Bolger, who was playing the Tin Man. But Mr. Ebsen had to bow out after nine days of filming when he discovered he was being poisoned by the aluminum make-up. He was replaced by Jack Haley.
Whatever renown he lost by relinquishing that part, he won it back on television, first as Fess Parker's sidekick on the early adventure show "Davy Crockett." The show was a huge success with kids, who knew the theme song by heart. He was cast as another back woods character, Jed Clampett, in the unlikely hit series, "The Beverly Hillbillies," a fish-out-of-water sitcom that placed some ignorant, oil-rich yokels in a Beverly Hills mansion. He was cast after the creator of the series saw the actor play yet another hayseed, Audrey Hepburn's husband in the film "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Critics pilloried "The Beverly Hillbillies," but viewers loved it, leading to a nine-year run, from 1962 to 1971 on CBS. As always, Mr. Ebsen's warm demeanor and casually bemused speaking voice added greatly to the appeal of the program.
The actor achieved a third hit television series with the detective program "Barnaby Jones," which ran from 1973 to 1980.
Mr. Ebsen was born Christian Rupolph Ebsen in Belleville, Illinois, on April 2, 1908. He learned his skills as a dancer at his father's dancing school. He moved to New York City when he was twenty and soon found work. His first marriage was to Ruth Cambridge and produced two daughters. He had four daughters and a son by a second marriage, to Nancy Wolcott. Both marriages ended in divorce. He married Dorothy Knott in 1985.
- July 7, 2003
Buddy Ebsen, who started out as a gangly and personable Ziegfeld song-and-dance man and gained lasting fame on television as Davey Crockett's sidekick, a hillbilly in Beverly Hills and an aging private eye, died on Sunday at the Torrance Memorial Medical Center, in Torrance, Calif., the hospital said today. He was 95 and lived in Palos Verdes, Calif.
The lanky, 6-foot-3-inch Mr. Ebsen was the canny Jed Clampett, the patriarch of "The Beverly Hillbillies," a popular CBS situation comedy about an Ozark farm family transplanted to a California mansion by sudden oil wealth.
"The Beverly Hillbillies" was ridiculed by many reviewers as the most abysmally lowbrow series in television history, but it was a runaway hit, soaring to top place in the Nielsen ratings within five weeks of its 1962 debut. The slapstick comedy had an original run of nine seasons, remaining among the 10 most popular shows through 1971.
Then Mr. Ebsen became the protagonist of another successful CBS television series, "Barnaby Jones," a laconic private investigator in late-and-getting-later middle age whose shrewdness was cloaked in nonchalance. The one-hour show first appeared in early 1973 and then ran continuously from 1974 to 1980, with many more seasons after that in reruns.
Mr. Ebsen started his career in vaudeville and nightclubs, then advanced to the stage and films. In Hollywood, he gained particular recognition in the 1930's with his flamboyant dancing and singing in performing "At the Codfish Ball" with Shirley Temple in "Captain January" and by gamely battling malaria in "Yellow Jack." His other 30's film hits included "Broadway Melody of 1936," "Born to Dance," "Banjo on My Knee" and "The Girl of the Golden West."
He was originally signed to play the the Scarecrow in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's "The Wizard of Oz," but when Ray Bolger, another longtime hoofer, pushed him out of the part, he was recast as the Tin Woodman. After weeks of rehearsal, Mr. Ebsen was forced to relinquish that role to Jack Haley after an aluminum-based makeup powder poisoned him.
In 1938, MGM offered him a seven-year contract, starting at $2,000 a week but requiring him to give the studio absolute control over his career. The independent Mr. Ebsen rejected that provision. As a result MGM blackballed him throughout the industry and his film career went into eclipse for nearly 20 years, until Walt Disney hired him as a character actor in the mid-1950's to play Georgie Russel, the sidekick of Davy Crockett (portrayed by Fess Parker) on television and in films.
Mr. Ebsen made it through his lean years by performing on the stage, mostly on the road. "I probably enjoyed show business most when I was doing plays like `The Male Animal' and `Good Night, Ladies,' when people would lay down their money and laugh and you'd see them walk out happy," he said in The New York Post in 1965. "By God, I'd feel honest. I could go home with a good taste in my mouth. You'd feel better, you'd feel more alive and like you were justifying your existence."
"The one flaw in this," he said of "The Beverly Hillbillies," even though the series enjoyed great popularity, "is that you can't hear the people laughing."
Buddy Ebsen was named Christian Rudolph Ebsen Jr. at his birth on April 2, 1908, in Belleville, Ill. Ten years later, his father, who owned a dancing school, moved the family to Orlando, Fla. Buddy took premedical courses at Rollins College and the University of Florida, but a collapse of the state's land boom forced him to leave school in 1928 and to pursue a career as a dancer in New York with his younger sister, Vilma. The pair won parts in the chorus of "Whoopee" and as featured dancers in "Flying Colors" and the "Ziegfeld Follies of 1934" and went on to success in Hollywood.
In World War II, Mr. Ebsen served in the Coast Guard as the executive officer on the Pocatello, a submarine chaser in the North Pacific. In his free time, he wrote sketches and staged variety shows and musicals. He met a fellow lieutenant, Nancy Wolcott, whom he married in 1945, and they had four daughters, Susannah, Cathy, Bonnie and Kiersten, and a son, Dustin. He also had two daughters, Elizabeth and Alix, by his first wife, the former Ruth Cambridge. Both marriages ended in divorce. In 1985, he married a third time, to the former Dorothy Knotts.
Mr. Ebsen's later movie performances included Audrey Hepburn's poignant, abandoned husband in "Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and a steely old cowpoke in "Mail Order Bride" (1964). He excelled in many television plays and wrote or co-wrote such songs as "Whispering Pines, "Handsome Stranger," "Baby Blues" and "Squeezin' Polka." He also wrote full-length and one-act plays that were performed in regional theaters. In 2001, he issued a privately published novel, "Kelly's Quest," that hovered near the top of The Los Angeles Times's best-seller list.
His television series "Barnaby Jones" had a deeply loyal following, including 30 New York business executives, aged 55 to 70, who met for lunch every Wednesday for years at a Rockefeller Center restaurant and later viewed the show's reruns together. A major reason for their loyalty, they agreed, was that Barnaby Jones was an old man doing a young man's job, inspiring them not to retire at 65. "No one counts you out but yourself," Mr. Ebsen assured them.
The performer savored life on his 36-acre ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, and he was an expert sailor who skippered his 35-foot catamaran, Polynesian Concept, to victory in major races. He also founded and headed a company that built oceangoing catamarans.
Mr. Ebsen's long-running television series made him a multimillionaire, but in the 1980's he appeared regularly in a new adventure series, "Matt Huston," as a former intelligence agent and uncle of the protagonist, a wealthy investigator.
Asked in 1984 by United Press International why he had returned to the rigors of a weekly show, he replied: "I'm used to getting up at dawn and going to the studio to be with my pals on the set. It's my lifestyle and I wouldn't trade it for any other."