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PART 2 AUDIO ARCHIVES Power of 10 millionaire Jamie Sadler That's the Question! host Bob Goen Jeopardy Summer Teen champion Meryl Federman Camouflage host Roger Lodge Jeopardy! College Champ Cliff Galiher $343,000 1 vs. 100 winner Barry Lander Player of the Year Michele Falco Scott St. John, Executive of the Year Richard Hayes of The Baby Game Ira Skutch, Match Game producer Miguel Ferrer of Celebrity Jeopardy! Geoff Edwards of Treasure Hunt and Jackpot! Bob Harris, author of "Prisoner of Trebekistan" Johnny Gilbert of Jeopardy! Bob Goen of That's the Question Ken Jennings, author of "Brainiac" Sara Bronson of Deal or No Deal $1.86 Millionaire winner Ed Toutant Network TV's top winner Dr. Kevin Olmstead Kathy Garver of Family Affair Burton Richardson of Family Feud Dylan Lane of GSN's Chain Reaction Author Wesley Hyatt on Emmy-winning game show players Laird MacIntosh of Treasure Hunters Ricki Lake of Game Show Marathon Wink Martindale Michael Davies Peter Marshall Lin Bolen |
RETRO INTERVIEW WITH JERRY MATHERS The evening of Oct. 4, at 7:30 in the East, America was introduced to Beaver and Wally Cleaver. The debut episode of Leave It to Beaver, "Beaver Gets Spelled," was actually the second show filmed. CBS executives had to huddle for a week on the tastefulness of the actual first episode, "Captain Jack," which featured Edgar Buchanan (later the Cleaver boys' Uncle Billy and the memorable Uncle Joe of Petticoat Junction). An early scene showed a toilet bowl. Ultimately, they network suits decided America could survive seeing an actual flush on television. The phrase "and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver" became an institution in water cooler vocabulary. Only nine when Leave It to Beaver premiered on CBS, Mathers was playing a character about a year and a half younger. Yet, 234 episodes and a network switch (to ABC) later----through escapades with Larry Mondello, Whitey Whitney, Richard Rickover and the peripheral Charles Fredericks----The Beav was a cultural icon. When the series ended in 1963, Mathers voluntarily and enthusiastically went back to a conventional life. However, beginning with a guest shot on The Dating Game in 1966, Mathers faithfully returned to TV on a sporadic basis when game show producers came calling. A self-admitted Jeopardy! junkie, Mathers would be right at home with Game Show Congress aficionados. Now 59, Mathers' latest game show appearance was on NBC's Identity, when time ran out before a contestant could identify him as a former child star. He continues to make personal appearances and is a spokesperson in the fights against diabetes and psoriasis, two ailments with which he has encountered battles. This week, TV Land celebrates the 50th anniversary of Leave It to Beaver with a weekend marathon (beginning at 8 p.m., EDT, Saturday). Six years ago, on the eve of his appearance with other child stars on NBC's Weakest Link, Mathers visited with TVgameshows.net about his career and his connection with game shows for 40 years. This encore of that interview includes three additional questions which were edited from the original piece. TVGS: Jerry, after looking at this rundown of people for Weakest Link with Emmanuel Lewis, Danica McKellar and Keshia Knight-Pulliam, I hate to say this but you were the "old man" of this group by about 20 years. JERRY: I think that's what they thought, too. You know I can't divulge the outcome because, even if you're a celebrity, they make you sign this incredibly thick paper saying you won't release anything about the outcome before the show airs. But I can tell you this: I think the other people on that show had the same idea (Mathers divulged privately to TVgameshows.net at the time that he was the first contestant voted off after nailing all of his answers in the first round). You won't believe some of the answers you'll hear on the show. I'll tell you one of them and I don't think I'll get in trouble for this. One of them was asked, "What's the shortest month in the year?" The answer one of the others gave was May. That may tell you something. TVGS: That's a scream! Had you ever met many of these younger actors who were on the show with you? JERRY: It was my first time meeting several of them who were either in their late teens or early twenties. It was flattering because a lot of them asked me things about Beaver and said the show had been an inspiration for them. You begin to feel old, though, when you realize almost all of them were not even born when our show began. TVGS: You've been playing games on TV for a long time now. How much responsibility do you feel when you're playing for a charity, as you were on Weakest Link? JERRY: I always enjoy game shows. I like playing them. I play along at home. I've always enjoyed Jeopardy! and I never miss it when I'm home. But in some ways, it's harder when you're playing for a charity because you realize it's someone else's money and they can use that money. So, if you're inclined to take a risk, you just don't do it. You don't want to take chances when you're helping a charity. I