To that large slice of the populace
addicted happily to The Donna Reed Show each Thursday night
on ABC—and to those witness to most of her 40-odd movies—the
name Donna Reed evokes a familiar and all-too-easily-accepted image.
Good Wife (to a pediatrician, in the series), Good Mother, gentle,
sweet-voiced and vaguely prim—that’s a Donna Reed.
Donna herself—originally Donna
Mullenger, the farmer’s daughter from Iowa—dryly commented,
“I hear ‘Donna Reed’ and I get a picture of a tall,
chic, austere blonde, which isn’t me. I’ve never liked
that name. It has a cold sound. Donna Reed.”
Hearing the name in her own slightly
mocking voice, she wore the expression of one having just tasted something
disagreeable. “For a while,” she said, “when the
publicity department at MGM was renaming me, I was Donna Adams. I
like that. But they heard about another Donna Adams somewhere, an
actress. For a few hours one day I was Donna Drake. Then someone remembered
an actress named Dona Drake and that ended that. So, I got stuck with—Donna
Reed.”
Ill-fitting name or not, this slender,
lively-eyed, extraordinarily well-featured actress has carved a reputation
that can only be regarded enviously by her contemporaries who were
also Hollywood fledglings in the early 1940’s.
Most of them have faded from the scene.
The pretty faces that coyly smiled out from the barracks pin-ups,
the Miss Fighter Squadrons and the Miss Bazookas—all, or nearly
all, are only dimly remembered. Why did Donna Reed move ahead while
the others dropped behind? “Let’s be realistic,”
a long-time friend observed. “Donna was no prettier, no more
talented than the other girls. But what she had was—here’s
an old-fashioned word for an old-fashioned virtue—character.”
By any yardstick, personal and professional,
Donna Reed is sitting pretty. Since 1945 she has been married to a
wise, voluble mover and shaker named Tony Owen, a one-time newspaperman
who knows the angles around the agency business and who has also produced
movies.
Owen is now head man—and no mistake—behind
Todon Productions (Tony and Donna abbreviated), under whose crest
is produced The Donna Reed Show. (Donna’s first marriage, in
1943, to Hollywood makeup artist Bill Tuttle, ended in divorce after
two years.) The Owens live happily and stylishly in Beverly Hills
with their children: Penny, 15 this month; Tony Jr., 14; Tommy, 11;
Mary Anne, 4 this month. The two eldest were adopted.
As to the professional side, The
Donna Reed Show—now in its third season and buttoned down
for next fall—has brought to its star pride and satisfaction
on several levels. Looking at you with very candid hazel eyes, Donna
sums up her philosophy: “I’m fed up to here with stories
about kooky, amoral or sick women. Hollywood and Broadway haven’t
always been so absorbed with these misfits. Greer Garson, Norma Shearer,
Irene Dunne all played strong, unsick women. But with the producers
today, it has to be ‘Butterfield 8.’ I just don’t
believe the public wants a diet of these sick females.”
Miss Reed’s chin, viewed in the past as one more attractive
part of a pleasantly assembled face, had never before seemed so full
of determination, nor her tone so resolute. “Oh, I tackled this
role with a vengeance,” she went on, sitting straight-backed
at her makeup table. “We started breaking rules right and left.
We had a female lead, for one thing, a strong, healthy woman. We had
a story line told from a woman’s point of view that wasn’t
soap opera. Then we broke the biggest rule of all. In Hollywood actresses
would never play mothers until they were grandmothers in real life.
There were even complaints that I looked too young.
“Well, there are plenty of women
my age [her birthdate is listed as Jan. 27, 1921] who look no older
than I do and they have teen-age children. In Hollywood it just wasn’t
done. So we did it!”
The effrontery of the enterprise delighted
her and she unloosed a full-throated laugh. “Another thing,”
she said, still amused. “Playing Mrs. Stone in the series is
comfortable. I wear clothes that fit. Even with all my girl-next-door
roles in pictures there was always someone on the set who’d
look me up and down and say, ‘Is that dress tight enough, honey?’
I was always so acutely aware of being glamorized.” She spoke
without rancor, a bemused look in her eye. “Frankly, I don’t
think people who go to the movies give a damn about revealing dresses.”
George Sidney, the movie producer who
directed her original screen test, recalls seeing more on that occasion
than wholesomeness or gentility. “Donna had—a quiet kind
of sex,” muses Sidney, the turn of phrase having the ring of
a movie title. “To me, Donna suggested an intriguing combination—ice
and fire.”
The Donna Mullenger who found her way
to a screen test at MGM was but two years out of the Iowa heartland—a
shy, uneasy, withdrawn girl. Looking back, she said, “I was
scared to death. They signed me for $75 a week but the only thought
that spun around in my mind was, ‘I don’t want to marry
an actor. I don’t want to marry an actor.’”
