If Anne Jeffreys never achieved quite the level of fame as a sitcom star that some of the other actresses in this book did, it may be because she was successful at too many different things to concentrate solely on her work in television comedy.
To some, she is best known as an RKO contract player of the 1940s, and leading lady in B Westerns and Dick Tracy films. Others remember her as a stage performer specializing in musical comedy who starred in the original Broadway production of Kiss Me, Kate. More recently, she has been a busy soap opera actress with recurring roles on ABC’s General Hospital and its less successful spin-off, Port Charles.
But to viewers of 1950s sitcoms, she was the glamorous, playful, and charming leading lady of one of television’s first fantasy comedies, CBS’ Topper (1953–55), in which she co-starred with real-life husband Robert Sterling. Jeffreys played “Marion Kerby, the ghostess with the mostest,” one of two mischievous ghosts who haunted the house and life of a conservative, middle-aged banker (played by Leo G. Carroll).
Topper, the TV sitcom, was only one of the many incarnations of Thorne Smith’s classic fantasy novel (variously subtitled “A Ribald Comedy” or “An Improbable Adventure”), which was originally published in 1926. Like much of Smith’s work, the novel featured a fantastic element that brought a new sense of fun and adventure to the monotony of daily life. Penned during the height of the Roaring Twenties (and Prohibition), Topper extolled the virtues of fast driving, glamorous nightlife, and frequent intake of alcohol, couched in the context of fantasy.
Before Jeffreys and Sterling inherited the roles of Marion and George Kerby, the characters had been adapted for a 1937 MGM film of the same name, played by Cary Grant and Constance Bennett, which resulted in two follow-ups (United Artists’ Topper Takes a Trip, 1939, also based on a Smith novel, and Topper Returns, 1941). Appearing in all three films as Cosmo Topper was actor Roland Young.
The property was even adapted as an NBC radio show, The Adventures of Topper, which had a brief run in the summer of 1945, with Young reprising his film role opposite Frances Chaney as Marion. As noted by Variety’s reviewer, however, a comedy centered on the antics of appearing and disappearing ghosts “reads good on paper and was even enhanced in the film treatment,” but played less well on radio, resulting in a show he found “singularly unfunny.”1 It would take television to fully exploit on a weekly basis the visual possibilities that Smith’s story offered.
In 1953, producers Bernard L. Schubert and John W. Loveton secured the rights to assemble a TV sitcom version of Topper. Schubert’s production company had already enjoyed success with another book to film to TV adaptation involving a charming couple, the amateur sleuths Mr. and Mrs. North. With that show already established on CBS, the producers signed George Oppenheimer as Topper’s head writer, and looked for a leading lady and man to star in the pilot.
Born in North Carolina on January 26, 1923, Jeffreys (originally Anne Jeffreys Carmichael) quickly proved her abilities in more than one arena, despite some health problems that sometimes kept her at home and a little lonely. Because her parents divorced when she was still a girl, and her father died a few years later, Jeffreys was extremely close to her mother, and would remain so. Discovered from an early age to possess a beautiful singing voice, she was encouraged by her mother, Kate, whose own stage ambitions had been thwarted, to perform. “I had a radio show of my own in Durham by the time I was 10,” Jeffreys later recalled. “I hated it, really, but Mother kept after me and all of a sudden the fever took.”2
Continuing her music lessons throughout her teenage years, the young Jeffreys was being directed toward a career as an opera singer, and moved to New York in pursuit of that goal. While studying music, she paid the bills as a model for the elite John Robert Powers agency. Despite her abundant musical talent, however, she soon concluded that she did not wish to pursue an operatic career, finding the work “too stiff and too confining.”3
With her mother’s encouragement, Jeffreys went to Hollywood, where she was quickly discovered and, before the age of twenty, launched on a film career. She made her film debut in 1942, playing a bit role in Tarzan’s New York Adventure at MGM, but her agent was unable to elicit strong interest in his client at that studio. Undeterred, he took her to the more workaday Republic Studios, where she became a contract player in 1943. There, she was quickly pigeonholed into B Western films that had little use for her singing talent.
