Max Baer Jr. spent nine seasons as Jethro Bodine, the strapping nephew on The Beverly Hillbillies who was forever chasing girls and never quite catching one. Off camera, the actor did settle down for a while. He married Joanne Kathleen Hill in 1966, and by 1971, the same year CBS canceled the show, the marriage was over. He has not married since, and he never had children.
Baer is 88 now, born December 4, 1937, in Oakland, California, and he is the last member of the show’s main cast still living, as our look at the surviving Beverly Hillbillies cast laid out this summer. He has said almost nothing publicly about why the marriage ended. But when a reporter asked him about family years later, his answer went straight back to the man he grew up idolizing.
How Did Jethro End Up With “Absolutely Nothing”?
Baer was 24 when The Beverly Hillbillies premiered in September 1962, a business graduate with a famous last name who suddenly had one of the most recognizable faces on television. Asked by TV Guide in 2008 whether his wild days on the show were fun, he shot back, “Are you crazy? Having two or three girls a day? That’s not fun to you?”
The fun stopped in 1971. The show went off the air, and Baer found that nobody wanted to hire the man audiences still saw as Jethro. His marriage to Hill was ending in the same stretch. “I was also going through a divorce at the same time,” he told TV Guide, “and I ended up with absolutely nothing.”
Could Max Baer Jr. Ever Get Out From Under Jethro?
He tried. “I hated it. I wanted to distance myself from it,” he said of the role in that same TV Guide interview. He went further in 2017 with columnist T.J. Simers of FORE Magazine. “I couldn’t go into a producer’s office and say I wanted to play the part of a neurosurgeon or pilot,” he said. “As soon as I came on screen, people would say, there’s Jethro.”
So he stopped waiting for someone to cast him. “The only thing worse than being a has-been is being a has-been with no money,” he told TV Guide, and his way out was to write and produce his own picture. Macon County Line arrived in 1974 with Baer playing Deputy Reed Morgan in a Southern crime drama he had scripted himself. It was made for well under $200,000 and earned more than $30 million, according to Wikipedia and FilmInk. “It wasn’t until I produced and wrote Macon County Line that I made a lot of money,” Baer said.
Next he bought the film rights to Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 hit “Ode to Billie Joe.” His 1976 movie version, Ode to Billy Joe, starred Robby Benson and Glynnis O’Connor with Baer directing, and it became another box office hit. After Hometown U.S.A. in 1979, he walked away from filmmaking, and the money paid for a dream that would occupy him for decades.
Why Did He Spend Decades Chasing A Hillbilly Casino?
In 1991, Baer secured a license from CBS to use The Beverly Hillbillies characters for businesses, which the Associated Press later reported covered restaurants, hotels and casinos. His plan was a themed hotel and casino in Nevada, near his home at Lake Tahoe. A 2003 attempt to convert a former Walmart in Carson City stalled, so in 2007 he bought land in northern Douglas County instead.
“We’re going to have The Beverly Hillbillies truck in the lobby,” he promised TV Guide in 2008, when he hoped to open by 2010. County commissioners approved the project by a narrow vote, but neighbors sued, and the county rejected the giant oil derrick sign he wanted along U.S. Highway 395, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Record-Courier reported. “I will not do it unless I can do it the way I want,” he said. By July 2012 the development had been suspended amid litigation.
In December 2014, the Associated Press reported that Baer had sued CBS over a deal involving Jethro’s BBQ, a restaurant chain in Des Moines, Iowa, saying it undercut his rights and that he had spent as much as $1 million developing his business. In 2015 a Los Angeles judge’s tentative ruling threw out most of his claims, according to MyNewsLA. The casino has never been built, and the stubbornness behind it ran in the family.
What Did His Father Have To Do With It?
His father, Max Baer, won the world heavyweight championship from Primo Carnera in 1934 and lost it to James J. Braddock the following year. The champ died in 1959, when his son was 21. When Ron Howard’s 2005 film Cinderella Man made the elder Baer into Braddock’s cruel rival, his son was furious. “That’s the hottest I’ve ever been about anything,” he told TV Guide, insisting his father “was a good person and a likable guy.” He told the Jewish news service JTA that his father “hardly ever bore a grudge” and would invite beaten opponents to a party.
His own later years brought a heartbreaking loss. In January 2008, his girlfriend, 30-year-old model Chere Rhodes, died by suicide at their Lake Tahoe home, as People and the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Baer was 70.
He still lives at Lake Tahoe, largely out of the public eye. To Simers, Baer was blunt about his place in television history. “I was born Max Baer Jr., the son of a great boxer, and I’ll die Jethro Bodine. Period,” he said. “I never really got the chance to be me.”
Then he explained the choice he made after his only marriage ended. “But I never had any kids,” he said, “because I don’t think I could have been the father that my father was to me.” Max Baer was still his idol, he added, not as a fighter but as a person. “He was my buddy.”
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