#357 Beyond Leave It to Beaver: Stephen Talbot’s Journey Acting and Journalism

Jeff Dwoskin 0:00

Alright, everyone. I'm excited to introduce my next guest, TV documentary producer, writer for frontline reporter. So much, so much the but before becoming a journalist, a documentary producer, my guest was a television child actor the late 50s and 60s, best known for his role on Leave It to Beaver. Gilbert Bates Bay BFF of Theodore the beaver. Cleaver, I'm so excited to welcome to the show. Steven Talbot, what's up? Steve, I'm going to go back and forth on that. I'm going to

Stephen Talbot 0:39

you call me whatever you want, Jeff. I answer to a lot of names. But Hi, yeah, from San Francisco, live and in color.

Jeff Dwoskin 0:47

Awesome, awesome. So, oh, so I know Leave It to Beaver. It's like, what people would go. Oh, hey, Steven Gilbert on Leave It to Beaver. I happen to be a Twilight Zone fanatic, like, I love the Twilight Zone. And so I was talking to Johnny Iman, and he was one of the CO stars with you in the fugitive. And after I had him on the show, he's like you should talk to Steve and Talbot, he goes, I admire everything that he has done since becoming an actor, and he would make a great interview. E so I guess he says, Hello. Well, that's

Stephen Talbot 1:25

very nice of him to say that look like you. I am a hardcore Twilight Zone fan. It was my favorite show when I was a kid. That's the show I most wanted to watch. So it was a total thrill for me to be in two episodes of The Twilight Zone, and I got to meet a true hero of mine, Rod Serling, the creator of the series, the writer, and he was every bit as impressive in person as he was on screen, very serious guy, very moralistic man, and a terrific producer and writer. So it was an honor I felt to be on that show. I did two episodes. One was outdoors, the one with John that he mentioned the fugitive, which was fun, and that's when I met Serling. We filmed that in a park in LA on a very, very hot day, I remember with the light reflectors in our eyes. And then I did one episode with Dean Jagger as the star of an episode in which a man went back in time and his old radio and that one was the one season where Twilight Zone was shot on video. And we did that at the CBS Studios in Los Angeles, off of Fairfax and Dean Jagger was a terrific actor, a really serious, fine actor. I did several TV shows with him, including an episode of a series called Mr. Novak, in which he played a high school principal. But Dean Jagger was a really impressive actor. I was always, it's always an honor to work with him. So the Twilight Zone, I loved the series, and it was a highlight of my young career as an actor to be on the show.

Jeff Dwoskin 3:12

So All right, so the episode you're talking about there is static, where you were, the boy,

Stephen Talbot 3:19

yes. The boy, as I say, Jeff, I answer to a lot of names.

Jeff Dwoskin 3:27

That was literally your name on the show. Was the boy. What was it like experiencing this wild as a fan before I experienced it after? You know, I like where I would watch it all the time, just over and over again, I bought the, I have my, I have a half, half my quarter of one of my shelves right now is Twilight Zone toys, the all the DVDs. Little thing would do so like I, I've just always been obsessed with that storytelling. I think it's like the best storytelling ever. I always thought, thought it was fascinating too. They were never able to really replicate it. Even by calling other things the Twilight Zone. They were never able to really make it that. Again,

Stephen Talbot 4:10

I completely agree with you. It was unique at the time, and as a kid, you know, 910, 11 years old, the same here as I was doing. Leave It to Beaver and acting and lots of other shows. I was an avid TV viewer. I had my favorite TV shows and the Twilight Zone I really liked because it was, first of all, it was scary. Secondly, it was serious. You felt like kind of a grown up watching I did as a kid, watching the Twilight Zone, like, Oh, these are serious issues. And it was incredibly well written. And the stories were like, they were like, oh, Henry short stories with twists at the end. There was a strong element, of course, of science fiction, but they were also like, moral lessons. There was one I'll never forget they left. Big imprints on me. It was one episode I'll never forget that I watched a guy who's a gambling addict, and he goes to Las Vegas, and he's deeper and deeper in trouble. And the final scene is a slot machine comes alive, and like a robot, comes into his room, and he backs up and backs up in horror and falls off the ledge to his death. And I thought, gambling, I'm not going to be a gambler. I'm not going to be a gambler. That's scary as hell. So that was one episode. And then there were shows like the monster. I don't have the title, Maple Street on Maple Maple Street on Maple Street, which was a brilliant episode in which you see an All American small town neighborhood, suburb. Everyone's getting along. It's a warm day. People are outdoors, playing, washing their car, and suddenly things begin to go wrong. And as each things, each thing goes wrong, people turn on each other, and by the end, they're killing each other. And the the final, final shot, the final scene, is the camera pulls back to a spaceship, and they're aliens in the spaceship saying, See, I told you we wouldn't have to invade the world. We can just do a few things, and these people will destroy themselves. So those kind of of moral lessons were, you know, he was a progressive thinker. He was a liberal thinker. He was a critic about social ills. And that all came through in the series, and as as one kid watching them, they've stuck with me all these years.

Jeff Dwoskin 6:54

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's amazing, like the ones that kind of just stick with you. And I mean, obviously the Burgess Meredith one with the books, it's like where he finally has time to read and then his glasses break. I mean, just the whole idea that you can change the story in a split second at the end, that kind of thing, I think, had the most impact on me, and the way I think about things, tell me more about Rod Serling, so what did you say to him? I mean, was it like, Hi?

