RKO was in serious trouble after Howard Hughes bought the studio in 1948, and from there, things went on a downward trajectory. By 1955, it was up for sale once again - this time, to the General Tire Company. The number of films produced by RKO dropped off dramatically, and in 1957, the studio had only one film in production - and that was only for retakes of a film shot the previous year - I Married a Woman (1958). The film features the highly unlikely pairing of nightclub comedian-turned-television-star George Gobel (later a regular on The Hollywood Squares) and Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe, Diana Dors, who had just signed a three-picture deal with RKO. Also in the cast were Adolphe Menjou, Nita Talbot, Jessie Royce Landis, and in a brief cameo, John Wayne.

Produced by William Bloom for George Gobel's company, Gomalco, and directed by Hal Kanter, I Married a Woman was written specifically for Gobel by Goodman Ace, who was most famous for his radio and television show, Easy Aces. The film, which had the original working title of So There You Are, features two prominent themes of the 1950s: the advertising business and the pneumatic bleached blonde sexpot. Gobel plays the ad man, Marshall "Mickey" Briggs, who creates the "Miss Luxemburg Beer Beauty Contest," and ends up marrying the winner, Janice Blake (played by Dors). A series of complications pad out the plot until there is the predictable happy ending. The majority of the film was shot in black and white, but the sequence of John Wayne appearing in a film-within-a-film was shot in Technicolor.

Gobel was riding high when the film initially went into production in mid-July 1956. A former child actor on stage and radio, he had branched out into television with his The George Gobel Show and had made the transition to films with Paramount's, The Birds and the Bees (1956). Like Gobel, Diana Dors had begun her career as a child actor in England and had blossomed into a curvaceous beauty. Dors was an intelligent woman who had a knack for self-promotion, which often got her in trouble with censors and moral crusaders. It also garnered her bad publicity in the United States, who saw her as a Marilyn Monroe knock-off. One such story centered around a dress that she wore to a party given by director Hal Kanter to kick off production of I Married a Woman. According to reporters, Dors showed up at her "coming-out party in Hollywood in a dress which some guests thought let her come out too far. The New York Post quoted a male guest as saying, 'I was too embarrassed to look down. All I could do was stare at the ceiling when I met her.'"

I Married a Woman languished unreleased for over a year as RKO tried to improve it, but to no avail. When it was finally released (through Universal-International) in May, 1958, the critics panned it. Howard Thompson wrote in The New York Times "You have to be a George Gobel fan, and a very patient one, to get much real fun from I Married a Woman [...] [T]he picture laboriously widens one running gag to feature length. [...] But the task of stretching what might have made a pretty good fifteen-minute television sketch into eighty-four minutes just about licks everybody. This includes a fine writer like Mr. Ace, whose wisecracks continually sparkle while the incidents and tempo flounder."

As for RKO, it was sold one last time in 1958 to Lucille Ball (who had once been under contract to the studio) and her husband, Desi Arnaz, who transformed it into Desilu Productions. RKO was no more.

By Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:

"World News in Brief" The Age 4 Jul 56
Babington, Bruce British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery
Erickson, Hal All Movie Guide
McDougal, Dennis The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood
New Catholic World - Volumes 186 - 187
Thompson, Howard "The Screen; 'I Married a Woman' Stars George Gobel'" The New York Times 4 Nov 58
"At the Movies: Three Good Films on Hold-Over List" The Sunday Herald 13 Jul 58