But she primarily maintained a low public profile with her third husband, Dr.
The producers wanted me to be as tall or taller than the kids.”īut even with heels, Billingsley said, “sometimes I would stand on the stairs for a scene so I could have some more height.”Īfter “Leave It to Beaver” ended in 1963, Billingsley made occasional TV guest appearances.
“In the beginning of the series I wore flat shoes, but then Wally and the Beaver began to get taller,” she said. And there was a practical reason she wore high heels on the show. “So no matter what I was doing - cleaning, cooking or answering the phone - I had those darn pearls on,” she said. “Every show was taken from some kernel of truth, something that had happened to their children or a relative.”Īs for her trademark white-pearl necklace, Billingsley said in 2003 in The Times that she wore it “because I have a big hollow in my neck” and the necklace covered the spot perfectly. “Joe Connelly had seven children, and Bob Mosher had two, and they had a lot of material right there,” Billingsley told the Nashville Tennessean in 2003. “They” were Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, the creators of “Leave It to Beaver,” the first TV series to show life from a child’s point of view. And six months later, they called me to start the series.” “When Roy died, my agent made me work all the time. “It’s a terrible blow, but you can’t wallow in your grief,” Billingsley said in a 1993 interview with The Times. In 1953, Billingsley married director Roy Kellino, who died three years later of a heart attack at age 44. In 1955, she played co-star Stephen Dunne’s wife on the short-lived situation comedy “Professional Father,” and she portrayed Gale Gordon’s girlfriend on several episodes of the situation comedy “The Brothers.” That continued into the ‘50s, when she also began landing roles on “Four Star Playhouse” and other television anthology programs. When the marriage ended in divorce in the late ‘40s, Barbara Billingsley already had begun playing uncredited bit parts and small roles in a string of B movies. Her marriage in the early 1940s to restaurant operator Glenn Billingsley, nephew of Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley, produced two sons and prompted her move back to Los Angeles, where her husband managed the Mocambo nightclub.
She later toured with Billie Burke in a production of “Accidentally Yours.” The show closed after four performances, but she “decided New York was more fun than college” and found work as a $60-a-week fashion model. She was attending Los Angeles City College when she joined the cast of “Straw Hat,” a comedy that went to Broadway in late 1937. 22, 1915, she and her sister grew up in a single-parent household after her parents divorced when she was an infant. Wouldn’t it be nice if you came home from school and there was Mom standing there with her little apron and cookies waiting?”īorn Barbara Combes in Los Angeles on Dec. “Good grief,” she told TV Guide, “I think everybody would like a family like that. I’ve never known where one started and where one stopped.”Īs for the idealized TV family on “Leave It to Beaver,” which continues in reruns on cable more than half a century after its debut, Billingsley had her own explanation for the Cleavers’ enduring appeal. I think the character became kind of like me and vice versa. I had two boys at home when I did the show. She set a good example for what a wife could be. “Some people think she was weakish, but I don’t. “She was the ideal mother,” Billingsley said of her character in 1997 in TV Guide. As June Cleaver, Billingsley was the personification of an Eisenhower-era stay-at-home mom - at least one residing in fictional Mayfield, U.S.A.: a mild-mannered, perfectly coiffed housewife who typically wore dresses, high heels and a strand of white pearls even while vacuuming or baking cookies for her boys.