A Man Named Jed

Did I ever tell you the story of a man named Jed Clampett?  Jed was dirt poor, living in the hills of Arkansas.  He had no education and no job, but he had a little piece of swampy bottomland left to him by his father.  Jed always wanted to drain the swamp so he could farm his little piece of land, but he never had the wherewithal to do it.  

Sometimes, when what little money he had ran out, the only way for Jed to feed his family was by hunting.  Deer, squirrel, boar, it didn’t matter.  He’d kill it, and they’d eat for a few days before he had to hunt again.  

One day, Jed was hunting a boar when he noticed a big black spot bubbling up in the swamp water on his land.  Not recognizing this ooze, Jed collected a bit of it in a bottle and brought it to the county extension agent, Frank Kimball, to examine.  Kimball didn’t recognize it either, so he sent it off to the Arkansas State Geologist.  

A few days later, a man named Brewster came to see Jed.  Brewster worked for a large oil exploration company out of California, and he had great news.  What bubbled up from the swamp on Jed Clampett’s land was West Texas Crude, and if Jed allowed his geologist to run some tests, he’d like to buy that swamp land.  

Jed was against the idea, but his cousin, Pearl, encouraged it.  Pearl had been a widow for many years, and her opportunities were running low and this Mr. Brewster was single, so she talked Jed into letting him and his geologist friends have a look.  Within a few days, Brewster made Clampett an offer on the land.  He was willing to pay twenty-five million dollars in cash for a spot of land Jed and everybody in the county thought was worthless.  At first, Jed was dubious about the deal because he wasn’t entirely sure how much a million was, but Cousin Pearl again talked him into it.  

Suddenly richer than anyone ever imagined, Pearl convinced Jed that he should move away from their mountain holler.  He should go where rich folks go to expand the horizons for his twenty-one-year-old daughter and take Pearl’s twenty-year-old son with him.  Pearl’s son, Jethro, exceeded every possible educational opportunity in the entire county when he passed the sixth grade, and Pearl worried the holler couldn’t keep up with his vast potential at chiperhing and such.   

Brewster set Jed up with an account at the Beverly Hills Commerce Bank with Milburn Drysdale as his banker.  Drysdale found a house where their now largest depositor could live on the same street as his own house.  Jed, his daughter Ellie, Jethro, and Jed’s mother-in-law, Daisy, whom everyone called Granny, loaded up Jethro’s Oldsmobile Model 37 truck and drove from Arkansas to Beverly Hills.

That part of the story everybody knows.  These hillbillies trying to fit in Beverly Hills were the subject of constant gossip back in the early sixties.  Some of the neighbors hated them, but in some circles, they were celebrated for their unique views on life.  The world moved on, though, and Jed and his peculiar kin were soon forgotten.  I didn’t forget them, though.  Jed liked me, even though none of my business ideas ever panned out.  I was the one who brokered the deal for Jed to buy Mammoth Studios, which looked like a disaster at first, but eventually made a fair amount of money when we sold it to Universal so they could expand their theme park.

I think, at first, there was some thought that I’d be a suitor for Ellie May.  Don’t get me wrong, Ellie was one of the most beautiful women I ever saw.  Tall and strong, she was incredibly athletic.  Someone taught her how to play tennis once, and she spent the next twenty years beating all the men at the Beverly Hills Tennis Center.  One, she wore a silver lame dress to a studio function, and my friend Bolt Upright coined the phrase “Arkansas Titanium Torpedos” with reference to her bosom.  His real name was Barry Taylor, but nobody named Barry was going to make it as an actor in the sixties, so he changed it to Bolt.

Ellie was beautiful, and she had a heart of gold, especially when it came to animals.  After her father died, Ellie began opening animal shelters all over southern California, and she started a television campaign for people to spay and neuter their pets.  Ellie would have been the perfect woman, except for one thing.  Ellie was probably the dumbest person I ever met.  Her innocent, wide-eyed act wasn’t an act.  She lived with the mind of a twelve-year-old for the rest of her life.  

Her banker, Mr. Drysdale, had an assistant named Jane Hathaway, who was brilliant, financially and in every other way.  Although she was mostly a lesbian, Hathaway would sometimes drink herself into trying to seduce Jethro.  Hathaway took it as her life’s mission to take care of Ellie and Jethrow, advising them financially and helping them navigate the complexities of living in Southern California.  Ellie never married but spent the rest of her life living in the house her father bought when he moved to California, with Hathaway having her own suite of rooms.  

Jane Hathaway devoted her life to protecting Ellie from suitors with an eye on her father’s money.  She was successful too, but there are ways to rob a girl of her treasures without touching her bank account.  A young Freddie De Cordova, who went on to become the mastermind of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, had a contract to produce a picture starring a certain blue-eyed singer from Mississippi who was as famous for his hips as he was for his songs.  With filming set in Hollywood and New Orleans, De Cordova rented space at Clampett’s Mammoth studio to shoot the riverboat scenes in his picture, Frankie and Johnny.  

