by Sam Staggs
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It was in 1965 that Eva landed the role for which she is remembered by legions of TV viewers, Lisa Douglas. Although not the legacy Eva would have chosen, Green Acres made her a bigger star than ever before. Its 170 episodes also provided steady work and a large income for six seasons, until 1971.
Given the many oddities of network television, it’s risky to single out one show as especially bizarre. Even so, Green Acres belongs among the more indelibly flaky. It deconstructs the archetypal myth of happy rural America by mixing elements of a surreal fever dream with the frantic action of Hollywood animated cartoons, the paintings of Grant Wood and Grandma Moses, and chaotic set pieces from the silent films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Perhaps with a nod to the Marx Brothers, language turns somersaults: endless puns, malapropisms, figures of speech taken literally, meanings turned inside out. The alphabet has gone mad. The result, when these visual and verbal elements are chopped up and reassembled as a goofy collage, is a work of American Dada.
Like the original European Dadaists from roughly 1915 to 1925, the creators of Green Acres rejected reason and logic in favor of chaos and irrationality. Whether the producers and writers of Green Acres also intended their work as antiwar protest and a rejection of bourgeois capitalist society, as their European predecessors had done, is a topic for academic seminars. (To start that discussion: Paul Henning, creator/writer/producer at various times of The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres, came from Missouri, like Mark Twain, whose writings no doubt influenced these sitcoms. David Marc, in his book Demographic Vistas: Televison in American Culture, depicts Henning as “unabashed and hyperbolic in his idealization of backwoods life.”)
Although Henning is often called the creator of Green Acres, he neither desired nor accepted such credit. He insisted that Jay Sommers be given full acclaim as the show’s creator. Henning was executive producer only. Nor did he write any of the scripts. One might say that while The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction were Henning’s progeny, to Green Acres he was godfather. Nevertheless, his semblance hovers around every episode. For one thing, Green Acres is the mirror image of The Beverly Hillbillies. In the latter, country comes to town; in the former, city slickers Oliver and Lisa Douglas try farm living. Then, too, Henning had written for George Burns and Gracie Allen in the early days of television. So memorable was Gracie’s gaga shtick that the writers of Green Acres updated it for Eva’s Lisa Douglas.
Eva, however, was no one’s first choice for the role. According to Stephen Cox, in The Hooterville Handbook: A Viewer’s Guide to Green Acres, Jay Sommers wanted Martha Hyer for the part, but she demanded too much money—$100,000 per show. Next, Sommers tested Marsha Hunt and Janet Blair, followed by some two dozen other actresses. Neither he nor CBS thought Eva right for the part, one reason being her accent. But Eva was Henning’s choice from the start. He and his wife remembered her from fifteen years earlier on Broadway in The Happy Time, and to them she was the only viable candidate for Lisa Douglas. Unlike Sommers and CBS, they liked the incongruity of her accent. Another point in her favor with the Hennings was the lingering foreignness that she (like the other Gabors) retained even after decades in the U.S. Eventually Henning overruled his producing partner and the network: “I’m going to use Eva Gabor!”
Henning’s choice delighted Eddie Albert. He and his wife, Margo, had met Eva and Zsa Zsa in the 1940s at a party given by Ernst Lubitsch, when he and Eva were lovers. During the Green Acres years, Eddie, Margo, and Eva often socialized in the evenings after work. “Margo was one of my best friends ever,” Eva told Stephen Cox in 1993. “I loved her. And I love Eddie very much also.” (Margo retired from acting in 1965 after a twenty-year career. She died in 1985. Eddie Albert died, age ninety-nine, in 2005.)
Despite Eva’s congeniality, she had Gabor nerves and during the first season she tangled with Richard L. Bare, who directed virtually every episode of Green Acres. Interviewed by Stephen Cox, Bare said, “When Eva got on the show she must have thought, I’m going to be a television superstar. She immediately started to dominate the set.”
Eventually Jay Sommers intervened. He called Bare and Eva together and said, “Now what’s all this about, Miss Gabor?”
“He keeps me in a box,” she answered vaguely. “He won’t let me do anything.”