Stephen Talbot 7:26

Yeah, okay, first of all, I'm like a 10 year old kid. But you know, my dad was an actor, and I grew up in Hollywood, and I knew what it was like to be on a TV set or a movie set. So that wasn't a shock. But, you know, here was this guy who was writing brilliantly, writing these scenes. And you know, later in high school and college, I was an English major. I loved reading novels. I loved reading short stories, and I admired writers. And later in my life, working for PBS, I've made half a dozen biographies of writers dash Hammett and Carlos Fuentes and Maxine Kingston and Ken Kesey. And I made those films, really because I honored those writers and for the ones who were alive, I wanted to meet them. So meeting Rod Serling, even as a kid, I knew enough to think, wow, this guy is brilliant. But you know, if you remember people who remember the original twilight zone, you know, he was, he had that 50s look of a very serious guy, you know, short hair, dark suit, thin, dark tie, and he looked right at the camera, and you know, he was not intimidating, but a little scary. You know, you knew you were going to enter this strange world with him, the Twilight Zone, you didn't know quite where you were going to go. So he was like that in person. He was like that in person. He was a very friendly gentleman, but it was like, whoa. This guy is brilliant and serious, and he in real life, he looks just like he does on TV.

Jeff Dwoskin 9:20

Yeah, there was something about his introductions and just the way he looked and sounded 100% where you're like, Oh, we're about to be because he would, sometimes he would interrupt the world and then take you into it, let you know what you just saw and what you're about to experience. And I think in some of the new ones, that was part of the hardest part to replicate was that Narrator style. It just, it was really hard to find someone who can do exactly what he did and how he did it. And it was, you know, exactly

Stephen Talbot 9:54

No, there was no Rod Serling left. And, you know, years, I'm also, I'm a big film. Lore. Fan of movies, and I'm a big fan of movies about prize fighters. And Rod Serling wrote a great one for television, Requiem for a heavyweight. And it's one of those, you know, break your heart, kind of films about, you know, how brutal and cruel boxing is, you know, he just, he, he wrote great TV during a golden age of serious TV,

Jeff Dwoskin 10:28

nothing better, like, I can still watch it. I mean, like the marathons everything, I can just sit down and it's just, it's incredible. I just, I love it. So I'm just, I'm excited that you were on onto. Well, let me ask you a question with the Twilight Zone background. And I know you stepped away and we're gonna, we'll go back and flip around in the timeline, but like the leave, Leave It to Beaver and the Twilight Zone, right? I know you kind of like, after acting, you kind of like, all right, you know, I'm putting Gilbert aside because you wanted to focus on being a journalist, and that makes perfect sense. But nowadays, do you ever, do you ever do the comic cons? Do you ever like, go and and meet the fans and sign because you got quite a resume? It's, you know, people of very specific fan bases that would probably love

Stephen Talbot 11:21

I've never done that, Jeff, I've never done that. And you know, maybe now that I'm 75 what the hell I might might, I might do some I keep getting invited by various friends of mine to come along with them. John Provost, from Lassie, I did three episodes of Lassie. He does those. Jerry Mathers, Richard Carell, who is another one of beaver's buddies on Leave It to Beaver. So yeah, you know, here's the deal with me. In a nutshell, I grew up in an acting family. I wanted to act because I saw my father making TV shows and doing theater backstage, so it looked like fun to me, and I begged and badgered my parents to let me act, and they were very reluctant. My My mom had been a professional singer, my dad's whole life was as an actor, and they saw that acting as a kid could be tough for the kid, especially in your in your life overall. So they were very reluctant to let me act as a kid. They didn't want me to. They said, when you're an adult, be our guest. It's terrific. It's a lot of fun. It's it's not the most stable profession. You know, there are a lot of risks. But if you want to be an actor as an adult, great, but don't do it as a kid. Well, I spent too much with my dad, time with my dad on TV sets to not want to do it. So finally, I begged and harassed them, and they let me, and once, I started acting, and one role led to another very quickly. So I was a really busy kid actor. I mean, in four or five years, I ended up in like, well over 50 episodes of Leave It to Beaver, and I probably did another 50 other TV shows. Perry Mason, Lassie, lawman, sugar foot, Wanted Dead or Alive, whatever was on TV at the time. And I also did one movie, funny movie with Dick Clark and Tuesday Weld, a teenage High School confidential kind of movie called because they're young. And the biggest thing I ever did, the hardest, the most challenging, was a big play in the La Jolla Playhouse in Southern California, dark at the top of the stairs with Marjorie Lord. I was the co star of that very serious play. She had been the wife on the Danny Thomas show. So I was a busy, really active kid, and in a way, when the Leave It to Beaver series ended. I was 14 years old, and it was getting tougher to take time off from regular school because my parents had insisted that I always be in a regular school, that I would never be in a studio school. I would never be under contract to somebody where I would have to show up all the time. They wanted to be a me, a normal kid with a regular education. They were big believers in education, so that was very wise in retrospect. I'm glad they did that. But when I hit high school, I had been a good student, and it was kind of easy to drop out of school for a few days and go shoot a beaver episode and then come back. By the time I was in the eighth grade wrestling with algebra, I thought, hey, you know, this isn't so easy to be working all the time and in school. Plus, I wanted to be in school. I wanted to make friends in school, and I wanted to play sports. Six and one time. The last show I ever did was a Lucy show, Lucille Ball. It's a live on tape show, and as a result of doing that show, I missed a JV football game, and my coach took me aside afterwards and said, Look, you know, I know you work in TV, but you're a starter on the JV football team. We need you. You gotta decide you can play football, or are you going to act and at that stage, age 14, it was the easiest decision I ever made in my life. I said, I want to play football, and I did. So my parents said, Fine. Good choice. My agent kind of freaked out. Said, Wait a minute, you're giving up a lot of money here. Fortunately, my parents didn't need the money. My dad was a working actor. We were an upper middle class family. They didn't rely on my income, and so I ended up getting seriously into high school, loving it, and at that stage, I did plays in high school, I did the high school plays, which was fun, but that was it. I didn't burn out on acting. I just wanted something different, and I ended up as becoming a documentary filmmaker and a journalist.