was asked to do the classic TV edition of Millionaire but I was going to be on a steamboat when they were taping. My two daughters and I were going for 15 days from Chicago to New Orleans down the Mississippi Queen. When they want you for these things, they don't usually give you much warning. They called on a Friday to say they wanted me for Weakest Link that Monday. But I value the time I have with my children so I had to say no to Millionaire. I'd still like to do it sometime because I like the game. TVGS: You did your first game show in 1966 and I remember the roar that went up from the audience when you were picked over Eddie Hodges and Barry Gordon for a date on the nighttime Dating Game. How much of a fan have you been of game shows through the years? JERRY: I really like game shows. I always have. Most of them, you can watch with your family and I think that's very important. My youngest child is now 16 and it's tough to watch TV with my children. So much of it now appeals to elements which makes you uncomfortable. I don't really understand why television feels it has to produce so much programming where you sit down to watch and then you have to explain to your children, "This is not something I believe in or that we ought to be watching." We need a balance and, most of the time, game shows offer that. You mentioned that Dating Game. The girl that was on with me (Heraldine Williams) who was the bachelorette was not 18. We went to England for the date and the producers didn't find out she wasn't 18 until after we were there. That created quite a furor. But I've done a lot of game shows and I'm sure you remember most of them. I did Tattletales, Family Feud, Tic Tac Dough, Bullseye. They did a week with a lot of us on the Match Game/Hollywood Squares Hour and I was the center square. Of course, I've played the current Hollywood Squares several times and I was on Ultimate Fan Search last year on TV Land. I did the recurring spoof with Jay Leno called Hollywood Survivor with Florence Henderson, Danny Bonaduce and a lot of the classic TV stars. I won that one, so I guess you could say I'm a game show champion. Of course, I didn't win the kind of money they do on Survivor. And I'll let you in on another one: I'm about to be on I've Got a Secret (on Oxygen). I always enjoyed that show when I was doing Beaver but I was never asked to do it. I'm not sure why, probably because for most of the time, we were on another network and in those days, if your show was on ABC and a game show was on CBS, your own network didn't want you crossing over and taking audience to the opposition. But this time when I went on, my secret was that I had my green baseball cap from Leave It to Beaver. John Ritter was on the panel and he got it on the first guess. It was a great compliment to me that he remembered something that specific from the show. TVGS: You mentioned the issue that networks had with each other. It's still an issue because after Ray Romano was such a hit on the first celebrity Millionaire, CBS banned all of its stars from doing another celebrity edition. Is that why Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont were not asked to do game shows at the time? JERRY: That may well be it. I always thought they would have been great doing Password and it was on while we were still doing the series. ABC didn't have any celebrity game shows while we were on and all of their game shows, I think, were on in New York. I vaguely remember something about them being approached to do nighttime Password but it never happened. TVGS: With you appearing on Weakest Link with the other child stars, it brings back to mind you honestly did not have a lot the hangups of some other child performers of your era. No drift into drugs. No suing your parents. You went back to being a regular person after Beaver, though you'll always be The Beaver to America. Why do you think your after-series life turned out more positively than did some others? JERRY: I think it was two things. For one thing, I had a very special family life. My mother and father made sure when we were home, we were part of the family, not a TV star. When we ate at the dinner table, we didn't talk about what happened on the set that day. And the other thing: my father was fully employed while I was doing the series. What happened with so many of the other child actors who had a lot of problems was their families were living off the money they were making. When their series ended, they had a lot of question marks as to whether they would have food on the table. So, if that's your life, you are having to live like an adult, rather than a child. That's not normal and there's an enormous amount of pressure you're living with to be the family's breadwinner as a child and a tremendous adjustment if suddenly that income is not there. My Dad (Norm Mathers) retired as superintendent of one of the the L.A. school districts and he had been both vice principal and principal of the largest high school in the L.A. unified school district. He'd pretty much seen it all as far as behavior was concerned and we knew what the rules