Loaned out to RKO in 1944 for a featured role in the Frank Sinatra musical comedy Step Lively, a remake of the Broadway hit Room Service, the actress made a strong impression on studio executives, who bought out her contract from Republic. Unfortunately, despite the musical talent she’d shown opposite Sinatra, her new employers continued to plop her into a series of mostly forgettable B pictures, either in-house or on loan to other studios. There were occasional highlights, such as her appearance as the “Lady in Red” who turns against her bank robber lover in the crime melodrama Dillinger (Monogram, 1945). Her role as Tess Trueheart in RKO’s Dick Tracy (1945), beautiful leading lady whose boyfriend is too busy to pay her the attention she deserves, was no great acting challenge, but the film was popular enough to be reprised in a follow-up, Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946). Both films entertained movie audiences without resulting in any noticeable career advancement for the lead actress.
Beautiful Anne Jeffreys, reunited with Dillinger leading man Lawrence Tierney, in RKO’s Step by Step (1946).
Throughout the 1940s, Jeffreys’ beauty and talent won her popularity with movie audiences, almost in spite of the variable scripts she was handed in mercifully forgotten epics as RKO’s Ding Dong Williams (1946) and the Judy Canova hillbilly comedy Joan of Ozark (1942) at Republic. All told, Jeffreys clocked appearances in more than 30 feature films between 1942 and 1948. Despite her success in Step Lively, her film work rarely took advantage of her singing ability; Western films would be the genre with which she was most closely associated during this period.
Still under studio contract to RKO, Jeffreys’ career received an unexpected boost in 1947, when theatrical composer Kurt Weill heard her sing, and put her musical gifts on display in the Broadway production of his show Street Scene. A musicalization of a previously Pulitzer Prize–winning play about tenement life, with Langston Hughes as its lyricist, Street Scene opened on the New York stage in January 1947. Jeffreys, cast as ingénue Rose Maurrant, earned praise from prominent critics like the New York Times’ Brooks Atkinson, who praised the actress and her co-star Polyna Stoska for their ability to “not only sing with depth of feeling and vocal brilliance but endow the parts with loveliness of character.”4 Her performance was beautifully recorded for posterity on the original Columbia cast album, despite an attack of flu that had her “hanging onto the stool to sing it”5 during the recording session.
Given six months’ leave from RKO to appear in the Broadway production, Jeffreys completed her work on Street Scene in May 1947, and reported for work in Hollywood. Unfortunately, her stage triumph did little to enhance her film career, which began to wind down as the decade did. Her role in the Randolph Scott Western Return of the Bad Men (1948) would be her last film assignment for almost 15 years.
Once her movie commitments expired, Jeffreys focused her attentions on stage work, climaxing when she assumed the title role in the Broadway smash Kiss Me, Kate, which had opened in December 1948. Replacing the originally cast Patricia Morison (also a B-movie veteran), Jeffreys starred in more 800 performances of Kate at the New Century Theatre between 1949 and 1951, missing not a single show.
“When you get on stage, something truly magical happens,” she later explained of her Broadway experience. “Adrenaline kicks in, along with something indefinable, no matter how badly you felt before. I tore ligaments in my knee during a performance of Kiss Me Kate and found a way to move around effortlessly on stage by putting my foot in a shoe box and sliding! I believe that it was then that I realized I could do anything under any circumstances if I put my mind to it.”6
Cast as Lilli Vanessi, a stage star playing Katharine opposite her ex-husband’s Petruchio in a musical version of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Jeffreys’ plum role gave her the opportunity to sing Cole Porter songs like Lilli’s memorable solo, “I Hate Men.” The role drew on a more spirited side of Jeffreys that had not been often seen in her 1940s film work, but would surface in her portrayal of Marion Kerby on Topper.
Like most Broadway veterans, she would not, however, reprise her role in the film version of the highly successful musical, being replaced by longtime MGM contract player Kathryn Grayson as Kate for the 1953 release. Although Jeffreys’ performance was not preserved on the original cast album, on which her predecessor Morison sings the role, Jeffreys did later record her songs for a 1959 RCA Victor album opposite Howard Keel, who starred in the movie version of Kate.