Jeff Dwoskin 16:19

Amazing. Let's Okay, let's unpack some of that. Let's go back. Okay, so you've grown up your father, Lyle Talbot, huge actor in the was it 30s, 40s, 50s? I mean, it was just like I did find some trivia on him, the one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, a founding member, and then also the very first person to play Commissioner, Gordon and Lex Luthor. Another reason you should hit these comic cons, you sell those eight by zones. That's kind of a big deal. That's That's some good trivia, but I had heard some of those before. I'd heard you talking about some of those. But the one that I found that I'm like, Oh, this is a I really like this piece of trivia. The may be the only actor to have starred in both leading roles of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple.

Stephen Talbot 17:19

Yeah, that's how versatile an actor my dad was, so he played both Felix and Oscar in different national touring companies of the odd couple. What happened with my dad is my dad had started in the stage way back right out of high school in the Midwest, and he came to Hollywood after becoming a star in the theater and traveling 10 shows and theaters in the Midwest in the 20s. He came to Hollywood in the early 30s and was signed under contract by Warner Brothers because sound had been invented in pictures, and they needed actors who could talk, and they were recruiting theatrical actors all over the country, and so my dad came. He was a very good looking guy, and he hit Warner Brothers just when they were a big pioneer of sound pictures, and they started making a ton of gangster movies. So my dad was in all these Warner Brothers films with Betty Davis and Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy. And he played a lot of gangsters, but she was never He said he always wanted to do light comedy. He wanted to be a romantic lead in light comedy, but he was always playing the gangster in a tuxedo who ran the nightclub and was robbing banks with Barbara Stanwyck. So I love those movies as a as a kid, when I discovered them, I thought, Oh, my God, Dad, you were in these movies. Yeah, this is fantastic. So he was, he was a kind of a movie star in the 30s, a matinee idol. And then as time went on, you know, he got older, he put on weight for a while. He had a kind of drinking problem, and he was in a lot of character roles. By the time I came along, he married my mother. It was like his fifth marriage, but it was the one that stuck. She was a lot younger than he was. They ended up having four kids together and being a very suburban la couple, tremendously in love with each other. For she ended up, even though she was much younger, dying younger than he. But for 40 years they were married, and when I was a kid and with my siblings. There were four of us. He became a TV sitcom star. So he co star. So he was on the Bob Cummings show as Bob Cummings Air Force buddy, and then he was Ozzie Nelson's buddy on the Ozzie and Harriet show for a decade. And so he did all these TV shows, whatever was on. TV. And in those days, what actors would do is all those TV shows did not shoot in the summer. So he would hit the road in summer stock with people from those TV shows, and they were billed as, you know, as seen on TV, Lyle Talbot and so and so. Hit the road. He did plays with Ozzy, did plays with Bob Cummings, and we as a family would hit the road. He took us all along in the family station wagon. And that's how I saw the country. That's how I came to Traverse City, Michigan for the first time, and Chicago and Boston and all, I saw the whole country every summer traveling with him. So he was that kind of stage actor, and so he went his his career came full circle. He went back to the to the theater

Jeff Dwoskin 20:51

good old Traverse City, Michigan. Yes, let's go Pure Michigan there. Now we get him as a sponsor. So it was funny when you were saying, you know, sometimes you say something, not you, but just anyone, and, like, the weight of it doesn't hit you until, like, a second later, like you're like, they were calling your father because they have this new thing called sound, right, hey, right. Isn't that crazy? Like, the thing about hey, Lyle, we want to get you into the movies. We got this new thing. It's called Sound what? What's that? You know? How you can hear me right now. We're going to apply that to the silver screen. You know, we want you to be a part of it.

Stephen Talbot 21:34

Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's how crazy it was. And of course, you know, the Warner Brothers, there were a bunch of brothers, and one of the brothers was totally into sound, and the other brother was going, no one wants to hear actors talk. Chris can ever want that

Jeff Dwoskin 21:53

is so funny. I mean, it's so funny just to think about, like, the, you know, when they go through the transitions. I mean, we're going through transition right now, right with AI and stuff like that. There's always something that in 20 years, we'll look back and it had been played out, but it's like, yeah, at one point there wasn't even color.

Stephen Talbot 22:10

Well, absolutely. And you know what revived my dad was once in a movie with Mary Astor, you know, from the Maltese Falcon. They did a couple of pictures together. It was called trapped by television. And it was kind of a sci fi film about this new thing, this is in the 1930s about this weird thing called television. And they had this monstrous camera Australia. And if you got in front of that TV, you could be trapped. You could be it was like a Twilight Zone. He could be sucked into this camera. Forget the exact plot. But Au contraire with my dad, television saved and revived my dad's career, when he had gone through his movie career and gone through these serials like Batman and and Superman, where he did quite a good job as Lex Luthor, he was pretty amazing. They put a bald plate on his head. Played a very serious mad scientist and Lex Luthor, but he'd gone through all that phase, and his career was a bit of a low point. And suddenly TV is invented. TV hits big, and a lot of actors in the movies were, oh, no, TV is beneath us. We're not going to go on TV. I'm talking the 50s, the early 50s, but my dad said, fantastic, I'm working and he would do the Gero George Burns and Gracie Allen show. I mean, all these early kind of, you know, TV shows, and he, he did very well thanks to television. Were

