Along with Ann Sothern (q.v.), veteran film and stage actress Eve Arden provided one of TV’s most prominent depictions of working women in the 1950s, with the successful adaptation of her popular radio sitcom Our Miss Brooks, which debuted on CBS-TV in October 1952.
Arden played Connie Brooks, English teacher at suburban Madison High School. Chief among Miss Brooks’ day-to-day concerns were her prickly relationship with stuffy school principal Osgood Conklin (played by Gale Gordon), and her frustratingly unfulfilled flirtation with shy, bookish science teacher Philip Boynton (Robert Rockwell). Rounding out the regularly seen cast were Miss Brooks’ elderly landlady Mrs. Davis (Jane Morgan), Conklin’s pretty daughter Harriet (Gloria McMillan), and future leading man Richard Crenna, who raised his vocal chords to distressingly screechy levels as her numbskull student Walter Denton.
The show, which was a comparatively realistic, low-key situation comedy for its time, and a forerunner to the “workplace comedies” that would become popular in the 1970s, had been a favorite on CBS radio since 1948. For Arden, it offered a welcome opportunity to play a role that varied from the “type” that had begun to feel like a trap in her film career.
Born near San Francisco on April 30, 1908, Eunice Quedens was the daughter of a successful milliner, a single parent who’d divorced the girl’s father over his gambling habits. With her business demanding much of her time, Eunice’s mother placed the girl in a convent for a time, and later allowed her to live in rural Mill Valley, outside San Francisco, with an aunt.
From a young age, when she won a medal for a recitation to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the future Eve Arden enjoyed performing. By the time she was in high school, starring in school plays, she was infatuated with show business. She landed her first professional gig while still a teenager, when friends of her mother took her to a local theater company and dropped her off at the front door, suggesting she get herself a job. Amazingly, she did just that.
Relocating to New York to further her stage career, she was hired for the Ziegfeld Follies company. It was there that, being told her real name was not suitable for a marquee, she glanced at a jar of Elizabeth Arden cosmetics and thought of a new one. Eve Arden worked on the New York stage for the next several years.
Although she made an inauspicious film debut in a long-forgotten cheapie called Oh, Doctor! (Universal, 1937), she first came to the attention of moviegoers with her featured role in RKO’s 1937 hit Stage Door, a comedy-drama about the ambitious women who inhabit a theatrical boardinghouse in New York. A standout among the powerhouse cast headed by Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers, and featured newcomers Lucille Ball (q.v.) and Ann Miller, Arden displayed a gift for wisecracking that would be both her claim to fame, and her bête noire, professionally.
During the shooting, she became acquainted with Lucille Ball, who would also receive a career boost from Stage Door. The aspiring actresses in the film are mostly friends, although competitive when an acting job is at stake, but Arden and Ball established a strong relationship off camera minus the rivalry. They were re-teamed in another, less successful comedy for RKO, Having Wonderful Time, the following year. Both still in their twenties and as yet uncertain what footholds they might find in Hollywood, they became friends, and would remain so throughout their careers. And both would ultimately find a level of career achievement and satisfaction in television that largely eluded them in movies.
For a time, Arden juggled stage work—she was featured in Cole Porter’s 1941 Broadway musical Let’s Face It—with supporting roles in films like the Marx Brothers’ At the Circus (MGM, 1939). Although her ties to Hollywood would grow stronger in the 1940s, her passion for the stage was lifelong, and she would return to it often.
Like her friend Lucille Ball, Arden would eventually become frustrated by film studios that saw them most easily as brittle, sarcastic women who snapped off quips—Ball referred to them as “the drop-gag girls.”1 Never groomed as a leading lady, Arden nevertheless became a busy Warner Brothers contract player in the 1940s, where she specialized in supporting roles as sardonic sidekicks of leading ladies like Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jane Wyman. She was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actress for her role as Ida Corwin in Mildred Pierce (1945). Ida was the staunch ally of the heroine whose best-remembered line, referring to Crawford’s wayward daughter, was “Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea—they eat their young.”
Arden’s instantly recognizable voice was also heard on popular radio programs such as The Danny Kaye Show, and The Sealtest Village Store, where she replaced Joan Davis (q.v.) when that actress was given her own show. That series kept Arden in front of audiences from 1945 to 1948.
All of these roles played on the wisecracking image of which Arden was growing tired by the late 1940s. “I just don’t like that dame,” she once said of her screen persona. “She is hard-boiled, unsentimental—and not me.”2 She resolved to seek out roles that would allow her to show a fuller range of emotions.
Although The Sealtest Village Store raised Arden’s profile as a radio entertainer, she later speculated that it may have been a chance social encounter with CBS chairman William Paley that resulted in an offer to star in her own vehicle, Our Miss Brooks, a role for which actresses such as Lucille Ball and Shirley Booth had also been considered (and which Booth had played once in a test episode). Although the initial script didn’t greatly impress her, a rewrite by writers Al Lewis and Joe Quillan, who would be associated with the show throughout its long run, made her reconsider. Chief among the show’s appeals for her was the opportunity to broaden her screen image. Although the character of Connie Brooks would unquestionably trade on Arden’s ability to pitch a sardonic remark, she also had a warm and likable side that the actress found greatly appealing.
Eve Arden became a CBS radio star in the 1940s with Our Miss Brooks.