Jeffreys’ engagement in Kiss Me, Kate was not only a professional success, but also resulted in a personal landmark for the actress. She’d been married briefly to Joseph Serena, a captain in the U.S. Navy, in the mid–1940s, a union that ended with an annulment. During the run of Kate, Jeffreys met another current Broadway performer, film actor Robert Sterling. Then appearing a few blocks away in a show called The Gramercy Ghost, Sterling had been divorced from actress Ann Sothern (q.v.) in 1949. Jeffreys and Sterling fell in love, and their relationship culminated in marriage on November 21, 1951, Kate having closed in July. Their union would not only be a source of great personal happiness for Jeffreys, but also set the stage for her transition to television work.
Following a brief stint in another musical comedy, Three Wishes for Jamie, during the spring of 1952, Jeffreys teamed with her new husband, developing a nightclub act that would allow them to work together. Like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had done a couple of years earlier, they used the act as an opportunity to display their chemistry as a team. The popularity of their nightclub act led to an out-of-the-blue television offer to star in the Schubert-Loveton Topper pilot.
“So we came back and played the Coconut Grove at night and shot the pilot during the day,” Jeffreys later explained. “Then we went up to the Fairmont in San Francisco. They called and said it was the quickest selling pilot of that time—only two weeks after they got it all together, it sold! So we canceled the rest of our club acts to come back and do Topper.”7 The show had been sold to sponsor R.J. Reynolds Tobacco (promoting Camel Cigarettes), and would debut on CBS’ Friday night schedule in October 1953.
As in Smith’s novel, and the original MGM film, the series would revolve around the adventures of a rather straitlaced suburban husband whose life was complicated by the presence of two sexy and playful ghosts. However, the TV pilot, “Topper Meets the Ghosts,” provided a backstory slightly different than the previous versions.
Anne Jeffreys with real-life husband and frequent co-star Robert Sterling about a year after their marriage, enjoying cocktail chat with actress Nancy Carroll.
In the film, Cosmo Topper (played by Roland Young) knows George Kerby as a young, rather irresponsible playboy whose wealth has earned him a position as one of the trustees at the bank where Topper is an executive. Playful George (Cary Grant) and his glamorous wife Marion (Constance Bennett) meet an untimely end when his reckless driving results in a car wreck. Purchasing the sleek car from the Kerbys’ estate, Topper is shocked to find that George and Marion’s restless spirits still inhabit it.
TV’s Topper brought the characters together in a completely different fashion. In the pilot, George and Marion perish in a skiing accident, as does their guide dog, a Saint Bernard named Neil. When Cosmo Topper and his wife Henrietta (played by Lee Patrick) purchase the Kerbys’ house, the stodgy banker learns that his house is haunted by its previous occupants, who take it upon themselves to brighten his dreary existence.
Topper, as played by Young in the 1937 film, is on the verge of what would later be described as a “mid-life crisis.” Entrenched in a rut of monotonous daily life, and kept firmly under the thumb of his fussy wife (played by Billie Burke), Topper buys the Kerbys’ sleek roadster as an act of rebellion. Though basically devoted to his wife, he is charmed by the young and flirtatious Marion, who unleashes an unexpectedly adventurous and playful side of the dignified businessman.
For TV, the character relationships were slightly different. While TV’s Cosmo Topper, being unable to oust the Kerbys from his home, ultimately learns to enjoy their company, the comedy in Topper usually takes the form of his embarrassment and discomfort at their antics. Jeffreys, although glamorous and stunningly beautiful as TV’s Marion Kerby, plays a character toned down a bit to be acceptable to 1950s viewing audiences.
In TV’s Topper, George and Marion are fun-loving, slightly bored ghosts who cheer up their daily existence with mischief and playfulness. Almost akin to poltergeists, though not of the deliberately malicious ilk, the couple (seen, as the show’s announcer says, “by only three people on Earth—you, me, and Cosmo Topper”) make various objects fly unexpectedly through the air, play invisible games of badminton, and otherwise wreak havoc in the previously sedate Topper household.
