Pentwater, Michigan
September 20, 2023
One of the nice things about modern streaming TV technology is the wide variety of obscure programming available to the curious and intrepid viewer on the Roku platform. We get a few of the ones that cost money, like Netflix and Amazon Prime, but my preferred ones end up being the freebies such as the Roku Channel, YouTube, and Tubi, which is my current favorite. The latter two are laden with commercials, but what the hell, they're no worse that what one has to endure when watching a live sporting event on regular network TV. And they also feature many old situation comedies, like Leave It To Beaver, The Honeymooners, and The Life of Riley. They afford me the opportunity to see just what kind of stuff--good, bad, or indifferent--I spent the idle hours of my youth watching. It's a great way to see what kinds of garbage the media-meisters of yesteryear thought the public wanted to see. If you're lucky they even include some of the old commercials, often rudimentary by modern standards, but no more or less ridiculous than the ones they have today.
Lately I've done a deep dive into The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. I realize that when I was watching the show as a kid, I was probably watching some of it as it appeared weekly, and some of the older ones as reruns, since we didn't get a television at our house until about the mid-1950s. (I remember sitting by the radio listening to The Lone Ranger before we had TV.) Right now I'm watching season five of Ozzie and Harriet, which takes place in approximately 1957, in which Ricky Nelson is a high schooler, and David Nelson is attending USC, but living at home. On the horizon, about to break, but not quite yet, is Ricky's blaze into teen idol fame, which was heavily promoted--indeed launched--via the show itself, with Ricky ending each show in front of his band, strumming the guitar and curling his lips to a series of hot charting tunes. Ricky's style was a mix of the sensuality of Elvis and the rockabilly renderings of the Everly Brothers, plus his own clean good looks inherited from his parents and a deft way of conveying the probably imaginary fact that, despite his fame, he was just a lonely teenager looking for a girl to call his own. Not wholly original stuff, I grant you, but very effective at attracting his audience, and all done without the need for him to appear on weekly variety shows in order to keep his chiseled features before the adoring public.
But it's Ozzie Nelson I want to concentrate on here. This guy really fascinates me. On the show he plays a benign, lovable, and occasionally whiny paterfamilias, always getting himself into small scrapes with his braggadocio and low-level hubris, then getting caught up short and having to at least partially admit that he was mistaken, but always being forgiven by his long-suffering wife Harriet and devoted sons David and Ricky. Other TV men of the era played similar kinds of fools, to be sure. Ralph Kramden and Chester A. Riley come immediately to mind. The difference between them and Ozzie, however, is that Oz doesn't bellow or verbally abuse his wife or commit acts of absolute stupidity. He just sort of lets his best-laid plans, or his incorrigible dispensing of fatherly or husbandly wisdom, go slightly sideways, but in the end he owns up to his shortcomings pretty casually and effortlessly. And he's a decent, generous, and tolerant dad to his sons. Meanwhile Harriet provides the gentle sarcasm and wit needed to keep Ozzie in line, and she's usually one or two steps ahead of him all the way. Unlike Alice Kramden, she doesn't get in the last word with her arms folded and a frown on her face, but instead does it with grace and charm and an unfailing smile that makes you wonder what the hell she sees in this bumbling, lazy, goofball husband of hers.
One thing that separates the show from other situation comedies of the day is that it features all four members of the real Nelson family, and, I've discovered, was filmed in a studio replica of their actual house somewhere in the Hollywood Hills.
As I said, it’s Ozzie himself who most fascinates me. So, in an effort to learn more about him, I explored the internet and also took the extraordinary step of buying and reading a used copy of his autobiography, appropriately titled Ozzie, written in the early 1970s, just a few years before his death. Overall, I learned a number of things about Oswald George Nelson, born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1906. Early on, Ozzie took an interest in music, and began playing several instruments, including the ukulele and the saxophone, all very Roaring 20s and collegiate in nature. He began playing at local clubs in north Jersey and New York, and by the time he matriculated at Rutgers in the mid-1920s he was regularly burning the candle at both ends, going to college by day and leading big band gigs until the wee hours, all the while playing football and swimming for the school. Oh, and before that he was an Eagle Scout, attending an international jamboree in England and Europe in the early post-World War One years. After graduating from Rutgers he obtained a law degree, of all things, but decided at that point to go into the music biz full time, playing at high-toned clubs and speakeasies, mostly in Manhattan. Soon after, the band, consisting of him as leader and about a dozen musicians, began a practically endless tour of the east and Midwest that would have put many later rock groups to shame for its nonstop rambling from town to town for months on end.
