Barbara Billingsley, June Cleaver Of "Leave It To Beaver" and "Airplane" Dies

Barbara Billingsley, an American television legend who played "June Cleaver" in Leave It To Beaver and its sequel Still the Beaver (also called The New Leave It to Beaver), and was a hit in Airplane, died Saturday at the age of 94 in Santa Monica, California.

Way before Mad Men there was Leave It To Beaver, the real 1950s show that promoted the ideal of the American Family. A suburban couple with a house with a white picket fence where the wife, Barbara Billingsley, cleaned it while wearing a skirt, heels, and pearls.

Billingsley proudly played June Cleaver from 1957 to 1963, and was the television series everyone watched when this blogger was a small boy in the early 1960s.

From this African American's point of view, Leave It To Beaver was still the ideal family example and there was nothing in the show to tell blacks they could not achieve that standard. What some forget it that a person can watch a program that doesn't have anyone who looks like them in it, and still enjoy it. Still, a program that's racially diverse is more desirable than the other way, but it's for the reason stated that June Cleaver became "America's mother."

Leave It To Beaver expressed basic good values. Billingsley said that the shows writers and creators didn't try to hit you over the head with them, they were there, but just under the surface.

On Talking Jive In Airplane

Later in her career, Barbara Billingsley would play a kind of parody of her Leave It To Beaver character in the classic comedy Airplane:



Billingsley said people talked as much about that scene as any she'd done in Leave It To Beaver. She had to actually learn jive, or what's now called Ebonics, to do the role. "I was cast because I'd been June Cleaver, I'm sure that was the humor of the thing. I was sent the script, and I thought it was the craziest script I'd ever read, and my husband thought it was funny," she said. "Well, my part wasn't written. It just said I talked jive. So I went to see the producers and I said I would do it. I met the two black fellas that were talking jive (in the scene). They're the ones that wrote the jive talk. And we went to lunch and we discussed this whole thing. You know there's even a book out about jive?

"I was put in contact with a girl who worked at Paramount who knew all about jive. They never figured out if it was the slave days - they didn't want whitey to know what they were talking about - or whether it's street talk. She couldn't tell me. Anyway, I researched for it, and these fellas were wonderful and they taught me."



Barbara Billingsley is survived by her two sons, a stepson, and four grandchildren. With her passes on a key milestone in American culture: the model of the 50s housewife.

Written by
Zennie Abraham