Visiting the set one day, everyone was only too happy to introduce Ellie to the movie’s young star, Elvis Presley.  The two Southerners stuck up a fast friendship and spent many hours talking in Presley’s trailer.  Ellie had never really been taken with a man before, but she swooned for Elvis.  For Presley, Ellie was just one of many, though, and soon the stars fell from her eyes.  Heartbroken, Ellie moved back to Arkansas by herself for almost a year before returning to California.

Ellie had little interest in the company of men after this.  She died childless but the loving benefactor of thousands of stray dogs and cats in California and Arkansas.  Her cousin Jethro would take many wives, but Ellie May decided she’d seen enough of menfolk.

Daisy, whom everybody called Granny, was in her seventies when she moved to California.  Of the entire family, Granny would be the least changed by the move.  In times of need, Granny knew how to distill liquor from corn and got quite good at it.  The family didn’t really understand the purpose of a swimming pool when they moved in.  Ellie kept trying to fish in it.  Eventually, she figured out it was for swimming only.  Granny took over the pool house, and that was where she kept her still.  Making your own whiskey was just as illegal in California as it was in Arkansas, but in California, Granny’s tonic developed quite a reputation for those wanting to try something a little different.  Granny became les causes célèbres, and everyone who wanted to test their limits loved her tonic.  Granny loved music and died on a trip to New York to see the musical Pippin with Ben Vareen.  She had a heart attack in the audience.  Out of her mountain clothes, everybody said she looked no older than sixty-five.  

The intellectual prowess that Jethro’s mother believed he had turned out to be fairly real.  Jethro was a brilliant businessperson.  Taken with the movies, Jethro became the executive producer for several successful films, including a romantic version of the popular song “Ode To Billy Joe,” which he shot in Mississippi.  Jethro loved Los Vegas.  With his allowance from Uncle Jed, Jethro bought an Alpha Romero and spent many afternoons driving out into the desert headed for Vegas.  

Jethro eventually got his hands on an interest in a smaller casino.  Noting how successful casino buffets were, Jethro had the idea of a buffet with a country theme that served grits and greens, chicken and dumplings, biscuits and gravy, and every other country delicacy he could think of, and he called it “Granny’s Kitchen.”  Granny’s Kitchen was so successful he began branching out and building restaurants all over the South East.  They were designed after Sam Drucker’s store back home and had cracker barrels and checkerboards to try and give suburbanites the feeling of living in the country.

Jethro’s mother, Pearl, borrowed a little money from Jed and bought the old Shady Rest Hotel back home.  An old boarding house next to a narrow gauge railroad, the hotel had seen better days.  Pearl died shortly after, but Jethro’s sister, Jethrine, had a head for business.  Jethrine had the idea she could sell weekends at an authentic country hotel, with home-cooked meals to people leading the accelerated lives of the sixties and seventies.   

Oliver and Lisa Douglass decided they were sick of living in Manhattan (or at least he was) and purchased a farm not far from the Shady Rest Hotel.  Douglass wasn’t much of a farmer, but he was a hell of a lawyer, and clients sought him out, even living in the country.  His wife Lisa maintained social ties in Manhattan, and her connections soon translated into guests for the Shady Rest as weekends in Hooterville became a popular vacation for the metropolitan set.

Jed Clampett had almost no business acumen.  Much to the chagrin of his banker, Milburn Drysdale, Clampett agreed to meet with anyone looking for investors.  Clampet invested his money based on how much he liked the people he was doing business with, not the prospects of their venture.  Normally, a man like this would soon be left without a penny, but the gods of finance smiled on Jed Clampet, and nearly everything he invested in paid off, even if it took a while.  By 1978, Jed’s original twenty-five million dollar fortune was worth nearly sixty.  

Around 1968, Jed’s young cousin Roy came to see him with an idea for Jed to invest in a television program.  Roy’s idea was a show similar to the Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In, but to replace the liberal politics with country music and replace the psychedelic design theme with a barnyard.   Jed didn’t know much about business or television, but he knew an awful lot about country music, so Roy’s idea fascinated him.  The show didn’t have a name yet, but most of their ideas about barn-this or country-that had all been used by radio programs.  When Jed saw design sketches for a cartoon mascot of a mule in a straw hat, he suggested they might name the show after the sound a mule makes.  Hee Haw ran for a record twenty-five seasons.  If Jed weren’t already a millionaire, he would be from this investment alone.   Before Hee Haw, Cousin Roy made a living playing “anything with strings,” including guitars, bass guitars, banjos, and fiddles. He could play classical as well as country, and for twenty-five years, Roy Clark was the host of Hee Haw, thanks to his cousin Jed.

The legend of the Hillbillies of Beverly Hills lived on well into the twenty-first century.  Jethro, Jethrine, and Ellie May all remained childless, so their vast fortunes were left to charities.  Animal shelters for Ellie May and scholarships for wayward girls trying to get into modeling schools for Jethro. Their palatial home, considered gaudy and ostentatious, even by Beverly Hills standards, remained on the market for many years and was eventually purchased by a family of Arabs who also found oil on land most considered worthless.

In the end, Jethro was all that was left.  Living in the penthouse apartment of his Los Vegas casino, you can still find him driving around the desert in an imported convertible, looking for pretty girls or a good meal.