SWEET, SINCERE AND SOLVENT

That describes Donna Reed and her happy, happy show

By Marian Dern

He sends her flowers at the beginning of each week’s show. She looks the way most husbands wish their wives looked after 19 years of marriage. He affectionately calls her “that broad.” She calls him Anthony. She laughed with apparent pleasure at this year’s Oscar-cast when introduced with three rather withering words by emcee Jack Lemmon—“sweet, sincere and solvent.” Together they make a charming couple.

Their names: Mr. And Mrs. Tony Owen. She is better known as Donna Reed, the cooly beautiful star of ABC’s The Donna Reed Show, shortly to begin its seventh year in television. He is the show’s executive producer, a voluble, gravel-voiced, crew-cut ex-agent who used to handle such stars as Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner.

They produce their show on the old-fashioned premise that more people prefer to watch saints than sinners. He tends to punctuate his conversation with words which would never go on The Donna Reed Show. She never uses those words. They employ a private press agent, female, who is never at a loss for words to embroider, interpret and elaborate on the Donna Reed Legend. Their efforts have culminated in a marvelous anachronism—a show that achieves a gilt-framed and, at times, sachet-scented portrait of modern American family life, a sort of electronic sampler of Home Sweet Home as it really isn’t.

And a sublimely well-behaved picture it is, so much so that it once caused irascible David Susskind to crack, “They ought to call it ‘“The Madonna Reed Show.’” (To which Donna was later to reply, “Mr. Susskind is sick, insecure.”) Mrs. Tony Owen is well aware that there must be millions of women who wish they could run their households as smoothly as Mrs. Alex Stone, whether it’s plotting how to keep hubby off the golf course and home on Sunday, or how to return an overly expensive gift from her husband without injuring his ego. Cheek for cheek, there is probably more hygienic kissing in the Stone household than in any half hour in television—kissing the children, invariably well-combed and docile, as they go off to school; kissing her husband off to work; smiling tolerantly when her husband forgets to kiss her good-bye, then kisses her with a sweet apology later.

As idealized as Donna’s show is, it accurately reflects how she wishes life could be, and how she has to some extent managed to make it. There are many people close to Donna, however, who believe that she employed what one of them has called a “whim of iron” to do so, and some of the unkinder ones claim she wears the pants in their production company a little more frequently than a lady should. Once when a producer phoned Tony Owen in Palm Springs to ask how he liked the new batch of scripts, he is reported to have replied, “I don’t know. Donna hasn’t read them yet.”

One of those who have seen a lot of Mrs. Owen in action over the years is William Dozier, until recently production chief at Screen Gems, where the Reed show is made. “Every year since the fourth season Donna has wanted to quit,” Dozier remembers. “But all of us knew it was a game. She wanted to be coaxed. She wanted more money. She’s a woman. We’d settle it, then await the end of the next season when the music would start, and we’d all waltz around again.”

There’s no question Donna has a mind of her own. As one director for the show put it, “She believes what she believes, and nobody is going to move that mountain.” She has strong opinions on everything from show scripts, to politics, to the kind of movies being made today. “They’re terrible,” she says. “Directors seem to hate women—make them look as if they’ve never seen a comb, and give them roles of unwed mothers and tramps. There’s nothing left for families but Walt Disney and Doris Day. …Doris never says yes until the fellow marries her.”

Some salty remarks

Yet if there’s more to Donna than “sweet, sincere and solvent,” it is also true that whenever she steps too far from that image, there is a retraction. Complimented on some salty remarks she made in a recent magazine article, she smiled, but quickly explained that “it was a cold windy day and I was feeling too harsh.” When she explodes with anger about the fact that “so many magazines and books nowadays want only the lurid details of an actress’s private life, and an actress almost has to behave sensationally to stay on top,” she is quick to add, “I’m not judging people’s personal behavior. But they don’t have to talk about it publicly.”

Appearances are the thing. And though her husband has espoused the old credo of “write anything as long as you spell the name right,” Donna believes that the press should print only nice things about people and that actresses should never be cast as anything but good, heroic ladies.

Perhaps it has some connection with Donna’s girlhood on a farm at Denison, Iowa, during the Depression. She came to California originally to attend Los Angeles City College, was discovered when she won the inevitable beauty contest, and was cast thereafter in Good Girl roles.

If there ever was a wish to play a sexy, bad-girl type, it wasn’t evident until suddenly in 1953 when Donna won the part, and an Academy Award, for the prostitute in “From Here to Eternity.” “I don’t think she knew what one was, but she wanted that part,” Tony says. The film’s director, Fred Zinnemann, explains, “Alma was not really a professional tramp, but a small-town girl who only wanted to go back and be respectable. That’s why Donna was so good in the part.”

Donna herself, though proud of the accomplishment, has always felt compelled to rationalize her playing the role at all. “That picture was done in the best of taste—nothing spelled out. The girl looked soft, and if youngsters saw the film, they didn’t even know what she was. Of course, after that, they put me right back into the other kind of part,” Donna says. Then, sighing wistfully, she adds, “Why do good girls always have to be so dull?”

A double standard of behavior

That one comment pinpoints the dilemma of Donna Reed. And her essential duality frequently manifests itself in her own show. The Owens use a double standard of behavior, drawing a line between life as it is and life as it is acceptable on the TV screen.

They are dead serious about keeping their viewers on the straight-and-narrow. Owen has definite ideas on this. “There’s a good side and a bad side to everyone,” he says. “Sure, they’ll go for the nasty stuff at first, but you have to give them an ideal to look up to.” To which estimate of the public mentality Dozier might well agree, for while he believes that “Donna is one of the brightest gals around Hollywood, you could never have her that way on the show. No one would watch.”

But at home, at least, Donna and Tony can relax and be themselves. The Owen House in Beverly Hills is large, stylish and comfortable, decorated with bright green carpeting, flower arrangements, patterned wallpaper. It looks as if a family lived there, right down to the swing set sitting on a patch of lawn just outside the picture windows.

At first Donna felt guilty about not spending enough time with her children, but her own common sense told her to take a long look one day. “I saw that my children were doing fine and didn’t need Mother hovering over them every minute.” Donna then did something that Mrs. Alex Stone would never contemplate in her darkest moments. “I quit PTA,” Donna exclaims. “Now I leave those meetings up to parents who feel guilty.” Then she adds quickly, “But I did do a lot of PTA work when the children were younger.”

The Owens’ four children, Mary Anne, 7, Timothy, 14, Tony Jr., 17, and Penny, 18 are lively youngsters, and the younger ones greet visitors with a shy naturalness typical of most children. Donna is very careful not to put them in “the unearned spotlight,” and is rarely photographed with them. “About once every three years we allow them to be photographed, so they don’t think we’re trying to hide them,” she says.

On the walls of the bedroom Donna has just hung a variety of gilt-framed family photographs—of the children, which she took herself, of high points in her career, anniversary events of her 19-year marriage, of the two brothers and two sisters, her parents and grandparents from Iowa. They make a very pretty picture in the room. Donna regards them with a look of deep satisfaction. “I’ve wanted to do that for such a long time—all the high points, all the wonderful things.” She turns, pauses a moment reflectively, the says, “You don’t think they look like too much, do you?”