The Beverly Hillbillies is a favorite of retro television, and it features six main stars as the “Clampett” family, their banker and his secretary. But did you know that two of the actors really didn’t get along behind the scenes? Here’s a look at The Beverly Hillbillies clash that later became a full-on feud.
Back in the 1960s, The Beverly Hillbillies aired for a smooth nine seasons of classic TV.
But, behind the scenes, there was little-known tension between two of the show’s stars, which later erupted into a public feud. We’re talking about actors Buddy Ebsen, who played “Jed Clampett,” and Nancy Kulp, who played secretary “Miss Jane Hathaway.”
The Beverly Hillbillies cast feud: Buddy Ebsen and Nancy Kulp
Ebsen and Kulp clashed while making The Beverly Hillbillies, but this fact became better known years after the show when the pair ended up in a spat over politics.
The sitcom ended in 1971, and Kulp later embarked on a brief political career in the ’80s. The former actress ran in 1984 as a Democrat for Congress in her home state of Pennsylvania. She was up against Republican incumbent Bud Shuster.
But Kulp was met with a nasty surprise when Ebsen, her former Beverly Hillbillies co-star, got involved in Shuster’s campaign against her. The popular TV star volunteered to record a radio ad opposing Kulp in which he called her “too liberal.”
In the end, Kulp was badly defeated by Shuster, and in the aftermath of her loss she spoke out against Ebsen. “How dare he,” she remarked to the AP in 1985. “It wasn’t his business.”
But it turned out the pair had been at odds going back to their Beverly Hillbillies days. They often discussed politics on set but “rarely agreed,” Kulp told the AP.
Another time, Kulp said she found Ebsen difficult to work with but that she “never would have done something like” orchestrating a political ad against him.
It’s also believed that Kulp was a closeted lesbian amid less-accepting times in Hollywood, but it’s unclear if that factored into the conservative Ebsen’s clashes with her or his act of betrayal during her campaign.
Did Buddy Ebsen, Nancy Kulp make up after political spat?
As for how the story ended — there seems to be conflicting versions of if Ebsen and Kulp reconciled after the feud. She died in 1991, just a few years after her political loss.
Cheatsheet and Outsider say that both actors claimed they later made up, but there’s no obvious record of them ever meeting or appearing together again. Let’s hope they did!
