OAKLAND, Calif. — The last Clampett still sitting at the supper table is 88 years old now, and he is finally ready to talk about the cousin he lost, the girl from the Louisiana swamps who taught a heavyweight champion’s son what real toughness looked like.

Max Baer Jr. , the man who played the gloriously dim-witted Jethro Bodine for nine seasons on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” has spent decades deflecting questions about his co-stars with gruff jokes and a gambler’s smile. But when the conversation turns to Donna Douglas, the actress who played Elly May Clampett, the rascal’s mask slips.

He leans forward, his voice drops, and he speaks about her with a tenderness that cuts through six decades of Hollywood cynicism.

Donna Douglas died on New Year’s Day 2015, at the age of 82, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, near the tiny community of Pride where she was born Doris Ione Smith. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the fall of 2014, and she told almost no one. Max Baer Jr.

did not know she was sick. He learned of her death the way millions of other Americans did, through a news flash on television.

Then a friend delivered a message that Donna had left for him, words she had whispered in her final days, knowing they would find their way to Lake Tahoe. “Tell Maxie I thought I was going to get better.” Baer repeats the sentence slowly, letting it hang in the air.

He sighs, a long, rattling exhale from a man who has outlived them all. “I loved her,” he says simply. “She was Elly May until the day she died.”

To understand the bond between Jethro and Elly May, you have to understand where Max Baer Jr. came from. He was born in Oakland, California, the son of Max Baer, the heavyweight champion of the world who once knocked out Primo Carnera in front of 60,000 screaming fans at Madison Square Garden.

But the champ carried a secret sorrow that haunted him for the rest of his life. In 1930, a young fighter named Frankie Campbell died after a bout with Baer Sr. , and the champion had stayed by the man’s side until the ambulance came, holding his hand as he slipped away.

Max Jr. once remembered the advice his father gave him, words that shaped everything that followed. “The Bible says it is far better to give than to receive,” his dad told him.

“So get the heck out of the fight business.” Max listened. He earned a business degree from the University of Santa Clara, and he was doing his military service in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1959 when he heard over the radio that his father had died of a heart attack.

He was 21 years old, alone in a strange city, and the most famous man he had ever known was gone.

Meanwhile, down in Louisiana, a girl named Doris Ione Smith was growing up about as far from Hollywood as a body can get. She was born in the little community of Pride near Baton Rouge, and her family didn’t have much. With an older brother and a pack of boy cousins around, she was a tomboy from the start.

She ran, climbed, dug in the dirt, and came home sweaty and happy. She was forever dragging home turtles, frogs, stray dogs, and baby birds that needed feeding. Sound like anybody you know?

In high school, she was a star on the softball team. She married young, had a son named Danny, and by 1954, she was divorced and raising him on her own. Her friends kept telling her she was too pretty to sit at home.

In 1957, she finally entered a beauty pageant and won Miss Baton Rouge. Then she won Miss New Orleans, too. With three months of savings in her pocket, she made up her mind to go to New York.

There was just one small hitch. She had never been on an airplane in her life.

New York didn’t roll out the red carpet, but it opened a side door. Doris, now Donna Douglas, posed for toothpaste ads, then landed a job on NBC as the letters girl on the Perry Como show, and later the billboard girl on the Steve Allen show. Picture Vanna White, only 30 years early and with a Louisiana drawl.

Reporters and photographers named her Miss Byline, and she wore the title on the Ed Sullivan show. Small acting parts followed, and she took them all.

On “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” she played a sorority girl named, of all things, Donna. She had a bit in “Lover Come Back” with Rock Hudson and Doris Day. On “Mr.

Ed,” she shared an episode with a lanky young cowboy actor named Clint Eastwood. Those of us who grew up with these shows can probably still hear that horse talking. But the part that truly changed her life was one where, for most of the episode, the audience never even saw her face.

In 1960, she appeared in “The Twilight Zone” episode called “Eye of the Beholder.” If you have seen it, you have never forgotten it. A young woman lies in a hospital bed with her head wrapped in bandages, desperate for an operation that will make her look normal.

