Sitcom Queens: Divas of the Small Screen

By Gale Storm and Michael Karol

Whether it was Lucy and Ethel (Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance) or Eve Arden as Miss Brooks, Gale Storm as her dad's "little" Margie, always interfering but with the best of intentions, or the more modern Bea Arthur as Maude, flaunting the conventions of how a woman was supposed to behave, we all have our favorite funny ladies who brought us laughter every week, and, for a half-hour at least, took us away from our daily problems. Classic TV expert Michael Karol, in a series of original essays, examines the roles these Sitcom Queens played on TV, and how they became the beloved TV icons of generation after generation of TV fans. With a sitcom timeline and a Top 10!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 20, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595846276

Gale Storm

Michael Karol is a New York-based writer and editor. His books include Lucy A to Z: The Lucille Ball Encyclopedia, and The ABC Movie of the Week Companion. Visit him online at www.sitcomboy.com.

Book preview

Copyright © 2006 by Michael Karol

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse

2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Portions of this book were previously published in Funny Ladies:

Sitcom Queens (2003) Front and back cover design, including all illustrations © 2006 by Michael Karol Author’s photo © Craig Hamrick

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-40251-9 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-84627-6 (ebk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-40251-8 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-84627-0 (ebk)

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword, by Gale Storm:

I feel blessed.

Preface

Introduction, by Doris Singleton

A Sitcom Queen Timeline

Act One:

The Top Ten Sitcom

Queens (Plus One)*

Intermission: Lucy & Ethel Redux

Act Two:

And the Rest…

Animated Women

City Folk, Country Cousins,

Island Hoppers, and a Changing

Landscape

Maid to Order

Modern Women

Mommies Dearest

Movin On Up

Senior Citizens

Supernatural

Working Women & Bachelor Gals

Appendix 1: Genie Award

Winners, Television Performance

Appendix 2: Side Dish

Bibliography

About the Author

To my Dad, who taught me what funny was.

I’m not funny. What I am is brave.

—Lucille Ball

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Craig Hamrick for the idea; Saul Fischer for copy editing the manuscript; to Gale Storm, Larry Storch, and Doris Singleton for sharing their memories; Marie Wallace; to Ronald White for helping with the cover design; to Christopher Popa of Big Band Library at bigbandlibrary.com for helping pinpoint dates for Desi Arnaz’ gigs at Ciro’s; and to all the Sitcom Queens, those who led the way, those who continue the tradition of laughter, and those yet to come who will inherit the throne.

Foreword, by Gale Storm:

I feel blessed.

Did I want to be an actress when I was growing up? No, I never, ever would have imagined that it was at all possible; it was like something completely unattainable. But in school I always loved drama class, and got into the plays. I knew I was good at it, but even so, it was an absolute impossibility. I wouldn’t have even dreamed of it, actually, but I won a lot of state acting contests, after junior high—including the Gateway to Hollywood contest. Jesse Lasky—a very famous Hollywood producer at the time—and his entourage toured the United States looking for talent. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that entering, much less winning, was a possibility, but I had two schoolteachers, bless their hearts, and they changed my life. They backed me into a corner and said, ‘You’re going to enter that contest!’

[The rest, as they say, is history. Gale Storm won the national tryouts and was given her star name. Gale is as delightful and funny as we remember her from her Golden Age classic TV series, My Little Margie and The Gale Storm Show. After speaking with her for this book, I can add that she is gracious, humble, and just plain nice. As a result of the contest, she did more than thirty movies, most of them B pictures, enjoyable but forgettable double-bill fillers, through 1952. (Read her bio in the Top Ten section.) Then television beckoned. But it almost didn’t happen…]

"It might seem like I moved easily from pictures into television; if you look at my resume you see the film The Woman of the North Country, in 1952, the same year I started on My Little Margie. But by the time I got to that last picture, my career wasn’t exactly zooming; it was pretty much on the wane. I’d reached a point where I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to stop waiting for the phone to ring, I’ve had this much career and it’s fine, I have my family, and if that’s all I’m supposed to have, I’m going to give up [show business] and not have any more expectations.’

"Of course, that’s when the phone rang. It was Hal Roach, Jr.—he didn’t call my agent, he called me, and I still have no idea why he happened to select me…we never had time to talk once we started working. He said they were doing a pilot called My Little Margie, and would I come in and read? I did, and they already had cast Charlie Farrell [who would play Vern Albright, Margie’s exasperated dad].

"They said they liked me for the role, and I could take the script home, read it and see how I felt. But I read it and felt the relationship depicted between the father and daughter wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t anything horrible or incestuous (laughs), it just wasn’t good, and even though I would’ve loved to have done a series, I called them back and told them how I felt about it, and I said how much I appreciated their considering me for it, but the way I felt about the script I couldn’t do it.

"I really was not in a position to be a critic, but nonetheless I told them that, they thanked me, and that was the end of that. A week or so went by, and I got another call from Hal Roach Jr. He said they’d considered what I’d said and done some rewriting, and they wanted me to read the script again. When I got it, I just loved it, the parts that bothered me were completely gone.

