When Ken Osmond played kiss-ass Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver, kids used to chase him around the neighborhood. Not because his character was such a rat, as the Beaver might say, but because his young neighbors concluded he must be rich.
“They figured I had money,” Osmond told The Saginaw News, per MeTV. “I had to take off. Trouble was they came in a pack, so I couldn’t take ‘em one at a time.”
Did Osmond even have dough?
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Compared to other kids, probably — but he didn’t have a fat deal with Leave It to Beaver. “The amazing thing is, even though I ended up being in 97 of the 235 episodes, I was never considered a season regular,” he wrote in his memoir, EDDIE: The Life and Times of America’s Preeminent Bad Boy. “And I never, ever had a long-term contract.”
One couldn’t blame Osmond for looking over his shoulder. While he got his share of fan letters, he also got hate mail, “blasting me for being such a rotten, cowardly person.” Even Tony Dow, who played Wally Cleaver, got letters criticizing him for letting Eddie do bad stuff to the Beaver and encouraging him to haul off and belt that Eddie Haskell in the nose.
That’s why Osmond’s favorite Beaver episodes were the ones that showed Eddie’s human side. Every once in a while, “I got to portray a vulnerable and more sympathetic Eddie character,” he said, presumably cutting back on the hate mail.
The chasing stopped after Leave It to Beaver, since Osmond rarely acted once the show ended. “Basically, I was typecast after Beaver went into syndication,” Osmond once told Bill O’Reilly. “Every time I’d walk into a casting office, all they could see was Eddie. And that’s a death sentence in Hollywood.”
In 1970, Osmond became a police officer. (Contrary to urban legend, he did not become Alice Cooper or porn star John Holmes.) Osmond’s fellow officers knew about his Beaver past, “and I got constant ribbing from them,” he confessed. He served for 10 years before getting shot three times while chasing down a car thief in 1980. He retired from the force and briefly returned to acting in the 1980s, still typecast as Eddie Haskell in the revival, The New Leave It to Beaver.
In his later years, Osmond found that people he met were kinder than the kids who used to chase him for cash. “I am a friend everywhere,” he told O’Reilly. “I can go to a large metropolis some place on the East Coast or a small Midwestern town, and they treat me like a long-lost relative.”
“Eddie has been so good to me for almost 50 years now,” Osmond said. “He has opened doors, and I’ve got to go places and see things and meet people. You know, it’s just unimaginable.”
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