Thinking About Dobie Gillis – 61 Years Later

Come stroll with me down Memory Lane …

“DO-O-BIE wants a gal who’s dreamy,
DO-O-BIE wants a gal who’s creamy,
DO-O-BIE wants a gal to call his own.
Is she blonde, is she tall, is she dark, is she small,
Is she any kind of dreamboat at all?
No matter; he’s hers and hers alone …”

If you recognized this as the theme song from the TV comedy “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” chances are you’re somewhere up in my age bracket.  The series debuted on CBS in September 1959, when I was 11 years old, and ran for four seasons through the spring of 1963.  In my near-pubescent opinion, it was the most hilarious thing ever seen on television.

Dear reader, forgive me that I turn from august subjects like UFOs to contemplate Dobie Gillis.  There are serious matters here too.

I‘ve been watching the episodes from the beginning, one per week as in the old days, on my laptop as I do the standing exercises prescribed by my physical therapist to keep my spine in decent shape.  Six decades have passed since I was seventh-grade Dave, just beginning to notice girls, lying on my belly on the living room floor in front of the black-and-white TV and laughing hysterically.  Dobie, at least at the start of the series, was 17 years old.  (The actor who played him, Dwayne Hickman, was 25.)  In another six years, would that be me?

Strictly speaking, to say anything sensible about the show I should have watched all four years of it.  At this rate, I’m likely to get there sometime in 2024.  So here’s an interim report, looking backward from the 2/23/60 episode, entitled “Dobie Spreads a Rumor” but which might better have been called “The Return of Zelda Gilroy.”  About whom more anon.

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The basic story:  Dobie lives with his parents, his doting mother (Florida Friebus) and his irascible father (Frank Faylen), who spends much of his time in a fury–painfully understandable to me now; back then I found it just comic–about Dobie’s refusal to lift a finger to help out in the family grocery.  His best friend is a shabby and dim-witted but lovable beatnik named Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver, later to go on to an even more popular role as Gilligan in Gilligan’s Island).  The beginning of each episode finds Dobie in a park somewhere in his unnamed town, next to a statue of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” often mimicking the Thinker’s posture.

And thinking, thinking, thinking about girls.

This was, remember, the end of the Eisenhower era.  It was a more innocent time, at least according to our misty recollections from the other side of the looming sexual revolution.  (1960: the FDA approves the Pill for contraceptive use.)  Dobie’s behavior with the fair young ladies, whose hearts he transiently manages to win, is almost embarrassingly chaste–a bit of arm-touching here, a bit of hand-holding there.  Kissing mostly restricted to one episode, “The Flying Millicans” (2/2/60), when Dobie takes up with Aphrodite Millican.

Aphrodite: stunningly beautiful, precociously brilliant, almost preternaturally strong.  (She lifts a marble bench without effort, cracks open walnuts with her bare hands.)  She’s also sexually aggressive, pressing her kisses on a frightened Dobie while her father looks on, beaming approval.  She picks first Dobie, then Maynard, as her destined soul-mate.  Both flee from her as though from a plague.  So, apparently, did the show, for Aphrodite never turns up again, although the actress playing her, Yvonne Craig, would appear in other roles.  Strong stuff, this teenage love goddess, for so innocent a world.

Innocent–really?  Although the theme song stuck with me over the years, I’d forgotten the animated cartoon that accompanied it, which shows a squat, crew-cutted Dobie peeping through a knothole in a fence at an assortment of nubile young women, then turning to the audience with a lecherous smirk that I now find unsettling, not to say creepy.  How, I wonder, did audiences react to it in 1959?  There must not have been complaints, or at least no substantial number of them, since the cartoon kept on running.  What were my father, my mother, thinking as they watched it in our living room?  What was I thinking?

Was I being taught what a sexual male is, what I ought to be in a few more years?

Certainly I was being taught lessons about boys and girls together, most of them fairly cynical.  A girl must be creamy and dreamy, if she’s to be appealing.  A boy must be athletic, or “dominant,” or most of all rich.  Dobie’s recurrent love interest, the radiantly beautiful Thalia Menninger played by the radiantly beautiful Tuesday Weld (who was, remarkably, slightly younger even than her role), is obsessed with money, willing to consider Dobie as a boyfriend only to the extent he can rake it in.  She’s a “rat,” one of her other suitors tells Dobie, who can be dominated only by an even bigger rat.  She bristles in indignation at the label.  But she doesn’t deny it.

No wonder Maynard the beatnik chooses to be completely asexual.  Who needs chicks? he demands.  They’re nothing but trouble.  At which point Dobie and his equally frustrated rival for Thalia’s affections, rich-boy athlete Milton Armitage (Warren Beatty), turn in unison to Maynard and cry out: “Shut up!”

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It surprised me, watching these episodes from Dobie’s first season, how I remembered absolutely nothing of any of the plots, although I know I must have seen them when they first aired.  Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise.  The stories have, at their best, an inspired silliness, like the episode (11/10/59) in which, after a tonsillectomy, the previously tuneless Dobie starts singing like Elvis Presley.  More often the silliness is just dumb, sometimes (to my 73-year-old sensibilities) painfully so.