In the meantime Ozzie cut some records, including—get this—the first-ever recording of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” with Ozzie himself doing the vocal in a sort of Rudy Vallee-style croon. And he could carry a tune. That was in 1931, when he was 25 or so, well before greats like Ella Fitzgerald made the song famous, and a generation before Mama Cass of the Mamas and Papas scored with the most successful version of the song. Check out Ozzie’s rendition on YouTube. Or just imagine a young Oz crooning “Say nighty night and kiss me,” backed by soft strings and muted horns.
A few years after that a young vaudevillian named Harriet Hilliard joined the band as the obligatory “girl singer,” and in due time the two of them married. Harriet, who had been born Peggy Lou Snyder in Des Moines in 1909, was by then a stage veteran and also in demand for Hollywood B movie parts. They spent their time on the road, conquering the nightclubs and hotel ballrooms east of the Mississippi, with Harriet occasionally going to LA to make a movie, until she quit the movie biz, for the most part, to become a wife and mother. Nah, just kidding. Between and after having David in 1936 and Ricky in 1940, she continued to tour with the band and do radio with Ozzie, pretty much full time. The two of them had a regular role on the Red Skelton radio show, singing and leading the band and doing some husband-wife schtick, until Red got drafted in about 1944, and they found themselves pretty much in charge of the show. I note all this to point out to those, like me, who only knew them on TV, that they were already very well known all over the country before The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was ever conceived.
In the late 40s it occurred to them, or to someone else in the business, that they should do a show that was about them as a family, so they could include the boys and be with them and more or less exploit the fact that they were this All American post-war family. So began the program, as a regular radio show, written, directed, and produced by none other than Ozzie himself, with some help from his younger brother Don. When radio shows began to give way to TV in the early 50s, Ozzie and Harriet decided to do the show on television, but they didn't stop one and start the other. Oh no. For about two years they did BOTH the radio and TV versions of the show at the same time, with, of course, different writing and production and studios for each. As if this weren't enough, during the summer hiatus (then only 13 weeks off in the summer, with about 39 shows a year being produced), they toured the country in summer stock productions of popular musicals and stage comedies. I mean, damn! And lest you think they neglected the boys with all this work, no, not at all. They traveled with nannies and relatives and attended ball games at Hollywood High and all the shit that model parents are supposed to do.
Aside from hyping and presenting a perhaps rosier-than-life picture of the Nelson family, my real purpose in all this has been to tell you how I arrived at the answer to the puzzle that nearly all Ozzie and Harriet viewers have had over the years, namely, what the hell did Ozzie actually do for a living, and why did he always seem to be loafing around the house and taking naps, no matter what day it was? When confronted with this question, Ozzie would generally evade it, and say that he wanted to have the show seem as if it were taking place on the weekend, so that the audience would be able to relate to him and the family better. But this wasn't always the case. The show often took place during the week. So Ozzie would say, if really pressed, that his character was a lawyer. But even this seems far-fetched, because if he was indeed a lawyer, he worked only part time, if that. Many was the afternoon when he'd wander home in the middle of the day, dressed in a sport coat and tie, but not looking anything like a working attorney. Indeed, he had a neighbor, Darby, who was a lawyer, and who dressed the part.
Anyway, I think I finally figured out the key to Ozzie's indolence on the show. I believe he was acting out a fantasy--that of a guy who had nothing much to do, and plenty of time in which to do it. Because the reality is that Ozzie Nelson, and for that matter Harriet, were tireless workaholics, probably with barely a moment to spare between acting, writing, producing, rehearsing, performing, promoting, and parenting. They were Energizer bunnies on steroids, day after day and year after year. Their idea of relaxation was what most of us would consider vigorous activity. There are people like that, I know. I'm just not one of them.
So if you're creating a fantasy alternative television life for yourself amid all that frenzy, why not have your protagonist just kick back, put his feet up, and relax, occasionally doing a light chore or chatting with his next door neighbor, even if it takes you 12-16 hours a day to create this illusory character? Ozzie did this for 435 episodes over fourteen years, from 1952-66, still a record for the most sitcom episodes ever produced. This guy's life was cut short by cancer at 69, but he lived at least two lifetimes during that span--Eagle Scout, school athlete, law student, band leader, actor, etc. etc. etc. It's exhausting just to think about. So when you watch the show, if you do, just remember that Ozzie Nelson on screen was, as the cowboy said of the Dude in The Big Lebowski, "taking 'er easy for all us sinners."
I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that.
