Bad boy who viewers loved to hate
Ken Osmond made the name Eddie Haskell synonymous with weaseldom. As the duplicitous pal of Wally Cleaver on the popular family sitcom Leave It to Beaver, Osmond depicted a character Eisenhower-era Americans loved to hate, an unctuous sneak who relished abusing Wally’s brother, Theodore—aka The Beaver—but turned on a dime when an adult appeared. “My, you look lovely today, Mrs. Cleaver,” he might say, with an obsequiousness that never quite fooled his target. Hired for a single appearance, Osmond was such a hit with audiences that he stayed on for all six seasons—and made himself unfit for any other role. Typecast and unable to find acting work, he became a Los Angeles police officer for 18 years, growing a mustache as a disguise. “I would walk into a casting office and all they could see was Eddie,” he said. “In the industry, that’s an absolute death sentence.” Osmond grew up in Glendale, Calif., where his father was a movie-studio carpenter and his mother was “an agent who started taking him to auditions when he was 4,” said The New York Times. He was soon appearing in commercials and won his first speaking part at age 9, in the
Ken Osmond
1953 movie So Big, starring Jane Wyman and Sterling Hayden. Other movie parts followed, as did TV appearances on Lassie, Fury, and Annie Oakley, and in 1957 he was cast as the gum-chewing, jean jacket–wearing Eddie. When the show ended in 1963, Osmond “worked as a helicopter pilot and studio prop maker,” said The Hollywood Reporter. Ready to start a family, he joined the LAPD in 1969, “bulking up on milkshakes and bananas to make the minimum weight.”
On a motorcycle patrol in 1980, he was “shot three times by a suspected car thief,” said The Washington Post. His protective vest stopped two bullets and a third “was deflected by his belt buckle.” Days later “he was nearly shot again.” Osmond became clinically depressed and “spent days in isolation without speaking to his wife or children.” He retired from the force and said his mental health improved only when he returned to the Haskell role for a 1983 TV movie that launched a cable series, The New Leave It to Beaver, which ran for four seasons. “We had a family,” Osmond said of his close relationship with his castmates. “It really was and still is.”