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#Bye Bye Birdie #Janet Leigh #Dick Van Dyke #Ann-Margret #Maureen Stapleton #Bobby Rydell #Jesse Pearson #Ed Sullivan #George Sidney #1963

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Lgbtq+ singer and actor Jesse Pearson as Elvis-inspired pop star Conrad Birdie in the Columbia Pictures/George Sidney musical romantic comedy Bye Bye Birdie, 1963. Born Bobby Wayne Pearson in Seminole, Oklahoma on August 18th, 1930, Pearson was signed by Decca Records in the late-1950s and recorded two singles which were later heard by composer Charles Strouse, who wrote the music for the original 1960 Broadway production of Bye Bye Birdie. After actor Dick Gautier (who played Conrad in the Broadway musical) fell ill, Strouse suggested Jesse for the role when the play embarked on a national tour. Successful in the touring production, Pearson was then hired by Columbia Pictures to play Conrad Birdie in the screen adaptation opposite Ann-Margret, Dick Van Dyke, Paul Lynde, Janet Leigh and Bobby Rydell (Van Dyke and Lynde were also both connected to the stage version, being the only two actors brought in from the original Broadway play). Though the movie was a box office hit and Jesse received positive reviews for his portrayal of the vain, overly confident and somewhat obnoxious Birdie, his career didn't take off as expected and he ended up playing "guest-starring" roles on episodic television, appearing during the 1960s on Bonanza, The Andy Griffith Show, Death Valley Days, McHale's Navy and The Beverly Hillbillies. He also found work narrating albums that combined music with poetry, recording Rod McKuen's The Sea (1967) and Home to the Sea (1968), as well as The Body Electric and The Body Electric-2, working with McKuen again on two albums adapted from the poems of Walt Whitman. In the 1970s Jesse wrote the scripts for two X-rated adult movies under the pseudonym "A. Fabritzi", The Legend of Lady Blue (1978) and Pro-Ball Cheerleader (1979). Sadly, Jesse was soon after diagnosed with cancer and he moved with his boyfriend to Monroe, Louisiana to be near his mother, where he passed away on December 5th, 1979 at the age of 49. Though his later career wasn't what he'd hoped for, Jesse's memorable performance as Conrad in Bye Bye Birdie has stood the test of time and the film remains a beloved musical over sixty years later. (Weird Fact: actor Dick Gautier, who Jesse replaced in the touring stage production of Bye Bye Birdie, also later had a connection to the adult entertainment industry via his son, Randy, who became an X-rated film star in the '90s under the name "Austin Moore", appearing in both straight and gay productions. Randy later gained notoriety when he stole a private video from the home of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee in 1995 featuring self-filmed intimate moments between the couple, releasing it on the internet through a distributor and causing Pamela tremendous embarrassment and almost destroying her career.)

The gifs of Jesse Pearson in this post feature his rousing performance of A Lot of Livin' to Do alongside Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell in the 1963 screen version of Bye Bye Birdie, as seen in the video below.