In creating Miss Brooks, she drew on memories of the teachers who had an impression on her as a child. “I remember with affection those who taught me,” Arden said. “I recall my third-grade teacher, umpteen years ago—Miss Ruth Waterman—she had dimples, big brown eyes, and was always smiling. I try to give Miss Brooks that same smiling quality.”3
The radio show was a hit, and became part of Arden’s professional life for the next nine years. By the early 1950s, CBS wanted to launch a video version, and looked around for a suitable television production company.
In 1951, her friend Lucille Ball’s I Love Lucy had revolutionized TV comedy, and Ball and Desi Arnaz’s company Desilu was suddenly a major force in the industry. Given Arden’s extensive stage experience, it’s not surprising that the notion of filming before a studio audience, as Ball and company did, appealed to her more than the one-camera, closed-set method used on other contemporary CBS sitcoms like The Amos ’n’ Andy Show.
During early 1952, Arden was an occasional guest on the Desilu soundstage, and had an opportunity to witness how the Lucy shows were assembled. Two of her Brooks co-stars gained first-hand experience by making guest appearances on I Love Lucy during this apprenticeship period—Richard Crenna, who played a Walter Denton-ish lovesick teenager in an episode called “The Young Fans” (2/25/52), and Gale Gordon, who made two appearances that spring as Ricky’s Tropicana boss Mr. Littlefield.
From Desilu’s perspective, as company president Desi Arnaz later recalled, doing Our Miss Brooks offered Desilu a profitable cost-sharing opportunity. Having obtained everything necessary as an independent producer to film a weekly TV sitcom, it was easy enough to double up and shoot a second one using much of the same equipment, and many of the same crew members. For a time, the two shows would even share director William Asher, who helmed the pilot and other early episodes of the Brooks TV show.
The cast of the radio show, a cohesive team after four years together, would transfer to the new venture largely intact. The exception was up-and-coming leading man Jeff Chandler, not yet the movie star he would become, who had voiced the timid and square Mr. Boynton on radio. Although he was willing to continue his role, even while Universal Studios was grooming him for movie stardom, Arden and her producer knew that his look was too blatantly virile to play Boynton on TV, and recast with actor Robert Rockwell.
The pilot episode, “Trying to Pick a Fight,” revolved around Walter Denton’s advice to Miss Brooks that an occasional quarrel could bring a new spark to a romantic relationship. Disaster follows when Miss Brooks tests the theory, first by goading Mr. Boynton into a pointless argument, then by sharing the advice with Mr. Conklin, who uses it so thoroughly that he mistakenly thinks his wife has gone home to Mother.
The first TV episode, which took care to introduce the basic characters and situations to viewers who might not have been fans of the radio series, was vague on the exact nature of Connie’s relationship with Mr. Boynton. In an early scene, it’s said that they’ve been “dating” for four years, ever since she began teaching at Madison (and coinciding with the radio show’s 1948 debut). Walter Denton alludes to their regular Friday night dinner dates. Mrs. Davis, Connie’s landlady, even says that they’re “going steady,” though Miss Brooks disputes this, saying Mr. Boynton’s greatest affection is reserved for his laboratory frog, MacDougall. For a couple who are supposedly in any kind of romantic relationship of four years’ duration, though, it seems a bit odd that Miss Brooks and Mr. Boynton aren’t even on a first-name basis.
If the relationship is rather unclear, Miss Brooks herself is not. From the outset, Arden plays a woman who knows her own mind, and, second perhaps only to Lucy Ricardo in 1950s sitcoms, expresses it. Her character emerges as one of the smartest and sassiest women on TV, and viewers loved her for it.
Later in the pilot episode, determined to goad Mr. Boynton into a reaction, Miss Brooks lets him have it. Finally, annoyed, he tells her—in a very mild, Boyntonish way—that she’s roused him to anger. Longtime fans knew better than to expect Miss Brooks to back down:
Brooks: You wanna make something of it, Frog-Boy?
Boynton: Frog-Boy?
Brooks: Why don’t you leap down to the pond, and dunk your head under a
lily pad?
Boynton: So, you’ve been spying on me after school!
While she pays a surface respect to her boss, it’s also apparent that Miss Brooks sees Mr. Conklin’s shortcomings clearly. Her wisecracks about him, though rarely said in his earshot, nail him with telling accuracy. And, in the pilot, when he is AWOL temporarily, on the trail of his wife, Connie plops herself down in his office, trying out his desk chair for size, and identifying herself to a telephone caller as “Acting Principal Constance Brooks.”
Thirty-five years before Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97) came on the scene, Connie Brooks was the epitome of the woman who’s stronger and more able than the men in her life, both professionally and personally. Mr. Conklin is usually portrayed more as a stuffy, penny-pinching blowhard than an effective administrator, and Mr. Boynton, competent teacher though he might be, is clearly not much of a catch for a woman as bright and witty as Connie Brooks. But the lady herself is obviously a capable professional, and aggressively pursues what she wants in life, even though she doesn’t always get it.
In another early episode, “Blue Goldfish” (12/5/52), when the school’s lack of heat and shortage of needed equipment creates problems for Walter, Mr. Boynton, and others, it’s Miss Brooks who’s enlisted to broach the subject with Mr. Conklin. She’s clearly the ringleader, and the one to whom others, male and female alike, look for leadership. She’s also shown to be a good teacher, one who holds her students to high standards, and takes an interest in their well-being.