Not surprisingly, the “dead” characters on Topper were distinctly more lively and animated than the live ones. The Kerbys’ untimely demise didn’t seem to interfere with their abilities to eat, drink, and not surprisingly, considering the sponsor, smoke—the latter an especially neat trick for characters presumably no longer breathing. The real-life romantic chemistry and charm of Jeffreys and her husband Robert Sterling make TV’s George and Marion appealing and glamorous, to the degree that prevailing standards allowed.
Completing Topper’s main cast were two veteran film actors, Leo G. Carroll and Lee Patrick, playing Mr. and Mrs. Topper. Carroll, whose credits stretched back to MGM’s Sadie McKee (1934), played Topper as a genial, patient, and rather unassuming man. His portrayal was not unlike that of Roland Young, who’d played the role in all three of the Topper films, though Carroll’s version was less inclined to break out of his middle-class rut than Young’s had been. (Young, after a long film career, had died in the summer of 1953, causing some critics to criticize Carroll’s portrayal of Topper as being imitative of his recently deceased predecessor).
Cast as Mrs. Topper, Lee Patrick would also contribute strongly to the show’s humor and appeal. In the TV series, much of the Kerbys’ antics took place in the Toppers’ living room or kitchen, and required frequent impromptu explanations from Mr. Topper whenever something bizarre took place in front of his wife’s eyes. TV’s Henrietta was a rather dizzy, vague woman who readily accepted her husband’s rather suspect cover-up stories for whatever she’d just seen.
Patrick, a Warner Brothers contract player in the 1940s, was versatile enough to play Mrs. Biederhof, the chilly, snooty mistress of Joan Crawford’s onscreen husband in Mildred Pierce (1945), as well as Sam Spade’s assistant in The Maltese Falcon (1941). In her early fifties when Topper began, the actress had already made a successful transition to character roles, and was the veteran of a previous comedy series, NBC’s Boss Lady, which had had a brief run in the summer of 1952. Rather unjustifiably relegated to featured billing in Topper’s closing credits, Patrick was a major factor in the show’s success, with her comedic reactions to the strange goings-on that constantly surrounded her.
Also regularly plagued by the Kerbys’ shenanigans were the Toppers’ cook Katie (an early role for the veteran comedic supporting player Kathleen Freeman), and Topper’s even stuffier boss at the bank, Mr. Schuyler (played by Thurston Hall). Henrietta’s friend Thelma (Mary Field) turned up now and then as well.
To everyone around him, Topper would eventually become adept at the impromptu explanation for what they’d walked in just in time to see him do. As on the later I Dream of Jeannie, the magical characters on Topper had a habit of vanishing just as the hero’s friends and co-workers arrived on the scene, leaving him holding the bag—and making scarcely plausible explanations for what they’d witnessed. (Seeing Mr. Schuyler’s eyes bug out at the file floating off his desk toward the file cabinet, Topper helpfully explains that there’s “a bank draft.”)
Like Wilbur Post of Mister Ed (CBS, 1961–66), Major Anthony Nelson of I Dream of Jeannie (NBC, 1965–70), and Tim O’Hara of My Favorite Martian (CBS, 1963–66), Cosmo Topper was a man who spent much of his time trying to keep a whopper of a secret. Even when he does decide to tell the truth, as in “The Diamond Ring” (3/19/54), it doesn’t help. Readily confessing to his doctor that he’s bedeviled by the three ghosts who inhabit his house, Topper is merely advised to consider a relaxing stay in a sanitarium. In the same episode, a police psychiatrist and his colleagues similarly refuse to believe Topper’s story, even as one of them has his hair rumpled by the invisible Marion, another’s cigarette is snatched out of his hand by George, and a third feels Neil’s warm, wet tongue slurping against his cheek.
