Actor, exec known for Dobie Gillis role
Dwayne Hickman, the actor and network TV executive who despite numerous achievements throughout his life would always be remembered fondly by a generation of baby boomers for his role as Dobie Gillis, has died. He was 87.
Mr. Hickman died of complications from Parkinsons on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles, according to a statement from a family representative, B. Harlan Boll. He was surrounded by family members when he died, it said.
Although Mr. Hickman went on to appear on other TV shows and in movies, as well as to successful behind-the-scenes careers as a publicist, talent booker for a prominent Howard Hughesowned casino in Las Vegas and TV programming executive for CBS, he could never escape his public connection to Dobie.
“Oh, my gosh — it’s Dobie Gillis! I grew up with you!” former President Clinton told him when the two met while Clinton was governor of Arkansas.
“Now it’s nice,” Mr. Hickman, who was also an accomplished painter, told a reporter during an exhibition of his work in St. Louis in 2003. “It’s very sweet to see how much Dobie Gillis meant to a lot of baby boomers, who are always nice when I meet them.”
His autobiography, co-written with Joan Roberts Hickman, his wife, was published in 1995. It was titled “Forever Dobie.”
Mr. Hickman had small parts in movies and TV shows as a youngster, but had given up acting by 1950 to concentrate on his studies at Los Angeles’ Cathedral High School. After graduation, he entered Loyola University.
“I was in the art program and was heading toward architecture when I got a call from my old agent toward the end of my freshman year,” he recalled in a 2003 interview. “He said he had a role for me in ‘The Bob Cummings Show.’”
Mr. Hickman went on to play Chuck MacDonald, the teenage nephew who tried to get a piece of his Uncle Bob’s action as Cummings’ Bob Collins character worked as a photographer of glamor girls. Mr. Hickman, meanwhile, continued his studies on the side, eventually earning a degree in economics from Loyola.
“The Bob Cummings Show” (later called “Love That Bob”) lasted from 1955 to 1959, and toward the end of its run, Mr. Hickman made a pilot for author Max Shulman about a lovelorn 16-yearold named Dobie Gillis who pursued, but could never win the heart of, almost every girl he saw.
“The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” marked by sharp humor and a brilliant young cast that also included Bob Denver, Warren Beatty and Tuesday Weld, was an instant hit when it debuted in 1959.
After the TV show folded in 1963, Mr. Hickman went on to appear in such films as “Cat Ballou” with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin and such popular 1960s youth-oriented pictures as “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini,” “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine” and “Ski Party.”
After his acting career slowed in the 1970s, Mr. Hickman became talent director at Hughes’ Landmark Hotel and worked 10 years as a program director at CBS, overseeing such series as “M.A.S.H.,” “Dukes of Hazzard,” “Maude” and “Designing Women.”