Arden, drawing on her experience playing brittle, caustic women in movies, as well as her own natural warmth and charm, created a character that combined the best of both. Connie Brooks doesn’t suffer fools gladly, though she’s often knee-deep in them. But she’s also one of the more accomplished working women seen on 1950s television, and a forerunner to later TV women such as Mary Richards who had a better handle on their professional life than they did on the personal. And unlike many of TV’s women, then and later, who plotted and schemed to land a man, it’s always pretty clear in Our Miss Brooks that there’s nothing wrong with Connie herself. Arden plays an attractive and smart woman, and the self-deprecating element that crept into characters like The Dick Van Dyke Show’s Sally Rogers, or The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s Rhoda Morgenstern, is largely absent here.
As the show’s longtime producer Al Lewis explained to TV Guide, Connie Brooks “is not a man-chaser in any sense of the word. She has a deep and abiding crush on Boynton and Boynton alone.... She is strictly a one-man woman, and that’s the way it’s going to be.”4 Lewis’ take on the situation would keep the show afloat for most of its run, until a drop in ratings led to some changes in 1955.
Away from the set, Eve Arden epitomized not only the accomplished professional—she would be a highly regarded working actress over a five-decade period—but also the woman who balances the demands of work and home. Although an early marriage to literary agent Edward Bergen ended in divorce by the late 1940s, she had become a parent with the adoption of two little girls. While touring in a summer stock production, she became friendly with her leading man, a young actor named Brooks West, and they were married in 1951, soon adding an adopted son, Duncan, to their blended family. In 1954, Arden would give birth to a son, Douglas, completing the family that would occupy much of her energy and thought for the rest of her life.
Clearly her family life was important to her, and she devotes much space in her autobiography to accounts of bringing up her children on a ranch outside Los Angeles, their travels together, and a happy marriage. The picture that emerges is of a woman whose two greatest loves are her family, and the work she does in the theater. While television may not have been as artistically satisfying as stage work, Miss Brooks was important to her, not only for the professional success it represented, but also for the financial security it gave her family.
Though she says little about it in her book, Arden encountered a situation that would become much more common a generation or so later in American families—the wife who was more successful professionally, and a bigger wage-earner, than the husband. West, who was younger than she (by about eight years), was less established as a performer, and would never attain the level of fame she already had by the time they married. A few months before Miss Brooks made its bow on television, West was cast in a supporting role in the sitcom My Friend Irma, which joined the CBS schedule in early 1952. When the series underwent a format change a year or so later, West’s character was written out. It was to be his only regular series role.
Meanwhile, Our Miss Brooks, debuting on CBS’ Friday night lineup in October 1952, quickly earned a place in viewers’ hearts, and received critical praise as well. “Our Miss Brooks had a smooth professional look, and seemed to have made the move to TV without dropping a pun or a pratfall,” reported Time.5
Longtime New York Times TV critic Jack Gould, surveying “TV’s Top Comediennes” in 1953, was not so enamored of the program itself (“hardly the best of the situation comedy shows”), but admired Arden’s “brittle, caustic style and stinging delivery of a wisecrack.... If only she had a less banal vehicle to work with, Arden might be second to none.”6
Arden’s characterization also earned her praise from another constituency, as Hyman Goldberg reported rather floridly in a Cosmopolitan profile of the star:
“Because she has implanted in her vast following the notion that teachers bleed when they are pricked, that they occasionally find someone of the opposing sex to be not altogether revolting, and when their salaries are meager they are apt to be not very happy and even a bit threadbare, teachers everywhere regard Miss Arden, and her network alter ego, Connie Brooks, as the best thing that has happened to pedagogy since the innovation of the long summer vacation. Each week she receives several hundred letters from grateful teachers.”7
From the show’s first season, Emmy voters took notice of Arden’s work, nominating her as Best Comedienne of 1952. Although Lucille Ball took home the prize that night, Arden’s turn came a year later, when she was named Best Female Star of a Regular Series. She missed out on accepting her statuette in person, so sure had she been that someone else would win. She would continue to receive nominations every year that Miss Brooks remained on CBS.
While some reporters wondered, stereotypically, if Arden and Lucille Ball’s CBS sitcoms, both for Desilu, had them engaged in a rivalry for the attention of TV audiences, the women were in fact supportive of each other’s endeavors. As Ball pointed out, “Don’t forget that I’m Vice-President of Desilu Productions, which means the better Miss Brooks does, the better off I am. That’s not exactly competition, if you see what I mean.”8 Both were also surely savvy enough to see that, for all that they had been compared in years past, they had developed personal styles, and shows, that were not particularly similar.
Eve Arden and husband Brooks West with her Emmy Award for Best Female Star of Regular Series (Our Miss Brooks).
Mindful of her debt to Desilu, and her friendship with the Arnazes, Arden would charge them nothing for her cameo appearance in “L.A. at Last,” a 1955 episode of I Love Lucy. One of Lucy’s most famous episodes, it shows Lucy, Ethel, and Fred rubbernecking at celebrities lunching at the Hollywood Brown Derby. Before Lucy has a memorable encounter with movie star William Holden and a dessert tray, she makes acquaintance with the nearby Arden, playing herself, who helpfully identifies her own caricature on the wall when Lucy mistakes it for one of Judy Holliday or Shelley Winters. Arnaz later repaid the favor with a guest stint on Brooks.
