Off camera, offstage, he was not a straight man. Mel Cooley kissed Alan Brady’s ass, while serving as the constant butt of jokes and insults by gag writer Buddy Sorrell (played by Morey Amsterdam). Richard Deacon was Mel Cooley, Brady’s brother-in-law and the show’s pompous, prissy-“unctuous”-producer.
Van Dyke played Rob Petrie, head writer of a comedy-variety series called The Alan Brady Show. Tall, balding, wearing glasses and usually a suit and tie, he was not at all flamboyant, but a suburban Dave Berg character come to life.ĭeacon was still in the Beaver cast when he stepped into his career-defining role on The Dick Van Dyke Show in October 1961. Fred was an annoyance to his neighbor and co-worker, Beaver’s dad Ward Cleaver. The series premiered on CBS on October 4, 1957, and switched over to ABC in its second season, where it remained until its final episode aired on June 20, 1963. Not at all flamboyant.” Richard Deaconĭeacon had a long career in television and films by the time a generation of kids got to know him as Fred Rutherford, Lumpy’s father on Leave It To Beaver. My character always represents the Establishment. I’ve been called every adjective - smug, lugubrious, unctuous, bland, you name it. “I’m nearly always an executive of some sort, in suit and tie, and somebody always pricks my bubble of dignity. “As a straight man, I’m hired for my buttoned-down quality,” he told author Boze Hadleigh.
What follows are the stories of three of them, actors whose roles were well-defined and brilliant in their simplicity, but whose personal lives were more complicated, full of compromising relationships, situations and positions. They, along with other favorite sitcom characters, were influences on American punk culture and today are looked upon as pioneers. Even kids planted in front of the television sets in the 1960s knew there was something “funny” about Uncle Arthur and Claymore Gregg. Most did not “come out” officially, but there was no need.
But along with political activists and social revolutionaries, there were a number of entertainers who, in the decades surrounding the rebellion, brought a clear, if often exaggerated, gay presence into American homes. With this year’s Gay Pride Month marking the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, the accomplishments of LGBT heroes of the past fifty years have been widely celebrated. In a way, though, they helped to blaze trails for which they were never given credit. The faces of these three actors were familiar to Baby Boomers raised on TV situation comedies.