Jeff Dwoskin 23:47

you able to meet George Burns? That would be a good one to me. I

Stephen Talbot 23:50

did once Meet George Burns. I'll tell you a very funny thing George Burns, in addition to being a hysterical comedian and quite a guy, he loved to smoke cigars, and so did my dad. My dad, I don't remember my dad without him smoking a cigar or smoking a pipe. He never smoked cigarettes, and he was once up to be the spokesperson for a major cigarette company. They were all set to sign him. It would have been a lot of money, although maybe hard to live with, if you've been the spokesperson for cigarettes, but he he could not inhale a cigarette. He literally could not inhale. So he loved cigars, he loved pipes, but he didn't get the cigarette deal because he couldn't inhale their cigarette and blow it out, the smoke out through his nose, but he liked to smoke cigars with George Burns. And George Burns owned a studio, General Services studio, little boutique studio in downtown Hollywood, right in the heart of actual Hollywood. And George Burns did his show there, and Bob coming. Did his show there. And later, Ozzie and Harriet did their show there. So my dad was a regular at that studio when we lived in Studio City, California, and he would get up in the morning and drive the station wagon down to Hollywood and go on that set and do one of those shows, one of those three shows over and over and over again. And later, Francis Ford Coppola bought that studio when he was very flush with money from the Godfather films. And he made quite a few films there, and they did not those films did not do very well at the box office, he went bankrupt, and he had to sell that studio. But for a while, what George Burns had had as his studio was Francis Ford Coppola's studio. And I have a favorite photo, one of my favorite of the 1000s of photos of my dad working in Hollywood and movies so forth. There's a great photo of George Burns, Bob Cummings and my dad all laughing, arms around each other's shoulders. George Burns smoking the big cigar.

Jeff Dwoskin 26:13

That's awesome. I love that. I love it. Couple other things. So you mentioned that you were in school while and then you would dug out, do a show here, Leave It to Beaver there. What was it like being in school with the other kids? Are they? Like, like, they calling you Gilbert, like, like, what? What was it like for them to hang out with a budding TV star?

Stephen Talbot 26:39

I, my my parents were Episcopalians, and they sent me. I went to public elementary school for first three or four years, and then they put me in an Episcopalian Grammar School in Hollywood. It's called Campbell Hall, and the high school I went to was an Episcopalian prep school that was right across the street from my family's house, which is one of the main reasons I went there. But that was a very elite school. My family was comfortably upper middle class, and I was probably the poorest kid in that school, and all the big politicians in LA sent their sons. There was an all boys school. It's called Harvard Boys School, and it was also a military school. So I wore a military uniform. Believe it or not, Gilbert ended up in a military uniform my whole high school career. But you know, Gregory Peck's three sons went there. Jonathan Winters, sons went there. Alan lads, son went there. It was filled with the Hollywood elite sons. Eric Von schroheim, the director and actor his his grandson was in my class. I mean, everybody was somebody, and if they weren't actors, sons or producers or directors sons. They were the sons of the mayor Ronald Reagan sent his son there. Ron Reagan, Jr, Nixon's top aide, HR Haldeman, son was there when I was a kid. So it's filled. Was a very Republican school at the time, pretty conservative. It was filled with those people. So that's a long way around, Jeff to answer your question, which is, what was it like dealing with other kids? In a way, those kind of kids could have cared less. Their their dads were in Hollywood. Their dads were bigger stars. They were living in the shadows of their parents. Sometimes that was very difficult for them. Sometimes they were very proud of the fact. But it wasn't an issue. It wasn't an issue. One kid was one of my very best friends, rich Baskin, whose dad founded Baskin Robbins ice cream. Rich is a big guy. We played football together. We went to college together. And Rich wanted to be a star. He wanted to be a singer and star, and he did some acting. Eventually, he teased me unmercifully. He loved nothing more than pointing out to any group we were in that I was Gilbert on Leave It to Beaver and trying to get a rise out of me so rich, you know? And here's what happened when I was a kid, only in the last year or two of Leave It to Beaver. Did I get recognized on the streets because I was like a guest star in so many shows people don't remember you from that maybe, oh, you want Perry Mason last week. Maybe that happened. So it was not and Leave It to Beaver. Was not in reruns. It had gone off the air when I was in high school. Cool. So mercifully, no one bugged me about that at all. I hit college on the east coast in the late 60s. I think I'm a cool guy now, hanging out with intellectuals, you know, counter culture people very got very political. I got very involved in anti Vietnam War protests. I'm in college, much to my chagrin, leap into beaver goes into reruns. So I would go from my college to an all girls school, you know, trying to trying to get a date, you know, for a dance. I'd walk into the dorm room and everyone was watching Star Trek, or Leave It to Beaver re reruns, and suddenly Gilbert was like a thing again. So in college, I like, I mean, my hair got long, I grew a mustache, you know, I was a 60s kid. I don't think I looked like Bieber. I probably still like Gilbert, I still probably sounded a bit so the only time it really drove me nuts was when I was in college and trying to be a cool guy

Jeff Dwoskin 31:09

was Leave It to Beaver considered a square show. Or like, like, what did who was watching it when it was first on? I mean, you know, I mean, like before it became the classic that it became. You know, when it was,

