TV
has taught Miss Reed to make up her mind—but quietly
At 10 o’clock, right on schedule, Mrs. Tony Owen whooshed, a
little breathlessly, into her sun porch. “You look
nice, dear,” she said to her unshaven, pajama-clad husband.
The
three other men in the room leaped to their feet. “You,”
said one of them, “are the first sign of the sun I have seen
all morning.” He was Phillipe Halsman, there to take Mrs. Owen’s
picture for TV Guide’s cover. His was more a statement
of fact than a flowery compliment. Mrs. Owen is known professionally
as Donna Reed. At 39, she looks a good 10 years younger, and has long
been acknowledged as one of the loveliest stars in Hollywood. No tricks,
either. At 10 o’clock on a rainy Sunday morning, with a houseful
of guests, four children (two of them sick), two dogs and a flu-ridden
husband, there is no time for anything but a quick brush through the
hair and a fast dab of lipstick. Mrs. Owen comes by her beauty with
all the honesty of the Iowa farm girl she was before she became a
movie star.
Two
hours later the Halsman equipment has been removed, the furniture
carefully put back in place and all the guests save one had departed.
Donna poured a fourth cup of coffee for her remaining visitor, and
thought back over the 18 months she had been involved in television
on The Donna Reed Show.
“We’ve
been quite a success, I guess you might say,” she said. “And
I really, honestly, knew we would be, right from the beginning. I
wouldn’t have gone into it with any other feeling. That sounds
presumptuous, but I don’t mean it to sound that way. We just
knew, that’s all.
“But
I’ll tell you something. It couldn’t have been done without
Tony here. He’s the producer, as you know. And without him,
there’d have been nothing—except maybe me in a sanitarium.
“I
have a theory. Show business is like government. The minute you have
a dictator, you’re in trouble. A dictator is his own worst enemy.
He is surrounded by yes men, and ‘yes’ is the only word
he ever hears or listens to. Stars who insist on taking over and running
their own shows—producing, directing, writing, casting, set
designing, lighting and everything else—never have anything
but trouble.
“It
sounds corny, I know, to say that I look upon this show of ours as
I look upon my family, but it’s true. It didn’t start
out that way, but it’s become that way. I myself do much more
than I ever did during the dear days at MGM and Universal. You get
caught up in a feeling of excitement. You find yourself dying every
Thursday night to learn how you came out in the ratings against Betty
Hutton and Bat Masterson.
“You
find yourself wondering if next week’s script is going to be
all right and if you can play it. We have, basically, two writers
and each is completely different from the other. One relies pretty
much on stand-up jokes, funny lines. The other is more of a situation
man. That may not sound like much of a problem for a performer, but
believe me it is.
“We
use different directors and we do this for a reason—to keep
us from getting bored, keep us on our toes. We used to have the same
director every week—and he’s a good director, we still
use him—but we’d find ourselves getting in a rut, resorting
to professional tricks like stock facial reactions. You do that and
you start losing your warmth, your spontaneity.
“I’ve
learned how to make decisions, and I mean decisions right now—not
tomorrow morning or next week. I don’t mean that I’m running
the show—anything but—but Tony consults me, the director
will ask me for an opinion, casting wants to know what I think about
this or that actor. At MGM all I ever had to worry about was who sent
the flowers to my dressing room and did I know my lines for the next
scene.
“We
made out biggest decision at the end of our first season. We decided
that if we were going to come back this season, we were going to come
back at 8 o’clock, not 9:30. Nine-thirty isn’t right for
a family show.
“Well,
this sort of started something. We’ve had a wonderful relationship
with ABC, but ABC has dozens of shows to worry about and I rather
imagine it’s not the easiest thing in the world to make up a
well-balanced network schedule. They had us firmly set at 9:30 Wednesdays.
“But
we’d had too many letters from people, asking us to come on
earlier so their children could watch. So we just got stubborn. We
said that if we couldn’t come back at 8, we wouldn’t come
back at all. So they moved us to Thursday night. At 8.”
Shelley
Fabares, a lovely, sweet-faced 16-year-old who plays Donna’s
daughter on the show, slipped into the room, early for a script reading.
“Shelley,”
Tony said, “Tell me. Have you ever seen Donna lose her temper
on the set?”
“Never,”
said Shelley, with the solemnity of a reader of the Scriptures. “I
have never once, not once, heard Mrs. Owen lose her temper.”
“See?” Owen said triumphantly. “But she’ll
sneak off the set when things are going wrong and get me on the phone
and bang-bang-bang.”
