Bea Benaderet - Later Life and Career

Later Life and Career

Benaderet was quite busy during the last decade of her life, starting with a voice role as Betty Rubble in the animated series The Flintstones, which debuted in 1960. The Flintstones reunited Benaderet with her 1940s co-workers Alan Reed (Fred Flintstone) and Mel Blanc (Barney Rubble and Dino). Benaderet received no on-screen credit for her many voice characterizations with Warner Bros., as the studio was bound by Blanc's iron-clad contractual stipulation that no other voice actor could ever receive credit for their work while he himself was under contract to Warners. Benaderet supposedly resigned from the show in 1964 owing to the workload on Petticoat Junction, when in fact Director Joe Barbera unceremoniously replaced her with Gerry Johnson for the remainder of the series' run.

Benaderet was seriously considered for the role of Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies, which began in 1962, by producer Paul Henning (earlier the producer of The Burns & Allen Show), who ultimately felt she was too buxom and feminine for the character he envisioned as a frail but caustic little spitfire; Irene Ryan was eventually cast. Henning cast Benaderet as the middle-aged, widowed Cousin Pearl Bodine (Jethro's mother), and she appeared in the pilot, as well as a majority of episodes throughout the series' first season. Cousin Pearl and her daughter Jethrine moved into the Clampett mansion with the rest of the Clampett clan late in the first season. However, the female Bodines disappeared after Henning cast Benaderet in his next series Petticoat Junction, which premiered in September 1963. She starred as Kate Bradley, owner/operator of the Shady Rest Hotel, who was said to be a cousin of Pearl Bodine.

Petticoat Junction proved an enormous hit in its first season, and remained a top-25 program for several years. Benaderet had done a radio variation of Green Acres with Gale Gordon beginning in 1950 called Granby's Green Acres. The Green Acres television series later became a spinoff of Petticoat Junction, with Eva Gabor portraying Benaderet's original part in this new series, and Benaderet herself showing up in the first few episodes as her Petticoat Junction character, in order to establish the Hooterville setting (Eddie Albert took Gale Gordon's role as the lawyer who moves to the country to become a farmer; whether he was considered for the role or not, Gordon was otherwise occupied with his role on The Lucy Show).

Benaderet was diagnosed with cancer in 1967, which led to her departure from Petticoat Junction in what was hoped would be a temporary absence, during which time Rosemary DeCamp was brought in to play "Aunt Helen" in scripts obviously written for Benaderet's character Kate. However, Benaderet was well enough to return for a few additional episodes in the fall of 1968 before being written out permanently. Shortly after the death of Benaderet, June Lockhart was brought in to play a female doctor who had set up her practice at the Shady Rest hotel, and thus became the show's surrogate mother figure.

On October 13, 1968, Benaderet died in Los Angeles, California at the Good Samaritan Hospital from lung cancer and pneumonia.

She was entombed in Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Her second husband Eugene Twombly died of a heart attack on the day of her funeral (four days after her death), and was interred beside her. Twombly had been a sound-effects artist for a number of radio and television shows, including The Jack Benny Program, on which Benaderet had been a regular cast member.