Throughout its successful four-year run on prime time television, Our Miss Brooks profited from the sarcastic slings and arrows that Arden handled so masterfully. This style of comedy, so associated with the actress, didn’t come to her quite as naturally as people often assumed, according to her longtime colleague Richard Crenna. “There was not a lot of Brooks in her,” he said years later. “She had a wonderful sense of humor, but I wouldn’t say she was particularly sardonic. She never played the comedian offstage—she didn’t need to be the funniest person in the room, unlike so many comics, who find it difficult to get off. She went out, got the laughs, and went back to her ranch in the Valley. She was just a wonderfully unselfish actress, and was just so up all the time; she made you feel good to be around her.”9
Arden’s son, producer/writer Douglas Brooks West, has a slightly different take on his mother’s humor. Though he agrees that she rarely applied that same biting humor off-camera—“she would never say an unkind thing to anybody”10—he believes that it was more than a stage affectation.
“She created that persona that so many people use as an icon,” West says today, adding that Arden had the character down so well that she could often contribute dialogue to scripts that needed a boost. He points to one of her best-remembered lines as Principal McGee from Grease—“If you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter!”—as an example of one of her contributions.
Although Our Miss Brooks unquestionably revolved around its title character, it was more of an ensemble comedy than many 1950s shows, and Arden seemed to be unafraid of letting her fellow actors shine. Gale Gordon, who practically patented the role of the irritable, blustering boss, squared off ably against Miss Brooks, a good match for Arden’s strength. His character here is more varied and amusing than his later incarnations as Lucy Carmichael’s (and later Lucy Carter’s) constantly yelling bosses on The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy. (Had he not been under contact for Brooks, he might also have played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy).
Robert Rockwell also deserves praise for his portrayal of Philip Boynton. The actor neatly bridges the two elements of the character that viewers need to see. He’s able to play the handsome, smart, nice, if shy, man that Miss Brooks finds appealing, as well as the side of him that, consciously or not, keeps her at arms’ length—and keeps the show’s primary conflict alive.
In the show’s early years, busy radio and TV actress Mary Jane Croft, today best-remembered for her many appearances as Lucy’s pal Mary Jane on The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy, had a recurring role as Daisy Enright, fellow Madison High teacher and rival for the attentions of Mr. Boynton. Miss Enright, almost a precursor to The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s Sue Ann Nivens with her sweetly voiced jabs at the heroine, brought out the side of Miss Brooks most like those snappish movie roles Arden played so well.
In “Home Cooked Meal” (6/3/55), Miss Brooks and Miss Enright are both vying to impress Mr. Boynton with their domestic skills. Miss Enright ups the ante by inviting him over to watch her new TV set, leading Mr. Boynton to reminisce about the early days of TV, when there was so little of interest to watch. She quickly agrees:
Enright: Yes, in those days I remember—in my teens, there weren’t very many stars on television.
Brooks: When you were in your teens, there weren’t many stars on the flag.
After three years on TV (and seven on radio), Our Miss Brooks underwent a major overhaul in the fall of 1955, reacting to a ratings drop that had taken the show out of the Top 25 in ratings. I Love Lucy had recently experienced a lift with a story arc about the Ricardos’ and the Mertzes’ trip to Hollywood. Brooks producers strove for a similar effect by introducing new storylines, and writing out some longtime cast members. In the season’s second installment, aptly titled “Transition Show” (10/14/55), Connie loses her job at Madison High, which is scheduled to be bulldozed. Soon landing a new position at Mrs. Nestor’s Private School, she is elated to be free of Mr. Conklin at last, until she finds that he, like she, has found a job there.
Although Gale Gordon’s status on the show as Arden’s chief nemesis remained intact, other featured players fell by the wayside in the new format. Almost thirty years old, Richard Crenna opted out of his role as gawky teenager Walter, who’d already been in high school for the better part of a decade on the show. The producers also elected to drop Robert Rockwell, as Mr. Boynton, from the regular cast, sending him off to a job in Arizona.
Deciding that the long, uncertain courtship of Miss Brooks and Mr. Boynton was played out, they gave Connie a succession of new love interests. Primary among them was actor Gene Barry, later TV’s Bat Masterson (NBC, 1958–61) and the star of Burke’s Law (ABC, 1963–65). Less retiring than Mr. Boynton, the character opened up new stories, but also removed some of the underlying tension that had been endemic to the show’s humor. Other additions to the cast included Nana Bryant as school owner Mrs. Nestor, and Bob Sweeney as faculty member Oliver Munsey.
Arden did not embrace the changes. “I didn’t want to leave Madison High,” she told TV Guide, “and I didn’t want to lose either Mr. Boynton or Mrs. Davis.”11 Along with the cast and character changes came a new, earlier time slot (8:30 p.m.) for Our Miss Brooks, replacing the just-cancelled Topper. But none of the changes managed to lure back the audience that was drifting away.
TV Guide, in an unusually negative review, commented on the show’s ratings drop. “The reason for this isn’t too hard to pinpoint. It would seem that Miss Arden and her writers don’t have too much respect for their viewers’ taste and intelligence. The situations, bordering on the slapstick, are too incongruous to be believable. To make certain that nobody misses the point of a gag, they run it into the ground. Sometimes they even trample on it.”12
As the season progressed, and audiences failed to embrace the new characters and stories, some familiar elements of the original show began to resurface. In mid-season, “Mr. Boynton’s Return” (2/17/56) for a visit sparked a rivalry between him and Connie’s new love interest. A few weeks later, Boynton was applying for a faculty position at Mrs. Nestor’s school, and Gene Barry had left the cast.
In April 1956, the sponsor renewed the show for another six months, but the deal was an unusual one, calling for only a handful of new shows. CBS began to show reruns of episodes from previous seasons, including the 1952 pilot, sometimes with a new wraparound segment featuring original cast members like Mrs. Davis. In May, the series aired its last original episodes, though reruns continued to play through the early fall. The radio show, which had survived into the twilight days of network radio sitcoms, was soon laid to rest as well.
