Retro TV: Classic Film Stars and Television

Classic Film Stars and Television

There is a scene in Joseph Mankiewicz’ classic 1950 film All About Eve between George Sanders’ acerbic critic, Addison DeWitt, and Marilyn Monroe’s Miss Casswell, a “Graduate from the Cocacabana School of Dramatic Art,” in which Casswell has just performed poorly in an audition for a Broadway play.  DeWitt tells her it means she will have to turn to television.

Casswell:  Do they have auditions for television?
DeWitt:  That’s all television is, my dear, Nothing but auditions.

That scene pretty well sums up what the major movie studios, and many of the stars of the time, felt about television — a medium for amateurs, has-beens or never-weres.  But certainly not a medium for stars.  Why — to turn to television would be slumming it.  Yet there were exceptions — even early on.

Some major stars did recognize the potential of television and jumped in at the very beginning.  Bob Hope, for instance, did the first of his hundreds of television specials on Easter, 1950.  This was while he was still a major box office movie star. Of course this was a “special” or, as they were called at the time, a “spectacular” and not a weekly series.  Now that would be going too far. 

Ah, but what about people like Jack Benny and Burns and Allen?  Hadn’t they appeared in popular films? Of course. But they were really top radio stars who were adapting their radio shows to the new medium. Benny hadn’t actually starred in a movie since The Horn Blows at Midnight in 1945 when he came to television with a monthly series starting in 1950 — and you would have to go back even further to the last time Burns and Allen had appeared in a movie together.

Lucille Ball was a movie star before she began doing I Love Lucy.  But she wasn’t a major film star in the way actresses like Claudette Colbert or Paulette Goddard were.  She was the “Queen of the B’s” at RKO and worked steadily without really escaping mid-range stardom.  By 1951, her movie career was stalling and television came to the rescue.  I Love Lucy was really a reworking of her radio series My Favorite Husband, in that it recycled scripts and used many of the behind-the-scenes talent, while creating a new format.  Lucy became a major star — but a major television star. 

The same could be said for Robert Young, who had been working in movies for a quarter of  a century when he adapted his popular radio show Father Knows Best for television in 1954.  Good movie roles were drying up and television, especially a television series which he partly owned, would keep his face before the public and eventually pay dividends financially.  Young never made another feature film after he began working on TV.

If a major movie star began working in television, it was usually a star past their prime who had been lured to the new medium to host or star in an anthology series.  Anthology series are not presented as much these days but were actually quite popular during the 1950’s and into the 1960’s.  Anthology shows were usually hosted by somebody who introduced a different play each week, whether dramatic or comic in tone, and sometimes featured a repertory of the same actors along with guest stars. 

One of earliest examples was Robert Montgomery Presents which ran on NBC from 1950-1957.  NBC was looking for a respectable and (still) marquee name to front its ambitious anthology series and Montgomery was a perfect fit.  He would introduce the episode and, on occasion, even act in the play.  But more important to Montgomery was that he also produced the show and directed many episodes as well as served as a script consultant.  It was the behind-the-scenes activities that interested Montgomery more than the on-air performing.  Eventually Montgomery would even become the television advisor to President Eisenhower.

Loretta Young was another example.  She was an Oscar-winning film actress  whose movie popularity was fading.  By 1953, Young was forty-years old.  Not very old by today‘s standards.  But at the time, especially in Hollywood, an actress turning 40 often meant fewer romantic leads and a transition into character parts.  The anthology series, The Loretta Young Show (which included her dazzling entrances wearing the latest designer fashions to introduce the evening’s play) would allow her to perform many different parts each week, something that films would no longer enable her to do.  One week she could play in a romantic comedy, and the next, a suspense-filled drama, and so on.  She would go on to earn three Emmy Awards during the show’s eight year run. 

Other stars who were seeing a decline in their movie fortunes and who hosted a television anthology series include:  Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Wyman, June Allyson, Joseph Cotton and Dick Powell, who also emerged as a major producer with his Four Star Productions — the three other stars being David Niven, Charles Boyer and Ida Lupino.  Four Star eventually produced such shows as The Rifleman, Trackdown, Richard Diamond, Private Eye and The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor — Taylor, who left MGM in 1958, along with twenty-five years of solid movie stardom, was another example of a one-time big box office name throwing his hat into the television ring in an attempt to prolong his celebrity.

Probably the most successful film actor to make the transition into a weekly non-anthology television series at this time was Fred MacMurray.  MacMurray had gone through some lean times during the 1950’s despite working constantly.  However, in 1959 he made a comeback in films with The Shaggy Dog for Walt Disney Productions, which became the third most popular film of the year.  In 1959, he joined the cast of the latest Billy Wilder film, The Apartment, in a leading role, and won ecstatic reviews; the film would go on to win Best Picture for 1960.

