Dobie Gillis Will Even Cross Political Lines for Zelda

Dobie still loves Zelda. Or at least enough to endorse her despite the fact she’s a liberal Democrat and he has been a registered Republican.

At a recent reunion of the cast of the television series “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” the actor who played the title role, Dwayne Hickman, said he’s supporting former co-star Sheila James Kuehl in her bid to become an assemblywoman for the 41st district.

Attorney Kuehl, as all you Dobie fans may recall, played the brainy Zelda Gilroy, Dobie’s true-blue high school sweetheart on the late-’50s sitcom.

Hickman, listed by the county last year as a member of the GOP, is the only former cast member who lives in the district, which includes Santa Monica, Malibu and the west San Fernando Valley. Steve Franken, who played Chatsworth Osborne Jr., is a campaign volunteer for Kuehl but lives just outside the district’s boundaries.

Maynard G. Krebs, aka Bob Denver, lives even farther afield. He came in from his mountaintop home in West Virginia for last week’s reunion, which also served as a fund-raiser for Kuehl.

All of the cast members insisted that Kuehl is just as brainy as the character she played so long ago. “She’s brilliant and has a great sense of humor,” Denver said. “I caught her once memorizing the whole script. She said, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ ”

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UNDERCOVER COUNCILMAN: Santa Monica City Councilman Kelly Olsen has been out again at night trying to catch drug dealers in the act.

But this time, police say, the councilman unwittingly drove his white truck right through the middle of a police undercover narcotics surveillance operation. Moreover, Olsen was driving on a pedestrian-only beach access road at the time, Sgt. Gary Gallinot said.

Olsen says the police have the wrong man. He acknowledges he was in the area earlier this month to observe drug dealing with a reporter from the Outlook newspaper. But he says he parked a block away from the site of the surveillance operation. What police thought was his truck, he says, was probably a beach maintenance vehicle.

That puts the councilman at odds with a lieutenant, a sergeant and several other Santa Monica police officers who, Gallinot says, insist it was Olsen who drove through the stakeout.

Olsen has made periodic forays to the Palisades Park area to videotape drug-dealing there as part of a crusade to get the city to step up its anti-drug efforts. He suggests that his efforts may be rubbing some people the wrong way.

“It was made clear to me there was a price to pay for keeping on talking about drugs in the park,” he said, declining to say who gave him the warning. “If this is the price . . . I’m glad to pay it.”

Olsen accompanied an Outlook reporter and photographer to the park area on several nights this month to show that drug dealing there had not abated despite a monthlong sting operation in April. Outlook Executive Editor Patty Burnett said neither the reporter nor the photographer was with the councilman when the alleged driving incident occurred.