For most of the episode, another actress, Maxine Stuart, plays her under the gauze. Then the bandages come off and the camera reveals Donna Douglas, a strikingly beautiful woman, while the doctors and nurses gasp in horror. We finally see their faces twisted and pig-like, and we understand that in this world, she is the one who is considered ugly.

The closing narration reminds us, as you might guess, that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. It is still ranked among the greatest episodes Rod Serling ever made. Television producers took notice of the girl with the unforgettable face, and one of them, a Missouri-born writer named Paul Henning, was about to cook up a show about a family of Ozark mountain folks who strike oil and move to the fanciest zip code in America.

More than 500 young women turned out to read for the part of Elly May Clampett. Donna remembered standing in line for hours and saying one line before hearing, “Thank you. We’ll call you.”

But she kept getting called back until only a handful were left. On the final day, the producers asked if she was good with animals. “Sure,” she said.

She had had lots of pets. Then they asked if she had ever milked a goat. In her mind, she was thinking about cows, so she said, “Yes.”

They pulled back a curtain and there stood a goat. Years later, she explained it with a perfect deadpan. “I had milked cows before,” she said.

“I figured they were equipped the same, so I just went on over and did it.”

Max’s own audition was a little less wholesome. He was living on $55 a week in unemployment insurance, and on the day of his screen test, Irene Ryan, who would play Granny, took the nervous kid to lunch. They had a couple of martinis.

When he walked into the cabin set with Buddy Ebsen, he bumped into the doorframe, turned, and politely said, “Excuse me.” The producers loved it. Jethro was born.

Then, just a week after Donna won the part, she was hit from behind at a red light. Her head struck the steering wheel, and she landed in the hospital with a severe concussion. She was dizzy and sick for days.

After about two weeks, terrified they would give Elly May to someone else, she checked herself out and showed up for work, the room still spinning. On September 26, 1962, “The Beverly Hillbillies” premiered on CBS. It was Donna’s 30th birthday, and she was playing a teenager.

That is show business for you.

The critics hated the show. They called it corny and silly. The audience did not care one bit.

Within weeks, it was the number one program in America, and Flatt and Scruggs’ banjo theme, “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” went all the way to number one on the country charts. In January 1964, an episode about Granny mistaking a kangaroo for a giant jackrabbit drew one of the largest audiences any half-hour sitcom has ever had. The critics, it seems, were the only ones not laughing.

What made it work was the family. Buddy Ebsen, the calm, wise Jed, had once been cast as the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz” until the aluminum powder in his makeup nearly killed him, and he had to be replaced. Irene Ryan was a vaudeville veteran with impeccable timing.

Raymond Bailey played the greedy banker, Mr. Drysdale, and Nancy Kulp played his long-suffering secretary, Miss Jane Hathaway. Bea Benaderet, Jethro’s mother, Pearl, in the first season, was also the voice of Betty Rubble on “The Flintstones.”

Max always said Buddy was the real star. Back in 1962, when reporters noticed young Jethro was getting more fan mail than anybody, Max had a ready answer. Buddy’s admirers, he explained, were not of the age group that writes letters.

Well, Max, those of us in that age group are writing now. He added that Buddy kept throwing the best lines to the rest of them, and that if he ever became as big a star as Buddy, he hoped he would be as big a person.

Like any real family, they squabbled. Max once compared a TV cast to a dog and a cat stuck in a room, learning to get along because they have to. He admitted he yelled at Irene, and she yelled right back, and that when he got cross with Donna, she would sometimes cry.

But nobody outside the family was allowed to pick on them. Donna, for her part, summed Max up in two words. “He’s a rascal.”

Max loved to tell about the blooper reels they would watch at the Christmas party. One year, Buddy and Irene staged a naughty little gag in a bedroom scene, and the whole crew roared, all except Donna, who said flatly, “That’s nasty.” That was Donna.

Buddy also tried teaching Max to sail, and Max joked that he did not learn much about sailing, but learned a lot about drowning.

