Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (7 page)

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Authors: Frank Bank,Gibu Twyman

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BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
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Page 33
tastes. God, my first car, my brother and I got from selling illicit firecrackers. We always spent our summers in Oklahoma and there you can buy fire-works over the counter. Every time we came back, we'd bring a trunk-load. A dollar a pack here, a dollar a pack there. We were able to buy this old car.
"It was a 1950 Mercury. Not much of a car.
"I don't think I resented Frank's flashy ways. No. It was just different than what I was accustomed to and I had no idea how he could afford such things. I was making the same money he was and I couldn't."
About others in the cast:
"We played basketball on a hoop outside the soundstage. I've never really been into sports. It was not my thing. But Tony was a jock from the get-go. Whoever was on Tony's team won. It was a lot of fun, even if I couldn't play worth a crap."
Best prank ever on the set:
"There was this time when Frank went around whip-creaming everybody. He'd sneak up and get it in your hair. Squirt it in your face. Down your neck. Down your pants.
"We made up our minds to get even.
"We'd gone camping according to this one script on 'The New Leave It to Beaver.' Everyone except Lumpy went on the trip. The storyline called for us to get jammed out in the rain, with no tents or anything. The scene called for every last one of us to be lounging around in the mud trying to get some sleep.
"We were really crudded up and terrible.
"Frank was inside this humongous motor home, meanwhile, with this microwave and color TV and everything. And he never got a drop of mud on him.
"But we just kind of worked behind his back and kept the cameras rolling at the end of our camping scene. As we reached the end of the scene, we grabbed Frank and dragged him out into the mud.
"Oh yeah, he saw it coming the instant before we grabbed him. He tried to escape, but he didn't make it. There was a whole bunch of us on him. The crew was in on it, too.
"We plopped him in this big mudhole that was created by the artificial rain, not far from his motor home. We got him good and muddy. He looked like a mummy wrapped in mud.
"Matter of fact, we got him so good, the cameras were rolling when we dragged him in the mud and they kept it on tape and used it in the show."
About Hugh and Barbara:
"They were Mom and Dad. When I still see Barbara today, I call her 'Mom.' I love Barbara dearly. She is everybody's mom. We miss Hugh terribly since his death."
 
Page 34
About the fact Jerry Mathers once said Kenny and I had the toughest roles on the show:
"It's very flattering to hear Jerry say that. I thank him for it. I don't think it's so much a matter of how we made our characters work. It's more the types of characters Jerry and Tony had. The characters of Wally and the Beaver don't lend themselves to raw energy and playing with the characters.
"I'd been to every acting class available before 'Beaver' came along. So I had a lot of professional training prior to that. Before they turned the cameras on, I'd really try and be Eddie.
"As far as Lumpy Rutherford, he started out as a guy stuck in one episode. Dumpy Lumpy, dumb as an ox. Instead of one or two episodes, Frank stuck around. The reason? He was perfect for Lumpy. Both physically and, if you watch him, you can see it in his face. He is Lumpy for X-period of minutes. Big Dumpy Lumpy."
About why the show has endured in the hearts of its fans:
"Believe me, I've heard this question a lot, so I've given it a great deal of thought.
"First off, film-making back then was an art. Today it's no longer so much of an art. Today it's a matter of 'let's put this together real quick and make some money on it.' It's not about quality.
"Another major thing is that 'Leave It to Beaver' was totally different in that it didn't have funny lines. It had funny situations. That's totally different from any sitcom you watch today.
"Today, it's setup . . . setup . . . joke. I think the thing that made 'Beaver' fly so well is that every show, every plot, was something that you as a child went through yourself. So you could relate to it.
"Remember the time that you lost your haircut money? Are you gonna tell your mom? The time you ordered something from a catalogue without mom and dad's permission? Just silly things like that.
"It's good, clean entertainment. When you get home after a hard day at the office, you want to escape someplace. That's what television is all about.
"Do you want to escape to Miami and chase drug-dealers? No. I tell you, Mayfield's a nice place to escape to.
"Another thing that helped the longevity is that you can go back for years and years and years, through all the supermarket tabloidsyou will not find any crap associated with anyone on our show.
"Nobody robbed a liquor store. Nobody has been strung out on drugs. Nobody went into prostitution. I mean, not just the cast, but the crewmembers, and everyone, were family people.
"I think most people watching the show felt that way, too.
"We were just part of their family."
 
