Saturday, October 16, 2010

A Fond Farewell to Barbara Billingsley

Leave it to Beaver was one of my favorite shows of the 50s. Once I became a mother, June Cleaver was one of my role models.

Los Angeles-- Barbara Billingsley, who gained supermom status for her gentle portrayal of June Cleaver, the warm, supportive mother of a pair of precocious boys in "Leave it to Beaver," died Saturday. She was 94.

Billingsley, who had suffered from a rheumatoid disease, died at her home in Santa Monica, said family spokeswoman Judy Twersky.

When the show debuted in 1957, Jerry Mathers, who played Beaver, was 9, and Tony Dow, who portrayed Wally, was 12. Billingsley's character, the perfect stay-at-home 1950s mom, was always there to gently but firmly nurture both through the ups and downs of childhood.

Beaver, meanwhile, was a typical American boy whose adventures landed him in one comical crisis after another.

Billingsley's own two sons said she was pretty much the image of June Cleaver in real life, although the actress disagreed. She did acknowledge that she may have become more like June as the series progressed.

"I think what happens is that the writers start writing about you as well as the character they created," she once said. "So you become sort of all mixed up, I think."

A wholesome beauty with a lithe figure, Billingsley began acting in her elementary school's plays and soon discovered she wanted to do nothing else.

Although her beauty and figure won her numerous roles in movies from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she failed to obtain star status until "Leave it to Beaver," a show that she almost passed on.

"I was going to do another series with Buddy Ebsen for the same producers, but somehow it didn't materialize," she told The Associated Press in 1994. "A couple of months later I got a call to go to the studio to do this pilot show. And it was `Beaver.'"

Decades later, she expressed surprise at the lasting affection people had for the show.

"We knew we were making a good show, because it was so well written," she said.

"But we had no idea what was ahead. People still talk about it and write letters, telling how much they watch it today with their children and grandchildren."

After "Leave it to Beaver" left the air in 1963 Billingsley largely disappeared from public view for several years.

She resurfaced in 1980 in a hilarious cameo in "Airplane!" playing a demure elderly passenger not unlike June Cleaver.

When flight attendants were unable to communicate with a pair of jive-talking hipsters, Billingsley's character volunteered to translate, saying "I speak jive." The three then engage in a raucous street-slang conversation.

"No chance they would have cast me for that if I hadn't been June Cleaver," she once said.

She returned as June Cleaver in a 1983 TV movie, "Still the Beaver," that costarred Mathers and Dow and portrayed a much darker side of Beaver's life.

In his mid-30s, Beaver was unemployed, unable to communicate with his own sons and going through a divorce. Wally, a successful lawyer, was handling the divorce, and June was at a loss to help her son through the transition.

"Ward, what would you do?" she asked at the site of her husband's grave. (Beaumont had died in 1982.)

The movie revived interest in the Cleaver family, and the Disney Channel launched "The New Leave It to Beaver" in 1985.

The series took a more hopeful view of the Cleavers, with Beaver winning custody of his two sons and all three moving in with June.

In 1997 Universal made a "Leave it to Beaver" theatrical film with a new generation of actors. Billingsley returned for a cameo, however, as Aunt Martha.

In later years she appeared from time to time in such TV series as "Murphy Brown," "Empty Nest" and "Baby Boom" and had a memorable comic turn opposite fellow TV moms June Lockhart of "Lassie" and Isabel Sanford of "The Jeffersons" on the "Roseanne" show.

"Now some people, they just associate you with that one role (June Cleaver), and it makes it hard to do other things," she once said. "But as far as I'm concerned, it's been an honor."

In real life, fate was not as gentle to Billingsley as it had been to June and her family.

Born Barbara Lillian Combes in Los Angeles on Dec. 22, 1922, she was raised by her mother after her parents divorced. She and her first husband, Glenn Billingsley, divorced when her sons were just 2 and 4.

Her second husband, director Roy Kellino, died of a heart attack after three years of marriage and just months before she landed the "Leave it to Beaver" role.

She married physician Bill Mortenson in 1959 and they remained wed until his death in 1981.

Survivors include her sons, three stepchildren and numerous grandchildren.

A Casual E-msg From Many Years Ago

I came across this e-message I sent some time after 9/11...I wonder how long it will be before the pain begins to lessen ... In any event, my emails are extremely casual...This one is no exception.

look...i am a new yorker...we were driving thru the city the day before sept. 11th..we were, in fact, at a motel in cherry hill, nj preparing to finish the drive to nc the next day...i wondered why the trooper stopped us and looked in the back of our car as we approached the chesapeake bay bridge/tunnel....we turned the radio on and listened to what was happening in new york city...it was brutal...when we got home we immediately turned on the tv...by then the towers had fallen and the pentagon had been hit... morgan and i stayed awake all nite watching the horror and not yet knowing who was responsible...it was numbing to realize that someone hated america and americans enuf to do such a dastardly thing..we didn't know yet how seriously, or to what extent our country was in danger...

but, we must not become the people who did this terrible thing...we must ask why it happened to us...we must resolve any holes in our security systems...we must change our behavior...we must keep our children safe...our families safe...our country safe...we must become better neighbors to the people around the world...we must return to setting a good example to those around us...we must learn to stop the hate...we must love our neighbors...next door, down the street, in the next country, around the world...we must act as christians, as jews, as muslims, as buddists, as shintoists, we must embrace all colors of skin, today we must look at our president as our president...not as our black president...we must teach our children not to discriminate against people who are not like
them...South Pacific is an old musical...but, in it there is a number entitled: "You've Got To Be Taught To Hate."...or the number from West Side Story, "America" ... the broadway performances of the 50s and 60s tried to warn us not to discriminate...we are taking entirely too long to learn ...

america is composed of immigrants...from europe, from south america, from africa, from asia, from australia, from cuba...and so on...america is truly a melting pot...we are so fortunate to live here...we have to learn to accept and get along with people from around the world....there is so much to learn....learning new cultures will never harm us...we are all children of God...we are all heirs to the kingdom of heaven...