Stephen Talbot 31:23

when it was no when it was first on, it was people like me. It was baby boomer kids. It was a baby boomer generation show. And it wasn't the most popular show on TV. But the one thing that everyone says about Leave It to Beaver, which is absolutely true, is it was the first TV sitcom that was told from the perspective of the kids. So this wasn't like, you know, life with father. This wasn't told from the adults point of view. This was seen from the perspective of white suburban kids, kind of on the loose, which was what it was like in the 50s. You know, you went to school, you came home, you were on your own until dinner time, and whatever you did, you know, you could get away with baby boomers watched it. Yeah, by the late 60s, as you know, I see the Beatles behind you, as you know the Beatles, and you know all the great music from San Francisco and Woodstock, and you know Monterey Pop and all you know the counterculture breaks out. The anti war movement gets very serious. There's a huge civil rights movement in the country, yeah, at that point, Leave It to Beaver. Is a square show. I'll tell you a true story, true story that burned into my memory. So I was very active in the anti war movement, and at one point, I was invited to go to a little New England style town hall meeting in Connecticut, kind of place where playwright Arthur Miller would have lived or Paul Newman. And it was in A E old New England church, whitewash church. And it was a panel of students, some draft resisters, some people who were about to go to jail because of their opposition to the war, and some black panthers who had come up from Newark, leather jacket shades, tough looking guys, and we're all on this panel. We're all giving our speeches about why we believe what we do very serious. Goes to questions. The first question from the audience, weren't you Gilbert, I'll leave it to Beaver. So and I'm mortified, and I look down the panel and one of the Panthers, the cool guy, the leather jacket the shades, slowly turns his head towards me, lowers his shades and takes a good look like that guy is Gilbert. So, yeah, those were the moments when I could have, you know, crawled under a rock. But, you know, you go through cycles in life. And the other big change became after sort of, you know, being an activist. The Vietnam War ends in 75 I became a serious television broadcast journalist, first of all, for the PBS station in San Francisco, KQED, and then in the 90s, I was a regular producer for the PBS series frontline, the best documentary series on TV. Still, that was serious business, so the last thing I wanted to be known as was a childhood actor, and when they did the beaver reunion series in the 80s, which was on Disney and Kay still the beaver, still the beaver, not my favorite show, but they asked me to be in it. And I was tempted, because I like those guys. I like Jerry math. Years I like Richard Carell, you know, Barbara Billingsley was wonderful. Tony Dow was a fantastic guy who I looked up to as especially as a kid. Got to know it as an adult a little more, I thought, Okay, well, that's very cool, but I literally was starting a career where I was on TV doing investigative reporting, and you couldn't be a serious journalist on television, and going back to be on TV, you turn your channel, and there's the same guy playing Gilbert on TV. It just was a non starter. You couldn't do it. And they reluctantly understood when I turned down that role, but I just, unlike all of those people, I was not an actor anymore. I was I was a television journalist and writer.

Jeff Dwoskin 35:50

I respect the what you did, and I think it makes sense in hindsight, like now. Steve Talbot, right now, do you wish maybe you'd just done the movie now, maybe not the new, Leave It to Beaver TV show that followed right after. But you're like, that would have been just a nice maybe I could have done it, you know, I mean, like or like, you think, all right, no, I made the right choice. Life panned out the way it was supposed to the

Stephen Talbot 36:19

latter. I made the right choice. I made the right choice. I'm glad that I have stayed in touch with those guys, and in recent years, a little more closely, especially with with Tony before he died, and with Jerry still. And I'm about to go see John Provost later this week. He lives in California, the kid who was the star of Lassie when I was in that show. So yeah, it's nice to have these connections. Look, I still I love movies, I admire good actors, I like great television. So I look at it as someone who grew up in Hollywood. And you know, I'm one of those people who watch Turner Classic Movies. And I'm like my parents in the old days, who would sit at home and watch a movie, and you'd just be getting into the film, and my mother would go, Wait a minute. Wasn't wasn't she married to so and so and blah, blah, blah, and then she got the divorce. And I'd go, excuse me, I'm trying to watch the movie here. You know, we're in a Humphrey Bogart thriller. You know, I don't want to know who directed it, and blah, blah, blah. Now I'm that guy who sits at my couch trying to interest my wife, who has no interest in these details about all the behind the scenes things in Hollywood. So I care about Hollywood. I'm into that, but I am very happy that I spent, you know, 40 years of my adult life, being a reporter and being engaged in the world and making serious documentaries.

Jeff Dwoskin 37:46

It's funny you say about the the reruns, because I can see that, you know. I mean, like, and it doesn't take a lot of episodes, you know, you think cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch was only in like, eight, you know. I mean, and like you were in almost, I'd say, what? 20 some percent of all, you know, 56 episodes. Some 20% the funny thing is, when I was looking it up like Ken Osman, Eddie Haskell was only, was in just less than 100 he wasn't, you know, like you think, you wouldn't think like he wasn't in every episode, you know? I mean, it's like I did find an interesting thing about when I was just looking up, Leave It to Beaver stuff. Admittedly, I watched it all growing up, but I had to do a little research. Just to jog my memory, I watched your first episode where you are a debut on the show. You were a jerk your

Unknown Speaker 38:40

character, but

Jeff Dwoskin 38:42

there was a nice lesson kind of wrapped in it. Was he the guy who played your father on that show, the same guy who played your father later on the show? Or was it a different actor? I felt like it was blonde, and then later, during some football scene, it seemed like he had dark hair. I wasn't sure if it was the same guy. You