Bare’s version of the conflict was more pointed: “Miss Gabor tends to overact and I’ve been trying to restrict her hand movements. I’m trying to get her into what I think is an acceptable mode.”
Eva argued, “I just cannot do that. It’s either him or me.”
Whereupon Jay Sommers turned to her and said, “Miss Gabor, if anyone leaves the show, it’s going to be you.”
Years later, Bare clarified Sommers’s bluff. “If Eva had taken her complaint to CBS, I would have been expendable.” She didn’t, and from then on she and Bare were friends. “I never had a day’s trouble with Eva after that,” he said. In his office hung a photograph of him directing Eva in a Green Acres bathtub scene. Eva’s inscription, in green ink: “To dear Richard. Believe it or not, I love you. Eva.”
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The grind of a long-running TV series means boredom and hardship no matter how grateful the actors are to have work, and no matter how seriously they take the job. Penny Stallings, in her exposé Forbidden Channels: The Truth They Hide from TV Guide, recounts the grueling process that Eva underwent to remain ageless and beautiful, from age forty-six when the show began to fifty-two, when it ended: “Eva insisted on bringing along the well-known makeup man Gene Hibbs [who] devised a mechanical, as opposed to surgical, face lift for her based on a technique that had been used earlier for Lucille Ball and Barbara Stanwyck.
“The procedure began with the affixing of several discreet adhesive patches to the top of Eva’s forehead and above her ears. Tiny silver hooks embedded in the tape were attached to elastic cords which encircled her scalp and were hidden under the elaborate bouffants and wigs she wore as Lisa Douglas. With the bands pulled tight, Eva’s face remained supernaturally taut—even when she got allergic smelling hay.”
Eva’s devotion to Hibbs and his facial necromancy led to a rumor that persists to this day. According to Stallings, Hibbs’s work was so crucial that Eva refused to give him a two-day leave in June 1969 to do the makeup on Judy Garland’s corpse “even though Liza Minnelli had made a special request.”
Eva denied being so imperious. “He and Judy were good friends,” she said, “and she wanted him to do her hair when her time came. Gene told me he did not want to do that. But he could have gone if he’d wanted.”
Those who write about Hollywood glamour seldom mention the underside: the tape and hooks holding up a face, the hot wigs, and, in Eva’s case at least, getting up 5:00 a.m., working until after six in the evening, then going home to memorize “about thirty-eight pages of script every week,” as she recalled.
Was it worth it? Eva’s Lisa Douglas looked so ethereal, so unworldly that she seemed like Titania among the rustics, and in every episode she met the requirements for a fairy queen. One reason that Eva in Green Acres is remembered so vividly is because of her ravishing costumes. And not just one or two per episode, but many. In the first season, the eminent Hollywood designer Jean Louis did her lavish outfits. During contract negotiations, Eva demanded that he be hired. She would not settle for anyone else. Her further demands almost cost her the role, for she insisted on Peggy Shannon for her hairdresser and Gene Hibbs for makeup. Eventually the producers realized that Eva was right: lacking her dazzle, the show might not have survived its laugh track. (One reviewer counted 161 annoying hee-haws in just thirty minutes.) Eva made sure the producers saw a batch of fan letters that arrived after she appeared in a certain Jean Louis gown that she had worn in an episode a few weeks earlier. “What happened?” these viewers demanded. “Can’t you afford a new dress?”
Jean Louis was nearing the end of his career, however, and his taste in materials far ex
ceeded television budgets. Eva’s costumes for subsequent seasons were almost entirely the work of Nolan Miller, in his early thirties and so new to film and TV fashion that Eva considered him her discovery. Everything she wore—dresses, negligees, evening gowns (often worn in the barn or in the kitchen while preparing inedible meals), boas, furs—were either Miller originals or else redesigned by him using prêt-à-porter from department stores and boutiques. In some episodes, Eva’s costumes are elaborate to the point of excess, often so garish they put your eyes out.
Long after the series ended, a TV interviewer asked Eva, “What is it like to look beautiful and glamorous all the time?” A look of perplexity shadowed her face, as if she were about to reveal something momentous. “It is exhausting,” she sighed, and for a moment she seemed ready to deflate.