What I did retain, besides the theme song, was a few nuggets, a few recurrent jokes.

Anytime anybody goes to a movie or talks about going to the movies, the film showing is always “The Monster Who Devoured Cleveland.”  When the elder Gillises go out for a movie (2/16/60), and Dobie’s mother praises it as having been “different,” her husband retorts: yeah, different, the monster devoured Cleveland in one big gulp, not section by section, suburb by suburb.  When the snobbish Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. (Steve Franken) visits the Gillis home and declares it “amusing,” Dobie’s father says, yeah, we get our laughs from sitting around looking at it (1/26/60).  All these details stayed with me for more than sixty years, even while the stories in which they were embedded slid into oblivion.

It strikes me, as I write, that the really good lines all belonged to Dobie’s furious, clueless father.  Best of all was when, in episode after episode, he mumbles in exasperation, “I gotta kill that boy, I just gotta.”  Evidently this did arouse protest, since eventually it was dropped–much to the detriment of the show, it seemed to me at age 12, when “Dobie Gillis” had taken a turn for the solemn and didactic and wasn’t one-tenth as funny as it used to be.

(And in the 1/12/60 episode, where Dobie runs for junior class president and has fantasies of being President of the United States, his father changes the line to “I gotta assassinate that boy, I just gotta.”  After November 22, 1963, would this have seemed even remotely humorous?)

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And of course I could never forget the characters.  Dobie himself.  His parents.  Maynard.  Thalia.  Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. (always dopier and funnier than Warren Beatty’s Milton Armitage, whose place Franken took when Beatty quit the show).  And most of all Zelda Gilroy.

Zelda first appears in episode 3 (“Love Is a Science,” 10/13/59), which hews pretty closely to one of the stories in Max Shulman’s The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, on which the series is based.  (Shulman also wrote the theme song and many of the scripts.)  She’s a math and science whiz who falls in love with Dobie and insists that sooner or later he’s bound to fall in love with her.  It’s a matter of “propinquity,” she explains: in science classes where seating is alphabetical, Gillis and Gilroy will always sit next to each other.

Eventually, she dumps Dobie as the “rat” he turns out to be–he two-times her with Thalia while she does his math homework for him–and, at the end of the episode, she’s going steady with one Clyde Gillingwater, who now is the one sitting next to her.  “They’re very happy,” Dobie says wistfully, and logically that ought to be the end of Zelda.  But “logical” is precisely what the Dobie Gillis stories are not, and she turned out to be too terrific a character to be abandoned.

Indeed, she’s the only character in “Dobie Gillis” for whom it’s possible to feel at least intermittent respect.

In a way, she’s a stock character: the brainy, unattractive girl to whom the boys pay no attention, both because she’s unattractive and because she’s brainy.  (Even Aphrodite’s looks couldn’t save her from the curse of her intelligence.)  She doesn’t wear glasses–“men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” ran the old stupid saying, which in 1960 it may still have been possible to take seriously.  But otherwise, plainly dressed and bare of makeup, she fits the stereotype.

My mother, who did wear glasses in high school and all her life felt the wallflower’s pain, had a considerable fascination with Zelda.  If they’d chosen a truly homely actress to play Zelda, my mother used to say, the joke would have been unbearably cruel.  But the actress they did pick, Sheila James Kuehl, was in fact very cute, if not quite the “creamy” dreamboat of Dobie’s fantasies.  So her doomed pursuit of Dobie could be used for laughs, after all.

The most recent episode I watched, “Dobie Spreads a Rumor,” begins with Dobie girl-less and Zelda, without explanation, back in his life.  The previous episode had ended with him winning Thalia; in this one Thalia’s not only gone, she isn’t even mentioned.  As I said: logical it’s not.  Zelda, however, is ready for him, on the melancholy theory that nobody else wants either of them so they might as well have each other.

What follows is too involved, and too ridiculous, to be properly summarized here.  Suffice it to say that Dobie and Maynard manage to spread a rumor that the Gilroy family have suddenly become millionaires, and the rich and popular boys–the obnoxious Chatsworth among them–are on the phone asking Zelda out.  Her response: “Drop dead.”  She’s Dobie’s, and only Dobie’s.

Whereat her father intervenes: if only she’ll go out with Chatsworth Osborne Jr., then Chatsworth Osborne Sr. will agree to a bank loan.  And so, for the sake of the family …

Zelda:  “What am I, some kind of chattel or something?  If you’re going to just sell me, like some horse or some cow.” “I’m gorgeous,” she tells her mother, when asked why Chatsworth could possibly want to date her, and for that brief shining moment she is gorgeous.  “You sold me!” she cries out to her father, pointing her finger in accusation.  “Your own flesh and blood!  What are we, some kind of savages in the jungle?  If you think I’m going to date that Chatsworth drip just because his father gave you some–“

But she never gets to finish her sentence, and in a short time she too has been corrupted.  In the world of Dobie Gillis, no outburst of integrity can have any real consequence.  The episode ends on the sourest, most cynical note of any I’ve seen so far.

Did my parents realize this, sense the devastating bitterness beneath the hilarity?  Did I sense it, as I faced manhood in that “innocent” time that was anything but?

She should have stuck with Clyde Gillingwater.