The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which was on CBS from 1959 to 1963 was one of my all-time favorite situation comedies — and as recent viewings have shown, one that holds up pretty well decades later. It had sharp writing with lots of clever, rapid-fire dialogue. A lot of actors couldn't have handled it but a lot of actors aren't Dwayne Hickman. He was, like Silvers as Bilko or Gleason as Kramden, perfect for the role.
Sadly, he just died at the age of 87. The cause is given as complications related to Parkinson's disease. I'd heard he was battling the disease for some time but it still comes as a bit of a shock. I first met him in 1978 and to partially quote an earlier post on this blog…
My then-employer Jimmie Komack got the job of producing Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis?, which was a pilot intended to revive the old series. The show's creator, Max Shulman, had written a very funny script in tandem with Eric Cohen and on the strength of it, most of the old cast committed.
I had nothing to do with the pilot other than to be around and watch in horror as Komack decided he was going to "reinvent" the show, and that he was eminently qualified to do this because he had never been a fan of the old series. He got rid of Shulman and that script, commissioned a new one that contained none of the old charm, and produced a revamp that absolutely no one liked. Hickman was rightly furious that Dobie had been devalued.
The revival went nowhere, nor did a later attempt which Komack had nothing to do with. But I got to meet Dwayne and to commiserate with him. He seemed like a nice, smart guy who knew more about doing a comedy series than anyone else on the premises. The next time I met him, he was putting that end of his skill set to work as a development executive in the comedy department at CBS. I worked on a pilot (unrelated to Dobie) that he and everyone in his division loved.
We came as close to taping the thing as you can get — it was even cast — when folks above his tier killed the whole thing. Dwayne was nice enough to call me — and he really didn't have to do this — and tell me that he'd fought for it and that its demise was not because of the writing. Basically, the exec at CBS who had to give the go-ahead to make the pilot saw who the producer was and killed the project without ever reading the script. That's not the only time I've heard of that happening.
The last few times I saw Dwayne, he was signing pictures and his very-good autobiography at autograph shows. He liked that I could endorse his account of what had happened with that '78 pilot, which he was still sore about. In spite of that, he was a classy, clever guy. That has not been true of everyone I admired on TV and then met in real life. But it was true of Dwayne Hickman.