Doodles Weaver

Winstead Sheffield Weaver, known professionally as Doodles Weaver, was an American character actor, comedian, and musician born on May 11, 1911, in Los Angeles, California. His mother gave him the childhood nickname "Doodlebug" on account of his freckles and large ears, a name that eventually shortened to the one he carried throughout his career. He was one of four children born to Sylvester Laflin Weaver, a wealthy roofing contractor, and Nellie Mabel Dixon Weaver. His older brother Pat Weaver later served as president of NBC during the 1950s, and his niece is actress Sigourney Weaver. Of English and Scottish ancestry with roots in New England, Weaver attended Los Angeles High School before enrolling at Stanford University, where he contributed to the Stanford Chaparral humor magazine and acquired the nickname "The Mad Monk" for his pranks and practical jokes. He was reportedly suspended in 1937, the year he graduated, for pulling a prank on a train returning from the Rose Bowl.

Weaver launched his professional career in radio, appearing as an occasional guest on Rudy Vallée's program and on the Kraft Music Hall during the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1946 he joined Spike Jones's City Slickers, and he was featured on Jones's radio programs from 1947 to 1949. On those broadcasts Weaver introduced his comedic alter ego Professor Feetlebaum, a character who spoke in spoonerisms and deliberately scrambled words and sentences as though afflicted with myopia or dyslexia. He toured the country with the Spike Jones Musical Depreciation Revue until 1951, with the radio programs frequently broadcast from the cities where the Revue was staged. Among his most recognized recordings is a Spike Jones parody of Rossini's William Tell Overture, in which Weaver impersonated gravel-voiced sports announcer Clem McCarthy as a race commentator who confuses a horse race with a boxing match. The recurring long-shot horse named Beetlebaum became so associated with the record that RCA reprinted the label to include the name in parentheses after the song title. Jones and Weaver followed that success with a 1949 parody of the Indianapolis 500, set to Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours, again featuring Beetlebaum as the surprise winner. After a listener named Beetlebaum threatened legal action, Weaver changed the character's name to Feitlebaum. In 1966, Weaver recorded a novelty version of Eleanor Rigby, in which he sang, scrambled the lyrics, and played piano while inserting interruptions and insults throughout the performance. He was also a contributor to the early issues of Mad magazine, including a piece in which his Professor Feetlebaum character copy-edited Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address with grammatical corrections and marginal notes.

Weaver's Broadway career spanned from 1940 to 1945. His credits include Meet the People and the musical Marinka. These stage appearances ran concurrently with his radio work and established him as a versatile performer across multiple entertainment platforms.

Weaver made his television debut on The Colgate Comedy Hour in 1951, performing a commercial parody involving a pig that generated enough audience response for NBC to offer him his own series. That summer, The Doodles Weaver Show aired on NBC as a replacement for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, running from June through September. The program featured Weaver alongside his wife Lois, vocalist Marian Colby, and the comedy team of Dick Dana and Peanuts Mann, with its premise built around Weaver attempting to produce a no-budget television series using only the leftover costumes, sets, and props from more popular shows on summer hiatus. He went on to guest star on numerous television series, including The Spike Jones Show, The Donna Reed Show, Dennis the Menace, The Tab Hunter Show, Batman, Land of the Giants, Dragnet 1967, and The Monkees. On Batman he played Crier Tuck, a henchman of The Archer. He also hosted several children's television series and in 1965 starred in A Day With Doodles, a series of six-minute shorts intended as alternatives to cartoons for locally hosted children's programs. Each episode featured Weaver portraying himself and, in disguise, all other characters, with the closing credits listing both "Doodles... Doodles Weaver" and "Everybody Else... Doodles Weaver."

His film work encompassed more than 90 appearances, including The Great Imposter (1961), Pocketful of Miracles (1961), Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), in which he played the man assisting Tippi Hedren's character with a rental boat, Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor (1963), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) in a cameo role, and Six Pack Annie (1975). His final film was Earthbound in 1981.

Weaver was married four times and had three children. His first marriage, to Beverly Masterman, took place in 1939. His second marriage, to Evelyn Irene Paulsen, ended with a divorce decree on December 22, 1948, though that decree was not recorded at the time. In 1949 he married nightclub dancer Lois Frisell, who had the marriage annulled in 1954. His fourth and final marriage was to actress Reita Anne Green in October 1957; they had two children together before divorcing in 1969. At the time of his death, Weaver had completed a memoir titled Golden Spike, which remains unpublished.

On January 16, 1983, Weaver's son Winston discovered him dead at his home in Burbank, California. He died of two self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the chest, and his death was ruled a suicide. His son stated that Weaver had been despondent over his deteriorating heart health. A funeral service was held on January 22 at Forest Lawn Mortuary in the Hollywood Hills, and he was buried in Avalon Cemetery on Santa Catalina Island, California.