Arden wasn’t brokenhearted to see the long-running series fade to black. “I do love Miss Brooks,” she said, “but enough of a good thing can be too much. Besides, the old Madison High films are going into syndication, the present show will be on all summer and RKO has just sold all those old movies to TV and I’m in most of them. People are going to have to go to Siberia to escape me.”13
In Our Miss Brooks’ next-to-last episode, “Principal for a Day” (5/4/56), Miss Brooks finally got her chance to sit in the administrator’s office, when the new owner of Mrs. Nestor’s Private School recommended her for the job. It was a long overdue promotion, albeit temporary, for the woman who’d so long demonstrated that she was just as capable, if not more so, than the men who usually held such jobs.
Today, when a long-running series comes to a close, there’s usually a highly publicized final episode, which brings the show’s stories to a happy conclusion. Not so in the 1950s, when such special episodes, and even shows with holiday themes, were often seen as detrimental to the series’ afterlife in syndication.
Eve Arden reunited with TV co-star Robert Rockwell (Philip Boynton) for the Warner Brothers’ film version of Our Miss Brooks (1956).
Although the final TV episode of Our Miss Brooks was unremarkable, the show had an unexpected resurrection when Warner Brothers released a movie version, featuring the original cast, in 1956. Given the show’s fading popularity, studio executives may well have regretted green-lighting the film by the time it hit theaters. But for Brooks fans, it was an unusual opportunity not only to see the stories from the series reenacted—the film opens with Connie beginning her job at Madison High School, and meeting Mr. Boynton—but also to find out the ultimate fate of Miss Brooks and her hesitant suitor, which the series had left unresolved.
Introducing a rival to Philip Boynton in wealthy newspaper publisher Larry Nolan (ironically, played by Ann Sothern’s longtime co-star Don Porter), the movie escalates the basic situation that the series had so long propagated. Originally at odds with Nolan, who challenges her teaching of his teenage son, Connie gradually acknowledges an attraction to him, and sees an alternative to her stalled relationship with Mr. Boynton.
Armed with a marriage proposal from Nolan, Connie is able to stir the milquetoast Boynton into more action than she ever saw on the radio or TV episodes, sharing a fairly passionate kiss and finally getting on a first-name basis. Dreaming of the home she might someday share with “Phil” (which includes the proverbial white picket fence), Connie imagines snuggling with him in front of a roaring fire, and happily looking in on their children (eight of them!) By the movie’s fadeout, after a misunderstanding with Phil threatens to break them up for good, Connie finally is on her way to marrying her man after eight years. (Although some sources report that she actually becomes Mrs. Boynton in the course of the film, this is not so, although it’s clearly the expected outcome by the time the end credits appear. Only in one of the fantasy sequences is she seen in a wedding gown, being carried across the threshold).
Simultaneously with the movie’s release, Miss Brooks made her debut in yet a fourth medium. Dell Comics, which published numerous movie and TV tie-ins during the 1950s, issued a one-time-only Our Miss Brooks comic book, which was adapted from the movie screenplay. A collector’s item today, copies of the comic in mint condition sell online for $200.00 or more.
Our Miss Brooks, the movie, is an occasionally odd hybrid between the familiar characters and gags of the series, and more conventional movie plot elements. In the TV show, Connie’s setbacks with Mr. Boynton typically are good for nothing more than a wisecrack. In the film, the romance is treated more conventionally, and taken more seriously. Connie’s belief that she has misinterpreted Philip’s intentions reduces her to tears, and the movie’s final payoff threatens to turn them into a conventional romantic couple. It’s just as well that the producers and writers of the TV series never allowed the marriage to happen in the show’s later seasons, as it would have been as disastrous as the same happy ending was for Rhoda (CBS, 1974–78) twenty years later.
The movie of Our Miss Brooks was a box-office failure. Perhaps it came too late, after public interest in the series was on the wane. Arden herself complained that the studio publicized it insufficiently. It may also be that the failure of this film, like Liberace’s Sincerely Yours (1955), also for Warners,’ and the relatively disappointing box-office returns of Lucy and Desi’s Forever, Darling (MGM, 1956), demonstrated that moviegoers wouldn’t pay to see offshoots of current TV shows. (Although, a generation later, remakes of baby-boomer favorites like The Beverly Hillbillies were a much more viable option). Still, it was satisfying to see Miss Brooks land her man at last, and the movie was a better alternative than the twenty-years-later reunion shows for classic sitcoms that would be all the rage in the 1980s.
In the fall of 1956, Our Miss Brooks began its afterlife as a prominent feature on CBS’ daytime schedule. Reruns of Arden’s show, which sponsors were quick to buy, displaced a young comedian named Johnny Carson from his CBS daytime slot. Meanwhile, Arden was still under contract to CBS, and being groomed for her next project.
Even though the network considered Our Miss Brooks played out, executives knew that its star still had a substantial following. A year after the original series vacated the prime time schedule, Arden made a comeback to prime time TV with another CBS sitcom, The Eve Arden Show. The new program cast her as author and lecturer Liza Hammond (named after one of Arden’s own daughters), a widow who tried to be a good mother though she was often away from home. Featured in the cast were veteran film and radio character actor Allyn Joslyn as the manager of her lecture bureau (and potential romantic interest), Frances Bavier (soon to become The Andy Griffith Show’s Aunt Bee), as her mother, and child actresses Karen Greene and Gail Stone as her twin daughters.
