By Favius Friedman

There are times when her husband wails that she is “almost painfully shy”..and then there are days when the people who work with her call her “The Tiger”—and mean it! There are those, unacquainted with the real Donna Reed (above with son Timmy), who still think of her as…well, just another prosaic example of TV’s “Mother Knows Best.” “They’re living in a dream world,” hooted a big-muscled crew man on Donna’s show. “This gutsy little blond doll is an awful lot of dame.” Well, is Donna really the lady—or really the Tiger? Frankly, there are also those days when even her children don’t know for sure!

In a town where the voice of the self-enthralled dominates the smog, Donna Reed is a unique, compact, 113-pound package of feminine contradictions. She is, of course, a million leagues away from the froth-and-bosom star who makes a fetish of descending upon New York from Hollywood with a floor-length mink on her back and two more heaped conspicuously over her arm. “As a farm girl back in Iowa, the only real talent I could boast was a knack for long-range spitting through my teeth.” She’s improved a bit, though, since then—or perhaps Donna just never understood her own strength.

“You know something,” said one Hollywood columnist, “when a producer needs a dame that men buy diamonds for, he gets a Bardot or a Mansfield. But when he needs a woman men commit mayhem for, he seeks out Donna Reed.”

Well, perhaps, not mayhem exactly, but anyway, something.

There was, for long, a legend around the Screen Gems lot, where “The Donna Reed Show” is filmed, that the mild-seeming Donna just never blew up, that the extent of her self-assertion rarely went beyond a curious disinclination to be filmed in a kitchen apron. “Gentlemen,” she announced firmly one day, digging her heels stubbornly into the carpet of her dressing room, “I don’t cook with an apron on in my own house, so why should I wear one as Mrs. Donna Stone, of Hillsdale, U.S.A.?”

“Hmmm, a toughie,” they murmured, but shrugged their shoulders and finally agreed to lay that apron down. “Blondes,” they seemed to say, “how do you figure them out?”

Once, too, a visiting fireman joined Donna and a friend at lunch, during a working day, and suggested that Miss Reed embellish her rather Spartan melted cheese sandwich with a bit of strong waters. “It will enhance your performance this afternoon,” he said. “Make your eyes shine with sex.”

“Some eyes, not mine,” Donna smiled, firmly clasping her tomato juice. “It would only make me look half asleep. You see, nobody thinks I’m terribly exciting, and a drink would be such a waste.”

Not exciting? Donna?

The nice girl blows up

Then came that never-to-be-forgotten day when Patient Griselda got fed up to her pretty teeth with an unreasonable director who thought—mistakenly—that he was the heir to Simon Legree. The nice girl really blew up.

The specifics of the actual blast-off are as yet a highly classified secret (the unreasonable director, they say, is still running), but from that moment, there was a new look of admiration in strong men’s eyes. More even than this, though, the deceptively-mild Donna won her spurs as “The Tiger,” a highly unlikely but seemingly delicious role for her. As a gag, the cast and crew members bought her a stuffed tiger for her dressing room, a bottle of Tiger perfume, and hung pictures of snarling tigers on the camera boom and on her personal chair.

“Oh, yes,” Donna laughed, “they still call me ‘The Tiger,’ but really, I don’t allow myself to blow up more than three or four times a year. Like, say, on Groundhog Day, Friday the 13th, and St. Valentine’s Day. But seriously, I try to keep my temper in check; otherwise, the rest of the cast and crew would be demanding equal time. And that’s impossible; it could not be allowed.”

The truth is, of course, that the real Donna Reed, as someone once said, “is far from being Hollywood’s answer to Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.” Serene and sunny—most of the time—Donna’s fresh, uncluttered look belies the strong and forceful person she is. The muscle is there, to be used only in crises.

One observer, not long ago, watched her dash off at her lunch break to an Italian restaurant a block or so from the set. Donna was dressed in a skirt, flat heels and a button-down, Ivy League plaid shirt, and over her shoulder she flung a soft, well-worn, tobacco brown tweet coat. It was one of Hollywood’s windier days, and as Donna hurried along the short stretch of Gower Street, she cupped both hands around her meticulously-arranged blond hairdo—“She has the hardest hair in the world to work with,” says her husband—to keep the wind from tearing it apart.

Curb-bound at Sunset Boulevard by a red light, Donna still clasped both hands to her head, fearful of the ravages the wind might do. But not because of personal vanity; it was for another reason altogether. “Oh, dear,” she sighed, “my hairdresser will kill me if anything happens to my hairdo!” Yet, displaced hairdo or not, a covey of admiring males all broke out into cheers as Miss Whistle-bait hurried across the street.

Later, back on the set, a visitor was moved to say, "I think there's been some grave miscasting around here, Donna. You should be playing the teenager on this show."

The appraisal was not too far-fetched.  For all her growing youngsters, her seventeen years of marriage, her actual age (it is unbelievable, but Donna is 41!), she still looks, even at ten o’clock in the morning, like someone dewy enough to lead the cheering section for her high school team. Perhaps it’s because, as she once revealed, she sleeps in shell-pink chiffon shorties, with yards and yards of lace. “The joke is,” she giggles, “that I’m ‘in the pink.’ I like jokes.”

But more than anything, Donna, for a long time, has been the dazzling proof that nice girls don’t necessarily have to be dull. “What has TV given you?” a ponderous interviewer once demanded.

“Money,” said Donna brightly.

