What Happened to Buddy Ebsen From The Beverly Hillbillies

TLDR: Buddy Ebsen was originally cast as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz in 1938, spent two weeks in an oxygen tent after aluminum dust from the makeup coated his lungs, was replaced without public explanation, was blacklisted by Louis B. Mayer for refusing an exclusive contract, and didn’t become a household name until he was cast as Jed Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies at age 54.

He died in 2003 at 95.

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There is a version of The Wizard of Oz in which the Tin Man is Buddy Ebsen.

He had the role. He filmed it for nine days. Then he woke up one night unable to breathe, with his fingers and toes curling involuntarily and his arms and legs beginning to bend backward at the joints.

He spent two weeks in an oxygen tent. MGM replaced him without telling the public what had happened.

That was 1938. Ebsen spent the next 24 years surviving a studio blacklist, a world war, and a series of near-misses before finally landing the role that made him famous.

He was 54 years old when The Beverly Hillbillies premiered. He had been in the entertainment business for 34 years.

Arrived in New York With $26.25

Christian Ludolf Ebsen Jr. was born on April 2, 1908, in Belleville, Illinois. His father was a Danish immigrant choreographer who owned a dance studio, and the family eventually settled in Orlando, Florida, where Buddy and his siblings trained under their father.

He graduated from Orlando High School in 1926 and started pre-medical studies, inspired by witnessing his sister’s epileptic seizures.

The Florida land boom collapse ended that plan. There was no money for medical school.

In 1928 he moved to New York with approximately $26.25 and a marketable skill: he could dance in a way nobody else could dance.

He was six feet three inches, which kept him out of chorus lines because he was too tall, but his loose-jointed, wind-blown scarecrow style was distinctive enough that people noticed him anyway.

He appeared in the Florenz Ziegfeld production of Whoopee and then invited his sister Vilma to join him.

Together they became “The Baby Astaires,” a vaudeville act that eventually reached the pinnacle of the circuit at the Palace Theatre after a rave review from Walter Winchell.

MGM brought the siblings to Hollywood in 1935 for Broadway Melody of 1936.

Ebsen danced with Shirley Temple in Captain January, with Frances Langford in Born to Dance, and with Judy Garland in Broadway Melody of 1938. Walt Disney was fascinated by his movement style.

Disney filmed Ebsen dancing in front of a grid, analyzed the frames, and used the footage as reference for animators working on Mickey Mouse in the Silly Symphonies series.

Ebsen’s eccentric physicality became the template for how the mouse moved.

The Tin Man and the Oxygen Tent

In 1938 Ebsen was cast as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. Ray Bolger, cast as the Tin Man, campaigned for a swap because he felt the Scarecrow suited his style better.

Ebsen agreed.

Principal photography began October 12, 1938, and for nine days he appeared on set in Tin Man makeup, which required a layer of clown-white covered with fine aluminum dust that was reapplied under hot lights throughout the day.

The aluminum dust was inhaled constantly. It coated his lungs.

From his 1994 autobiography The Other Side of Oz: “My breathing was excruciatingly labored, no oxygen seemed to reach my lungs. Tests revealed that my lungs were coated with the aluminum dust with which they’d been powdering my face. The strange thing was that back then, pure aluminum dust in the lungs was considered harmless. I was in the hospital under an oxygen tent for two weeks, and went from there to the Coronado Hotel in San Diego to recuperate.”

MGM did not initially believe him.

Studio heads reportedly doubted the severity of his condition until a furious nurse physically blocked a studio representative from returning him to the set.

Producer Mervyn LeRoy hired Jack Haley as the replacement, modified the makeup to a safer aluminum paste, and the production continued.

No public explanation was given for Ebsen’s departure.

Haley re-recorded the Tin Man’s vocals, but Ebsen’s voice remained on the final soundtrack in several ensemble reprises of “We’re Off to See the Wizard.” His Midwestern enunciation of the letter “r” distinguishes his contributions from Haley’s, for anyone listening carefully enough.

Ebsen referred to the film as “that damned movie” in interviews for the rest of his life.

He complained of breathing difficulties for decades afterward. He lived to 95, which suggests he was made of something remarkably durable, but the incident was not something he ever fully forgave.

Blacklisted by Mayer and Then the War

After his recovery, Louis B. Mayer offered Ebsen an exclusive contract that would give MGM total control over his professional and personal life.

Ebsen refused.

“You can’t own me,” he told Mayer. “I can’t be a piece of goods on your counter.” Mayer reportedly responded by vowing that Ebsen would never work in Hollywood again.

For the better part of the next decade, he was largely right.