Then there was Jethrine, Jethro’s twin sister, played by Max in a dress with his voice dubbed by Linda Kaye Henning, the creator’s daughter. Max said that after wearing the padding, the girdle, and the makeup, he finally understood that women go through absolute misery to look good. Ladies, I believe that is what they call a conversion.

Onscreen, Jethro and Elly May were the two kids of the household, and the writers had a field day with them. Jethro was forever chasing a new career, brain surgeon one week, Hollywood producer the next, and most famously a double-naught spy. Elly May, meanwhile, filled the mansion with critters, from raccoons and possums to a chimpanzee named Cousin Bessie, and turned the swimming pool into the cement pond.

Every young fellow who came courting got wrestled to the ground before he could finish saying hello.

Max was the youngest of the main cast, and he and Donna fell into the easy rhythm of real cousins, teasing, needling, and covering for each other. The joke underneath it all was that Jethro, all 6-foot-4 of him, was the one with no common sense, while Elly May, the beauty queen, could outrun, outclimb, and outfight any man in Beverly Hills. That was not really acting for Donna.

She had been doing it since Pride, Louisiana. Max, who had grown up around prize fighters, knew a tough customer when he saw one, and for all her sweetness, Donna was one of the toughest he ever met.

Donna’s fame spread far beyond Beverly Hills. In 1966, she was cast opposite Elvis Presley in “Frankie and Johnny,” and she later said the two of them spent their breaks talking about faith and spiritual books instead of flirting. The king of rock and roll and the queen of the critters swapping thoughts on the good book.

Hollywood did not know what to make of her. She did not drink, did not chase the nightlife, and did not give the gossip columns much to chew on.

In 1971, she married Robert Leeds, a director on the show. But that same year, the party ended. CBS swept out nearly every rural comedy on its schedule, from “Green Acres” to “Mayberry R.

F. D.” Pat Buttram, Mr.

Haney on “Green Acres,” famously quipped that CBS canceled everything with a tree in it. “The Beverly Hillbillies” was still pulling solid ratings. It did not matter.

After 274 episodes, and Donna appeared in every single one of them, the Clampetts were evicted.

And for Max and Donna, the hardest years were just beginning. The trouble was, America could not see them as anyone else. Max put it bluntly.

He said he was about as much in demand as cancer. He could not walk into a producer’s office and ask to play a neurosurgeon or a pilot, because the moment he appeared on screen, people would say, “There’s Jethro.” Donna faced the same wall.

She was offered walk-ons and bit parts, and as time went on, roles in slasher pictures and films she felt crossed a moral line. She said no. She would rather walk away than be ashamed of what she put on the screen.

Max took a different road. If Hollywood would not hire him, he would hire himself. In 1974, he wrote, produced, and starred in “Macon County Line,” a gritty drive-in picture made on a shoestring that went on to earn many millions, one of the most profitable independent films of its day.

Two years later, he directed “Ode to Billy Joe,” based on the Bobby Gentry song. Not bad for a fellow with a sixth-grade education.

Still, Jethro followed him like a hound dog. When the Clampetts reunited in a 1981 TV movie, Max refused to take part, and another actor stepped in as Jethro. Donna and Buddy went, along with Nancy Kulp.

Eventually, Max made his peace. “If I have to be Jethro,” he decided, “I’ll be Jethro.” He confessed he suffered from what he called tunnel vision, and he aimed it at a wild dream.

In 1991, he licensed the rights from CBS to build a Beverly Hillbillies casino in Nevada, with a mansion out front, a giant oil derrick, a cement pond with rope swings, talking slot machines shaped like the characters, and Granny’s shotgun wedding chapel, where a pretend groom would be led in by two sheriffs in handcuffs. You have to admit, it beats bingo night at the Elks Lodge. Lawsuits and zoning fights tangled the project up for years, and it was never built.

But nobody can say Max Baer Jr. ever thought small.

Donna, meanwhile, turned toward the things that had always mattered most to her. In 1982, she enrolled at a Bible training center in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and graduated two years later with a focus on children’s ministry. She sang gospel in churches all over the country, earned a real estate license, and wrote children’s books, including one called “Donna’s Critters and Kids.”