Neither she nor anyone else on her show—Carl Betz, Paul Petersen, Shelley Fabares—are namby-pampy, cut-outs, or one-dimensional ciphers stamped out by a cookie-cutter to emerge without a flaw.

“We try to be affable people,” Donna said, “but not syrupy sweet.” There are times when we even yell at each other, a little, but that’s the kind of family we play. I don’t portray the All-American Mom, and Carl Betz isn’t the All-American Daddy, either. So help me, if we had to do that type of TV mother and father every week, I’d go off my rocker. Our stories do not revolve only around the kids.”

Ice and fire

Moreover, Donna today is just about the only woman TV star who has survived “all the perils of the rating wars,” without compromise in her standards or her beliefs. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” one Hollywood executive said. “Donna is no prettier, no more talented than the other girls. But what she had was—and this is an old-fashioned word for an old-fashioned virtue—character. And besides, she does have a quiet kind of sex: All ice and fire.”

There is also the fact, as her husband is aware, that Donna is a rampant perfectionist, and “it’s no fun to be a perfectionist.”

Donna’s perfectionism, the tough-talking, wheeling-and-dealing producer admits, can be a drag at times. “There are days when nothing is ever quite right,” says Tony, grinning wryly. “No matter how good the show is or how high the ratings have been the week before, Donna suffers; the good should have been even better.

“Why is she so critical of herself? Well, she’s essentially a pretty shy person—perhaps more than anyone except those really close to her are aware. She’s sure that, no matter what anyone tells her—she’s not very good. Donna could win five more Oscars in a row and she still wouldn’t be convinced of her value as an actress.

“Sometimes she’s like that at home, too. She’s curiously reluctant to get on the tennis court with the good players, or swim in other people’s pools, because while she does both of these things better than average, she doesn’t think so. She’s wrong, of course, but you try to change her opinion of Donna Reed; I can’t.

“And though she may not blow her top on the show very often, she’ll sneak off the set when things are going wrong and get me on the phone and bang, bang, bang! But that’s my Donna, my doll,” Tony laughed. “It’s part of the whole thing that makes her tick, makes her so very good at whatever she does.”

And Donna? “Well,” says The Tiger, “I couldn’t have done it without Tony as the producer of the series. Without him, there’d be nothing, except me in a sanitarium.”

Yet for all her “whims of iron,” Donna is still a warm, sensitive human being who is as concerned about the youngsters in her show almost as much as she is about her own family.

In her own serene and humorous way, Donna demonstrates constantly her belief that one should “never let the business of acting interfere with the business of living.”

“I’ve been in Hollywood for…well, quite a while,” Donna once explained. “And all I ever had to do was to look around me and see the tormented, unhappy women in this business. Perhaps I was just a wide-eyed kid from an Iowa farm, but I saw right from start that the one thing I didn’t need was stardom and unhappiness. All to often, the two seem to go together. Somehow, you can’t be both ‘star’ and woman, not and still be what you really have to be—a whole person.

“Please don’t think I’m condemning other actresses. I’m not. It’s just that this unhappiness seems to pervade the Hollywood atmosphere, and sometimes I think it can be pretty shattering. And yet, you don’t have to fall into all the traps, although women in this business keep doing it over and over, so it must be hard to avoid. I’ve seen it happen. And then that’s when I pinch myself. That’s when I tell myself, ‘Donna, you’ve been a pretty lucky person, all in all.’”

There have been rumors lately, that Donna is “tired” and would like to retire from her series and the end of this, her fifth season. There were rumors she was “tired” last year too. Once, following a Hollywood party about that time, William Dozier, West Coast production head from Screen Gems, approached his old friend Donna and said, all sympathy, “I know how terribly tired you are. May I carry you out to your car?”

Donna, to her credit, completely broke up.

“But,” says Donna now, “I’m not ready to say when I’ll quit. There’s been no decision as yet. But there’s a pretty good chance I will be back. Anyway, I do know that I’ve been sort of—call it ‘tapering off’: Doing fewer entire shows, and letting the others do a little more. I must say, though,” Donna laughed, “tapering off the show is like tapering off smoking or drinking. In fact, it’s harder. I don’t know why, but it is/”

And what would The Tiger do with herself is she were to retire?

“Oh,” she said jokingly, “do such exciting things as go to more P.T.A. meetings, help the kids with their homework and meet oftener with their teachers. I want to dress up a little more at night—wear some of my fancy clothes. Lately, I seem to have forgotten how to do it. Why, I get dizzy just climbing into high heels!

“Honestly, though,” Donna went on, “I’d like to join my husband in producing the kind of pictures families can see, parents can take their children to. There are so few of them around these days. Almost nobody except Walt Disney seems to be making pictures that aren’t sick, sick, sick, or boiling over with sex.”

All this is as yet in the future. Right now, Donna is infinitely more excited about the way she acquired “the first real vacation house we’ve had in years.”

“It’s down in Palm Springs,” she said gaily. “I’ve been dreaming of a place like this, but never had one. Then, just a few weeks ago, some friends put their tiny but perfect Palm Springs house on the market. It was beautiful, exquisitely decorated, and exactly what I’ve longed for. So, Tony and I walked through the place from front to back, and when our friends asked me if I liked it, I said, ‘Like it? I’m buying it.’ I bought it the way I’ve always dreamed of doing things—inside of ten minutes!”

“That’s Donna,” Tony Owen once quipped, “she just never stops amazing me.” Nor anyone else, for that matter. There’s just one thing this still-amazed Donna Reed enthusiast wonders about:

How do you dare whistle at a tiger?