were at home. TVGS: When the series ended, you merged right back into civilian life without a beat. JERRY: When Leave It to Beaver ended, I was a freshman in high school. Universal talked to us about doing another season or two. There was some talk about doing a couple of additional years in color but we felt like we would just be repeating stories with Beaver we had already done with Wally. The studio wanted another long-term contract to put me into another series and perhaps some movies. I said no. I wanted to go to regular high school and play football and other sports. In our family, that was an easy decision. My Dad said if that's what you want to do, do it. My family was not living off the money I was making, so I didn't have the kind of pressure other kids did whose families were living off their incomes. After six years of doing a series as a kid, I was very happy to go to regular school. I went back to living a normal life. But I knew a lot of situations where if the kids didn't work, they were devastated. Some of them I knew, some of them, I didn't. TVGS: Jerry, you said it was an easy transition back to a conventional life after Beaver but how were you treated by your peers in your high school when you reverted to being a "regular guy?" JERRY: Believe it or not, it wasn't difficult at all. I had a set of friends off the set who weren't connected with the show. We had known each other for years and did things together during the summers when we weren't filming. For a while, I did personal appearances at amusement parks or tourist attractions on weekends but those were limited to summers. For the most part, it didn't take long to return to being Jerry. TVGS: Jerry, Hugh Beaumont, in my opinion, was the most underrated actor on television of his era and certainly one of the most unfairly maligned TV fathers by critics and TV writers of the current day. I knew fathers like Ward Cleaver and, sadly, we don't have enough of them today. JERRY: I'm very glad you said that. Hugh never became the major name in television that he should have been. He was a fine, fine man and an excellent actor. Yet, you'd never know he was a performer when he was off the set. He did his job and he was just Hugh otherwise. I will say there was a lot of Ward in Hugh and probably a good bit of Hugh in Ward. He had done many of the Michael Shayne movies in the forties. But what a lot of people never knew was he was a Methodist minister. He served small churches because that's what he felt was his mission. He was a man's man in that he treated people exactly the way he wanted to be treated. Hugh was so good as Ward that he was probably typecast. I saw him do an episode of Mannix once that was completely out of character and he was good. But I'm sure when he sought out different parts after our show, casting directors probably could see nothing but Ward Cleaver. It was a kick, though, when he turned up as a father (of Mike Minor's character, Steve Elliott) on Petticoat Junction a few years later. They picked the right man. TVGS: You've probably been asked this 10,000 times....but when this was all happening in the '50s and '60s, did you have a clue you'd become an American legend? Growing up, your character was my alter ego and when I went to my 30th high school reunion, a few reminiscences popped up from my classmates about the similarities between me and The Beav. JERRY: That's one of the greatest compliments you could give me. It's funny, none of us realized this would still be going and still be as popular today. When you're doing something like Leave It to Beaver, you consider yourself lucky if you keep getting renewed for another year. But, it's funny, Ken Osmond---who played Eddie Haskell---is really a very nice guy but he told me not long ago, "You realize Eddie is no longer a noun, he's an adjective!" TVGS: Writers who have maligned the show as being "unrealistic," in my opinion, are the ones who are and were out of touch. True, most of us didn't have a mother who vacuumed the house in a dress and pearls and my father didn't eat most of his meals in his suit. But you and Tony Dow were not "sitcom kids" and the analysts tend to forget that was an era where kids did treat their parents with far more respect than today and if a child misbehaved or violated the house rules, consequences resulted. JERRY: The interesting thing is the show has been seen in 180 different countries and in 160 different languages and the reason is because all of the episodes are from real life. The two writers saw to that, particularly Joe Connelly, who kept a notebook from the time he was a little boy. On TV today, a lot of the shows with kids or anyone else are just built around jokes. Everything goes at the pace of standup comedy. If anything is unrealistic, it's that. Leave It to Beaver doesn't have a lot of jokes. In fact, in some shows, we didn't have any. When people criticize the show that it doesn't reflect life the way it really was in the '50s, you have to remember, Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary of the '50s. It was a sitcom. It followed life through the eyes of a