Former monthly contribution by late TCM host Robert Osborne to the TCM newsletter Now Playing in June, 2003.
Hard to believe but, yes, it's true, that is Shirley Partridge on our cover, the beautiful singing matriarch of TV's long-running show “The Partridge Family,” back in the days when she was also known as Shirley Jones, playing a role that's 100 light years away from Partridge land, as a hooker named Lulu Baines in the 1960 movie Elmer Gantry. (And so good was Shirley in the part, she won an Academy Award for her performance.)
It may also amaze some people to discover that TV's serene and luminous Donna Stone also once played a lady who worked horizontally in a Hawaiian bawdy house, winning an Oscar for her performance, before she settled into play TV's perfect – and vertical–mom on “The Donna Reed Show.” (Donna's prize-winning From Here to Eternity also airs on TCM June 17.) It's all part of the not-so-secret pasts of some of the great television icons who've been so much a part of our lives for so many years – from back in the days when J. B. Fletcher (Angela Lansbury), instead of solving murders in Cabot Cove, spent her time counseling a winsome Margaret O'Brien in New York's Hell's Kitchen, when Jim Anderson (Robert Young) was a father who didn't necessarily know best, when Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) was commanding men on battlefields instead of running roughshod over "Meathead" in the living room at home.
Some of our favorites began in films but later segued into television (i.e. Angela Lansbury, Ernest Borgnine, Loretta Young, Robert Young, Fred MacMurray), while others went the opposite route (Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Denzel Washington, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear). Nowadays, one can do it with no stigma attached–but back then it wasn't always so easy.
For years, Hollywood's film studios cold-shouldered anyone who even tried, with the big studio moguls looking down their noses at anyone willing to "sell out" and join the television universe. But Lucille Ball, more than anyone else, broke that taboo in the early 1950s. In addition to working in less-than-memorable films, she also did a popular weekly radio series called “My Favorite Husband,” which CBS begged her to do in a television format. She was agreeable, but only if her real-life husband Desi Arnaz was cast as her sitcom husband. Initially, the network balked. "A Cuban husband? It can't be done. The public would never accept it," they said. But Lucy was trying to save a marriage; she and Desi rarely saw each other because she was in Hollywood working while he was constantly on the road touring with his orchestra. "No Desi, no show," she said, and meant it. And the fledgling television industry, as it turned out, needed her much more than it didn't want Desi. So, somewhat grudgingly, a barrier was broken, something for which we can all be grateful. You can see Lucy and Desi in 1954's The Long, Long Trailer, which they made for director Vincente Minnelli at MGM when their TV series was at its most popular. Our series officially begins with Lucy, the barrier-breaker, in one of her post-“I Love Lucy” movies, 1968's Yours, Mine and Ours with Henry Fonda and Van Johnson.
I hope you have a lot of fun checking out the movies which feature great sitcom stars of the '50s and '60s, as well as several unforgettable TV dads, moms and detectives. How sweet it is, and...away...we...go.
