August 28 - Nancy Kulp

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On this day, in 1921, Nancy Jane Kulp was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The only daughter of a traveling salesman and a teacher, Nancy and her family had moved to the Miami, Florida area by her mid-teens. She graduated from the Florida State College for Women (now known as Florida State University) with a degree in journalism in 1943 and went on to the University of Miami to get a Master’s in English and French. Her academics were interrupted in 1944 when she joined the female arm of the United States Naval Reserve during World War II. She rose to the rank of lieutenant junior grade before being honorably discharged in 1946, returning to school to finish her graduate degree. Nancy married Charles Dacus in 1951 and the couple moved to Hollywood, California where she became part of the publicity department at the MGM studio.

Nancy had barely begun her job at MGM when George Cukor, director of such classics as A Star is Born and My Fair Lady, convinced her that she should be in front of a camera rather than behind a desk. Within months, she made her big screen debut in George’s 1951 comedy The Model and the Marriage Broker. Over the next few years, Nancy appeared in seven more films, mostly comedies, including two more of George’s (The Marrying Kind and A Star Is Born) as well as high profile classics like Shane and Sabrina.  Although she popped up in more than two dozen films over the course of her career, Nancy, like so many character actors of the era, didn’t really shine until she found her way onto our television sets.

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Nancy made her debut on the small screen in 1954 in an episode of the anthology show Lux Video Theatre (they put the word video in there so you wouldn’t confuse it with radio version). By the following year, she was showing off her comedic talents as Pamela Livingstone, a recurring role on The Bob Cummings Show. During the next several years, she had guest appearances on dozens of shows, doing everything from I Love Lucy to Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Maverick. She again enjoyed recurring comedic roles on Our Miss Brooks and Date with the Angels (an early Betty White vehicle). And then, Nancy was lucky enough to discover some bubbling crude and cemented her place in television history.

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In 1962, when the producers of The Bob Cummings Show were putting together a new project, they fondly remembered working with Nancy and decided to cast her in a main role this time around. They cast her as Jane Hathaway, loyal secretary to greedy banker Milburn Drysdale and needed friend to the newly rich Clampett family, on The Beverly Hillbillies. Although technically a side character, Miss Jane appeared in nearly 90% of the shows 274 episodes and earned Nancy an Emmy nomination in 1967. She stuck with the lovelorn assistant right up until Hillbillies was abruptly cancelled in 1971, in spite of its high ratings. And she was one of only three original cast members to reprise their roles for Return of the Beverly Hillbillies, a mediocre-at-best made-for-television movie in 1981.

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Nancy has three entries in the annals of Disneyana. Her first, and most recognizable, came in 1961. She played the beleaguered Miss Grunecker, assistant to camp leader Miss Inch, in the Hayley Mills classic, The Parent Trap. A year later, she had a small role in the comedy Moon Pilot as a space flight nutritionist. Her third and final role with Disney (and her last film role altogether) required her voice only as she brought to life Frou-Frou, the horse that helps get rid of the evil butler Edgar, in The Aristocats.

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Nancy’s career began slowing down as the Seventies rolled on. She did nab recurring roles on The Brian Keith Show and Sanford and Son, as well as several guest spots on The Love Boat, but parts were becoming fewer and farther between. In 1980, Nancy made her Broadway debut stepping into the role of Aaronetta Gibbs in the play Morning’s at Seven. She spent several months with the production, finishing the run of the show in August 1981. For the rest of the decade, she made just a handful of television appearances with her final small screen role being a nun on an episode of the classic sci-fi show Quantum Leap.

As she was contemplating the end of her acting career, Nancy decided to dabble in politics. In 1984, she ran as a Democrat for the United States House of Representatives in Pennsylvania's Ninth District, her home at the time. She knew it was a long shot (the district had voted Republican for decades) but she went for it anyways. The experience was marred when Buddy Ebsen, her old co-star from The Beverly Hillbillies, actually volunteered to campaign for her opponent. She was soundly defeated, getting only slightly over a third of the vote. It was probably the exact same outcome whether or not Buddy participated but it caused a decided rift to form between the two. Buddy later claimed to feel terrible about what he did to Nancy and they sort of made up before her death, but the damage to their relationship had definitely been done. 