Stephen Talbot 38:58

know, it's funny. I do occasionally go on some Leave It to Beaver fan sites, where people on Facebook are obsessed with it and go into all the details and all the contradictions. Let's just say that over six years the Leave It to Beaver writers who were very, very talented, but different people wrote the show. They weren't that into consistency, especially when it came to secondary characters. So, you know, Gilbert, people who are totally into the series always laugh. There were three different names for Gilbert. There was gates, Bates and Harrison was one name I didn't pay attention to that. The writers didn't pay attention to it, and we thought, you know, the other funny thing is, no one thought this was going to last when you were making these TV shows, and we were doing, Leave It to Beaver. It was so much fun to do the show. I really enjoyed doing it, and that's why I did it. I mean, if it hadn't been fun, I. Have been acting, but it was fun to go to the set and to act and to play a role and to play a jerk. You know, I like to think of myself as not being a jerk, but it was fun sometimes to play the villain or the jerk. Over time, the Gilbert character, who was always getting beaver into trouble and then bailing on him became more of a friend the last two years of the series, in particular, when we're growing up, the writers didn't know quite how to handle us. Suddenly, they let us start to, you know, make it clear we were interested in girls and and Jerry and I were sort of chafing at the limits of the series. You could see it was really kind of coming to its end. But in those days when we were quite good friends, Gilbert, as a character, became more of a supportive friend to the beef. So it evolved over time.

Jeff Dwoskin 40:57

And then were you originally brought on to the show because they were going to phase out Robert Stevens, Larry Mondello, that sound right?

Stephen Talbot 41:05

Rusty. Yeah. Rusty. Stevens, Rusty, yeah, yes. And, you know, I don't know what the hell really happened there, but if you if he was clearly, first of all, he was a very funny guy. He was as a kid, he was a great deadpan actor, and he was very funny in that role. Something happened, Barbara Billingsley and other people say at the time that his mother was became difficult. You had to have a guardian on the set. And you know, was demanding more. I don't know exactly what happened, but clearly the first three years of the six year run, he was beavers main friend, and then he was disappeared. He suddenly disappeared from the series. So yes, the character of Gilbert, when I first did Leave It to Beaver. That episode that you watched, I thought it was a one off. Just about every other show I was doing was a one off. I came on this set, I put on whatever clothes were necessary for the show, whether I rode horses in the western or got shot at in the crime mystery movie or something, or was working with a big star like Barbara Stanwyck, you just, you know, did what you did, and then you were gone. Was over. And so Leave It to Beaver. Was just unusual in that I kept coming back. And, you know, by the third season, I just looked this up the other day, there were 39 episodes a year. I was in 20 of those episodes, so it's basically in every other episode that year. And that was I realized my seventh grade, I was in a public school, good public school in San Fernando Valley, California, I barely remember that year in school. That's that's the one year when I was working so much that school became kind of a blur, and I was into school. I liked school. It began to phase down a little bit after that. But those two years, the third and the fourth season, or fourth and fifth seasons, Gilbert was a heavy character, and then what would happen, believe me, this, I had the weirdest arrangement because of my parents, which worked for me, which was that the writers would write me into an episode. And then they would call my agent or directly call my parents and say, okay, Steve's in the show next week. And then my parents would go to me and they'd say, what's it like in school? Can you get out? And I would say, oh, no, I got a big test next week. I can't do it. And they would tell my agent to tell the producers, and they would go, okay, and they would write out Gilbert, and they would write in Richard or or Whitey, one of the other characters to take that role. That happened with probably the most famous episode of Leave It to Beaver, where Jerry Mathers the beaver climbs up into a billboard on a dare and goes into a steaming bowl of soup to see on the Billboard whether it's real or not. And it's Whitey, who's the one who goes him in to do it, doing it that was originally written for Gilbert, and I turned that down because I can't remember a school conflict, or maybe I was doing another TV show at the time, and then they offered it to Richard Carell, and he turned it down because of a conflict, and so Whitey ended up being in that episode. But that was my deal. I always had the right to say no, and at one point they wanted to put me under a full time contract to get me to be in the show all the time. And my parents said, No, they'll never do that. They didn't want me to be in a studio school on the set. They always wanted me to be in a real school. Very interesting.

Jeff Dwoskin 44:49

So is this mostly because your dad had some clout? Yes,

Stephen Talbot 44:54

it was. It was. And, you know, my dad had worked with everybody. And he'd worked with a lot of kid actors, and he used to say the only kid actor he ever really liked was Shirley Temple. He made a movie with Shirley Temple where she they're in one great scene together, and he's playing a guy who's trying to marry her mother, who is broken up with her husband, and Shirley wants to get them back together, so my dad comes along to date her mom, and Shirley Temple is a little little girl totally steals the scene from my dad. She was a really good actress, so my dad admired Shirley Temple, and of course, she ended up having an amazing adult life too. She was a US ambassador. He saw far too many kids who led troubled lives. The most famous case being a guy who was a friend of his, Jackie Coogan, who was the kid in the old great Charlie Chaplin movies. And Charlie Coogan, in those days in the 20s, was one of the most famous actors and well paid actors in the world, and his parents robbed him blind. They blew all the money. So when he came of age, he realized he was broke, and he had a hard time regaining his footing in Hollywood. He did. Eventually. He was in a lot of worked with Lucille Ball a lot. He and my dad worked together. I did an episode of the Lucy show with him, Jackie Coogan. He's a very nice man, but because of Jackie Coogan, he went to court to sue his parents, and in California, they still call it the Coogan law. And it's a law that says, if you're a child actor, a certain amount of money has to be set aside for you for when you're an adult, so your guardians, or your parents, if they're evil, can't steal it all from you. So you

Jeff Dwoskin 46:52

were protected from that because you mentioned earlier, your parents didn't rely on you for your income, but that that was really something that a lot of child stars, the parents would live off, and that was probably a little bit why this type of thing happened. Jackie Coogan, uncle, fester. Uncle

