In
1953 a rising star named Donna Reed was busy winning an Academy Award
in motion pictures, while a clown named Milton Berle was even busier
infecting the Nation with the jolly new TV virus.
This year, with The Donna Reed Show
on ABC and The Milton Berle Show, or Kraft Music Hall,
on NBC at the same time in most parts of the country, this virus could
easily prove fatal to one of them.
And Donna Reed, who off stage, is sometimes
apt to look on the gloomy side of things, seemed to be suffering early
this season from the unhappy impression that Milton never looked better.
"I expect it will be catastrophic
for us at first," she said, two weeks before Berle's first show
went on the air and two days after her first one had been seen.
A couple of hours earlier, she had read
The Donna Reed Show's first reviews in trade papers. The notices,
as players have been saying backstage for centuries, were "unkind."
"But," she continued, "I'm
hopeful. I think the novelty will wear off for Milton Berle after a
month or so and we'll come out on top."
As prophesied, Berle's first show Oct.
8 set the highest Trendex of the 1958 fall debuts. His 31.2 left Miss
Reed with 10.9. A week later, Trendex gave Berle 25.6, The Donna
Reed Show 6.9. The next week she was back at 10.03 and Berle was
down to 23 but still on top for Wednesday night. Trendex rated Berle's
Nov. 12 show at 25.5, Miss Reed's at 11.6.
In her own series, the Oscar-winning
"bad girl" of "From Here to Eternity" is playing
the wife of a pediatrician whom she involves in and extricates from
such light-hearted malpractice as judging a baby contest. She also has
a wise-cracking small son who drags her on slapstick camping trips,
and a teen-age daughter who is up to here in boys.
The Donna Reed Show is Miss Reed's
fourth TV vehicle, and she does not think very highly of the other three--a
1955 Ford Theater, a G.E. Theater early last year
and a Suspicion late in 1957.
The G.E. she says, was so bad
she was ashamed of it. "It's the worst thing I've ever done, but
I'm told it got one of the seriest highest ratings. Personally, I think
people were fascinated by how bad it was, too hypnotized to turn it
off."
In Hollywood it is unusual to hear a
star alibiing success in the form of a high rating, or in any other
form, for that matter. Donna, however, is scarcely less outspoken with
some curiously mixed feelings about her own series.
"My main worry at first was whether
I'd have the energy.
"I assumed some other details would
be taken of. I thought we'd have a staff of writers turning out the
same kind of script every week, for one thing. We haven't. We'd had
simple stories from a man who used to write for 'Fibber McGee and Molly,'
and some scripts by Nate Monaster, who writes more subtle, complex stories.
So the character I play is not exactly the same in every episode, as
I thought it would be.
She added: "That was very disturbing
to me at first. I thought if one 'Donna' was right, the other must be
wrong. But I have been told I am mistaken, since I'm really playing
an extension of myself, no matter who writes the scripts.
"So I've taken their word for that
and done the best I could with each show. I think some of the stories
are true to life and some are--well, too basic, I guess I'd better say.
In real life Miss Reed, who turned 37
last Jan. 27, is the wife of Tony Owen, producer of the series which
the Owens, Screen Gems and Irving Briskin, another producer, co-own.
Previously she was married for two years
to make-up man William Tuttle.
She and Owen, a 51-year-old former Chicago
newspaperman and Hollywood talent agent, have been married 13 years.
Owen calls his wife "my doll, my
Donna," loudly praises her "special talent" as ideal
for TV, keeps up her spirits by sending flowers to her dressing room
at the start of each episode, usually on Monday. The bouquets contain
notes reminding her how many shows she has filmed and how many more
they have to do to complete the series--"13 down and 26 to go,"
etc.
The arithmetic is impeccable but the
impression is that the Owens would like to make their bundle in TV and
get out, although neither of them, of course, is saying so. Asked about
her work, Donna tends to be a little lukewarm: "Making a series
isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be." "The reviews
don't bother me. I wasn't expecting good ones." I guess the only
sure thing for television is a Western."
On camera, being a consummate actress,
she turns on real tears over rag dolls, substituted in some scenes for
the live infants who play Dr. Alex Stone's patients in the stories.
But between scenes she keeps pretty much
to herself, speaking when spoken to, aloof from the horseplay inevitable
on any film set, giving the impression less of an artist burning with
a bright flame than of a woman who would like nothing so much as to
get it over with and go home.
"Donna's always quiet," says
Carl Betz, who plays her husband. "She saves her strength. She
isn't like those actors who clown it up off camera until they haven't
got any spark left."
Also, Betz says, echoing an observation
common among Miss Reed's fellow workers, "Donna misses her children,
Some days it's obvious that she's depressed, although she'll deny it.
"Then Tony will call home on the
sly and have the nurse bring the baby to the set, and sometimes all
the kids if it's after school. Then she's happy for the rest of the
day."
The Owens have four children, the two
oldest being adopted. Penny was 12 last May; Tony Jr., 11 last March;
Timmy, 9 last July, and Mary Anne, a year old last May. The six share
a Regency-style Beverly Hills house in which, according to a neighbor,
"they live mostly at the back of the house, away from traffic noise."
Her domestic circumstances, says Donna,
had a lot to do with her final choice of a TV comedy, the rejected ideas
including roles as a widow with children, a globe-trotting diplomat's
wife with children, and a single-but-hopeful secretary.
Donna is a farm girl from near Denison,
Iowa, born Donna Mullenger and the oldest of five children. She can
still bake bread and once won $50 from Lionel Barrymore on a bet that
she could milk a cow. "I was almost 17," she said, "before
Mother would let me have a date, get a permanent or drive a car."
(Today she drives a sports car, leaving
home about 7 A.M. five days a week in order to spend an hour and a half
in Make-up and Wardrobe and be ready for filming at 9.)
At 18, Donna migrated to Los Angeles
with $60 in her purse and the conservative ambition to become a secretary
and maybe later on, a business woman. Instead she became a campus beauty
queen at Los Angeles City College at 20 and signed a movie contract
at $75 a week. Her stand-in on The Donna Reed Show, Frances
Haldorn, has been with her since her first picture, in 1941.
Incidentallly, Donna does not know Milton
Berle personally. "Tony does, though," she says. "They
got together at a party the other night and threshed out this whole
business about our shows being on opposite each other."
She thought for a moment, then added
"But I don't know precisely to what end."
