Illinois Hall of Fame: Buddy Ebsen
By Mark Rhoads
"You get more negative reactions than positive reactions as you go through life, and the big lesson is nobody counts you out but yourself...I never have, I never will."
--Buddy Ebsen
Christian Rudolph Ebsen, Jr. was born in Belleville, Illinois on April 2, 1908. In vaudeville, the New York stage, and movies, he got his start in his profession as what was then called a "song and dance" man. But in the medium of television from 1962 to 1980, he became one of America's best-loved actors.
Buddy's father was Danish and his mother was Latvian. The family lived in Belleville until Buddy was ten years old and then moved first to Palm Beach and then to Orlando, Florida where Buddy attended Rollins College in nearby Winter Park in 1927. Buddy had a sister Vilma who was also in show business. Buddy had to leave college for good at the age of 20 due to a financial reverse for his family when Florida real estate prices collapsed.
Buddy worked the vaudeville circuits and in 1934 he went to work on Broadway as a dancer for Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. Ziegfeld was a native Chicagoan who became one of America's most famous Broadway producers. Buddy sang and danced in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1934. Even after his service in World War II and the death of Ziegfeld many years earlier, Buddy came back to Broadway again for a 1946-1947 revival of the 1928 smash hit Show Boat. That show which was written by former Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago author Edna Ferber and was originally produced by Ziegfeld.
Buddy and his sister moved to Hollywood in 1935 where Vilma made only one film. Some of his film credits include Broadway Melody of 1936 with Vilma, Night People with Gregory Peck, Broadway Melody of 1938 with Judy Garland, Born to Dance with Elanor Powell, Captain January with Shirley Temple, Banjo on My Knee with Barbara Stanwyck, Girl of the Golden West, Mail Order Bride, Parachute Battalion, Walt Disney's Davy Crockett on TV, and the classic Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard.
Buddy started to play the role of The Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz, written by L. Frank Baum when he was living in Chicago in 1900. He had worked the year before with Judy Garland in Broadway Melody of 1938. But powder from his aluminum makeup made him sick enough to go to the hospital for two weeks and and he had to quit the movie in favor of Jack Haley, Jr. who was given different makeup. However, he is still credited with some of the joint songs in the movie because it is his voice and not Haley's in some songs on the sound track. He appeared in some minor Westerns until Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
During World War II, Buddy served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard for five years.
Many people, including Buddy, thought that he was ready to retire after filming Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1961. The movie won an Oscar for best musical score, Moon River, by Henry Mancini. Buddy was then about 53 and his dancing days were over with good acting roles seldom being offered because of his lingering reputation as a veteran of vaudeville.
But a producer who saw Buddy in Breakfast at Tiffany's asked him to audition for the role of Jed Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies TV show in 1962. Very few TV critics in 1962 gave a favorable review of the show's ridiculous concept, but few thought that Buddy was turning in a bad performance either. The show became a very unexpected hit and ran an astonishing nine years from 1962 to 1971 and is still seen in re-runs.
Two years later at age 64 in 1973, Buddy came back to TV with another hit TV series in which he played private a detective on Barnaby Jones for a seven-year run until 1980. But at 71, Buddy was still not finished and he kept on making appearances on TV. In 1993, at the age of 84, he played a cameo role as his Barnaby Jones character in a movie version of The Beverly Hillbillies. For his fans, just to see him on screen in that movie for a minute or two and playing his other TV role and not Jed Clampett was a big treat.
But even that was not his final performance. The last was a voice part in 1999 as Chet Elderson in an episode of King of the Hill on TV. He was age 90 in his final TV part and had a best selling book in 2001. But he still was not finished. At age 93 he recorded a CD of his favorite songs and wrote a romance novel.
Click here to see the list of Buddy Ebsen shows on Broadway.
Buddy Ebsen died July 6, 2003 at the age of 95 in Torrance, California after an acting career in stage, film and TV of about seventy-one years. Even though Buddy lived in Illinois for only his first ten years of childhood, he never lived in Missouri at all and yet he has a well-deserved place of honor on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. It is time Illinois gave more appropriate recognition to this kindly native of southern Illinois.