Elly May would have approved. She signed autographs and swapped stories with fans at conventions, always in her pigtails and her ruffled pink or blue. And when Mattel put out an Elly May Barbie doll in 2011 without asking her, the sweet country girl took the toy giant to court, and the matter was settled.

Donna once explained her feelings about the role better than anyone else could. “Elly May was like a slice out of my life,” she said. The character was a wonderful door opener, she added.

“But it takes substance and integrity to carry you through that door.”

One by one, the family left the stage. Bea Benaderet died in 1968. In 1973, Irene Ryan, who had triumphed on Broadway in “Pippin,” fell ill during a performance and died weeks later.

Her estate still funds the Irene Ryan acting scholarships, helping young theater students to this very day. Not a bad legacy for the woman who bought a nervous kid a martini. Raymond Bailey died in 1980.

Buddy, of course, had landed on his feet, solving crimes as the gentle detective Barnaby Jones for eight seasons. Nancy Kulp ran for Congress in Pennsylvania in 1984, and in one of the strangest twists in TV history, Buddy Ebsen recorded a radio ad for her opponent. Miss Hathaway lost, and the sting reportedly lingered.

She passed away in 1991.

Still, the survivors kept finding their way back to each other. In 1992, Max and Donna celebrated Buddy’s 84th birthday with him, and in 1993, the three of them reunited for a CBS special. Max liked to say that some of those old episodes were so funny that if you did not laugh, you had to be a pretty strange person.

In July 2003, Buddy Ebsen lay in a hospital bed at the age of 95. The night before he died, two visitors came to sit with him. His television nephew and his television daughter.

Donna remembered it simply. “Max and I were with Buddy the night before he died,” she said.

Think about that for a moment. Forty years after they had first walked onto that cabin set, Jethro and Elly May were still family, keeping vigil over the man who taught them both how to work. After that, it was just the two of them.

They did not live in each other’s pockets. Max was out at Lake Tahoe, and Donna was back home in Louisiana. But they kept in touch.

As Max put it, they were not the kind of people who would text, but they would call each other when there was something to share. Most of us have a friend like that. Someone we do not speak to every week, but whose number we would never think of deleting.

The last time Max saw her was in January 2013 at an autograph show in Los Angeles. “She looked exactly as she always did,” he said, “dressed in pink or blue with those signature pigtails.” What Max did not know, what almost nobody knew, was that in the fall of 2014, Donna was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

She told hardly anyone. She was, as Max said, a very private person. And then added with his usual honesty, “Nothing like me.”

On New Year’s Day, 2015, Donna Douglas died in Baton Rouge, near her hometown, at the age of 82. Max learned the news like everybody else. And then a friend delivered the words Donna had wanted him to hear.

“Tell Maxie I thought I was going to get better.” Max, who likes to play the gruff old cuss, did not dress it up. “I loved her,” he said.

And then he gave her the finest compliment he could think of. “She was Elly May until the day she died.”

With her gone, Max said it plainly, with a sadness you could hear. “I’m the last man standing. All the actors, producers, everybody on the show is gone.”

Today, he is 88, still living at Lake Tahoe, the lone survivor of the family that once had tens of millions of Americans laughing on the same night. He has never pretended it has been easy to live in Jethro’s shadow. He once said he was born Max Baer Jr.

, the son of a great boxer, and he will die Jethro Bodine, and that he never really got the chance to be himself. But in a gentler mood, he made his peace with it. “If you made people laugh,” he said, “even at his own expense, then it was okay.”

Maybe that is the secret of the Clampetts, and of Donna most of all. She never tried to outrun the girl from the hills. She simply was her, critters and pigtails and Bible and all, right up to the end.

And somewhere, I like to imagine, Uncle Jed is calling the family to supper. Granny is stirring the pot, and Elly May is saving a seat for her cousin Jethro. Not too soon, Maxie.

Take your time. Y’all come back now, hear?