Ebsen tried to enlist in the Navy when the United States entered World War II and was rejected. He joined the Coast Guard instead, where his sailing skills were useful, and served as an officer on the USS Pocatello in the North Pacific recording weather data.

Thirty days at sea, ten days in port, repeating. He was discharged as a lieutenant in 1946. Sailing remained a central passion for the rest of his life.

In 1968 he designed and built a catamaran called the Polynesian Concept and won the Transpac race from Los Angeles to Honolulu.

Davy Crockett and the Road Back

His career began recovering in the early 1950s when Walt Disney cast him as George Russell, the loyal sidekick in the Davy Crockett serial that ran from 1954 to 1955.

The show was a cultural phenomenon and reintroduced Ebsen to a national television audience. He had been away from major visibility for roughly fifteen years. He was in his mid-40s. He kept working.

Jed Clampett at 54

In 1962 producer Paul Henning was developing The Beverly Hillbillies and needed someone to play Jed Clampett, an Ozarks patriarch who strikes oil and relocates his family to Beverly Hills. Henning saw Ebsen on television and declared he couldn’t imagine anyone else doing the role.

Ebsen was 54, had been in the entertainment business since 1928, and had been a household name exactly never. He read the script, laughed, and signed on.

The show premiered in 1962 and became a ratings phenomenon, drawing up to 60 million viewers and topping the charts multiple times across nine seasons.

Irene Ryan played Granny and Bea Benaderet played Cousin Pearl. Ebsen’s contribution to its success was specific. He played Jed not as a caricature but as a man of genuine wisdom and unshakeable decency who simply happened to be profoundly out of place.

The dignity he brought to the character gave the more eccentric performances around him room to breathe. Without a grounded center, Granny, Jethro, and Elly May would have been a circus.

With Ebsen’s Jed holding everything together, they were a family.

He negotiated creative input into the role and ensured Jed was the one who controlled the family finances, which gave the character a consistent authority that ran through all nine seasons.

His catchphrase “Wellll, doggies!” became one of the most recognized in television history.

Producer Paul Henning instituted what he called a news blackout on the cast’s personal lives, worried that seeing Ebsen on his yacht or Max Baer Jr. at nightclubs would break the audience’s relationship with the characters.

The Beverly Hillbillies ran until 1971, when CBS cancelled it as part of a broader purge of rural programming regardless of ratings.

Barnaby Jones and the Second Act

In 1973, at 64 years old, Ebsen launched Barnaby Jones on CBS, playing a retired private investigator who returns to work after his son’s murder. The show ran for eight seasons and 178 episodes and proved he could anchor a serious drama as effectively as a comedy.

Quinn Martin, the show’s executive producer, said the key to the show was Ebsen. Lee Meriwether, his co-star, described him as a dream to work with and said he worked at being at the top of his game every single day.

Barnaby Jones ended in 1980. Ebsen was 72. He kept working.

Guest spots through the 1980s and 1990s, a cameo in the 1993 Beverly Hillbillies film as Barnaby Jones rather than Jed, and a voice role on King of the Hill in 1999 that was his final television appearance.

He published his autobiography in 1994 and a novel, Kelly’s Quest, in 2000. He was 92 when the novel came out.

Personal Life and the Things He Cared About

Ebsen was married three times and had seven children.

His first marriage to Ruth Cambridge ended in 1942 after producing two daughters. His second, to Nancy Wolcott whom he met while both served in the Coast Guard, lasted from 1945 to 1985 and produced five more children. His third, to Dorothy Knott in 1985, lasted until his death.

He was a conservative Republican who campaigned against his Beverly Hillbillies co-star Nancy Kulp when she ran for Congress in 1984 as a Democrat.

He was a Christian who requested scriptwriters remove any lines that involved taking God’s name in vain. He built and raced sailing catamarans. He painted folk art and sold lithographs.

He co-founded the Beverly Hills Coin Club in 1987. He continued dancing the shim-sham-shimmy into his 90s.

How He Ended

Buddy Ebsen died of respiratory failure from pneumonia on July 6, 2003, at Torrance Memorial Medical Center in California. He was 95 years old.

He was buried at Pacific Crest Cemetery in Redondo Beach. His sister Vilma, the other half of The Baby Astaires, survived him and died in 2007.

He had arrived in New York in 1928 with $26.25 and a way of moving that nobody else could replicate. He survived industrial poisoning on a studio lot, blacklisting by the most powerful man in Hollywood, a war, and decades of near-misses.

He became famous at 54 and never stopped working. On the subject of career setbacks, he said it once in a way that covered everything: “The big lesson is nobody counts you out but yourself. I never have, I never will.”