"The First Beverly Hillbilly" Semi-Review

A microcosm of America's developmental trajectory?

I’ve had this book—The First Beverly Hillbilly: The Untold Story of the Creator of Rural TV Comedy—on my shelf since September or October 2019. I visited my parents in New Jersey that September and a couple of nights we watched The Beverly Hillbillies, which was on one of the streaming services they had.

I’d never seen it and found it amusing, and I either was vaguely aware, or my dad mentioned, that it was canceled along with a bunch of other shows in the “rural purge” in 1971, when a bunch of rural/country-themed shows were canceled. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which began right around the time of the rural purge, was the sort of thing that replaced those old shows: a more modern, sophisticated show and set of themes that spoke to younger urban and suburban audiences. That’s the rough story, anyway.

The book, which I’ll note a bit from, doesn’t really cover any of that—the final chapter addresses the cancelation of The Beverly Hillbillies (the author says the new generation of executives saw the Henning shows as “cornpone trash”). Huh. So we probably were starting to lose touch with the old rural-urban thing. This is maybe the final break with the past. but it’s mostly a biography of Paul Henning, the creator of the show, along with Green Acres and Petticoat Junction.

The book is by Ruth Henning, Paul’s wife, and it’s an old manuscript from the 1990s that was stored away in a library and then found and published by a library publishing arm in 2017. It’s a neat idea, a public library being involved in publishing works of local history and such. The book is kind of rough and like a lot of amateur biographies/histories is very much “This happened, then this happened, 20 years later this also happened but anyway at the time this happened….”

She writes early in the book that by some measures The Beverly Hillbillies was the most successful sitcom of all time (as of some time in the 1990s, but that might still be true given the fragmentation of entertainment and media). And yet, she says, he never got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, never won an award, and never had a book written about. She emphasizes that nobody ever wrote a book about the creator of the most successful sitcom of all time.

That’s interesting, and it kind of lines up with my interest in the timing of these show cancellations. Years ago I wrote a piece kind of wondering aloud when you could say the United States became a developed country. By most measures this probably happened some time in the mid-late 1800s, but I always found it fascinating how long it took for the last vestiges of “undeveloped-ness” to disappear. For example, rural electrification is not generally cited as having been absolutely complete until around 1970.

So the hypothesis I had in my head was that the “rural purge” marked the point in time when a critical mass of Americans no longer really identified with farm or country life, and that that point, 1970-ish, was sort of the long tail of the United States’ ascension to developed-country status.

I’m not sure that’s really correct—the canceled shows were still popular, if not quite as popular as when they began—but it’s interesting to consider. Certainly, today many fewer people would have actual experience with farmers, hillbillies, or rural life. (A great deal of what we now call “rural life” is exurban, anyway, or self-conscious in a manner that it wasn’t in the 1960s or 1970s or certainly before that.) So that’s the background of wanting to read about these shows and their creator.

There’s a lot of fascinating history in this book, even if it’s presented a bit more like trivia. Ruth Henning writes, for example, that radio was full of creativity and talent. Radio is “old-fashioned” now, but of course it was full of talent back then; that was the primary, mainstream home entertainment medium. I like to use this phrase, “the past was so old-fashioned looking,” to point out how history distorts our view of what these things looked and felt like at the time they were contemporary.

She also notes that Hollywood looked and felt like a quiet small town back then. Her description of Hollywood life is glamorous but also a bit Wild West. There’s this anecdote she tells where she and Paul were staying in a wealthy producer’s house while he was away—he just let them have it for a month or something—and it was stocked with caviar and champagne. At that time a friend of theirs from Missouri came to visit, and they wanted him to think they’d made it big. So they had a friend dress up in a servant’s outfit they found in the producer’s house, and had him serve everyone the caviar and champagne.

It’s a funny story, but it also feels like something that happened in the past. It took me a second to realize why, exactly, but it’s