Based on a memoir by author Emily Kimbrough (whose book Our Hearts Were Young and Gay had already inspired another, short-lived CBS sitcom), The Eve Arden Show was assembled for the star by an elite pair with impeccable sitcom credentials. Sol Saks, who would later create Bewitched (ABC, 1964–72), created the show, and Sheldon Leonard, producer/director of another long-running hit, The Danny Thomas Show, (ABC/CBS, 1953–64) directed. The show was also something of a West family project—Arden and her husband Brooks West formed a company, Westhaven Productions, which co-produced the show in association with CBS. West was credited as the show’s associate producer, and once again Arden chose Desilu Productions to oversee its filming.
In the pilot episode, “It Gives Me Great Pleasure” (also the title of Kimbrough’s book), Arden’s character, a novelist whose most recent publication is Summer’s End, receives a visit from George Howell of the Howell Speakers’ Bureau, who offers her a lecture tour. Despite the family’s limited finances, Liza turns him down flat, confessing to a massive case of stage fright. After much persuasion, she makes her slightly hesitant debut as a speaker to a woman’s club. Having been offered the stock advice about overcoming nervousness by imagining the audience members in their underwear, Liza gets the giggles momentarily as she gazes out into the audience of girdle-clad suburban matrons, then launches confidently into her speech.
Perhaps sensing that a bout with stage fright was by itself thin material for a series premise, Saks attempts to lay the groundwork for future stories (as well as convey a little bit of backstory) when George tells Liza, “You’ve been a widow for six years. You’ve buried yourself within these four walls [her home office], hidden in the pages of the books you write. You’ve been hiding from life.... When did you last have a highball? When did you last go on a date? When did you last kiss a man?” At episode’s end, Liza accepts a dinner date with George, and the stage is set for a possible romantic involvement—as well as for the “adventure, glamour, romance” that he tells her will be part and parcel of her new life.
CBS executives liked The Eve Arden Show, and had little difficulty lining up Lever Brothers (promoting a then-new product, Dove Soap) and Shulton (hawking Old Spice products) as alternate-week sponsors for the 1957-58 season. Scheduled for an 8:30 p.m. Tuesday time slot, Arden’s show would be sandwiched between two long-running CBS favorites, The Phil Silvers Show (1955–59) and To Tell the Truth (1956– 68).
All signs were indicating that Arden would be launching her second hit TV series. Then came the bad news. After the deal was in place, Arden was told that neither of the two sitcom titans responsible for shepherding the pilot show would be available to assume those functions on a regular basis. Leonard was committed to The Danny Thomas Show, and Saks to the Ida Lupino—Howard Duff sitcom Mr. Adams and Eve (CBS, 1957-58).
The series went into production despite the loss of its original producer and writer. After viewing the first episode of The Eve Arden Show, Variety published a review that sounded a warning signal, saying that the show “could be in for trouble.” While acknowledging that the show had been skillfully assembled, the reviewer felt that its basic setup had “extreme limitations” that might not wear well on a week-to-week basis. As for the star, “it’s regrettable that Miss Arden has become so stereotyped a TV personality, for this is a continuation of the barb-and-the-sally school of femme comedies.”14
TV Guide’s take on the show a few months later was more favorable, calling it “good clean fun” and the star “an actress of charm, restraint, style and grace.”15 Unfortunately, ratings for The Eve Arden Show were unimpressive, though Arden netted her fifth Emmy nomination for her work in the series. For the 1950s, the show’s depiction of a working woman’s conflict between home and career was downright innovative (and surely resonated with the star herself). Perhaps this worked against its acceptance with viewers, who may have preferred a more traditional maternal role model. Arden herself felt that, in the absence of director Leonard and writer Saks, there were too many voices trying to pull the show in different directions, and it never developed a clear identity. The absence of a strong romantic chemistry between Arden and co-star Joslyn didn’t help matters either.
After the show’s first season, CBS and the sponsors pulled the plug on The Eve Arden Show. Though Our Miss Brooks would enjoy a long afterlife in syndication through CBS Films (later Viacom) for years to come, Arden’s TV career was stalled. It would be almost ten years before her next regular series role.
As she often did throughout her career, Arden went back to the theater. It may have been the variety of roles she was allowed to play that in part explained her passion for the stage. Theater engagements also offered a welcome opportunity to co-star with her husband; she and Brooks West often toured in shows together, and would continue to do so into the 1970s. She often selected shows that included a male role suitable for him as well as a juicy lead for herself.
She earned critical plaudits for her starring role in the Los Angeles company of Auntie Mame (with West appearing as Beauregard Burnside). Over the years, she would expand her repertoire to include Butterflies Are Free, Hello, Dolly!, Little Me, and other staples of community theater.
“I think that was what she loved to do the most,” says Arden’s son of her stage work. “I remember sitting backstage in her dressing room. That was the place she was most comfortable.”
Arden also reactivated her movie career in the late 1950s with two prestigious films. Her role as lawyer James Stewart’s loyal secretary in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (Columbia, 1959) is relatively minor, despite her sixth billing; husband Brooks, though billed below his wife, fared better with his featured role as the prosecutor who opposed Stewart. Still, Arden’s co-starring role in a hit movie that received multiple Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, represented an auspicious return to the motion picture world for the actress after an absence of several years. Arden followed that project with the film version of William Inge’s play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (Warners, 1960), in which her strong performance as an unhappily married woman with a weak-willed husband demonstrated that her talent extended beyond making viewers laugh.