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Following her political loss, Nancy became an artist in residence for a while at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania and taught acting. She later moved to Palm Springs, California and became an active volunteer. In 1989, she admitted in an interview that she was a lesbian, sort of. Her marriage had only lasted a decade, ending a year before The Beverly Hillbillies started. When the interviewer, Boze Hadleigh, went to ask about her sexuality since then, she basically said "The question you're looking to ask is do opposites attract? My answer is that I think birds of a feather flock together." It was the late Eighties and that's about as close to coming out that most celebrities could do at the time. Nowadays, I'm pretty sure she would have been a leader in the LGBTQ community. Timing is everything.

In 1980, Nancy was diagnosed with cancer and underwent treatment for it. Unfortunately, by the beginning of the following year, the disease had spread. On February 3, 1981, it overtook her and the comedienne with the masters degree passed away in Palm Desert, California. She was only 69.

August 1 - Chuck Keehne

On this day, in 1914, Charles Keehne was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Chuck was the middle child of five children born to a telegraph operator for a railroad. He spent most of his formative years in southwest Missouri, graduating from high school in 1932. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Southern California to try his luck at the movie business. He found steady work as a carpenter building movie sets for various studios. At some point he was hired by the Western Costume Company as a costumer. He made it his business to become an expert in historically accurate costumes and by 1940 had left Western to strike out on his own. He found freelancing success on pictures like Knute Rockne, All American, with Ronald Reagan, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, with James Cagney.

World War II brought an interruption to Chuck's costuming career. He joined the Army Air Corps and became a combat cameraman in the Pacific. When the war was over, he remained stationed in Japan until receiving an honorable discharge in 1946. He returned to Hollywood, resumed working as a costumer and married his childhood sweetheart. Over the next several years, Chuck created the clothing for classic films like Fort Apache with John Wayne and A Bullet for Joey with Edward G. Robinson. Then, in early 1955, he stopped being a freelancer and created one of the most iconic wardrobe pieces in television history.

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The Walt Disney Studio found itself with a problem in the mid Fifties. They had done several live action films by that point and were poised to get heavily into television, but they lacked something that all the other studios already had: a wardrobe department. Animated characters didn't require a costumer but real people needed something to wear. Bill Anderson, the studio's production manager, needed to hire someone on full time to fix this dilemma. When Bill interviewed Chuck in April 1955, one of Chuck's first questions was Where is the Wardrobe Department? Bill's answer was Wherever you build it. Luckily for Disney, Chuck not only didn't shy away from the challenge of creating Costuming for a major studio, he was able to bring along two highly capable people to help him. He put Ted Tooey in charge of Men's Wardrobe, Gertie Casey in charge of Women's and took over part of the building that housed the Shorts Department (which would be closing down soon anyways, although most people weren't aware of that).

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Chuck's first task was outfitting the cast of Disney's new television show, The Mickey Mouse Club. Creating the look of the costumes the Mousketeers would be wearing was a piece of cake compared to actually keeping the cast in properly fitting clothes. Over the course of the shows three seasons, it would seem like every single cast member had several growth spurts. And then there was their headgear. Everyone agreed that some kind of mouse ears was definitely the way to go, but turning that great idea into a practical reality was a daunting task that fell to the newly hired costumer, Chuck. Working closely with Roy Williams, who had the original idea, several prototypes were designed and discarded. Some just looked too big, others were too heavy and ones that did actually look good wouldn't stay on the kids heads when they danced (or even just moved around).

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Chuck and Roy finally devised small hand crafted ears, tailor fitted to each individual Mousketeer, complete with rubber band chin straps to keep them from falling off all the time. The problem with the ears was the price: it cost $25 a piece to make them (about $240 each in today's money). Multiply that times dozens of cast members, add in the fact that the kids kept losing or crushing sets of them, and you begin to see Chuck's headache. Because mouse ears were actually just a small part of the wardrobe required for The Mickey Mouse Club. Distinct costumes were created for each of the individual days of the week (you couldn't possible wear the same thing for Talent Round-Up Day that you did for Anything Can Happen Day, right?) plus everything needed for the various shows-within-the-show like Spin and Marty and Annette. It really was like doing several separate shows all at once. Good thing Chuck and his crew were not only up to the task but created television history at the same time.