"The first season, Margie was a summer replacement for I Love Lucy and we were extended for several years because the ratings held up. And the final season of Oh! Susanna, my second series, was shot at Desilu Studios because Hal Roach had gotten himself into (financial) trouble with the wrong group of people. They were going to lock down the studio, and we had to get our sets off the lot before they did, so we moved to Desilu, which actually was kind of funny since that’s where I’d started—the Desilu lot was the former RKO lot.

"I didn’t get to know Lucy and Desi. I don’t think I ever met Desi, but I met Lucy and would see her occasionally, though never enough to say we were friends. I wish that had been true. I always liked her, of course, I mean as a person as well as her work, but we never really got acquainted.

"The only person in your group of funny ladies I could say I was acquainted with was Eve Arden, because I did a picture with her (1950’s Curtain Call at Cactus Creek). That was an interesting picture; everyone in it got his own TV show afterward…Donald O’Connor, Eve, myself. Eve was great, you couldn’t help but love her, very professional but not in a stiff way or anything, a real pro and a real sweet, smart, good person that you enjoyed thoroughly being with. You could always count on her to come through.

"Now, Betty White—I her more recently. I’d never worked with her, though I wish to heaven I had, she is just wonderful. They were doing a seminar for the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago in 1993, and spotlighting different segments of entertainment. Ours was a roundtable discussion with Betty, Jane Wyatt, and me: ‘Images of Women on Television from My Little Margie to Murphy Brown.’ Jane came in just before the seminar; Betty and I got to Chicago early and did everything together, all the pre-publicity interviews, from one TV station to another, radio stations in between, and she was fabulous, one of the brightest, funniest, and most talented people, a joy to be with.

"ZaSu Pitts—Zay-Sue is the correct pronunciation, not Zah-Sue, that’s the only thing she would correct anyone about—we all loved each other on Oh! Susanna. Both shows, in fact, were what you’d call happy shows—no competitive feelings, no jealousy, we all appreciated each other. And ZaSu was such a kick. We had a great relationship. I had one thing to do with the casting: Roy Roberts, who played the captain, had been in as many Margies as we could fit him in to. He was so funny, and could play such a variety of characters—you’d just let a little time go by and cast him some other way…and I said to myself and whoever else would listen, ‘If I ever do another television show, it’s gonna be with Roy Roberts.’ When we worked together, we just bounced our lines off each other and something clicked, it was so special.

"But I wasn’t going to do another television show—it was just too hard on me—unless I could not resist the concept.

"Some time went by, and one of the Margie writers called me and said he had an idea. He said, ‘Just give me a chance, and it won’t take me any time to show you what I have to show you. It won’t be anything to read.’ So he came in, and all he had was Time magazine. On the back cover was a wonderful ad for a luxury cruise ship. It read, ‘Our cruise director will see that you have a wonderful time, and you’ll visit all these exotic places.’ Anyway, it was just a natural sell, because it obviously was an unlimited format.

And then he knew what would really get me: He said, ‘Every third episode can be a musical, you get to prerecord with great orchestrations, and you get great choreography. (I wasn’t really a dancer, but give me two boys who can dance and lift and I can look good.) That was the clincher. All I could think of then was Roy Roberts as the captain, and he was perfect.

"At first, after I became well-known, someone would approach me and I’d think, ‘Oh I must know them, because of the way they’re looking at me,’ but the audience for television feels like they know you, you come into their living room every week. People feel like they’re your friend. I’m constantly amazed. Even now, thanks to reruns, people approach me as if I’m still at it, like I might start doing a sitcom next week!

"Laughter is one of the most important things we could possibly have. If we didn’t have that, none of us would be healthy. I really believe it has a great deal to do with good health. This week (June 26) is the 50th Anniversary of The Gale Storm Show, the fans and friends are giving me a big party on Saturday. That I’ve made people laugh over all these years makes me feel wonderful. I feel so blessed. I cannot possibly tell you how grateful I am, and how I thank God constantly for the opportunity not only to have enjoyed doing that, but that people still appreciate what I did."

Gale Storm Southern California Summer 2006

Preface

In a Newsweek cover story about the end of Friends after the 2003-2004 TV season, the magazine noted, "At least we’ve still got another season of Friends to help us forget our troubles. The sitcom probably won’t go down as one of the greatest of all time—it’s not in quite the same league as All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show or I Love Lucy—but it’s one of the most consistently funny shows ever." True enough.

More disturbing was the magazine’s conjecture about the future of the sitcom: "It’s no secret that the sitcom is dying. This fall, the four major networks broadcast 24 comedies, compared with 46 in the fall of 1993. It’s become fashionable to blame the rise of reality TV for the sitcom’s demise—heck, it’s fashionable to blame reality TV for society’s demise. But the fact is, what gets on the air is pretty depressing." I can’t