Sheila Kuehl
Sheila James Kuehl is an American politician and retired actress, who served as a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for the 3rd District from 2014 to 2022. Kuehl was California's first openly gay state legislator, having previously served in the California State Senate and the California State Assembly, where she was the Assembly's first female speaker pro tem.
Early life
Kuehl was born Sheila Ann Kuehl in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, Arthur, was an airplane construction worker at Douglas Aircraft. He was Catholic and her mother, Lillian, was Jewish. As a child actress, Kuehl performed under the stage name Sheila James.At age seven, Kuehl began to take tap dancing lessons. In one recital, Kuehl played an assistant in a skit called "The Old Sleuth" where she sat under a table listening for clues. To indicate she was listening, Kuehl made faces, which caused the audience to laugh and encouraged her to make more faces, resulting in more laughter. The skit was ruined, but the drama teacher, Mrs. Meglin, was impressed. Kuehl later recalled that Meglin told her mother, 'The kid's pretty funny. Can she read?' And my mother said, 'Oh, yeah, she can read, she skipped two grades, she's really very good.' Mrs. Meglin said, 'There's a radio series holding interviews...at an agent's office on Sunset Boulevard. Would you be interested in taking her to the interview? All she has to do is read...'
So we went for the interview and there were like 150 or 200 kids there and all you did was read. And I was called back...and eventually I got the part in what probably was the last family radio series before it went all music and news...'"
Career
Radio
Having landed the role at the age of eight, Kuehl starred with radio and film veterans Penny Singleton, Gale Gordon, Bea Benaderet, and Jim Backus on the family radio program The Penny Williamson Show airing live from Studio B of the NBC studios in Hollywood. Airing in the adjacent studios were the popular drama The Cisco Kid and The Bob Hope Show with Doris Day. Kuehl would later cite her interaction with the other NBC radio talent as influential in forming her professionalism and comedy skills. The show centered around Singleton playing Penny Williamson, a widow selling real estate in a small town to support two daughters. The show was "a light-hearted pitch for women's liberation, portraying Penny and her daughters as highly competent, self-sufficient females" dealing with bungling suitors competing for Penny's affections.Television
Due to her radio talent, Kuehl's agent convinced her parents to take her to auditions for a television role. Kuehl was signed to play Jackie, Stuart Erwin's tomboy daughter, in the television series The Stu Erwin Show, which ran from 1950 to 1955. Kuehl later recalled "The same 200 kids I think were there for the interview and I was called back and called back and called back and eventually I got that part. And beginning in 1950, I did that series for six years."After The Stu Erwin Show ended, Kuehl continued to work as an actress while going to school. Her academic success allowed her to skip two grades; by sixteen she was attending the University of California, Los Angeles. As her college studies continued she moved into a sorority house and began spending summers as a counsellor for a children's camp. At the age of eighteen, while working at the camp, Kuehl met a twenty-one year-old counsellor named Kathy and fell in love. Kuehl would later recall "It was just a funny attraction that neither of us would acknowledge. Then, one night she and I were sitting together at her place. She was rubbing my back and we just, like, went to bed. It was wonderful. But then we stayed up all night wondering if we were really sick." They concluded that they were "sick" but that nothing could be done. Kuehl later recalled "There was no movement then. There was nothing to read. I knew no lesbians. We just figured this was a rare thing and that we were two women who'd fallen in love and that we had to keep it a secret because nobody would approve. We didn't dare tell a soul." After that summer, with Kathy going to school in San Diego, the two exchanged passionate letters daily for a year.
''The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis''
During this time, Kuehl began acting the role for which she is probably best known – her portrayal of teen-aged genius Zelda Gilroy, the would-be girlfriend of the title character in the television series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963. Zelda was originally intended to be a one-shot character in the early Dobie Gillis episode "Love is a Science," but Dobie creator Max Shulman liked Kuehl and had her signed on as a semiregular cast member.Kuehl later recalled how she landed the part. "Well, when you're an actor with an agent, no matter how old you are, you go on interviews. I went on lots of interviews for lots of guest shots... and I had done two on Love that Bob with Bob Cummings and Dwayne Hickman, who played his nephew, and the director Rod Amateau, so I had met all the people who eventually were going to be much of the team for Dobie Gillis. In 1959, I was at UCLA, and I went on an interview for Dobie Gillis and I walked on the set and they all said, 'Oh, hi, we know your work, you're fine. Just go across the street and meet Max Schulman .' As it turned out, Max and I were the same height, and he was like buried behind the desk when I walked in. And he said, 'What's the first line?' And I said, 'I love you.' And he said, 'You're hired!'"
Signing a contract with Dobie producer 20th Century Fox Television required Kuehl, then 18 and in college studying theater, to change her major to English, so that Shulman, also a successful author, could act as her proctor on set to allow her to continue her studies. Kuehl earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1962, during the show's final season.