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After getting The Mickey Mouse Club up and running, the next two and a half decades must have seemed like something of an extended vacation, even as Chuck would oversee wardrobe for every single live action production the Walt Disney Studio did whether it was on the big screen or the small. He costumed Zorro and all the Wonderful World of Disney shows. He created Mrs. Banks' suffragette look in Mary Poppins, Haley Mills' California chicness in The Parent Trap and clothed Jodie Foster's teenage angst in Freaky Friday. Chuck was also Walt's personal dresser for all of his television introductions and public appearances. When he retired in 1979, he was personally responsible for the look of over 70 feature films and hundreds of television episodes. He then lived quietly with his wife, enjoying his two daughters and his grandchildren until his death on February 24, 2001 in Los Angeles, California. He was 86.

April 18 - Hayley Mills

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On this day, in 1946, Hayley Catherine Rose Vivien Mills was born in Marylebone, London, England. As the daughter of Sir John Mills, an actor who appeared in over 120 films, it was probably inevitable that Hayley would become a star herself. Talent does run in her family: her mother, Mary, was a playwright, her sister, Juliet, was on the soap opera Passions for decades, her brother, Jonathan, became a screenwriter and her son, Crispian, is a musician.

Hayley was first noticed when she was 12. Her father was set to star in a British crime drama, Tiger Bay. The producers were looking for a boy to play the other lead in the movie, a street rat who witnesses a crime. A pre-production meeting with John took place with Hayley tagging along. I’m not sure what exactly happened at that meeting, but the role was changed to a girl, Hayley got the part, the film was a huge success in England and she went on to win a BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer. Just as important to our story (and maybe Hayley’s, too), Bill Anderson, a producer at the Walt Disney Studio in America, happened to see Tiger Bay.

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Disney was gearing up to do a big screen adaptation of the 1913 novel, Pollyanna. The studio was having difficulty coming up with an actress to play the title role, until Bill said he’d seen someone who might be perfect in a British film. Walt watched Tiger Bay and agreed, hiring Hayley to play his upbeat orphan alongside Karl Malden and Jane Wyman. When Pollyanna was released in 1960, it was almost unanimously praised as Disney's best live action film to date, but failed to ignite audiences (or at least failed in the eyes of the studio, which was hoping for twice the box office of $2.5 million it achieved). It was enough to catapult Hayley to international stardom. For her work on the film, she was presented with a Juvenile Academy Award, the 12th and last ever presented. Interestingly, when Hayley was unable to attend the Oscar ceremony, another Disney Legend, Annette Funicello, accepted for her.

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For her followup to Pollyanna, Walt cast Hayley in her two most enduring roles:  Sharon McKendrick and Susan Evers in The Parent Trap. The film, also starring Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith, was a bona fide hit. It reached number six on the box office list for 1961 (just behind another Disney classic, The Absent Minded Professor) grossing over $25 million. It also marked the first time Hayley sang on screen, a duet with herself called Let's Get Together. The single version topped out at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and had the cheeky singing credit "Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills". The same year she did a British film, Whistle Down the Wind, which also became an English hit and, along with The Parent Trap, earned her the vote for biggest star in Britain 1961.

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Hayley's third film for the studio came in 1962, In Search of the Castaways. Starring opposite Maurice Chevalier this time, Castaways became the hit of the Christmas season, reaching number three at the box office for the year. The next year, she starred with Burl Ives in the musical Summer Magic. Not as big a commercial success as her two previous films, Hayley still managed to earn a Golden Globe nomination for her performance. In 1964, she appeared in a critically acclaimed British adaptation of The Chalk Garden with her father and her fifth Disney film, The Moon-Spinners. The last of her string of hits with the studio came the next year when she played Patti Randall in That Darn Cat! opposite Dean Jones (in his first Disney film). Her six films in six years had turned Hayley into the most popular young actress of the decade.

