By Eunice Field “This is for adults only,” Donna said. “It’s about a four-letter word that takes in most everything exciting that other Freudian four-letter words seem to leave out. It also includes sex! The word, of course, is love. I believe it’s good for your mind, body and spirit to love as hard as you can. And it’s also a sin—a real sin against God and nature—not to love. And this goes for people, animals, children, goldfish, trees, art, love of God and his commandments, and love of your chosen man…and oh, yes, love of being just wonderfully alive. “If my own life is an example,” she continued, “I have to believe that every sort of love is more beneficial to the giver than the receiver. Some people write to me, asking how Tony and I have managed to stay happy and in love after seventeen years of married life. My answer is that I have no formula or secret gimmick. There is nothing secret about my love for Tony. My love for him is a frank, full, complete thing, and let’s face it…I get as much out of giving him pleasure and fulfillment in love as he does, maybe even more. What’s more I’m proud to admit it. Once you make a secret out of your love, I think it becomes a miracle that lost its magic on the way…” If Donna has a richer conception of love than many less happy actresses, her husband tends to credit it to “her early years on an Iowa farm and the good example set by her parents. They were the kind of home folks who knew what it was to eke out a living from the soil, and they understood, without yakking about it, that there’s no substitute for God and love. In Hollywood, you meet lots of women who’ve walked on thick-piled rugs all their lives. They grow up thinking the world is covered with that kind of luxury rug, and all you have to do to be happy and successful is to put one dainty foot in front of the other. But Donna has known the hard scrabbly soil of a Depression-hit farm, and she knows happiness is based on keeping a wind-blasted house warm with lots of faith and love. Let me say this: Some guys hate to come home after a bad day at the office. They don’t want to spoil the atmosphere of their home. But if I have a bad day, the first place I rush to is home…to Donna and the unshakeable iron of her faith in me—an iron, I might add, that’s covered by the sweetest and loveliest skin this beauty-conscious town ever saw.” About her parents, Donna has said, “They never filled us with guilt.” They were religious people, attending the Methodist Church in Denison, Louisiana, regularly all during Donna’s childhood. “They never preached to us about loving each other all the time. We were two sisters and two brothers, and my parents used to shrug off the usual amount of inter-family quarreling. My father used to say, ‘It takes two to fight.’ He’d leave it at that. They have loved each other deeply, continually and naturally. We’d have been too stupid really not to have caught on after a bit. We began to take loving as the normal and best way of life. To this day, I shudder when I hear some woman scold a child with: ‘Mommy doesn’t love you when you’re bad…’ It’s an invitation to rebellion. Tony and I make our children feel they are part of our love and that this is a thing with deep roots and will not change with every passing wind.” Some time ago, Tim and Penny got into a hassle over “who did what first and why!” Donna felt the disagreement was getting rather hot and was tempted to intervene, but Tony put a restraining arm about her and shouted as he bent Donna backward in a mock-passionate embrace, “This is how we do it in the movies.” The kids came running to see, their curiosity getting the better of their anger. Later, Tony said, “It’s better sometimes to let them have a scrap. It gets the steam out of their system.” Since Donna hates “sulking in any form”—she considers it a trick of inflicting pain on someone you love without leaving yourself open to retaliation—she encourages an occasional “blow-up” as a way to clear the air between people. Donna’s faith holds that all the wisdom and revelation of the Ten Commandments and Golden Rule can be compressed ultimately into the admonition “to love.” But it is also her view, as it was Bernard Shaw’s, that weaklings sometimes make a racket out of love proffered them. “Both from my parents and from Tony, I’ve learned that, no matter how strongly you love, you yourself…your character…must be equally strong. Especially in sexual love, where there are often great temptations and a tug-of-war between what is desired and what is known to be right. I believe a person must be as morally strong as he is in his passion. Too many people blame taking the wrong step to their ‘having loved too much.’ Why not turn it about? Credit your love to having taken the right step. Young girls and boys and susceptible to such cliches as ‘If you loved me enough, you’d do it!’ As they get older and wiser, they see through this sort of gambit. But if they begin be refusing to do wrong in the name of love, their reward will be in gaining a deeper and more fulfilling enjoyment of love. “The act of loving—and loving in the decent way—may begin with your parents or your family, but it spills over into other areas. You develop a respect and love for yourself, and this gives you a springboard into a love of life and nature generally. It’s hard to love other people when you despise yourself. I began by loving my parents with all my heart and soul. From that, I found it easy to love Tony and my family children and to be filled with reverence for all living things. You might say love is a kind of energy that renews itself and gets stronger the more it is used and expended. “I feel sorry for bigoted people,” Donna said. “Their prejudice has robbed them of the best pleasure in life, the experience of real love. I can’t understand how anyone can beat to walk around for years with hate in their hearts. I’d stifle with that feeling. But tolerance, or its opposite, has to be learned. People aren’t born with hate. Like the song in ‘South Pacific’ points out, “You’ve got to be carefully taught!’” Donna is speaking from personal experience, an experience which taught her that prejudice is not necessarily limited to bias against race, religion or creed. Donna went to a four-room country grade school. Later, she went by bus each day to high school in Denison. Even though she’d heard rumors of the situation before, she was still surprised to find tremendous prejudice among city students and their parents against the farm youngsters. Perhaps the metropolis folks thought of their rural cousins as “hicks.” Or perhaps it was because many of them had been reared on farms, but had been unhappy and broken away. In order to make their mark in the school, the country teenagers had to work twice as hard. Perhaps for this reason, they invariably ended up as valedictorians of their graduating classes. Resentment grew so strong in the city people that the local newspaper stopped printing the names of honor students and valedictorians. Donna herself won a Beauty Queen contest and other country kids won many honors. The reason for this, Donna recalls, was that the farm group would select one person to run, then vote as a group. The city students, on the other hand, always had several candidates and their vote was split. “How foolish the whole thing was,” sighed Donna. “It was a definite form of prejudice fanned by the parents. Both groups of students could have profited a great deal through friendship with each other. Instead, they let prejudice come between them.” Mixed marriage When Donna and Tony fell in love back in 1945, they had several long and frank discussions on where to have the marriage ceremony. Tony’s parents were Jewish, but he was reared by them in the Christian Science faith. Donna was brought up Methodist. “If there had been any bigotry or hate in our hearts, we’d have been lost,” Donna recalled. “Instead, we took it for granted that it didn’t matter where you loved God as long as you loved Him…and it didn’t matter where we worshipped as long as we loved each other. So we each gave a little and were married in the Presbyterian Church and, our entire family now goes to the same church.” Thus, the question of religion, which might have caused a rupture between the lovers, only brought them closer together. Their children as yet encountered no problems with their faith. They attend a school of many mixed marriages. But Tim is very like his dad and quick to defend the right. When asked his faith, he usually declares, “Christian-Jewish!” Once, a young boy looked at him and asked, “How come?” Tim’s answer came quickly. “I like the best of everything!” Recently, a newspaper, referring to Donna as “the longevity queen of TV,” reported that she wanted to quit her show after this last season. According to this story, she was quoted as saying, “After 160 shows and some three million feet of film, maybe it’s time for me to quit.” Donna told us how she really feels on this subject. “I’ve been talking your ear off about love, all kinds. Still, there’s one kind of love I haven’t mentioned, and it’s among the most compelling. It’s part of what I mean by love of life. It’s usually called love of work. And I must admit that, whenever I start imagining what life would be like without learning new lines, going to and from the studio and facing the challenges of each new script, well, I don’t know if I could stand it, even though I am kept busy with many other activities. I love my work, and using any talent I have, as much as I love anything else in this world. If I didn’t—well, frankly, I wouldn’t be doing it.”