Her colleagues on the show liked her, though in a few cases it took a while for Eva to warm up. Mary Grace Canfield, who played the inept carpenter Ralph Monroe, noted “a lot of insecurity, and maybe a certain amount of delicate fear. I have a feeling that what we saw on the outside was not what was on the inside.” Eddie Albert said, “She isn’t harebrained, no matter what you may hear. The Gabors have gotten that reputation mainly from Zsa Zsa. But Eva is very responsible.” If Arnold the pig (and his two stand-ins) could have spoken in reality as in the show’s Disneyesque scenes, they might have praised her above all humans, for she said, “I loved Arnold. I always made sure they treated him safely. One day they bound him inside a baby cradle and I refused to work until they stopped.” Eulogizing Eva after her death in 1995, one of her friends said, “There is a special place in heaven for animal lovers, and especially for those who adore their porcine fellow-creatures.”
On the set and off, the Gabor wit seldom waned. One of the show’s dialogue coaches, Phil Gordon, told Stephen Cox about the time when he chatted with Eddie and Eva as they were being made up for the day’s shoot. Eddie asked whether he had heard any new jokes, and when Gordon started telling one, Eva interrupted. “Please, dahling, I do not like dirty jokes.” Then she turned and said, “Now where’s my fucking comb?”
Another time, Gordon drove Eva home after work. “I was nervous because she’s the star of the show, so I was driving slower than usual. A man was in the crosswalk and I stopped far ahead. Eva said to me, ‘Dahling, what are you doing? You drive the way an old man fucks.’ ”
Gordon’s retort: “Well, you ought to know.” They laughed all the way to her front door.
During the first season of Green Acres, Richard Brown flew from New York to Los Angeles on weekends to be with Eva. After the show became a hit, he moved to California and became a vice president of Filmways, the company that produced the series.
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According to David Marc in Demographic Vistas, “both The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres were still in Nielsen’s Top 20 in 1970.” Their days were numbered, however, as networks and ad agencies panted after younger audiences—the eighteen-to-thirty-four age group—that they considered hip and more likely to buy products promoted on hip shows. These youths, in Madison Avenue-speak, comprised the “quality audience.” Enter All in the Family, Maude, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Good Times, et al. (As for so-called quality in sitcom programming, one size fits all, then and now, with only rare exceptions.) After the 1970–71 season, no more rural comedies. And, as David Marc points out, “The 1971 television season found the prime-time network schedules without a new Paul Henning work for virtually the first time in television history.”
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Nineteen years after Green Acres left the air, someone concocted a follow-up. Return to Green Acres, with a familiar cast sadly slowed by age, resembles a pageant staged in a care home. The exception is Eva, who, seventy-one but looking forty, with her svelte figure and dazzling wardrobe, could pass for Eddie Albert’s granddaughter rather than his wife.
To distract myself while watching this misbegotten sequel, I looked for an unusual angle—and found it. Nostradamus-like, Return to Green Acres predicted the rise of Donald Trump!
Hooterville is threatened with destruction. A villainous New York real estate developer (played by Henry Gibson) and his obedient, cowardly son—Eric? Donald Jr.? Jared Kushner?—trick the inhabitants into selling their property for an environment-destroying industrial park and mall. Meanwhile, just when they are most needed in Hooterville, Oliver and Lisa have moved back to Park Avenue. Finding the city unendurable after their long absence, they heed the call of their friends who beg them for help.
Back in Hooterville, the naive rural folk had at first believed the villain to be on their side with his offers of money and commerce. By the time they realize his heartless plan to destroy their homes, it’s almost too late. Oliver and Lisa organize a huge protest, the New York destroyer brings in state troopers armed with rifles, and the Douglases end up in jail. All is lost until . . .
The tyrant is defeated. Hooterville’s citizens stage a fake earthquake that scares the despot, convincing him that his land lies over a dangerous fault line. Poltroon that he is, he jumps into his limo and hightails it out of town. The parable is uncannily prescient: the New York mega-crook at first seems a shrewd businessman. In the end, however, he’s exposed as an evil dunce easily outwitted by the innocents he set out to fleece.