Hayley's major affiliation with The Walt Disney Company ended about the same time as her major popularity did. Her career, however carried on. Over the next decade, she appeared in eleven more films. Some she did with her father (The Family Way in 1966) and some she did with her new husband, director Roy Boulting (Twisted Nerve in 1968 and Mr. Forbush and the Penguins in 1971). In 1970, Hayley made her West End stage debut in a production of Ibsen's The Wild Duck. After starring in a South African film, The Kingfish Caper, in 1975, she simply stopped acting for a while (it may have had something to do with the affair she had with Leigh Lawson, a fellow cast member in A Touch of Spring on the West End; a year later her marriage had ended and she and Leigh had a son, Jason, together).

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In 1981, Hayley returned to acting on British television in a mini-series called The Flame Trees of Thika. The positive critical reception gave her the courage to accept more roles and revive her career. She narrated an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney. The buzz that generated prompted the company to throw her into back into her old roles of Sharon and Susan from The Parent Trap in a series of made-for-tv sequels: The Parent Trap II, The Parent Trap III, and (for some sad reason) Parent Trap: Hawaiian Honeymoon. In 1987, Hayley starred in a new show on The Disney Channel called Our Miss Bliss. Bliss only lasted 13 episodes before moving to NBC, where it was reformatted (unfortunately for Hayley, minus Miss Bliss) and renamed to something you might be more familiar with, Saved By the Bell. Her longest gig of recent times was on a British drama, Wild at Heart, where she starred as Caroline Du Plessis for six seasons starting in 2007.

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Hayley has also been regularly appearing on stages around the world since her return to acting in the early Eighties. She played Anna in both an Australian production and a touring company of The King and I (I happened to catch a performance of that when it came through Orlando in the late Nineties; she sounded exactly like she did in The Parent Trap). She won a Theatre World Award in 2000 for her off-Broadway debut in Noel Coward's Suite in Two Keys. In 2015, she toured Australia with her sister, Juliet, in the comedy Legends!

Haley was one of the earliest people to be declared a Disney Legend. As part of the class of 1998, she only trailed Fred MacMurray, Ib Iwerks and the Nine Old Men in receiving the honor. And the honors coming her way may not be done yet. At the age of 73, Hayley's career is far from over. Later this year, she'll be featured in a new BBC drama, Pitching In. Hopefully the new venture will make us  more Wild at Heart and less craving a Hawaiian Honeymoon. 

November 14 - Brian Keith

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On this day, in 1921, Robert Alba Keith was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. The son of Robert Keith and Helena Shipman, both actors, his full name could also be Brian Robert Keith, depending on which source you consult. At any rate his professional name was Brian Keith and his career started shortly after his parents divorced when he was two.

When I say his career started, I mean he made an appearance in a silent film, Pied Piper Malone, at the age of three. He would then take a break for a couple of decades. His mother acted on stage and radio in New York while Brian was raised by his grandmother on Long Island. After graduating from East Rockaway High School in 1939, he joined the United States Marine Corps and served as an air gunner during World War II for which he earned an Air Medal.

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Following the war, Brian picked up his acting career with small roles on the stage and radio. In 1952, he branched out into television making his debut on an anthology series called Tales of Tomorrow. All kinds of parts followed on everything from The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse to The Adventures of Ellery Queen. In 1955, Brian landed his own show, Crusader, where he played Matt Anders, a journalist who tries to free people stuck in communist countries. It ran for two seasons. For the rest of the Fifties and into the Sixties, he had guest roles on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rawhide, The Fugitive, 77 Sunset Strip and dozens of other shows.

Brian had also had a variety of roles in movies during the same era, many in film noir genre, including one, Fourteen Hours, with his father. Brian's rugged good looks also made him good for Westerns and he starred in his share of those as well, including Arrowhead with Charlton Heston, The Violent Men with Glenn Ford and Sam Peckinpah's The Deadly Companions.

