When Eden Was in Suburbia

By Richard Stengel

Leave It to Beaver is back in living rooms across America

A house like any other house in the vast expanse of television suburbia.

Gabled windows sit atop the pseudo-colonial fac,ade. A sturdy elm offers shade for a manicured lawn. A flagstone path leads up to a hospitable front door. But 211 Pine Street, Mayfield, U.S.A., is not just any house. It is the home of Theodore Cleaver, infinitely better known as the Beaver.

The upbeat, bouncy theme song plays in the background as a mellifluous voice announces the cast spilling out the front door: "Leave It to Beaver, starring Barbara Billingsley, Hugh Beaumont, Tony Dow . .. and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver!"

Tousled-haired and grinning diffidently, Beaver is a 20th century Tom Sawyer. Able to resist anything but temptation, he is a dimpled noble savage who regards parents as gentle adversaries to be outwitted for their own good. He is a cultural icon for the baby-boom generation, the symbol of the apple-pie joys and melted ice-cream sorrows of an idyllic suburban childhood that never really was. After a successful six-year run, Beaver went off network television in 1963, but it continued to flicker on the mental screens of a generation.

Today it is back, playing in 34 of the 50 major markets around the country. When the show took a vacation this summer from WTBS in Atlanta, which reaches an audience of 21.2 million, the station received a greater volume of viewer response than it had for any other syndicated show. There are more than a hundred Beaver fan clubs across the nation, dubbed "The Loyal Order of the Beaver." Ex-Star Mathers today commands $4,000 for a lecture.

What accounts for the show's resurgent popularity? The Cleaver household is quintessentially suburban, the prime-time equivalent of John Cheever's sunlit lawns and the immediate ancestor of Steven Spielberg's split-levels. June forever emerges from the kitchen flawlessly coiffed and groomed, carrying a tray of freshly baked cookies. Ward, like all TV dads, disappears between 9 and 5 to a nameless job, but his real occupation is mowing the lawn and having heart-to-hearts with the boys. Wally, earnest and rather thick, is a slightly more amiable and less somnambulant Rick Nelson.

Weekly, the values of middle-class America were tested on the show's half-hour and proved sound. Like My Three Sons and The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver is based on a reassuring assumption: the family, solid and resilient, is the ultimate sanctuary from the world.

Beaver however, was different from the extended televison family of Rustys, Juniors, Buds and Kittens: he seemed real. The world of Beaver, notes Mathers, "was seen through the eyes of a child." To the Beav, adults were an alien and slightly comical species whose rituals could be observed and mimicked. Other television children were passive; problems happened to them. Beaver actively courted trouble. He brought home live snakes, fell into a steaming billboard soup bowl, and cut his own hair so that he resembled a precursor of punkdom. Beaver was not streetwise, he was backyard-wise. He was good, but never goody-goody. In his mind, he was guilty until proved innocent.

Beaver twitted the values of his parents without actually undermining them. In the secular Cleaver household, cleanliness was a substitute for godliness, yet Beaver only washed up to his wrists because hidden dirt didn't matter. Despite the show's recurring theme of honesty, Beaver's behavior routinely triggered layers of good-natured deceit. Ward secretly helped Beaver with his homework; June stealthily took over his paper route; Beaver kept mum.

The minor characters were as memorable as the major ones. Beaver's sidekick Larry Mondello looked and acted like a pint-size W.C. Fields. Wally's chum Lumpy Rutherford was just that. And of course there was the incomparable Eddie Haskell (Ken Osmond). If Mayfield was Eden, Eddie was the serpent slyly tempting Beaver to bite the apple of mischief. A leering skull dressed in a cardigan sweater, Eddie was smarmy to his elders and sneering to his peers. "Hey, Wally, if your gunky brother comes with us, I'm gonna Oh, hello, Mrs. Cleaver, I was just telling Wallace how pleasant it would be for Theodore to accompany us to the movies." In his high-pitched whine, Beaver supplied the bittersweet moral: "You know, Wally, I guess even creeps like Eddie got to have friends."

After Beaver went off the air, lurid rumors circulated concerning the show's characters. It was as if Beaver fans, disillusioned by the late '60s, wrote their own contemporary psychic postscripts to the show. Beaver was said to have been killed in Viet Nam. Wally was reputed to have married either Barbara Billingsley or Raquel Welch. Eddie Haskell was rumored to be either Porn Star John Holmes (whom he resembles) or the wraithlike Alice Cooper. The collective unconscious of '60s America, resenting and yet longing for the simple verities of Mayfield, attempted to corrupt the suburban paradise.

But, in fact, Beaver was at the time a student of philosophy at Berkeley, and is now a disc jockey and journeyman actor. Ken Osmond joined the Los Angeles police department in 1970 and sued the distributors of Holmes' films to clear up the confusion. Dow is a writer, sometime actor and the father of a son (it was his TV stand-in who was married to Raquel Welch). Mathers is currently negotiating with a network to update the past in a two-hour TV movie version of Leave It to Beaver, starring the original cast (minus the late Hugh Beaumont), with Beaver playing Father Cleaver, and a new generation of pesky children.

The show's characters are not the only ones who still seem to live in the shadow of Beaver, perpetually imprisoned in their adolescent roles. Millions of viewers who grew up with Beaver find their early memories eerily intermingling with the televised home movies of the Cleaver family. One night at dinner, Beaver told his parents that his teacher, the young and confectionery Miss Landers, was so old that she remembered a time even before there was television. Asked Beaver plaintively:

"What did people do before there was television, Mom?" --By Richard Stengel

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