Contributing to several of the first-season Topper scripts was a then-unknown Stephen Sondheim, hired after meeting head writer George Oppenheimer at a dinner party. In those days, it was still expected that a small, in-house writing staff could churn out weekly TV episodes with no difficulty, even on top-rated shows like I Love Lucy. Busy at the typewriter during the summer of 1953, the young Sondheim found the pace of TV work daunting, telling friends, “The schedule calls for an entire program to be shot every two and a half days. I don’t know how the hell they’re going to do it.”8
Somehow, the cast and crew managed. Not only did the Topper pilot quickly attract a sponsor, but its critical reception was largely enthusiastic as well, reviewers recognizing a show quite unlike most other comedies on the tube in 1953. Variety’s reviewer deemed the series opener “a socko start” that promised to be “one of the most diverting skeins of the year,” praising Jeffreys and Sterling as “a charming couple, whether on the cafe circuit or this debut in a regular teleseries.”9
Viewers agreed, and Topper became a popular success for CBS and Camel Cigarettes, despite competition that first season from another new sitcom, NBC’s The Life of Riley (1953–58), which starred film actor William Bendix. Although Riley emerged the initial ratings victor in the 8:30 time slot, Topper had its own following that kept it afloat, part of a solidly developing block of CBS Friday-night comedy that also encompassed Mama and Eve Arden’s Our Miss Brooks.
While not every couple might have relished the amount of togetherness that came as co-stars in a television series, Jeffreys said she and Sterling thrived on it. “It’s true Robert and I are together far more than most married couples, but this has helped our marriage,” she said. “I enjoy his company, I’m never bored around him, and I think he feels the same way. And even though we’re at the studio together all the time that doesn’t mean we are never apart. Some days Robert does not have the time to do more than speak casually to me. He has his duties—and I have mine. But this does not break the togetherness we always feel.”10
For the early 1950s, Topper was an extremely ambitious and innovative TV sitcom. While many prime time shows still aired live, making do with primitive sets and simple staging, Jeffreys’ show was a sophisticated special effects comedy ten years prior to the flurry of such shows (Bewitched, My Favorite Martian, I Dream of Jeannie) that would fill network schedules in the 1960s. Utilizing stop motion photography, double exposures, tricks with piano wires, and the like, Topper’s special effects crew dazzled audiences of the era with visual wizardry untried on any other show of the period. The show’s achievements would be recognized with an Emmy nomination for Best Situation Comedy that first season.
“Although the technical work at that time was really extraordinary,” remembered Jeffreys’ co-star Kathleen Freeman, “there was still none of the technological expertise that’s available today, so everything had to be done manually. For instance, floating glasses in front of a mirror usually required a couple of people high above with strings—or this special wire they used—and, of course, they had to make sure the wire didn’t show. Making the ghosts invisible or semi-invisible all took a great deal of time, too. It was very exhausting, as a matter of fact.”11
With the format of the show ruling out the possibility of it being filmed before a live studio audience, the producers utilized a laugh track that may have been generated by screening completed films for an audience. This method of gathering audience response was a popular practice at the time, before it became routine for TV sitcoms to simply use a laugh track compiled by a sound engineer from a library of responses to older shows. Adding to the implication, if not the reality, of a live audience, on Topper was the sound of listener applause at every commercial break, as if the curtain had just fallen in a theater.
As for Jeffreys herself, there were few, if any, sitcom leading ladies of the era more glamorous or captivating. Because she was playing a fantasy figure, rather than a (supposedly) real woman, she was permitted to sip martinis, wear slinky and seductive outfits, and drape herself across the lap of an older, married man, as she does in the first-season episode “George’s Old Flame” (7/2/54), breathing, “Oh, Topper darling, aren’t you attracted to me?” In Jeffreys’ capable hands, though, this was always playful, rather than offensive.
Unusual though their roles may have been, she and Sterling in fact played one of the most charismatic couples seen in 1950s sitcoms. Although the scripts sometimes called for the characters to be at odds, as in “The Proposal” (2/19/54), when, in Topper’s twist on a typical sitcom plot, Marion has a fight with George over his inattentiveness to his wife, Jeffreys and Sterling parlayed their real-life relationship into an onscreen chemistry that enriched the show. She would later remember “The Proposal” as her favorite Topper episode.