So MacMurray was on a roll.  He had another film on the docket at Disney.  However, television producer Don Fedderson badly wanted him to star in his new family television series My Three Sons about a widower bringing up his three rambunctious boys with the help of their crusty grandfather. 

Fedderson met with MacMurray and offered him a good deal of money, along with a partial share of the series profits, if MacMurray would do the show.  MacMurray told him the money was no problem — it was great — but he had heard from his friend, Robert Young, that television was a time-consuming strain that took everything out of a performer.  He wouldn’t have the time to make the films he was being offered by Disney, or to enjoy his favorite pastimes like golf, hunting and fishing.  He declined the offer.

Fedderson thought MacMurray was the only actor he could see play the father role and did some thinking.  He came up with a unique offer for the actor.  MacMurray’s scenes for the entire season would be filmed in 65 non-consecutive days.  This meant that when MacMurray worked, everything revolved around him.  Scripts had to be prepared so that MacMurray’s scenes for several episodes would be filmed during those days, and then the other actors would have to come back and complete the episodes without him.  So, Fedderson made MacMurray the counter offer — he could still have the money and a portion of the profits, and only have to work on the show 65 days.  That would give him 300 days to shoot his Disney movies and enjoy his leisure activities.  MacMurray thought he’d be crazy to turn it down–and, of course, didn’t.  My Three Sons went on to run twelve years (1960-1972) and MacMurray was the only actor on the show to appear in all 380 episodes even though he probably worked the least of all the actors connected with the show.

In the 1960’s some major film stars of the time were beginning to front television shows — particularly variety series.  In 1963, one of the biggest box office stars, Jerry Lewis, was offered his own weekly two-hour(!) talk-variety show on ABC.  He would be paid an astronomical amount – in the millions.  Because of his movie commitments, Lewis paid scant attention to his new TV show and thought he could wing it.  While The Jerry Lewis Show premiered well, it was ragged around the edges and was just too much Jerry! And not necessarily the movie Jerry that film audiences loved, but a darker and yes, more narcissistic version (a somewhat toned-down version of the Buddy Love character from his classic film The Nutty Professor).  The show became a ratings disaster and ABC pulled the plug after thirteen weeks.

That same season Judy Garland premiered with her variety show on CBS.  Garland had been one of the great film stars of the 40’s and had made sporadic film comebacks since leaving MGM in 1950, earning an Oscar nomination for the 1954 version of A Star is Born.  In 1963, she had just come off of another Oscar nomination for Judgment at Nuremberg.  She had also performed in a very successful TV special for CBS the season before.  Despite her (deserved) reputation for unreliability, CBS offered her a TV-variety show. 

Garland put her all into the show and surprisingly showed up every week, even for rehearsals.  Anybody who has seen this show on DVD or You Tube can see that she was performing near her best at the time.  But CBS didn’t know how to present her.  Furthermore, they put The Judy Garland Show opposite the number one television show in the country, Bonanza.  She was overwhelmed by the Cartwrights, and rather than put Garland in a more friendly time slot, they decided to try changing producers and formats on her — none of which helped.  At the end of the season, the Garland show was cancelled, and with it, a lot of Judy’s confidence.  Many people think that she never recovered from the demise of her 1963-1964 television series.

In 1965, Dean Martin decided to try his hand at a weekly variety series but, like Fred MacMurray, didn’t want to be pinned down doing a show, week after week, when he was still busy making movies, recordings and playing Vegas.  NBC allowed him to only show up on the date of the tapings, and he would watch the run-throughs of rehearsals (complete with a Martin stand-in) for various sketches and songs on a closed-monitored television in his dressing room while practicing his golf swing.  The Dean Martin Show ran for nine years, and part of the fun was seeing Martin taken by surprise by various people who would stop by to say hello, or laughing uproariously at some antics he had no idea was going to happen.  Martin’s cool personality allowed him to get away with this.

In 1968, singer-actress Doris Day moved to television, not in a variety show, but in a family sitcom The Doris Day Show.  Day had been a top ten box office star as recently as 1964, but her films had been declining at the box office, and her manager-husband, Marty Melcher, signed her, without her knowledge, to a CBS TV show.  When Melcher died, Day discovered that he not only signed her to a TV show, but also mismanaged her money – and the only way she could really get out of debt was to do the series.  So she did it for five years through various format and cast changes, and her name made it successful.

If there was any one season when major film stars would make their debut on television it might be the 1971-1972 TV season, when such August movie names as James Stewart, Shirley MacLaine, Henry Fonda, Rock Hudson and Glenn Ford fronted weekly TV shows — and in most cases, failed.

