Joby Baker, the nightclub entertainer and painter who played drums in a band with Elvis Presley in Girl Happy and starred as a radio D.J. on the short-lived CBS sitcom Good Morning World, has died. He was 92.
Baker died June 22 at a hospital in Yonkers, New York, his granddaughter Sofia Silverman told The Hollywood Reporter.
Managed early in his career by famed comedian Lou Costello, Baker appeared in The Last Angry Man (1959) alongside Paul Muni in the legendary actor’s final movie and shared the USS Echo with Jack Lemmon and Ricky Nelson in The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960).
The Columbia Pictures contract player showed up in Gidget (1959), Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) and Gidget Goes to Rome (1963), starring Sandra Dee, Deborah Walley and Cindy Carol, respectively.
Baker also worked opposite singer-actress Connie Francis in Looking for Love (1964) and When the Boys Meet the Girls (1965) and starred as a musicians’ manager in another song-filled film of its time, Hootenanny Hoot (1963).
In Girl Happy (1965), set during spring break in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Baker portrayed the drummer Wilbur in a band with Presley’s Rusty Wells, Gary Crosby’s Andy and Jimmy Hawkins’ Doc.
When the fabled CBS sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show concluded its five-season run in June 1966, the network “needed to find a replacement [for Dick Van Dyke], and CBS decided it was me,” he said in a 2020 interview.
So Dick Van Dyke Show principals Bill Persky, Sam Denoff, Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard created Good Morning World, which premiered in September 1967 and featured Baker as Dave Lewis and Ronnie Schell as Larry Clarke, hosts of a morning-drive radio program (The Lewis and Clarke Show) in Los Angeles. (Schell died three weeks ago.)
“They were going to call it The Joby Baker Show,” he said. “I went to these guys and I begged them please, please, don’t call it [that]. And I convinced them not to. It’s too much responsibility for a painter who might be in a terrible TV show. I was shy and nervous about stardom.”
The comedy lasted one season, canceled after 26 episodes.
Joseph Baker was born in Montreal on March 26, 1934. After his mother died when he was a toddler, his father — who had affectionally nicknamed him “Jobela” — took him to live in Oahu, Hawaii.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941, Baker escaped injury in the immediate aftermath when the house he was living in was hit by friendly fire. He and his stepmother quickly left the islands, taking the RMS Aquitania with thousands of other evacuees to San Francisco, he recalled in 2022.
After attending school in New York City, he came to Los Angeles and launched a nightclub act that got him laughs as a Jerry Lewis impersonator.
While in the U.S. Army, where he entertained the troops, he served with the husband of Costello’s first daughter, Paddy. He convinced the comic to come to his camp to do a show, and he would become his friend and then his manager. Baker said he often stayed at Costello’s home in the San Fernando Valley on weekends.
Baker was working as an NBC page in Hollywood when he got on The Red Skelton Hour in 1952, and he made his movie debut as an Army man in Target Zero (1955), starring Richard Conte and Charles Bronson.
He then appeared on series including West Point, Dragnet, Bachelor Father, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, Dr. Kildare, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Perry Mason and portrayed a young hood in Key Witness (1960), directed by Phil Karlson. He also recurred as Pvt. Kelly on Combat!
Meanwhile, he sang and cracked jokes as the opener for singer Johnny Mathis and “used to swing on the curtains” at the Sahara in Las Vegas before Costello and Bud Abbott came on.
Baker said he was showing his paintings out of an art gallery on La Cienega Boulevard when author Ray Bradbury walked in and mentioned that he had written a play to be performed down the street at the Coronet Theatre.
Baker then was cast as a Mexican named Vamanos in Bradbury’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, and his often ad-libbed performance impressed the creators of Good Morning World. (It also helped that Baker had appeared in two final-season episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show.)
Good Morning World, delayed a season because Persky and Denoff were starting That Girl for Marlo Thomas, also featured Julie Parrish as Baker’s onscreen wife; Goldie Hawn — in her first professional role — as her wacky friend; and Billy De Wolfe at the station manager. (After the series was canceled, Hawn was quickly hired for Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.)
Baker also appeared in the Disney films The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin (1966), Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968) and Superdad (1974); was a regular on two other short-lived shows, Stone and The Six O’Clock Follies; and guest-starred on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, F Troop, Mannix, Medical Center and Quincy M.E., among many other series.
Survivors include his fourth wife, Megan; his daughters, Ricka and Michelle; his son, Scott; his stepdaughters, Emma and Eliza; and his grandchildren, Sofia, Amelia, Finn, Avery, Zach and Monty.
Baker also was married to actress Joan Blackman from 1959 until their 1961 divorce, to Joyce Harriet Winter from 1961 until their 1975 divorce and to lyricist, singer, songwriter and poet Dory Previn (Andre Previn‘s ex-wife) from 1984 until her 2012 death. He illustrated The Dory Previn Songbook, published in 1995, and some of her other books.
See some of his paintings here.
At the end of the day, Baker considered himself foremost a painter. “I was not interested in stardom, in fact I was embarrassed by it,” he said. “I was the wrong type of person to be an actor.”