Page 35
Finally, I ought to be shotshouldn't I?if I got out of this chapter without hearing from The Man, himself.
Jerry Mathers.
The Beav.
He was, after all, the reason there was a Beaver to leave it to.
I was asking him about the show and these are some of the things he said.
About paling with Tony and Eddie and me:
Every once in a while if I was luckybecause I was kind of the tagalong as the youngest onewe would go to lunch at Bob's Big Boy. Frank always had a really neat car. Being the youngest kid and very impressionable, cars became very important to me.
But in a way it was kind of a favor if they would even bother to take me along.
Did we treat him like "The Squirt," as Eddie called him?
Not really. That really wasn't part of their persona. We were all working together, so it was really the kind of thing where everybody wanted, honestly, to make Tony and me happy. If for some reasonand this never happenedwe'd had some huge blowout, it would not have been good for the show. So everybody tried to keep everybody else happy.
His recollections of me:
I remember Frank over the series of the show, but not so much at first. Especially in the first few months of the show, there were all sorts of people who would come and go.
Only the good ones stayed.
When I met Frank, he was a very nice guy. But because there was a big age difference between us (7 years), I didn't really know Frank until the "New Leave It to Beaver" years.
When you're in your teens and early 20s and a guy is a few years older than you, it's a lot . . . but when you're in your 30s and 40s, that age difference pretty much evaporates.
When I started my business career and had more money to investand Frank had then gone into the investment fieldthat's when Frank and I really became friends, when he started managing some of my accounts.
Frank is very articulate. A very smart business person. A very good friend. That's the Frank I know today. I don't hesitate to trust a lot of my assets with him. And I definitely go to him for advice, any time there's a turn in the market, or for some reason I either come into or have to get ahold of some of my money and I want to know what to do with it, Frank's always the one I call. He has a very good insight into the market.
Obviously, he's honest.
He's somebody I care very very much and deeply about.
One that I'll always care and worry about.
 
Page 36
Frank, Kenny, Tony and and I were all very much good friends and we all remained good friends. You know, I went to Frank's weddings and over the years, whenever anybody would have babies, or even today when Ken Osmond's son got married and things like that.
You don't find many people like that. I've worked in a lot of different businesses and most of those people, while you're working with them, they're business acqaintances. And that's pretty much it.
But I go to personal events in Frank's and Kenny's and Tony's lives and when things happen in my life, I definitely tell them about it.
Why the Lumpy character endured:
Well, you know, all the characters on ''Leave It to Beaver" are all very endearing because people know people like that. Everyone knows an Eddie Haskell, who's the guy that stabs you in the back. Everyone knows a Lumpy, who's dominated by their father and in some ways is kind of the bully, because their father dominates them so much they're frustrated.
Because the characters are so well-written, there are general things about them, so that everyone can find some of their characteristics in people they know.
Frank is definitely a fine actor. He had a hard part to play, in a lot of ways. The bully is fairly easy, and almost every character actor could do that. But it's demeaning to have to play a bully who's also a browbeaten coward. That's a hard part for a young vibrant man to play a lot of times. And Frank took that part on, even though it's very far-flung from his own nature;
I mean, for me it was very easy, because the Beaver character is an everyman character.
But the Eddie Haskell character and the Lumpy character are harder to play, because when people see them they tend to think that the way they were like on the show, that's their true personality.
I mean, I'm sure Frank took a lot of guff for being Lumpy.
And yet, a lot of people identify with Lumpy. It may not be your parent, but you may have to knuckle under to your boss, or to maybe a wife, or some authority figure in your life. And that's what the Lumpy character does. He's the person who, you know, goes along . . . but the sad part about the Lumpy character, he takes it out on everyone else around him.
He's so frustrated, he vents all the stuff that's lingering in him. And the Beaver is the low man on the totem pole, so he gets the brunt of the frustration a lot of times.
Best athlete on the show:
Tony Dow. Tony almost in a way was a professional athlete. When he got the show, he was training for the Olympics in swimming and diving.
Ken Osmond was a fair athlete, but he was always kind of a skinny person, so he wasn't as athletic as Tony.
 
Page 37
Frank was fairly athletic. Baseball was more his sport, but there was no real place to play baseball. With baseball, all we basically could do was catch.
With basketball we could play half-court right on the sound stage, 2-on-2 or 3-on-3, depending on how many people were there.
Hugh Beaumont would play with us. He was very good. In fact, he taught me how to shoot one-handed shots and jump shots, all that stuff.
Whether I got to play basketball would depend on whether there was another kid there my age. Larry Mondello, Rusty Stevens would work. But otherwise, I wouldn't play just because when they divvied up the teams, there was no one close to my age or my prowess at the sport, because I was so much smaller.
When they're 13 or 15 and you're 8, you really don't play with them that much.
But anyway, what a lot of people don't understand, it was really almost a total work environment. We were on a very tight schedule. There really wasn't a whole lot of time for fooling around.
About Hugh Beaumont
I've been an actor since I was 2. And I knew Hugh before "Leave It to Beaver." Hugh actually was a very very close friend of my family. So I knew him not only on the set, but off the set. He would come over and my father and he would play golf and things like that. Aside from being someone I worked with, Hugh was like a Dutch Uncle maybe.
Why the show endured:
I think the first thing is the writing. Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher were both excellent writers. All of the shows from the original "Leave It to Beaver" came from real life.
They had quite a few kids of their own . . . 11. And then Richard Currell, who played Richard Rickover on the show . . . a lot of the "Beaver" character was based on things he and his friends did. And on things my friends and I did.
What Joe and Bob would do, when their kids came home from school, or Richard or I told them about things that had happened, they would pick little parts out that were universal, that happened to all kids.
Each show, I'm not saying happened to one kid. It's a conglomerate that happened in a similar vein to hundreds of kids. But because they really did happen to kids, things that really happened in the '50s or early '60s, could have happened in the '20s or '30sand still could happen in the '90s. And I think that's why so many people could relate to them.
In fact, one of the things I found peculiar, they just did a big demographic view of "Leave It to Beaver" and the No. 1 audience group for "Leave It to Beaver" . . . what would you think it would be?
You might think men in their 50s or 40s, right?

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