child for 24 minutes. That wasn't all of his life. TVGS: Ann B. Davis once told me the critics of The Brady Bunch failed to realize that the intent of the show was not to be real life. She said, "You don't solve every problem and wrap it up in a nice, neat little package in 24 minutes. It's a slice of life as we'd like it to be, if only it could be that way." JERRY: She's right. Our show was a little morality play---you either made the right choices or the wrong choices. The show was intended to show through humor that if you make the wrong choices, there is a consequence. You don't see much of that on television today. But everybody knows an Eddie Haskell. Other people knew friends like Ward has at work. There's always a rather eccentric person like Fred Rutherford. TVGS: Your show also never received a lot of credit for tackling a number of issues which faced teens which weren't discussed on television in those years, much less sitcoms. You had the episode where you unknowingly contributed to Wendell Holmes' drinking problem. JERRY: Definitely so. We did them in a light comedic form but we were considered controversial for our day and some of those shows, the network did not want to air. We had the episode ("Beaver and Chopper") about divorce (with Barry Gordon) where I went to Ward and June and asked when they were going to get a divorce, so I could get presents from stepmoms and stepdads. They didn't want us to do the show you mentioned with Wendell ("Beaver and Andy"). He played a house painter who was an alcoholic. Beaver accidentally helped him fall off the wagon when he gave him a bottle of rum Ward used to pour over cake at Christmas. ABC didn't like that one at all. They thought it was too heavy for a comedy. You may remember we didn't have one laugh in the final segment. Wendell must have sobered up. He became one of my teachers in the eighth grade during the last year of the show. We had an episode about international communication ("Beaver and Chuey") where we wound up insulting a Spanish family and you had almost no Latinos on television in those years. In the last year, we had the one where Wally goes out with an older girl ("Box Office Attraction") and she takes him into a bar. He has to make a choice between right and wrong. Those were issues which sitcoms did not deal with until several years later. TVGS: One question has never satisfied my curiosity. You started off on CBS and after only one year, the show moved to ABC, where it stayed for the last five years. Why did that happen? Was CBS unhappy with the show? JERRY: No. It was because of the way the business was run in those days. The advertising agencies controlled everything. The first year we were on, we were sponsored by Remington Rand. As you know, that company made business products and razors. A lot of people may not remember but the commercials were done live in between the acts on that first year. An announcer who was live in a studio in New York (Dick Stark) did the Remington commercials, either for typewriters or adding machines or electric razors. The problem was those kinds of products weren't terribly compatible with the audience we attracted. So, Remington Rand dropped its sponsorship at the end of the first year. Fortunately, we were picked up almost immediately by Ralston Purina, the dog food and cereal people. They made things which a family audience was more likely to buy. They were anxious to get us because the company was looking for a family show. CBS wanted to keep the show but Ralston Purina did most of its business with ABC at the time because it was a less expensive network. So, it was the ad agency for Ralston Purina that moved us to ABC. If you look back at television history, that was not always good, going from the most popular network to one that had about half of the stations as CBS did. What helped us was that first year on CBS. We were not a top 20 show nationally but we did much better in a lot of smaller cities, especially in the Midwest, the South and the Rocky Mountains. In those days, ABC didn't have a station in about 80 cities. So in most of those towns, the CBS stations that lost us kept us if there wasn't an ABC affiliate in town. At one point, we were on more stations than any program ABC aired, except for The Lawrence Welk Show. TVGS: You turned down a cameo in the '90s movie remake of Beaver. JERRY: Yes. Because when I saw the script, I saw right away this wasn't Leave It to Beaver. It didn't even come close. There were sexual parts in the script which were very questionable. In the movie, Beaver would look his Dad right in the eye and lie. Beaver would never do that, even if it meant he'd get in trouble. I told the producers about it and explained to them this wasn't Beaver. They kept saying, "Oh no. This is updating for the '90s. Really, it'll be fine." They kept trying to throw more and more money at me to get me to do it but, fortunately, I am in a position in life where I can say no to things like this, so I did. You know now how the movie turned out. TVGS: Yes I do and it's appropriate that no sequel was made. It's interesting to hear you say that about protecting your character. I met and interviewed Clayton Moore during the controversy when he was not allowed to wear the Lone Ranger mask at the time of that ill-fated move remake in the early '80s. He told me that character meant everything to him and to the children who followed him. He said he jealously guarded the image of The Lone Ranger and that was why he was personally hurt when he was told he could not completely stay "in character" with the mask for legal reasons. Mr. Moore told me he never did anything in his life that would publicly bring disparagement on The Lone Ranger. We don't have too many heroes left like that. JERRY: I'm a long way from a perfect person. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. But I was raised very well by my parents and, like Mr. Moore, I feel the image of Beaver Cleaver is worth protecting. We have too many tarnished icons in today's world and, as you said, it's difficult for children to have heroes. TVGS: In the '80s, you all got together, except for Hugh Beaumont, and did the CBS movie "Still the Beaver" and then went into The New Leave It to Beaver for cable. For one thing, how did you feel about the TV-movie? JERRY: I liked that a little better because I had a chance to play the Ward part. It had its flaws but it was far better than the actual feature-length movie in the '90s. The producers treated "Still the Beaver" with loving care. TVGS: Speaking of game shows, you had Joanna Gleason playing your wife in the CBS movie and her father Monty Hall told me she had a few people who were not very happy with her for divorcing the Beav. JERRY: She was the nicest lady, just so nice and so professional. We were lucky to get her for the movie. We were disappointed we lost her when we did the series. It was about a year after we did the movie when we got the green light to do the new series and she had other committments but if she'd been available, we may have tried to do more to revive the relationship between Beaver and Kimberly. But you asked about the movie and the series. The guys that were the writers and producers of the movie, Nick Abdo and Brian Levant, had written for Happy Days and when we did the series, they hired people who had written for Happy Days. Of course, that was a major success at the time and when you get people like that available, it helps you get a green light from the network. But that was also the weakness and it particularly showed in the writing. They didn't take events from real life and build the scripts. They went back to their Happy Days humor and that wasn't the way Beaver was. I went head-to-head with them over it but I didn't have creative control. But I still think the series was good. We lasted for 108 episodes and it was the strength of all of our people. Tony Dow, Barbara Billingsley, Ken, Frank Bank, all of us had worked together for so long. We knew each other's timing and we set out to make it work. I think we did because we lasted for four years and that doesn't happen with too many sequels. TVGS: Jerry, it's been 13 years (now 19) since the original cast did the last episode of the The New Leave It to Beaver. What are the chances of at least one more sequel or reunion? Perhaps Beaver as a grandfather? JERRY: Just because of the popularity, there probably will be something done again. Now, I don't know of anything specific at the present time. But the show is just so doggone popular, I have to believe you'll see another attempt to capitalize on it. Of course, what was Universal is now owned by Vivendi in France (which has since sold the company to NBC), so who knows what they will do? TVGS: We'll be watching Sunday night on Weakest Link and for I've Got a Secret....but how gratifying is it that after nearly 45 years, people still have a fond place for The Beaver? JERRY: More than you know. I really believe in the values our series represents. Today, parents and even grandparents will come up to me with their kids. The child or the grandchild will say, "Hey, that's the Beaver." The parents are totally shocked. I always love that. There are just as many hours on TV and a lot more channels to fill time than we had in 1957. You've had thousands of series made but the bank is very small of those who have that lasting touch with the audience: Leave It to Beaver, I Love Lucy, Andy Griffith, Emergency, The Cosby Show, maybe one or two from the '90s but not nearly as many. Those shows will always be around because the acting, the values and the feeling that you can watch with your families and not have to have a psychological discussion about them will keep bringing people back. And I'm grateful to every one of them who keep watching. The Dating Game (twice) Family Feud Tic Tac Dough Bullseye All-Star Anything Goes Star Games The Match Game/Hollywood Squares Hour Tattletales Dance Fever (judge) Ultimate Fan Search (TV Land) Weakest Link Hollywood Squares (Bergeron version) I've Got a Secret (Oxygen) Identity   Miss Francis' gowns by Bonwit Teller © Copyright 2007 TVgameshows.net. All Rights Reserved. |
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