Stephen Talbot 47:09

Fester. Yes, that's right, you're absolutely right. I mean, I'll tell you another story. There was a kid. He's no longer with us, long gone, but I think it's okay to see his name is Kid. His name was Charlie Herbert. And Charlie, I got the feeling he was one of many kid actors I knew or worked with whose parents were relying on his the income of the child or were pushing them to act. And Charlie was a good actor, and he had dark hair. I had blonde hair, and we would go on interviews for shows, and it was sort of a cost of the twine. If the mother in the show the star was blonde, I'd get the job, because I looked like her kid, brunette. Charlie would get the job. He had a mother, my mom, who was my guardian on this set most of the time, and just a wonderful I was so lucky to have great parents, my mom in particular, and my mom and I, she always made an adventure out of it. Was like a game. We'd go on these interviews, and we'd be sitting in the room reading the script, ready to go in to see the director, meet the producers, the casting director, and they would call you and they'd say Charlie, Charlie Herbert and his mom would stand up. She was a short woman, she'd stand up front of everybody in the casting office, and she'd go, give him hell, Charlie, give him hell. And Charlie would go off to the I thought, Wow, that's a little pressure. So it was that was a running joke my whole life with my mom. Is as adults, she would turn to me and go, give him hell, Charlie, give him hell.

Jeff Dwoskin 48:54

For the most part, most of the cast of Leave It to Beaver as a child. Actors kind of made it through. Okay, right? Yeah, no. Stanley for Farah had some drug problems later in life,

Stephen Talbot 49:10

yeah. Stanley was. Stanley was kind of a sad case. He was, he was a very shy, low key, kind of Deadpan Guy he would in real life. My memory of him is very much like the character he played, whitey. We worked a lot together, and I liked him, but yeah, he was, he was sort of the classic awful case of someone who doesn't have an acting career after their childhood work, and then he never really recovered. And yeah, he got heavily into drugs and he had a sad early end, but you're right. I mean, Tony and Jerry made it through and Barbara Billingsley, for sure, I still love her cameo in the airplane movie. That's a classic that everyone should see. I. Who knew Barbara Billingsley, best

Jeff Dwoskin 50:01

scenes ever I've seen. It's the best she can talk jive.

Stephen Talbot 50:09

She translates. So Barbara was wonderful. Hugh Beaumont did not have a long life. He was an interesting guy, because this dawned on me the other day. Hugh Beaumont had had a serious career as an actor in a lot of film noir films. He's in the blue Dahlia, which is the first Hollywood movie Written by Raymond Chandler, and he plays a world war two you know, guy coming home from the war and has a friend who has post traumatic stress syndrome and so forth and and so here's you Beaumont. He played a kind of a brutal, hardcore detective in a series of detective movies. And then he ends up being the father, the father of the decade. You know, the wonderful understanding father who delivers the moral lessons to Beaver and the Dan in the sitcom. But there are a whole bunch of guys like that. You know Fred McMurray. It was Double Indemnity, and then he ends up being the father on my three sons. And you know Perry Mason, Raymond Burr, the actor who is a vicious, sadistic villain in one movie after another in the film noir era, late 40s, early 50s. And then he's America's favorite defense lawyer who never loses a case, and Perry Mason. So it's, it's funny how these actors from the 40s and 50s made their transition into being sitcom fathers.

Jeff Dwoskin 51:32

It's so funny. You Played Perry Mason's son in one episode, right?

Stephen Talbot 51:36

No, not his son. I played, I No, I not his son.

Jeff Dwoskin 51:43

Oh, you were in one of the Perry Mason episode. I was in

Stephen Talbot 51:46

a Perry Mason episode. It was called the case of the wandering widow.

Jeff Dwoskin 51:52

You played the son of the title character. I played the son of the

Stephen Talbot 51:55

wandering widow. Okay,

Jeff Dwoskin 51:56

there you go. There you go. Um, in editing, that'll sound perfect the

Stephen Talbot 52:05

and that was one that was one time when I played a rich kid, and there's a final scene where, you know, they always sum up the episode, and how did we solve it? And I play this sort of obnoxious rich kid in a three piece suit. I remember never knowing what a three piece suit was, and suddenly I was in one acting and I'm the kid who, you know, Hey, how come you didn't sell this case earlier? I could see the whole thing come

Jeff Dwoskin 52:30

hindsight. So wonderful. The so, oh, so in your So, another piece of trivia that I found in your, in your lifetime pursuit, the hope no one ever recognized you as Gilbert. So going back to still the beaver the movie, which, by the way, I loved and watched, and I have two exact moments in that I beaver coming home, and then playing, take the long way home, I don't know. And then the funeral scene, because they did pay homage to Mr. To you, Beaumont. Yeah, Beaumont, Beaumont. But interesting trivia. Back to rusty, Stevens, Larry Mondello. They hired a detective to find him. This is f indv, so I'm assuming it's true. They hired a detective. His wife answers the phone and they're like, she's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. My husband was not and Leave It to Beaver or whatever. And so his own wife didn't even know that

Stephen Talbot 53:29

guy left it cold for whatever reasons. He dropped it cold. But they did get him back for that show. And the producer at that show, Brian Levant, as I say, tried to get me and I just explained I couldn't they even rewrote the role for me. They said, Okay, we understand you're a serious investigative journalist, so we'll come up with a serious role for Gilbert. So they wrote Gilbert as a psychiatrist who Bieber's supposed to go to to solve his he's getting divorced, his marital problem. I said, No, I'm not going to play a psychiatrist in the show. I can't do it, but they got my dad to be in an episode. My dad is in an episode. He plays a diabolic dentist in one of the episodes. So Brian levant went around saying he still says we didn't get tell Steve Talbot. We didn't get Gilbert, but we got his dad.