James Stewart had been successful on television, often playing himself as a guest star on television shows headlined by his friends Jack Benny and Dean Martin.  Nobody could play the drawling, aww-schucks “Jimmy Stewart” persona as well as, well, Jimmy Stewart himself.  Furthermore, his movie career was slipping.  His latest film Fool’s Parade was a flop.  NBC came to his rescue with the offer of a weekly family sit-com in which he would play a small-town college professor (married to a much younger woman) with a grown son and a ten-year old son.  The Jimmy Stewart Show would pay Stewart the then highest salary on television of $33,333.33 per episode — or about $800,000 per season. 

Stewart only accepted after director, writer and producer Hal Kantor flattered him.  Kantor told Stewart that no actor could play comedy as well as Stewart.  Kantor sincerely believed this, but he also believed that Stewart would photograph, well, very old.  “He looked 63 going on 73,” Kantor later said.  This made him seem unbelievable as a father of a ten year old son.  Stewart also wanted his real-life wife, Gloria, to play his TV wife, but NBC balked on this — hiring the younger Julie Adams.  While Stewart got along with Adams (and had indeed worked with her in his 1952 film Bend of the River), he never forgave the network for balking on Gloria. 

The network gave what they thought would be a perfect timeslot — Sundays right after The Wonderful World of Disney and just before Bonanza.  Who would dare turn-off Jimmy Stewart?  Well, lots of people did.  Disney turned out to be the 20^th highest ranking television series of the season, and Bonanza, while declining in its rating, was still a solid #19.  The Jimmy Stewart Show, sandwiched in between them, ranked #44 for the season.  It appears a lot of viewers switched to the second half of The FBI (ranked # 13) after watching Disney, and then switched back for Bonanza.

Stewart’s great friend Henry Fonda fared even worse.  His TV show which combined police drama with family sit-com, The Smith Family, was on ABC Wednesday nights with lead-ins Bewitched and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.  Unfortunately for Fonda, both of those series were on their last legs.  Bewitched, in its last season, and once a top ten TV show, was now ranked #72 in the ratings.  The Smith Family actually bettered it, but not by much, ranking a dismal #69 in the ratings.

Shirley MacLaine, not yet forty and a major movie name whose star was dimming, accepted doing her ABC series Shirley’s World – in which she played a jet setting photo journalist – only after producer Lou Grade told her he would finance a movie for her each year she completed a 22-episode run of the TV show.  Shirley’s World was an expensive show to produce, with episodes filmed on location in London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong, among other locales.  As it turned out, Grade only had to finance one movie for Shirley, Desperate Characters, because her TV show was cancelled after finishing next-to-last in the ratings for the season (#77). 

Glenn Ford’s contemporary western crime-drama Cade’s County allowed the low-key leading man to earn $500,000, playing a marshal whose district is in a sprawling desert of some southwestern state (never specified), and who takes on contemporary issues like discrimination and Indian rights while making his patrols in a jeep.  The CBS show had a promising start, ranking #11 for its first week but slowly eroded ending the season ranked #49 before the network pulled the plug.

The film star who had the most success during this 1971-1972 TV season was Rock Hudson, who played a middle aged police commissioner who investigates mysteries, with the sometimes unwelcome help of his youngish wife (Susan St. James) on NBC’s McMillan and Wife. This was part of its NBC Mystery Movie wheel series which also included Dennis Weaver’s McCloud and Peter Falk’s Columbo.  McMillan and Wife was a kind of an updated version of The Thin Man with romantic banter and comic situations in between solving mysteries.  Columbo proved to be the most popular of the “wheel” shows, though the McMillan episodes were also highly rated and overall the “Mystery Movie” ranked #14 for the season.  McMillan and Wife would run for five years (with one more season as McMillan after Susan St. James left the series). 

So, why did shows starring classic films stars like James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford and Shirley MacLaine fail, and Rock Hudson succeed?  It was probably because of a combination of poor time slots and less-than-stellar scripts. As for Hudson, he succeeded not because the McMillan scripts were great (they weren’t), but because he had unmistakable chemistry with his co-star, and was a younger leading man than Stewart, Fonda and Ford.  It was probably also because Hudson wasn’t seen every week, but rather in rotation with the other “wheel” shows.

Since then, of course, it has become more acceptable for movie stars to also appear regularly on television — especially on cable television in movies or even series.  Probably because more television stars are able to make the transition to movie stardom, so they don’t have the same snobbery that some classic movie stars had towards the television medium.   But it still continues to be hit or miss.

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–Charles Tranberg for Classic Movie Hub

You can read all of Charles’ Retro TV articles here.

Charles Tranberg is the author of eight books on such film and television stars as Agnes Moorehead, Fred MacMurray, Marie Wilson, Robert Taylor, Fredric March and William Conrad.  He has also written books on “The Disney Films” and “The Thin Man” film series.   He is also the author of several articles for Classic Images and Films of the Golden Age.