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If 21st-century Hollywood feels dominated by comic book-based movies, then ’50s and ’60s television owed a good deal to newspaper and magazine comic strips. The Addams Family, Blondie (twice), Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Hazel, Steve Canyon, and Terry and the Pirates all leapt from print to picture-tube with varied degrees of success. One of the more popular strip-based shows was CBS’s 1959-63 Dennis the Menace, with Hank Ketcham’s pint-sized terror played to perfection by child star Jay North, who passed away earlier this week at 73.
Born in 1951 in Hollywood, Jay’s parents separated when he was four. His mother, a secretary for the radio/TV performers’ union AFTRA, used her connections to get a six-year-old North an appearance on an L.A.-based kids’ cartoon show. The boy caught the eye of a talent agent who signed him to a contract, and in 1958 young Jay was making guest shots with the likes of Milton Berle, Eddie Fisher, and George Gobel. That same year he auditioned for the title role in a Dennis the Menace pilot for Columbia’s Screen Gems TV branch. While waiting for a network to greenlight the series, North could be seen on such shows as Wanted: Dead or Alive, 77 Sunset Strip, and Cheyenne. He also made his film debut in the inspirational frontier drama The Miracle of the Hills and the crime thriller The Big Operator.
Dennis the Menace premiered on CBS on Oct. 4, 1959, nestled in a Sunday evening timeslot between Lassie and The Ed Sullivan Show that practically guaranteed its success. It quickly became an audience favorite on its own merits, though. Kids and parents both enjoyed watching the cowlicked, overall-clad Dennis Mitchell get into one mess after another with his parents Henry (Herbert Anderson) and Alice (Gloria Henry) while driving his next-door neighbor George Wilson (Joseph Kearns) to distraction.
Despite the show’s title, North as Dennis was more mischievous than menacing, joined on his backyard misadventures by his faithful dog Ruff, best friend Tommy (Billy Booth), and occasionally by kn0w-it-all neighbor Margaret (Jeannie Russell). He even made a rare crossover appearance on a 1960 episode of The Donna Reed Show.
Unfortunately for Jay himself, life behind the camera was where the real menace dwelt. His mother entrusted his on-the-set care to her sister and brother-in-law, and the pair turned out to be severe disciplinarians who–according to North–would berate him verbally and even beat him if he messed up a scene or forgot a line. He was not allowed to socialize with the other cast members and usually ate meals by himself.
By the end of the third season, Dennis the Menace was still popular, but the death of co-star Kearns (he was replaced by Gale Gordon as John Wilson, George’s brother) affected the cast chemistry, and a now 11-year-old Jay was starting to age out of the role. CBS pulled the plug in 1963 after four years. As Jay later recalled in an interview, “Between the pressures of the business and [Kearns’s] dying, I became very serious, very morbid, and very withdrawn from the world. I was the antithesis of the little kid that I played on the television show.”
As often happens with juvenile stars, North’s post-Dennis career road was a rocky one. He could still be seen on TV with guest shots on Wagon Train, The Lucy Show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and My Three Sons, and he returned to the big screen in Ivan Tors’ 1965 family comedy Zebra in the Kitchen, playing an adolescent who (of course) causes chaos by letting the town zoo’s animals loose to bring attention to their poor living conditions.
In 1966 Jay starred in another film, M-G-M’s Maya, about an American teen who travels to India to meet his hunter father (Clint Walker) and joins a local boy (Sajid Khan) on a journey to deliver an elephant named Maya and her white calf to a distant temple. The movie’s success led NBC to order a Maya spinoff series for the 1967-68 season. North and Khan reprised their roles, but now they and their pachyderm companion were journeying across the Indian jungles on a search for Jay’s missing dad. They never found him, as the show only lasted one year, but it did make its young stars regular cover subjects of teen magazines. “I can say that I’m really proud of my work on Maya, from a professional standpoint,” North would comment. “I got to play an adult role and it was a challenge.”
While he finished graduating from high school in 1969, a typecast Jay turned to cartoon voice acting. His animation roles included heroic Prince Turhan in the Arabian Knights segment of The Banana Splits Adventure Hour and alongside Sally Struthers as the Stone Age teen leads of The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show. My childhood favorite, though, was the DePatie–Freleng fantasy series Here Comes the Grump. North played Terry Dexter, a normal boy who finds himself in a magical realm where he must help Princess Dawn of Gladland free her people from a “gloom spell” placed over it by a villainous wizard, the Grump. It was isekai decades before Iyunasha or The Owl House, but–just like Maya–the protagonists’ quest was never finished.
Eager to put the ghost of Dennis Mitchell behind him, Jay played a high school student who has an affair with a 28-year-old instructor (Angel Tompkins) that invokes the wrath of a deranged man (Anthony James) also obsessed with Tompkins in the 1974 softcore thriller The Teacher. When the film met with critical lambasting (Although it would become a home video fave years later), North tried to change course by enlisting in the Navy in 1977, but found military life less-than-satisfying and was honorably discharged two years later.
Jay was featured with fellow ex-juvenile TV leads Angela Cartwright, Lauren Chapin, and Paul Peterson in the 1980 Gary Coleman made-for-TV movie Scout’s Honor, and he appeared in three 1982 episodes of the ABC soap General Hospital. Another offbeat film role came in 1985, as a WWII Army officer, in the Yugoslavia/U.S./U.S.S.R. (!) military espionage thriller Wild Wind.
Following the 1990 suicide of child star Rusty Hamer from The Danny Thomas Show, North became involved with Paul Peterson’s support group A Minor Consideration, which works with young actors and counsels them on handling the pressures that come with a performing career. Remarried, transplanted to Florida, and finally at ease with his turbulent childhood, North began appearing at nostalgia shows, talking openly about his life, and working in the Florida Department of Corrections. His final film role was a cameo as himself in 2003’s Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, with David Spade.
Jay, who had been receiving treatment for colon cancer for several years, died in his Florida home on April 6. “I am so happy that I was able to have such a positive impact on people’s lives,” the one-time childhood menace said in a cable TV interview. “I’m going to write my autobiography and then I’m just going to live a contented, happy life…and kind of just vanish into the mists of time.”