Picture grabbed from BasementRejects.com

Brian's first film with Disney was Ten Who Dared in 1960, as William Dunn, one of a group of men mapping the Colorado River in 1869. He's probably best known for his next role with the studio, Mitch Evers, the father of Hayley Mills and ex of Maureen O'Hara in 1961's The Parent Trap. He then portrayed Major General Vannerman in the sci-fi comedy Moon Pilot, Uncle Beck Coates in Savage Sam, the 1963 sequel to Old Yeller, and Sheriff Pete Williams in A Tiger Walks with Vera Mills. Brian's final role with Disney was as Cam Calloway in Those Calloways, with Ed Wynn and, again, Vera Mills.

Picture lifted from EmbarrassingTreasures.com

While Brian would continue to appear in dozens of films throughout the rest of his life, his biggest success would come on the small screen. In 1966, he nabbed the role of Uncle Bill Davis on the CBS sitcom Family Affair, which starred another Disney regular, Sebastian Cabot. Brian would earn three Emmy nominations during the shows five year run and become a household name. In 1973, he would get a show named after him, The Brian Keith Show, which would run on NBC for two seasons. His final major television role would be Milton C. Hardcastle on the ABC crime dramedy Hardcastle and McCormick. That show started in 1983 and ran for three seasons.

After several decades of success, Brian's life would end with decidedly tragic notes. In April of 1997, one of his daughters, Daisy, would commit suicide. Two months later, on June 24, 1997, Brian would be found in his Malibu, California home, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His frequent co-star Maureen O'Hara believed that his death was accidental but he was known to be suffering from emphysema and depression and may have been facing financial problems. Brian was cremated and laid to rest next to his daughter, Daisy, at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles. He was 75.

September 20 - Frank Denny De Vol

On this day, in 1911, composer Frank Denny De Vol was born in Moundsville, West Virginia.

De Vol, as he was frequently known as, did most of his growing up in Canton, Ohio. His father, Herman, was the band leader at the Great Opera House so it's no surprise that De Vol started composing music at the advanced age of 12. Within two years, he was already a member of the Musicians' Union. He went to the University of Miami to study law, at his parents request, but only lasted six weeks. De Vol was determined to become a professional musician.

Taking whatever gigs he could find, De Vol did everything from playing violin in his father's orchestra to being background music in a Chinese restaurant. Eventually, in the 1930s, he would hook up with the Horace Heidt Orchestra as the man in charge of all the arrangements for the group. Arranging music was something he'd been doing incredibly well since he was 16 and he would continue to do it for decades to come. Sometimes he would record his own arrangement; sometimes he did it for someone else to play. A list of the folks who had hits with a De Vol arrangement would include Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Doris Day, The Supremes and Nat King Cole, who had a number one hit in 1948 with "Nature Boy."

Popular songs weren't the only place De Vol shined. He got into writing scores for Hollywood and got a nod from Oscar on four separate occasions. True the nod never turned into handing over an actual award, but when those nominations are for such films as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Pillow Talk, does that really matter? De Vol wrote the score for dozens of other familiar films including The Dirty Dozen, The Longest Yard, The Frisco Kid and the cult classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

De Vol was no stranger to the little screen, either. He did some acting, most notably on Fernwood 2 Night, but his most lasting television legacy would be his theme songs. Maybe you can't hum the number from Gidget or My Three Sons, even thought that one was a hit single, but I would put money on the fact that you know most of the words to another of his tunes. I'll give you a hint: it starts out "Here's the story, of a lovely lady... "

De Vol did work for Disney for both films and television. His scores for the big screen include The Parent Trap, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo and Herbie Goes Bananas. Fans of The Parent Trap might also recognize De Vol as Chief Eaglewood, the head of the Thundercloud Boys' Camp. For television, he composed the music for The Ghosts of Buxley Hall and Tales of the Apple Dumpling Gang, both for the Wonderful World of Disney.

De Vol's final film score would reach the big screen in 1981. His last appearance on television would be in 1980 and his last TV composition would be in 1982. De Vol would remain active in the Big Band Academy of America for another decade and half. In October of 1999, he would pass away from congestive heart failure. He was 88.