In the early 1960s, although she was frequently visible as a guest star on television, she was unable to find another suitable series role. She teamed with husband Brooks West for a sitcom pilot called “The Colonel’s Lady,” in which they played a movie star and the military man whom she marries. Unfortunately for Arden, who might have envisioned a chance to do for her actor husband what Lucille Ball had done for Desi Arnaz with I Love Lucy, this project never got off the ground. (In her autobiography, Arden wrote honestly, and with sympathy, about the dependence on alcohol that West developed during their marriage, and mentions career stress and frustrations as a contributing factor in his disease).
Screen Gems executive Harry Ackerman, who had been instrumental in putting together Our Miss Brooks as a radio show in the 1940s, signed Arden for the 1964 CBS pilot “Take Him—He’s Yours,” revolving around the adventures of a London-based travel agent. Nothing came of that project, nor of Universal Television’s “Be Careful—It’s My Art” (also known as “The Eve Arden Show”), which cast the star as a meddlesome New York widow who busied herself arranging the lives of her family.
Although not visible in her own weekly series, Arden turned up frequently as a guest star on shows like Bewitched, where she butted heads with Endora (Agnes Moorehead) as a vigilant baby nurse in charge of the newborn Tabitha. The 1966 appearance afforded her a professional reunion with the show’s producer/director, William Asher, who had directed her on Our Miss Brooks, and with executive producer Ackerman. She also appeared in an episode of NBC’s Run for Your Life (1965–68) that was designed as a pilot to star actor/singer Bobby Darin.
Desi Arnaz, who had been important to the success of Brooks on TV, would also be instrumental in launching Arden’s last regular series role. After selling out his interest in Desilu in the early 1960s, Arnaz went into business as an independent producer, and in 1967 signed Arden as the star of a new sitcom, The Mothers-in-Law. Developed by longtime Lucy writers Bob Carroll, Jr. and Madelyn Davis, the series cast her as Eve Hubbard, middle-aged suburban mother whose daughter Susie (Deborah Walley) married the son of next-door neighbors Kaye and Roger Buell. The bulk of the show’s humor revolved around Eve’s prickly relationship with the other mother-in-law, played by raucous actress-comedienne Kaye Ballard.
Originally intended as a comeback vehicle for yet another Desilu star of the 1950s, Ann Sothern, the show didn’t work for Arden and Sothern in tandem, who didn’t create sparks together. Sothern withdrew, and Arden found herself teamed with Ballard, whose loud and boisterous style gave Arden ample opportunity for raised eyebrows, long sighs, and wry putdowns. Actor Herbert Rudley, playing Eve’s rather bland lawyer husband Herb, gave Arden the first onscreen spouse of her TV career. By comparison, he made Philip Boynton seem downright exciting and personable.
Arnaz intended to sell The Mothers-in-Law to CBS, but executives there were not impressed, and passed on the show. With a sponsor in place, he was able to cut a deal at NBC, but found the series stuck in a difficult Sunday night time slot where it would face an uphill battle for survival opposite the second half hour of two long-running hits, ABC’s The FBI (1965–74) and CBS’ The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–71).
Recycling plots and gimmicks that had worked on I Love Lucy a decade earlier, The Mothers-in-Law felt passé to late 1960s viewers. Much as the writers worked to incorporate contemporary elements like rock bands, group therapy, and computer dating, the show had little to offer that was fresh or new. Executive producer Arnaz, struggling with alcoholism, wasn’t at the top of his game, and the show didn’t receive the attention it needed. NBC cancelled the series at the end of its second season of lackluster ratings.
Although The Mothers-in-Law was Arden’s last regular series role, she would continue to be a familiar face on TV. In 1972, she starred in “A Very Missing Person,” a TV-movie and series pilot. She played Hildegarde Withers, a retired schoolteacher (shades of Miss Brooks!) who teamed with a policeman to solve crimes. The character, created by mystery author Stuart Palmer, had previously been seen in a series of B-movies in the 1930s, played by elderly character actress Edna May Oliver. The series, designed to be one-third of a trio of “Great Detectives” shows, did not sell.
Eve Arden fails to appreciate the song stylings of Kaye Ballard in the pilot episode of The Mothers-in-Law.
In 1974, Arden won the final Emmy of her career, for her title role in a 1973 ABC Afternoon Playbreak special called “Mother of the Bride.” This short-lived series, designed as an occasional alternative to daytime TV soap operas and game shows, netted the star a perhaps-unexpected “Best Actress in Daytime Drama” award.
Arden continued to pop up in guest appearances on shows like Maude (CBS, 1972–78), where she played Beatrice Arthur’s saucy, slightly risqué aunt. A precursor to characters like The Golden Girls’ (NBC, 1985–92) Blanche, Aunt Lola had been around the block a time or two, and enjoyed the companionship of various men. Only in the episode’s final act does Maude discover that Aunt Lola is no longer as active as her niece wishes to believe. Inclined to quote the old saw about men being like streetcars—another one comes along every few minutes—Lola ruefully admits to her niece that, like those streetcars, her escapades with the opposite sex are mostly a thing of the past.
Arden’s appearance on Maude demonstrated that her still-sharp gifts as a performer were appreciated not just by her contemporaries like The Mothers-in-Law’s Carroll and Davis, who cast her in a guest role when they produced Alice (1976–85) at CBS, or by nostalgia fans who caught her on The Love Boat (ABC, 1977–86), but also by more au courant producers like Norman Lear. It was also interesting to see her play opposite Beatrice Arthur, who of the generation of television actresses rising to fame in the 1970s, was perhaps the most similar to Arden comedically. Both certainly shared the ability to fire off a retort.
