No Seeds, No Stems: Pure Bud
Sixty Years After the Cancellation of ‘Father Knows Best,’ Billy Gray Looks Back on His Years As a Child Actor, the TV Series That Made Him a Star, and the Scandal That Derailed His Career
To generations of fans, Father Knows Best (1954-1960) remains the gold standard of TV family sitcoms. Depicting the everyday trials and tribulations of the fictional Anderson family in the small town of Springfield, the show proved so popular it remains on the air in syndication over half a century after it ceased production, and it is reverently referenced in such subsequent TV shows as The Simpsons and Married…with Children. Actor Billy Gray played Bud, the rebellious, misfit teenage son of Jim and Margaret Anderson (Robert Young, Jane Wyatt) and brother to older sister Betty (Elinor Donahue) and younger sibling Kathy (Lauren Chapin). Writer Steve Uhler caught up with Gray, now 82, at his home in Topanga to talk about his years on Father Knows Best, his days as a child actor, and the drug bust that prematurely ended his career.
You were a very naturalistic child actor. Robert Wise directed you in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and said you were the best he’d ever worked with.
And I gotta thank my mom for that, I’m sure. She was an actress, mostly B-Westerns. She’d drive me to auditions when I was a kid. Later in life, our roles were reversed, and I was driving her to auditions. I started around age 5, and she would read me the lines. I was always just the kid next door or the newsboy…. I did scores of those kinds of things. I didn’t have any lines for several years; I just did bit parts. It wasn’t ’til I was about 10 or 11 that I started getting actual parts that were real characters. About the only instructions I ever got in acting was my mom telling me not to sound like I was reading. And I took that to heart. I tried to avoid sounding like I was reading from a script.
