A few years ago a girl with the initials B.B. wrapped a bath towel around her bouncing bottom and became a star overnight.It has taken America's B.B., Bea Benaderet, a little longer than it did Brigitte Bardot - something like 30 years longer. And Bea isn't bouncy any more, nor would she have thought of appearing in a bath towel when she was.
But today, after a career of playing supporting roles and off-stage voices, she is indubitably a star - of Petticoat Junction, latest creation of Paul Henning who, because of the success of The Beverly Hillbillies, which he spawned last season, is reputed to have The Touch.
Bea tells this story: Back in the early Fifties, when Henning was a writer on "The Burns and Allen Show" on radio, in which she played the neighbor, Blanche Morton, he told her, "Some day I'll write a show with you as the star."
When told this recently, Henning did not remember it. He says his determination to star Bea Benaderet is more recent. Before The Beverly Hillbillies went on the air, he had to see the pilot film scores of times as it was shown to network executives, prospective sponsors and aspiring writers. "I used to get pretty bored," he admits. "Finally I got so I was just watching Bea. And the more I watched her, the better I thought she was."
In The Beverly Hillbillies Bea played the part of Pearl Bodine, the high-falutin cousin, but the role she really wanted was that of Granny. Henning, who visualized Granny as what Cliff Arquette used to call "a little bitty woman," told Bea she was too buxom. But, undiscouraged, she made an all-out try for the part. Now she says she is glad she didn't get it. "If I had gotten that," she says, "I wouldn't have this."
"This" includes a pastel-blue, thick-carpeted dressing room, the heady experience of being interviewed by TV reporters who never had paid much attention to her before, and the dubious privilege of working from 5 o'clock in the morning until 7 o'clock at night. In other words, "this" means being a star, which is usually the fondest dream of every actress. But somehow Bea Benaderet doesn't act like a star and hasn't learned to accept the prerogatives of stardom.
For instance, she was embarrassed when Henning - whom she often refers to as "Mr. Henning," although they have known each other since radio days - brought a vacuum cleaner to her dressing room and began running it over the carpet, which he had noticed was soiled. (Henning is noted for not letting anyone else do anything.) An out-of-town newspaper man who happened to be there at the time was astonished. "Do you do this for all your stars?" he asked. "No," said Henning, "just for those I love."
The hard work of being a star does not disturb Bea, except that it keeps her away from her family - her husband and her children by a previous marriage: Jack, 23, and Maggie, 16. During the hectic days of getting the program ready for its debut, there were many nights she did not get home at all. She lives in the ranchy suburb of Calabasas, at the west end of the San Fernando Valley, about 25 miles from Hollywood. One night, she insists, she called home, and her son said, "Who is this?" When she said, "Mother," her said, "Mother who?"
Perhaps Bea Benaderet finds it difficult to act like a star because she is not the star type and never has been. At 11, she played the part of an old man with a gray beard in a school pageant. That was in San Francisco, where she was raised after being brought West from her native New York when she was 4 years old. Her roles have been on the mature side ever since. They have either been comfortable, neighborly married women like Blanch Morton, whom she played for 20 years with Burns and Allen on radio and television, or else outlandish creations like Gertrude Gearshift, the telephone operator in The Jack Benny Show, or Betty Rubble of The Flintstones, whose voice she is.
Even her name, which is her own, does not have star quality, despite the glamorous initials. Jack Benny calls her "Bea Bernadette," Ed Sullivan once introduced her as "Bea Benny," and to comedian Benny Rubin she is "Benny de Rat."
After working in local radio in San Francisco, Bea went to Hollywood in 1936. "The first thing I did was break my leg," she says. "I went to my first job on crutches and then got stuck in the elevator on the way." (Bea seems to be accident prone at critical points in her career. Recently, on the Petticoat Junction set, she tripped over a cable and broke her kneecap, thus holding up production for a week.)
Eventually, during the 1940's, she became one of the group of radio actors and actresses who appeared on almost all the network shows originating in Hollywood. Like most radio players, she was anonymous. "That was because we played so many parts," she says. "They couldn't very well say, 'The roles of Jane, Sarah and Sam Jones were played by Bea Benaderet.'" Two of the radio shows she appeared in regularly were "The Burns and Allen Show" and "A Day in the Life of Dennis Day," both written by Paul Henning.
In 1938 Bea married James Bannon, an announcer who eventually played Red Ryder in several motion pictures. When he became a cowboy star, Bannon decorated his convertible with steer horns, pistols and horseshoes. This show of stardom embarrassed Bea then as her own stardom does now. Whether this had anything to do with it or not, she and Bannon were eventually divorced, and in 1957 she married Gene Twombley, a sound-effects engineer.
She, Twombley and her son and daughter live quietly in a rambling, unostentatious home on Jed Smith Road in Calabasas, an address which sounds as if it might have come right out of Petticoat Junction. They have no swimming pool, but Bea's daughter has a horse which grazes on the sloping hillside behind the house. Bea knits and reads ("everything") for relaxation. On a rare day off, she goes to Newport, south of Los Angeles, to rest by the ocean at a hotel owned by former announcer Ken Niles, an old friend from radio days.
Bea's blonde hair should really be gray. It began to turn from the jet black it was originally when she was only 22, but it became completely gray during the agonizing wait before the birth of her daughter in 1948. Only weeks before the baby was due, she fell and broke her pelvis. "I thought that I had killed the baby," she says. She had not, of course, and today Maggie is a happy, healthy teen-ager. But Bea, meanwhile, had turned gray; it was at her husband's suggestion that she become blonde - the only way TV audiences have ever known her.
Her principal concern with Petticoat Junction is not her own future. She has never been out of work - in fact, she usually has had more job offers than she can handle; and despite her comparative anonymity, she has always made good money and saved it. Now she says, "I want the show to be a success for Mr. Henning's sake. He has always thought I was better than I am."
Not that she discounts being a star. But there is a small note of sadness in her voice as she repeats what Shirl Conway of The Nurses said to her: "Why did we have to wait so long?"