She also remained in demand for series roles, though none of them landed a prime-time berth. Arden teamed with Don Knotts for a 1975 pilot called “Harry and Maggie,” which cast them as bickering in-laws warring over the upbringing of her teenage niece. Network executives passed on the show, as they did “The Eyes of Texas” five years later, a B.J. and the Bear (NBC, 1979–81) spin-off in which she ran a detective agency staffed by pretty young women, and “Nuts and Bolts,” a 1981 sitcom pilot about robots that found her playing opposite impressionist Rich Little.
Though Arden was always able to keep busy professionally, it’s a pity that she didn’t have the opportunity to cap her TV career with one last noteworthy role. The Golden Girls, which revitalized the careers of four older actresses and gave them a tremendous showcase for their comedic skills, came along a few years too late for Arden, but it’s easy to imagine how much fun she could have been in a role of that type.
When TV producers were unable to make the best use of her comedic gifts, however, movie producers took up the slack. Her career as an educator developed a new wrinkle when Allan Carr cast her as school principal Miss McGee in Grease (Paramount, 1978), a role she would reprise four years later in the far less successful sequel (her final theatrical film). She also worked at Disney, where she was featured in the Kurt Russell comedy The Strongest Man in the World (1975), and played a key supporting role in the Chevy Chase–Carrie Fisher comedy Under the Rainbow (Orion, 1981), sporting a vaguely Continental accent as “The Duchess.” As she had done for forty years, Arden enlivened even mediocre movies and television shows, worth watching even when the script wasn’t. Even Woody Allen, at the height of his success and critical esteem, was said to be an admirer who was writing a role for her.
In 1983, Arden planned a Broadway comeback as the top-billed star of a new play, Arthur Bicknell’s Moose Murders. Cast as Hedda Hathaway, affluent owner of a hunting lodge in the Adirondacks, in what was intended to be a spoof of murder mysteries, Arden endured a painful rehearsal and preview period in which she realized the play, which she had originally regarded as “wild and different,”16 wasn’t working. Some reports had it that Arden, then in her mid-seventies, was experiencing difficulty remembering her lines onstage.
If that was the case, the problem, according to Arden’s son Douglas West, may have been the rigidity with which playwright Bicknell regarded his script. “My mother always rewrote her lines to fit her mouth,” West says. But in Moose Murders, “he wouldn’t let her contract two words.” Union rules sided with the writer, leaving Arden frustrated. At odds with the creative team, she finally left the show in an unpleas-ant “did she quit, or was she fired?” scenario that was a sad coda to her Broadway career.
Her role recast with actress Holland Taylor, the show died on opening night amidst a critical roasting. Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote a stinging review, saying that attendance at its one and only performance would “separate the connoisseurs of Broadway disaster from mere dilettantes for many moons to come,”17 and later naming it as perhaps the worst play he ever saw during his long tenure as a reviewer. The New York Post’s Clive Barnes, calling the show “indescribably bad,” reminded readers, “This was the show that parted company a few weeks back with Eve Arden. Some people have all the luck. Here it was clearly Miss Arden.”18
The Moose Murders debacle must have been particularly painful for a performer who had so long valued camaraderie with her fellow cast and crew. Son Douglas West, who accompanied his parents on a number of their theatrical engagements during the late 1960s and 1970s, says that, under normal circumstances, “The cast of a play was their temporary family. People who appeared in her plays became longtime friends.”
Trying to put the upsetting episode behind her, Arden turned her attention to an offer from Woody Allen, who wanted to cast her in his next film. Flattered by this opportunity to work with the critics’ darling, she happily accepted. Regrettably, a family crisis caused her to withdraw from Allen’s cast before she could even begin shooting. The crisis was the illness of Arden’s husband Brooks West, to whom she had been married for more than 30 years. She returned home, and remained at his side until his death in February 1984. Arden’s longtime manager and friend, Glenn Rose, later told the Los Angeles Times, “She never really quite got over the death of her husband. She was never the same after it.”19
In 1985, her autobiography, Three Phases of Eve, was published. Still grieving her husband’s death, she wrote fondly about their life together, and about the family they’d raised. About her work in films, surprisingly, she said, without rancor, “Outside of the money they paid me and some of the people I worked with and the time they allowed me for my child, making pictures was pretty much just a job to me.”20 Although her lifelong passion for the theater was undiminished, she also paid homage to Miss Brooks, still her best-known character, and one for whom she knew she’d be remembered.
In the late 1980s, Arden’s own health took a downward turn, and she began to withdraw from the acting world. A 1987 role on Falcon Crest (CBS, 1981–90), reuniting her with fellow 1940s Warner Brothers contract player Jane Wyman, was one of her last television appearances. She died of heart disease on November 12, 1990, at the age of 82.
Although obituaries faithfully recorded her many professional accomplishments, and she would continue to receive posthumous tributes such as her 1995 induction into the Radio Hall of Fame, it was first and foremost Our Miss Brooks that would be her claim to immortality, and Arden knew that. In her autobiography she quoted an actor friend who, sensing that she didn’t quite realize the impact that Connie Brooks had had on the viewing public, told her, “Don’t you realize how many millions have seen you as Miss Brooks and, as long as there are reruns, will go on getting joy from them?”21