To dispel two myths in order, Donna
wasn’t one among the carloads of cornfed beauty-contest winners
perennially out to storm Hollywood. Driving an $80 jalopy she had
ventured West with $60 in savings to live with an aunt and attend
Los Angeles City College. “My family figured this was the cheapest
way for me to get an education. Becoming an actress was a fluke.”
The second myth, and one solidly entrenched
in the American psyche, romanticizes to a rosy glow the good life
on the farm. “It may have been good training for life but we
had rough times,” Donna recalled. The Mullenger farm, seven
miles out of Denison, Iowa, had no indoor plumbing, to cite only one
pressing inconvenience in the icy Iowa winters. For Donna, oldest
of five children, there was water to be pumped and hauled into the
house and there was bread to be baked and firewood to be cut. “My
father and my brother were good farmers, but we never had enough land
to make a profit,” Donna said, sadly. “Last year they
gave up, finally, and turned the farm over to the Soil Bank. My father
had worked that farm for 60 years, giving it all he had.”
After attending a one-room country
school, Donna went to high school in Denison. In her third year she
emerged partly out of her shell after reading a book suggested by
chemistry teacher named Edward Tompkins (now a nuclear fall-out expert).
The book? Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence
People.” Smiling, Donna said, “I mean, of all books! But
it was just want I needed, at least in Denison.”
The big city of Los Angeles was another
matter. For the first six months on the campus, the pretty but excessively
shy coed went dateless. As a sophomore with hazy ambitions of becoming
a teacher, she won a campus beauty contest, for which a prize was
entrée to a movie casting director. “I remember this
beautiful, wide-eyed, frightened child walking into my office,”
says Billy Grady, for 30 years the head casting director at Metro.
“I was struck by her look of—quality. Please underline
that 89 times: quality.”
Her movie career, which progressed
rapidly, Donna divides into “B.E.” and “A.E”—before
and after “Eternity.” Until 1953 and “From Here
to Eternity,” wherein she played Alma, the tramp who befriends
Montgomery Clift, the bulk of her movie roles had been passive and
dull. “Eternity” won her an Oscar. Even so, Donna found
that the studios harbored an unconscionable resentment that she dared
accept such a role in the first place, disrupting the image they had
so carefully fostered. On that issue, Donna said, “The whole
point about Alma was that she was a tramp who had to look like anything
but. Anyway, all that winning the Oscar brought me was more bland
‘nice girl’ parts.”
In 1958, Donna entered TV full-blast
with The Donna Reed Show, which wasn’t exactly an instantaneous
hit. “How I overacted in those first episodes—my heavens!”
she exclaimed. “I had plenty to learn. But now I’m happier
playing Mrs. Stone than any part I ever had.”
It is a role—“wife”
to Carl Betz and “mother” to Shelley Fabares and Paul
Petersen—that obviously has drawn out hitherto unsuspected facets
of her talent. Humor, for instance, was almost non-existent in her
movie parts, but TV has made Donna an excellent if underrated comedienne.
The 5-foot-4-inch, 115-pound star foresees one more season for the
series and then she yearns for a high-protein dramatic role in a movie
or—this spoken in a try-anything-once-mood—the stage.
For a husband and wife merging their
efforts on one project, particularly a TV series, the road is strewn
with pitfalls. “We approached the whole idea with misgivings,”
Tony Owen was saying. “But it hasn’t hurt our marriage.
Sure, we argue, but mainly because I think Donna’s perfectionism
can be a drag. She could win five more Oscars and still be unsure
of herself as an actress. Never mind that soft and pliable look, Donna
has a mind of her own. And a good one.”
A classmate from City College days
who has been her stand-in from the beginning, Frances Haldorn recalls
Donna’s yielding to anger only two or three times on a set.
Actually her outbursts are so rare that when she exploded at the petulance
of a now-ex-director some time ago, the cast and crew referred to
her for weeks afterward as “Tiger,” an unlikely nickname
that delighted her.
“Donna,” an associate suggests,
“has a whim of iron. Still, she has no star complex. She’s
really nice, not just a ‘nice girl.’ But how she manages
to keep such a healthy balance of her family and work relationships
I don’t know. It’s almost frightening to see a woman with
such serenity.”
Internally, however, Donna Reed lives
in frequent combat with her doubts. “Everything an actress does
is turned to self,” she noted one day, staring reflectively,
almost somberly, into her dressing room mirror. “It’s
always how I look—my hair, my eyes, my mouth. Self, self, self.
“On the set there’s so
much taking from others, giving only to yourself. It’s hard
to turn off when you go home. This feeling that you can go on taking—you
have got to fight it. Marriage has to do with giving.”
She paused and half-closed her eyes.
“I’ve watched too many women in Hollywood louse up their
lives. Something within me—maybe it goes back to the farm in
Iowa—something very deep within me keeps saying, ‘Be leery,
Donna, be leery.’”
