Not much to say about Buddy Ebsen, who is dead at age 95, except didn't he have a great couple of careers there? Not many performers work so much and for so long. Not many star in three successful TV shows — in his case, Davy Crockett, Beverly Hillbillies and Barnaby Jones — and are so universally loved. I'm not sure what Mr. Ebsen's last performance was but it may have been a sketch he did for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. They were doing little fake previews of TV shows of the future and one was something like Barnaby Jones Fights Martians…with Buddy Ebsen still in the title role.
I'm guessing he was around 90 when he taped the spot and the best part of it was the whoop of joy from the audience when they saw him, even though the segment was pre-recorded. Maybe Jay will rerun it tonight. (Hey, Marvin! If you read this in time, go down the hall and suggest it to someone.)
I met Buddy Ebsen a few times, never for very long. He was charming and polite and rabidly right-wing, though not the way a Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter does it. Buddy's worldview was pretty much locked into 1940. That version of America had worked for him and he didn't see why it shouldn't work for everybody. It was pointless to debate him and no one attempted it, not even when he referred to John Wayne as a "war hero." I think Buddy could have said the world was flat and everyone would just have smiled at him and nodded.
I took one of the occasions to ask him about Walt Disney, who was a good friend and employer to him over the years. I'd always heard that the Disneyland animatronics started with an idea of Walt's to create a robotic Buddy Ebsen that could dance for people. At the particular moment I brought it up, Mr. Ebsen was being assaulted by someone else asking geeky questions about the Hillbillies show: Was Jethro really that dumb? Why didn't Elly Mae wear a bikini in the cee-ment pond? Stuff like that. At the mention of Disney, Ebsen lit up — and not just because he was freed from the previous line of questioning. He spoke warmly of his good friend Walt calling him every so often and saying, "Will you come out and dance for us?" Walt didn't have a choreographer and didn't seem to understand (or care) that you don't just tell a dancer to dance…you tell him what he's supposed to dance about. But Buddy went out to the studio several times and did something in front of Walt's cameras, and later he'd go back and see various puppets clumsily replicate what he'd done. He told me, "When I go out to Disneyland and I see all those puppets like Abraham Lincoln and the bears performing, I think 'I started that.' But you know, Walt never did get a puppet to dance like I did."