Having signed a contract in 1960 to do 21 shows for the next season of Dobie, that same year Kuehl was elected an officer in both the university student government and in her sorority. Despite this success, things became difficult that summer when love letters to Kathy that she had accidentally left at the sorority house were found by the cleaning staff and turned over to the alumnae council of the sorority. When she returned from summer vacation, the council confronted Kuehl with the letters demanding an explanation. Kuehl later recalled that at first, she tried to deny it and failing that, "I then just clammed up and took my sorority pin off and put it on the table and left. I cried all the way home." She was officially expelled from the sorority and despite assurance that no one would be told why, she was aware that rumors were spreading. Some of the members of the sorority refused to speak to her afterwards and avoided her. Kuehl moved back in with her parents under the cover story that she was homesick, but was still a member of the sorority of which they knew she loved being a part. Whenever her parents knew of a sorority meeting taking place, to prevent discovery, Kuehl would go to a coffee shop during that time and return with a story about the events of the meeting that she had not attended.
Despite Kathy moving to Los Angeles and their being able to see each other daily, the social sacrifices Kuehl was contemplating put a strain on their relationship. Kuehl later recalled, "By then, the whole idea of being queer was so overwhelming and scary. Not the sexuality, but the loss of everything. To be that way for good meant no family, no children, no career, nor normalcy, no parents. It seemed at that point that I should really get out of it. I told I didn't want to see her any longer." Kuehl had seen a man casually on and off during her relationship with Kathy and began working to make it more serious. They kissed, but they did not have sex and they almost got engaged. Kuehl could not get Kathy off her mind and broke up with the man to resume the relationship with her. Kuehl's closeted relationship with Kathy continued until the beginning of the 1970s, and had lasted 12 years before they broke up.
File:Broadside female cast 1964.JPG|thumb|right|Kuehl on Broadside, 1964
After Dobie Gillis ended its run, Kuehl co-starred with Kathleen Nolan, formerly of The Real McCoys, in the short-lived ABC television series Broadside, a female version of McHale's Navy, in its 1964–65 season.
Opportunities for acting work steadily diminished and Kuehl was forced to sell her Malibu house. She later recalled this period, saying, "I couldn't even get a commercial." Due to worries about her career and being closeted, she fell into a serious depression and developed a drinking problem. She was able to move forward after seeking help. She then moved in with her then-girlfriend, Kathy, and began working at the UCLA student activities office helping students organize around the rising political movements of the 1960s.
Kuehl made television guest appearances on National Velvet; McHale's Navy; The Donna Reed Show; The Beverly Hillbillies; Petticoat Junction; The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet; Marcus Welby, M.D.; and The Ed Sullivan Show from 1963 to 1970. On Petticoat Junction, Kuehl joined the Bradley sisters in a band called The Ladybugs, which was created to compete with Beatlemania. Kuehl, along with Jeannine Riley, Pat Woodell, and Linda Kaye Henning appeared as moptop singers performing "I Saw Him Standing There" on a March 1964 episode of Sullivan's show, just weeks after the Beatles had performed "I Saw Her Standing There".
By the end of the decade, acting roles had dried up for her. Though Kuehl "can't state with certainty that she was blacklisted" from further acting jobs over her sexuality, she claims that afterwards, "with few exceptions, the phone stopped ringing." A pilot for a Dobie Gillis spin-off, in which the character Zelda was the lead, was produced, but the president of CBS, Jim Aubrey, thought Kuehl was "too butch" to be a star for their network. Subsequently, the pilot was not promoted and did not sell, but Kuehl was not told about this immediately. Rather, she was informed by the director, Rod Amateau, when she arrived to shoot the following episodes. She was devastated by the news.
Kuehl's only acting roles beyond 1970 were in two Dobie Gillis reunion projects - a 1977 sitcom pilot produced by James Komack, Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis?, and a 1988 television movie sequel, Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis. In both productions, Dobie had married Zelda and the two were running the Gillis family grocery store and raising a teenaged son named Georgie Gillis.
Reflecting on the lasting impact of her role as Zelda, Kuehl told an interviewer, "First, there were no smart girls on television, period. All the girls were better looking than me, but dumb. I didn't mean the actresses were dumb, but that was sort of what you had to be in those days. So, a smart girl, brash, did not know she was a loser, which was sort of the theme for all the characters on Dobie Gillis…you just keep doing what you are doing because you don't know there's anything wrong with you. And the other thing, of course, 20 years later I started getting letters from young women saying, 'You were such a role model for me,' and now that the women's movement had started, I could see why. An independent, smart girl, knew what she wanted, went after it, but not in a mean way. And always by the end of the show, if you were doing anything dishonest against your friends, you would repent, because friendship was always the most important thing."