Dwayne Hickman, who starred as Dobie Gillis in popular sitcom, dies

Dwayne Hickman, an actor who portrayed the lovesick teenager Dobie Gillis in a popular sitcom of the 1950s and 1960s, creating an enduring and memorable TV character who remains alive in syndicated reruns, died Jan. 9 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, his publicist, Harlan Boll, said in a statement.

Hickman had been a child actor in the 1940s who had tagged along beside his then-better-known older brother, actor Darryl Hickman. He had small roles in several films before landing a part in “The Bob Cummings Show” (also called “Love That Bob”) in 1955. He said he learned almost everything he knew about acting from the affable, ever-smiling Cummings, who had been a movie star since the 1930s.

Although he was already in his 20s at the time, Hickman seemed to personify a generation of teenagers then coming of age in Middle America. When “The Bob Cummings Show” left the air in 1959, Hickman stepped into his new starring role as Dobie Gillis.

“When they wanted someone to star in ‘Dobie Gillis,’” Hickman said in 1959, “I was the only guy around who could play teenage comedy. The rest of the young performers are too busy copying Marlon Brando and wearing sideburns.”

Drawn from a series of short stories by author Max Shulman, who was a producer and writer on the show, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” was among the first network sitcoms to make teenagers the central characters, rather than their parents. The show’s title was an inside joke because Dobie was hapless in romance, forever facing rejection while ignoring the one girl who sought his attention, the irrepressible and overachieving Zelda Gilroy (played by Sheila James).

“What made Dobie so famous for so long,” Hickman told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1995, “is that he was the original spokesman for teens, and he represented so much of that angst of the teen years. The series was the first where the main character was a teen speaking for teens.”

Dobie’s father (played by Frank Faylen) always seemed to be in a sour mood, cajoling his son to help out around his grocery store. But Dobie was constantly dreaming up get-rich-quick schemes and pining for girls (not necessarily in that order) with his beatnik buddy, Maynard G. Krebs, played by Bob Denver, who later starred in “Gilligan’s Island.”

The lazy, disheveled Maynard, who wore a goatee and a bedraggled sweatshirt, routinely responded to the suggestion that he find a job by saying, with a combination of contempt and fright, “Work?!” Speaking in a blend of jazz lingo and goofy malapropisms, he got many of the best lines:

Dobie: “I’ll never chase another girl again.” Maynard: “Oh, you’re going to live in a cave and become a helmet!”

Dobie: “Maynard, that’s ‘hermit,’ and you don’t understand.”

Maynard: “You’re not chasing chicks? No, I don’t understand, clue me.”

During the show’s first season, Hickman bleached his hair blond, which caused a rash to break out on his scalp. For the remaining three years of the show, his hair was its natural brown, as Dobie progressed from Central High School to a junior college. The major characters followed along, including Maynard, Zelda, Dobie’s rich-kid nemesis Chatsworth Osborne Jr. (Steve Franken) and even his biology teacher, played by William Schallert.

“Dobie Gillis” helped launch the acting careers of Tuesday Weld, who played the unattainable Thalia Menninger in parts of the first two seasons, Marlo Thomas, Ryan O’Neal, Bill Bixby and Warren Beatty.

“Warren Beatty, I believe, never mentions that he was on the show,” Hickman said in 2003. “Beatty played Milton Armitage, a spoiled rich kid who was Dobie’s main competition for girls. Maybe he knew he was going to become a superstar, because he was always very standoffish with the rest of us.”

Beatty left the show in its first season. In one of Beatty’s final episodes, Dobie defeated his character in a race for junior class president.

The sitcom, which ran until 1963 and was also called “Max Shulman’s Dobie Gillis” and just “Dobie Gillis,” had snappy dialogue, a youthful point of view and an undercurrent of philosophical anxiety. In the opening and closing segments, Dobie often sat under a copy of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” striking a chin-on-fist pose as he mused directly to the audience about his problems.

“We were doing a kind of sketch comedy,” Hickman later said. “‘Dobie Gillis’ made no attempt to be reality. It was fun. Reality was the last thing we cared about.”

Dwayne Bernard Hickman was born May 18, 1934, in Los Angeles. His father sold insurance, and his mother had been an actress. Dwayne accompanied her to movie studios when his older brother was acting in films.

Dwayne Hickman was an extra in “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940), in which his brother had a part, then had more than a dozen juvenile roles in movies through the early 1950s. He left college for “The Bob Cummings Show,” then later completed a bachelor’s degree in economics at what is now Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

After “Dobie Gillis,” Hickman appeared in such tame but suggestive fare as “Ski Party” and “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” and had a supporting role in the Oscar-winning comic western “Cat Ballou” (1965).

By the 1970s, Hickman had largely abandoned acting. He worked as a publicist in Las Vegas, then became a CBS studio executive, supervising such hit sitcoms as “M.A.S.H.,” “Maude,” “WKRP in Cincinnati” and “Designing Women.” He also directed many episodes of TV shows.

He reprised the Dobie Gillis role in reunion shows in 1977 and 1988, and took up a second career as a painter. His landscapes and architecturally precise paintings of houses were shown at galleries around the country. In 1994, he published an autobiography, “Forever Dobie: The Many Lives of Dwayne Hickman,” written with his wife, Joan Roberts.

His earlier marriages to Carol Christensen and Joanne Papile ended in divorce. In addition to his wife of 38 years, survivors include a son from his first marriage; a son from his third marriage; and his brother.

Hickman said he was surprised that “Dobie Gillis” retained its popularity long after it aired and had become something of a cultural touchstone for a generation.

“People loved that Dobie guy, and they just kind of refused to see me as anything but him,” he said in 1995. “It’s still going on today.”