Rumors. Lies. Faulty memories. Take your choice. They are all a cause of false statements and incorrect assumptions about our favorite classic TV characters. There are so many you can choose from too, especially in regard to Leave it to Beaver and its many actors.
Jerry Mathers, the actor who played Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver was killed in Viet Nam. Not true. Who knows how that rumor was started? Hugh Beaumont, the actor who played one of the most amazing father figures on TV, Ward Cleaver, was a Methodist pastor. Well, that one was true. What about Ken Osmond, the amazing actor who portrayed America’s preeminent bad boy Eddie Haskell? Yes, he was the subject of a few different rumors. The most amazing was that Ken Osmond was a porn star. But, then there was that one that Ken Osmond went on after the show ended to become one of America’s most well known rock stars of the 1970s, Alice Cooper. Then there are all those rumors about Larry Mondello (Rusty Stevens). No, he is not an insurance salesman (wait, that one may have been true once) and his family didn’t move back east, causing him to leave the show. Those aren’t true.
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But here’s a new tidbit which could soon become a rumor if someone doesn’t nip it in the bud right now. The actor who played Beaver’s friend Richard Rickover is the modern day director Rich Correll. Among his many directorial jobs was that well known Disney comedy, Hannah Montana. Recently, I saw a comment on a Facebook page about Richard Correll and a question about his being friends with Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. Another comment mentioned that Richard Correll MAY have been scheduled to be at the Tate house on the night Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family. What a headline that would’ve been…. “Leave it to Beaver Actor Murdered with Actress Sharon Tate.”
This whole thought could be chalked up to a faulty memory as it is derived from the reading of an article in Town & Country Magazine over a year previous (heck, I can’t remember what I had for breakfast some days). That article mentioned that Richard Correll was one of the people who saw the Manson Family after they left the murder scene. Correll had been at the Harold Lloyd house as he had been visiting Lloyd’s granddaughter who he was dating at the time.
“As usual, it was about 3:30 in the morning when I left. Everything was so quiet at that hour. I was about to turn right onto Benedict Canyon when I heard and then saw a car driven by a man with long hair, what looked like another man in the passenger seat, and a couple of young women in the back. Their windows were down, music was blaring, and they were carrying on so loudly I thought they must be drunk college kids. They were no more than 10 feet in front of me.”
He figured out later, after watching the TV news reports about the murders, that he had seen the murderers.
There you have it… straight from Richard Rickover’s mouth. He wasn’t friends with actress Sharon Tate or director/producer Roman Polanski, but he was in their neighborhood and saw her murderers as they made their way back home.