Jeff Dwoskin 54:24

They didn't recast you, though, because Ed Meg Lee Jr was Whitey in the in the movie, I don't think it was in the TV show, but in the, in the still the beaver movie, yeah, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned John Provost name a couple times. He's been on the show. Great guy. I assume you didn't fall in a well, either in any of your episodes. Yeah, I did

Stephen Talbot 54:46

fall in a well. I didn't fall Okay. Here's a really quick, obscure story for you. There was a TV series called law of the planesman, which had one of the strangest plot lines. States. It was a Native American played by an actor, Michael and Sarah. And the story was that he was a law officer, and he saw Native Americans burn to the ground of village of white people, and there was a little girl left and they're smoldering ashes, and he rescues her and raises her. So the show is this Native American law man on a horse, studly guy with this little girl on his he's raising the little girl. The little girl in one episode falls down a well, and he wants to go in and rescue her, but he's too big. He can't. There's too much debris. It's on the farm of a racist guy, a totally racist guy, and he says, I, as the son of the racist guy, volunteer to go down the well. I'm a little boy and rescue the girl. And they lowered me down the well, and I do rescue her. Incidentally, she was the sister of Darlene on the Mouseketeers, the Darlene Gillespie acting that's cool. This was her younger sister, and they built on the Republic lot in Studio City, my hometown, a giant soundstage, half a well. It must have been 150 feet high, filled it with debris, fake cobwebs, and lowered me through the well. And it's half the show is me being lowered through the well. And it was guys, I like to say I did my own stunts.

Jeff Dwoskin 56:46

That's because they couldn't afford to stop me

Unknown Speaker 56:49

exactly and

Stephen Talbot 56:53

I remember the director. They shot it because they ran music over, dramatic music over most of it. It was silent except for the music. There was very little dialog, and the director is talking me through the megaphone, going, great, great. You know, you look scared. I was kind of scared, but it's terrific. And in an episode of Lassie where we're supposed to be building a flying machine for Little Timmy to fly in, this other kid and I are doing it on this and we filmed it on location. And the Lassie show was like beaver. Nothing went wrong. Everything on Beaver was like, completely stable. You know, it was like comfort food. Everything was well organized. No one was shouting at anybody. It was a really well run set and everything. Lassie was like wild in the streets. Lassie, there were dogs running around every it was a very active, physical show was shot on location. John provost has a lot of stories about what he went through. I mean, we did our stunts, and in one episode, they lower me over a cliff to show that the rope will hold. I remember they actually did that. They shouldn't have my they didn't approach my mother, who was my guardian on the set. They got some guy, a prop guy or something, who I like, to convince me this was all going to be fine and a lot of fun. And they put me in a harness under my clothes and lowered me. And in retrospect, it was an adventure. It was fun, but the Lassie show, Lassie bit me one of the attack dog lassies actually bit me in the butt while I was making that episode.

Jeff Dwoskin 58:35

It sounds horrendous, but also cool. At the same time that you can say Lassie bit you in the butt.

Stephen Talbot 58:42

I've joined out on that story for many years.

Jeff Dwoskin 58:45

That's a great story. So these are all amazing stories I do want, but I do want to mention because you've mentioned it a little bit too, but you've won numerous awards as a journalist and documentary filmmaker. I just, I mean, the list is insanely long. So we might go, I have to go another half hour just read all these. But two national news that was a joke. Two national news and documentary. Emmy Awards, three Peabody awards, DuPont Columbia, Journal of silver baton. Some of these. I don't even know what these are. Edward R Morrow awards, I mean, nominate three times for documentary script writing by the Writers Guild of America. I mean, there's on and on and on. You've made over 40 documentaries. You mentioned they were with frontline for so long, the best campaign money can buy Rush Limbaugh's America, the long march of Newt Gingrich and, most recently, the movement and the mad man diving into the anti war protests that you mentioned you were so much a part of,

Stephen Talbot 59:45

yeah, that's that's a film that came out last year on the PBS series, American experience, and anyone can watch it now. It's on all the streaming services, Amazon, PBS, passport, the library service, Canada. Be and that's a film I'm very proud of. It's a 90 minute documentary. It's about the year 1969 and Nixon and Kissinger what they were planning to do in the war and the anti war movement at that time. So I hope people do watch that. It's being shown on a lot of college campuses these days. It was, it was a pleasure to make tough film to make, but we made it during the pandemic. But it turned out well, the movement and the madman American experience, check, check that one out. But yeah, I look, I'm very proud of the journalistic career I've had, and was a real honor to work for frontline, for, I don't know, like, 18 years. And I made many documentaries. I covered politics a lot. You know, it was always, always a pleasure to have the support of public TV, who would back you up editorially and so forth when you got in a jam. They're very, very interesting films to make. I'm very proud of them.

Jeff Dwoskin 1:00:58

Amazing, amazing career, two amazing careers, really, right? I mean, just like this, it's like two lives that you have lived, and it's just both super amazing. And thanks for sharing all the stories with me. Okay,

Stephen Talbot 1:01:12

you're very welcome. Thanks, Jeff. It's been fun talking to you as you as you hear. Once you get my started on this stuff, it's hard to stop me.

Jeff Dwoskin 1:01:21

Well, I am glad that we were able to meet and spend this time together. And thank you very much. Check out that documentary, and all you're done with all your documentaries, it's going to be alright.

Stephen Talbot 1:01:34

Give my Give my regards to Broadway and Broadway that too when you're there, but Kim, my regards to Detroit and to Traverse City.

Jeff Dwoskin 1:01:44

I will. I will, thank you. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:45

All right, take care. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai