If you grew up in the 1950s, then the character Davy Crockett, played by Fess Parker, who died at 85 late last week, is an essential part of your mental furniture. His ballad most likely still plays over and over in your head, especially the fourth line, with its odd Appalachian spelling and suggestion of folk tale strangeness: “Kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.” Cosseted in your urban or suburban television room in Eisenhower America, how could you fail to be impressed by a feat like that? In truth, Davy Crockett was less the “king of the wild frontier”, as the song goes on to say, than the king of a merchandising juggernaut that convinced millions of children that they needed to own Davy Crockett pajamas and lunchboxes and coloring books and official Davy Crockett coonskin caps. We actually wore these little ratty-looking toupees with no irony or embarrassment at all.Rico says he wonders where his coonskin cap ended up...
The formula has since been duplicated countless times: someone dreams up a television show, gets children to watch it and then foists stuff on them. But the success of the Crockett episodes, which began appearing on the “Disneyland” program on 15 December 1954, took even the producers at Disney by surprise. Forty million people watched the shows, which were broadcast by 163 stations.
Television, which by then had been introduced to more than half of all American households, was a medium just waiting for a cultlike show with mass appeal to come along. But when the Crockett programs began catching on, the whole phenomenon still felt fresh and innocent. Watching, and then buying the Crockett souvenirs, seemed less like taking part in a fad than like participating in a civic ritual. Much of the shows’ success stemmed from Mr. Parker. Unlike Buddy Ebsen, who brought a certain vaudeville anticness to the role of Crockett’s sidekick, Georgie (and who a few years later, in inspired casting, turned up as another television backwoodsman: Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies), Mr. Parker inhabited his role with complete naturalness. He wore Davy’s coonskin cap, which was a big, furry bonnet, not the skimpy mass-market version, without a trace of self-consciousness.
Mr. Parker was a big man, well over six feet, who combined some of Jimmy Stewart’s handsomeness and winning charm with John Wayne’s physical presence, and he projected a natural air of modesty. His bosses at Disney, concerned with protecting Crockett’s image, discouraged him from taking parts in more grown-up pictures, like the John Ford film The Searchers or Bus Stop with Marilyn Monroe, and so we never got a chance to see what his range as an actor might have been. He was doomed to buckskin, reappearing in the ’60s as Daniel Boone, but on him it was as dignified as a suit.
By today’s standards Davy Crockett is an unlikely hero. He trapped animals and ate them. He made his own leather and wore it. He fought Indians. But he was in many ways the perfect embodiment of ’50s America. He was self-reliant, plainspoken, neighborly but not pushy, and he had no patience with foreign invaders. In the Disney version of Texas history, the battle of the Alamo, where Crockett dies (or we imagine he does; the show depicts him fighting to the end, swinging Old Betsy, his rifle, like a baseball bat), was all about protecting American soil from Mexican invaders wearing foppish, European uniforms.
The violence of the shows was stylized, even benign, and that too seems innocent now. But Mr. Parker’s character was never corny, probably because he brought such conviction to it, and the shows never seemed preachy. They were meant to be wholesome family entertainment, and they were. This was back when parents and children actually watched television together instead of retreating to private sets in different corners of the house.
It seems entirely fitting that in later life, having come to the end of his acting career, Mr. Parker reinvented himself as a successful vintner. Once an idol of baby boomers, a model of coonskin fortitude, he now became for them a source of middle-aged balm and solace, making wine they could sip in the evening as the shadows lengthened. Davy would probably have abstained, but he lived in an America where people were nobler and firmer of purpose.
Verlyn Klinkenborg (another great name) has an editorial in The New York Times on the same subject:
I don’t remember a single episode of Davy Crockett, nor did I own a coonskin cap. As for the famous theme song, it tends to wander away on its own, erratically, once it gets rolling in my head. But I remember Fess Parker. Any account of masculinity, for a certain generation, is incomplete without Mr. Parker, who died last week at age 85. In my memory, he embodies an inexplicable authenticity. This was not just the naïveté of a child viewer, unaware of how television shows were made or coonskin caps sold. It was something inherent in Mr. Parker.
Partly, I think, it was the angularity of the man, who seemed as lean as his flintlock rifle. And it was the way his right eye seemed to be slipping downward as his wry smile slipped upward. He had a solid frontier squint that every kid I knew tried to imitate when we looked into the faraway. What tied it all together was Mr. Parker’s voice, less Tennessee than Texas and carrying an astounding freight of respectability for such a soft backwoods twang. Whatever else he was to American lore, Davy Crockett was always Fess Parker.
Reading his obituary, I realized that I have a Fess Parker theory of the universe. He is said to have been unhappy at not being allowed to act for John Ford or with Marilyn Monroe, because of his relationship with Disney. But we live in a universe in which a Parker-Monroe pairing is simply not possible onscreen. It would have annulled the Fess-ness that made him Davy Crockett to so many children. I’ve been tempted to go back and watch Davy Crockett once again. But to do that, I would have to be terribly young again myself.
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