- Welcome back to another segment
of "Behind the Scenes of the Waltons."
Today, I'm going to be talking about
Ike and Corabeth Godsey.
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The character of Ike Godsey was introduced in our pilot
"The Homecoming."
In that TV movie he was played by Woodrow Parfrey.
And then when we went on to do the series,
of course, Joe Conley took over the role of Ike Godsey,
and played him brilliantly for all nine seasons,
and our TV movie specials.
The character of Corabeth Godsey
was not introduced until Season 3
in the episode "The Matchmaker."
And, of course, Corabeth was played just enchantingly
by Ronnie Claire Edwards.
In "The Matchmaker" a cousin of the Waltons,
Corabeth Walton comes to stay on Walton's Mountain.
She is on her way to Richmond, or so she says,
but like a number of Walton relatives who show up
for supposedly a short period of time she stays.
The Waltons were very generous and warm-hearted about
inviting relatives in and making them feel at home,
but it was very challenging
when they overstayed their welcome
with a house full of 11 people already.
Of course, John-Boy always had to give up his room.
So he was always sort of put out at that point.
In this case, Ike is thoroughly smitten by Corabeth.
And we have an opportunity to see a different side of Ike.
We see the man
who's sensitive and lonely,
and has
different aspirations for his life.
And we see a whole different dimension of him,
and for Corabeth she puts on airs,
which was one of the fun things about that character,
which Ronnie Claire brought to life so fabulously.
Being from Doe Hill and she has this sense of herself
as being much more refined.
And she speaks a little French,
and she appreciates dance and cultural things
that Ike just doesn't relate to at all,
but he does care for Corabeth very much.
And I always thought it was so beautiful in episodes
where we got to see that personal side of them.
And when they actually did really connect as characters,
and we saw the great affection,
and love that they did have for each other,
despite being so different on the surface.
In the episode "The Matchmaker"
Ike is at a loss how to court Corabeth.
He asks John-Boy to assist him
in sort of a Cyrano de Bergerac sort of way.
He wants John-Boy to write him lines, basically.
Give him things to say to Corabeth that will impress her.
John-Boy doesn't really want to have anything to do with it,
but he gives Ike a few tips,
which at first Corabeth seems interested in,
but then doesn't quite know what to do with,
and Ike doesn't know how to follow-up with it
because they're not his words.
So he doesn't know what to say next.
He just needed to find how to be genuine himself,
and show Corabeth who he really is.
And, ultimately, she responds to that.
I love the moment when
Corabeth and Ike have been on the Walton front porch
after dinner, and Corabeth comes in
passing through crying and says,
"Mr. Godsey asked me to marry him."
- And I said yes.
- I mean, it's just such a brilliant contrast
between a marriage proposal,
and her emotional state about it.
I loved the relationship of Olivia and Corabeth
in this episode, how compassionate Olivia is with her,
how she tries to give her a different perspective on Ike,
and on marriage,
how Corabeth states that she really would love to have
a marriage like John and Olivia's.
And yet realizes that that may not be something
that she ever has the opportunity for,
but, ultimately, she comes to recognize and appreciate
what Ike has to offer,
and what that life would have to offer for her.
I love at the actual wedding ceremony
when Corabeth is preparing,
and she is gathering up something old, something new,
something borrowed, something blue,
and Grandma offers up a blue garter from her wedding.
And I, Mary Ellen,
just snorts, laughs, and rolls her eyes
because the idea of Grandma with a blue garter
is just a little more than she can picture in that moment.
In real life,
Joe was less like Ike than Ronnie Claire was like Corabeth,
which is kind of odd.
Joe in real life was also a real estate broker.
And throughout the course of the Waltons,
he still operated as a real estate agent and broker.
Fortunately, he had offices with staff that could run,
and he could.
Because he didn't work every day on The Waltons
he was still able
to combine those two activities in his life.
He and Eric Scott were very close.
There were storylines with Ike and Ben,
namely when they put together
a little song and dance troupe,
which we saw in one episode.
And then we heard Ike sing, Joe sing from time to time.
He had a beautiful voice, a trained voice.
In "The Quilting"
he sang with some of the other members of the male community
while they're having a little pool tournament
while Mary Ellen is having her quilting.
So I always loved when Joe sang
because he did have such a lovely voice,
and it was fun when he and Eric created
the little song and dance troupe that they then went out,
and performed at state fairs and different things like that.
Eric stayed close with Joe throughout his life.
And we, as a cast were also close with Joe and his wife.
Joe would get together with Eric regularly
right up until his passing.
So I was really happy to see
that those relationships continued.
Ronnie Claire was like Corabeth
in that she was larger than life.
She had a dramatic flare,
and because she was from the South
that was not a put on accent.
She really did talk like that.
Although she was not as unaware
as Corabeth was about how - the effect she was creating,
Ronnie Claire knew exactly what she was doing.
And so it was put on for effect,
but in a more natural way.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
One incident that happened in my life
that was typical of Ronnie Claire.
It's a long story that I won't go into at this point,
but, basically, I had had in my life an extortion attempt,
and a bomb threat.
It's all fine, obviously, I'm here,
but there was a period of about a 12 hour period
where a lot of things happened.
The police were involved, bomb, sniffing dog.
And the next morning I was flying out
to do a publicity event in Indiana so I had an early flight.
It all resolved in the early hours of the morning
everything was fine,
but I had to get to the airport.
And I knew that this was something
that was going to hit the press.
So I called my mom on the way to the airport
to let her know, look, you're gonna hear this.
You're not gonna be able to reach me.
I'm gonna be on an airplane, but everything's fine.
When I came back from that trip,
and went into work the next week,
and it had hit "UPI" and "Associated Press."
Ronnie Claire in typical fashion was like,
"Well, some people will do anything for publicity."
I mean, it cracked me up as it was meant to.
So I always loved that about Ronnie Claire.
She always had these wonderful parties
with all these eclectic, eccentric sort of people.
And they were always fascinating
to see this collection of people.
That to me epitomized old school Hollywood parties,
just the personalities that were there.
I always really enjoyed Ronnie Claire's parties.
She moved back to Texas in her later years.
Bought some sort of a church, I believe it was,
and renovated it into where she lived that was her home,
which I thought was again eccentric
in the way that Ronnie Claire was.
She wrote theater productions and things like that,
and just was always involved in aspects of the arts
throughout her life.
She also wrote a book that I believe was titled,
or subtitled, Ike asked me to marry him and I said, "yes."
I have not read it.
I'm sure it's tremendous fun.
So if you've read it make some comments here,
and let other people know what it's about.
And maybe if you know where they can find it.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with Joe and Ronnie Claire.
I adored the characters of Ike and Corabeth.
I thought they brought a lot of humor to the community,
to the show.
They were fully realized dimensional characters.
Things happened to them.
Ike had a heart attack.
Ronnie Claire, Corabeth, had a drinking problem.
She tried all sorts of things to enhance her life,
and their life and make Walton's Mountain into
a cultural mecca that she craved in her life.
So a lot of wonderful things came about
because of those two characters on the show.
So thank you for asking about them.
I'm glad you have embraced them in the same way that we did.
I hope you enjoyed this little sneak peek
into Joe and Ronnie Claire, Ike and Corabeth Godsey.
I hope you'll join me again next time
for more "Behind the Scenes of the Waltons."
Thanks for watching.