‘Leave It to Beaver’s Barbara Billingsley Had No Patience for ‘Roseanne’
Barbara Billingsley, the actress who played mom June Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver, wasn’t nearly as generous with the compliments as Eddie Haskell, the neighborhood suck-up who was always trying to get in her good graces. Once she got a load of Roseanne, another family sitcom that became popular 30 years after her own, she complained to a newspaper about “this big, sloppy woman.”
“You know, the first time I saw Roseanne, I thought, ‘Ugh! I hate the messy house,’” she told Newark’s Star-Ledger, as reported by MeTV. It’s unclear whether Billingsley’s “big, sloppy woman” dig referred to the way the character kept her home or the sitcom star’s personal appearance.
The Conner house certainly looked nothing like the immaculate Cleaver abode. June was famous for vacuuming in high heels and pearls, an ensemble that Roseanne never pulled off on her show. Billingsley later revealed that both the pearls and heels were her ideas — the pearls to cover what she considered a “hollow” in her neck and the heels to keep up with the growing heights of Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers, the young actors who played Wally and the Beaver.
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Ironically, Billingsley was out of work for years thanks to an old-fashioned image that was more like June Cleaver’s than Roseanne Conner’s. In the minds of viewers, she was permanently stuck in the 1950s. That all changed when she broke with her pearls-and-high-heels persona in the movie Airplane!
“I was cast because I’d been June Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver,” she said in Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! “I’m sure that was the humor of the whole thing: that I talked jive.”
She wasn’t wrong. “Just the thought of June Cleaver in the role made us laugh,” admitted co-writer and director David Zucker. “She was simply the whitest white lady on the planet.”
Billingsley credited the Airplane! appearance with restarting her career, perhaps the reason that she landed a guest-starring role on a 1995 episode of… Roseanne.
Billingsley was one of several classic TV moms appearing in a fantasy sequence, and the first one Roseanne addresses by name. “Oh no, not June Cleaver!” she exclaims with a big smile on her face, complimenting Beaver’s mom on her trademark pearls.
“We’re the Sitcom Mom Welcome Wagon,” explains Billingsley, before explaining that Roseanne will have to prove she’s worthy of admittance to the club.
“Hey, I’m just as wholesome as any of you,” argues Roseanne, almost as if she’d read Billingsley’s remarks in the Star-Ledger years earlier. “I ain’t the one who named my kid Beaver!”
The two continued to bicker. “In my day, mothers did not have tattoos!” griped June.
Roseanne begged to differ. “You obviously never saw Harriet Nelson naked.”
The real Billingsley had to admit that there was more to being a TV mom than vacuuming in a perfectly pressed housedress. “(Roseanne) gives out some pretty good wisdom to her children,” Billingsley conceded. “There’s something there, a warmth and a love that we had in a different way.”
