Donna Douglas’ Elly Mae Clampett on ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ melted the hearts of teenage boys in the 1960s

The death of Donna Douglas froze the heart of pretty much every American boy who was a television-watching teenager in the early 1960s.

Wholesome as Douglas’s Elly Mae Clampett character may have been on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “wholesome” does not describe all the responses that Elly Mae evoked in that viewer demographic.

It’s also true that compared to what teenage and young-adult female characters regularly wear on TV shows today, Elly Mae looked like she was dressed for an ice cream social at the local Baptist church.

But in 1963, Elly Mae was incendiary.

For starters, she wore tight jeans, at a time when the uniform for female characters on TV was loose skirts.

The joke for purposes of the show was that because she was raised hillbilly, that’s just how “those people” dressed. They didn’t know any better.

Donna Douglas’ Elly Mae Clampett had boys glued to their TV sets in the 1960s.
Didn’t matter. Any excuse was a good excuse to get Donna Douglas into jeans. They were probably bluejeans, though that didn’t come across very clearly on a show that was originally filmed in black and white.

Her tops were never revealed. They were relatively form-fitting, again in contrast to the blouses worn by most other female characters.

When Elly Mae came onto the TV screen, all wide-eyed blond innocence, let’s put it this way. Her teenage male fans would have failed every quiz on what anyone else in her scenes said or wore.

Nothing about Elly Mae, it should be reiterated, was remotely suggested. Douglas herself, who later became a gospel singer and regularly worked with church groups, always made that point.

Elly Mae’s eyes were as innocent as they were wide, and school librarians on shows for pre-teens today are more provocative than Elly Mae.

And so what? None of that makes her any less magnetic to teenage boys. She was among a handful of actresses, a line that runs from Annette Funicello on “The Mickey Mouse Club” to Mary Tyler Moore on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” that no teenage boy from that era will ever forget.

Douglas, known for her role as Elly May Clampett in the TV series “The Beverly Hillbillies,” died January 1, 2015 at her home in Louisiana at the age of 81.
In terms of Douglas’s own career, she was also memorable in one much smaller and earlier role: Janet Tyler on a 1960 “Twilight Zone” episode called “Eye of the Beholder.”

Janet Tyler was a woman who underwent an 11th cosmetic operation in a final desperate attempt to make her look “normal.”

In the climactic scene, her bandages come off and it is revealed that the operation failed, dooming her to forever remain “disfigured.”

In the world conjured by creator Rod Serling, however, “normal” turns out to mean sunken eyes and a pig-like snout.

“Disfigured,” for Janet Tyler, she was doomed to spend the rest of her life looking like Donna Douglas.