his high school, during the first half of season one. Hickman later recalled that Beatty "looked at me like I was a bug" while on set. Beatty did remain friends with his brief co-star Michael J. Pollard. The two co-starred in Bonnie and Clyde eight years later. He quit the series in September 1959, midway through production of the first season after filming his fifth and final Dobie episode, "The Smoke-Filled Room", to appear in A Loss of Roses on Broadway. Former child actress Sheila James, who, playing daughter "Jackie" on The Stu Erwin Show, had worked with Dwayne Hickman on that series and The Bob Cummings Show, was cast without an audition as Zelda Gilroy, the tomboyish brainy girl who was in love with Dobie. Originally intended as a one-shot character for the episode "Love is a Science" (season one, episode three), Max Shulman liked both Zelda and Sheila James and had Zelda retained as a semiregular character. Signing a contract with Dobie Gillis necessitated James, then an 18-year-old college student, changing her major from theater to English, so Shulman could assist her with her studies on set. After the third season of Dobie Gillis, Rod Amateau and Max Shulman produced a pilot for a Zelda spinoff starring Sheila James as Zelda Gilroy, with Joe Flynn and Jean Byron cast as her parents. However, CBS president James Aubrey lingered over moving forward with the Zelda series for a long time before firmly rejecting the series, with Amateau telling James in private that Aubrey had found Zelda (and by extension James, then a closeted lesbian) "too butch". James' contract for the pilot and the resulting waiting period caused her to be absent from much of the fourth and final season of Dobie Gillis, though Amateau was able to hire her to return as Zelda for four episodes towards the end of the season. Acting roles became sparse for James by the late 1960s; she went into law and politics under her birth name of Sheila Kuehl, and later became the first openly gay person elected to the California State Legislature. Steve Franken, a 28-year-old character actor, was cast immediately after Beatty's departure as Chatsworth Osbourne, Jr., a replacement character for Milton Armitage. While both Milton and Chatsworth were rich rivals of Dobie Gillis's (and both characters shared the same actress, Doris Packer, for a mother) and were, according to canon,