Sic semper tyrannis.2
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In 1992, when Stephen Cox was writing The Hooterville Handbook, he interviewed members of the cast. In a recent telephone conversation, he talked about his afternoon with Eva at her mansion in Holmby Hills. I wondered whether she greeted him in full Gabor grandeur—wig, makeup, diamonds.
“No,” he said. “A little makeup, and if she wore a wig it was one of her less showy ones. She was dressed down, if you can imagine a Gabor dressing down. She wore jeans and a white shirt, the collar up a bit, and white tennis shoes.”
The interview proceeded well, according to Cox, who had brought along a stack of publicity pictures from the show. Having interviewed many TV actors, he found that such photos prompted them to recall details. “I handed Eva a stack of pictures that I planned to use in my book. She started looking through them and making a pile. She put aside half a dozen or so, and handed back the rest. She didn’t even ask, ‘Are these for me?’ I did not know what to say; it put me in a difficult position. I didn’t want the interview to veer off course, so I let her keep the pictures.”
At the end of the interview, which lasted a couple of hours: “She asked if I would help her move some lawn furniture!” At that, we paused the phone conversation for laughter. “Well,” he continued, “we went to her guesthouse, which was lined with huge enlargements of TV Guide covers beautifully framed, along with other memorabilia.
“Eva said, ‘I want to move this lounge chair over here, so you get in back and help me.’ Which I did.”
I suggested to Cox that when an older Hungarian asks you to do that sort of thing, which no one in Britain or Scandinavia, for instance, would dream of asking, it translates as, I like you, I trust you, and that’s why I’m asking for your help. That Old Country custom, added to the Gabor sense of entitlement, meant that Eva would not have thought it at all strange. And since Stephen Cox was in his twenties at the time, and Eva had commented on his rosy cheeks, calling him an “Irish boy” though in fact he was Canadian, he took it as a compliment.
Their interview at an end, he asked Eva to sign one of his remaining photos. “Would you please write on this one, ‘Give me Park Avenue’? She said, ‘Oh no, dahling, I’m just going to write “Love, Love.” ’ And that’s what she wrote.”
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A year or so after his convivial afternoon at Eva’s, Cox encountered her again. “That’s when it got weird,” he said. “At almost the same time that my book came out, a publisher had contacted Eva through her agent to float the idea of an Eva Gabor Green Acres Cookbook. The publisher, learning of The Hooterville Handbook, rescinded Eva’s offer. They believed that one Green Acres book was enough. She got win
d of it, and it made her angry.”
Movie stars, like others unfamiliar with publishing, imagine that any book they “write”—meaning a book that bears their name although written by someone else—will earn millions and garner endless publicity. They will become authors, even auteurs.
Around the time of Eva’s disappointment, the 1993 feature film The Beverly Hillbillies was released. CBS also produced a special called The Legend of the Beverly Hillbillies—a “mock-umentary” based on the anniversary of the TV show, and Cox, who in 1988 had published a book on that phenomenal series, was hired as a consultant. This pseudo-documentary included archival clips and new interviews having to do with the Clampett family. Eva and Eddie Albert, in character as Lisa and Oliver Douglas, were included in the special. A small set was built for them to reminisce about the Clampetts, recalling their zany arrival in Beverly Hills from the backwoods.
On the day that Eva and Eddie filmed their scene, sitting on a sofa in front of a mantel, Cox happened to be at the CBS studio in Hollywood. “I was taking pictures of the set,” he said. “I noticed Green Acres photographs on their mantel, which turned out to be photographs the CBS prop department had borrowed from me and then put in frames. At the end of the day, Eva gathered up those framed pictures—mine—and started to leave with them. I called aside one of the producers and asked him to make sure they were not removed from the set.
“He conveyed the message to Eva, who became upset. In front of Eddie Albert and everyone, she started yelling at me—I’m in the shadows at the edge of the set—‘You ruined my life! I need these photographs!’ She started to rant that I didn’t tell her our interview was for my book. Eddie came to my rescue. ‘Yes, he did,’ Eddie told her. ‘You know he did.’ I realized that he was the only one who could stick up for me. He was her equal. He calmed her down. I don’t even remember how it got resolved. Maybe I said, ‘Oh, whatever, let her take them.’ ”