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Max Baer, Jr.: ''We were not paid very well'' on the Beverly Hillbillies
Swimming pools? Nope! Movie stars? Definitely not!
You'd think starring in a classic TV show would set you up for life, right? Maybe not "chauffeured Rolls Royce"-levels of wealth, but at the very least, you'd expect an actor would be taken care of. For many stars of TV's yesteryear, that was the case. They might not have been millionaires living in mansions, but they certainly weren't destitute, either.
But for a few of television's brightest figures, the money fountain never totally turned on to begin with. For others, legal issues prevented them from feeling the true benefits of their bounty. There are plenty of examples of TV luminaries who you'd hope would be set for life, but are in reality just scraping by.
That was the case for Max Baer Jr., who starred as Jethro Bodine in The Beverly Hillbillies. While his onscreen counterpart might've swam in that swanky oil money, the truth was Baer's real life was far from Beverly Hills.
In Stephen Cox's retrospective, The Beverly Hillbillies, Max Baer Jr. set the record straight regarding how his funds were misused after the show went off the air.
When asked about how lucrative his nine years on one of TV's biggest comedies were, Baer said, "They were lucrative for my ex-wife. She got everything.
"Actually, I didn't make that much," he continued. "The first year of the series I made $500 a show. Second year of the series, I made $600 or $700 a show. Third year, we were the number one show in the country, I think I made $800.
So if the star of the show didn't make all the money, who did?
Most of the people who made the money were Filmways, the company who owned it, and Paul Henning, the writer/creator. Paul put in an awful lot of work on it, and I'm sure he deserved the majority of it. However, I believe even in that time, that as a cast, we were not paid very well. There were fringe benefits. We could go out and earn extra money. But we didn't earn enough for what we did."
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