In a very different way from Lucille Ball’s Lucy character, Marion and her husband often settled the hash of overly pretentious, nosy, or unpleasant characters. Taking time out from their self-appointed roles as Topper’s new best friends, the Kerbys could be counted on in a pinch to triumph over a burglar, a swindler, or even a badly behaved child. Although they regularly bewildered and unnerved Henrietta and maid Katie, the Kerbys also geared up for action anytime a stranger made himself unwelcome in “their” home, as in the episode “Henrietta Sells the House” (4/9/54), when they declare war on a retired military man who buys the Toppers’ home and threatens to separate Cosmo from his ghostly friends.
Depending on the needs of any individual Topper scene, Jeffreys’ Marion Kerby might be partially visible, pop in or out, be see-through, or be represented only by her voice. Given the complexities of shooting such scenes, even a trouper like Jeffreys found some difficulty in meeting the demands of Topper’s schedule. Filming 39 episodes per year, laden with special effects, meant long hours on the set. For the actress, accustomed to quite a different routine—and working hours—as a Broadway performer, filming Topper was a challenge.
“I’m a workhorse,” she told TV Guide. “Always have been. But it’s taken a long, long time to get used to this 6:45 a.m. business. In New York we never got to bed until around 4:00 in the morning. We’d sleep all day, have lunch at 5:00 or 6:00 in the afternoon, get to the theater at 8:00, have a snack after the show and then party a bit until 4:00. Nice normal Broadway routine.”12
Despite her busy schedule, Jeffreys concluded her first season as a sitcom star with happy news on the personal front. As the show’s 1953-54 season wound down, the actress announced that she was pregnant with her first child. Acknowledging the collaborative effort involved in this as well as their television work, she and her husband named their son, born on August 2, 1954, Jeffreys Sterling. He was the first of three sons Jeffreys would have over the next several years.
With the show’s second season came one cast change. Actress Kathleen Freeman departed her recurring role as maid Katie, turning up in a prominent assignment opposite Thomas Mitchell on the syndicated sitcom Mayor of the Town (1954-55). Replacing her on Topper, as a gawky but similarly spooked cook named Maggie, was actress Edna Skinner. Skinner, previously a stage actress, is better known to baby boomers for her later role as wry, shopaholic Kay Addison in the early years of CBS’ Mister Ed (1961–66). Stepping in for Freeman could have been an awkward situation, but Skinner didn’t find it particularly worrisome: “There’s always going to be the comparison [to the original performer] and you have to realize that that’s going to happen. And so, rather than do an aping of anything, you must bring your own interpretation to the role.”13
Otherwise, there were few changes to Topper’s proven formula in its second season on CBS. Behind the scenes, original writers Oppenheimer and Sondheim gave way to a team headed by veteran comedy writer Philip Rapp. Rapp, who’d begun to contribute scripts to Topper during the latter half of the first season, soon became the show’s supervising story editor (i.e., head writer). He brought with him a substantial resume that included the development of the hit radio comedy The Bickersons, as well as screenplays for several inventive Danny Kaye film comedies of the 1940s.
Cast of Topper: Anne Jeffreys and Robert Sterling (standing) with Leo G. Carroll and Lee Patrick (Cosmo and Henrietta).
In search of new stories, Topper’s rejuvenated writing staff would eventually take Cosmo and his companions further and further from home, the scripts incorporating trips to Las Vegas, a desert island, and even Lisbon—though, in this case, Lisbon was a town in South Carolina. Although the first-season episode “Henrietta Sells the House” tells us that, should the Toppers move to a new house, George and Marion won’t be able to come along (it’s “against the rules,” she explains), those rules apparently don’t preclude them from taking an occasional trip with their friend.
One such outing, “Topper Goes West,” was a flashback to Anne Jeffreys’ days as a Western actress, the episode mocking genre stereotypes as “Calamity Marion,” George “Tall in the Saddle” Kerby, and Cosmo “The Dude” Topper showed off their prowess with trick riding, quick-draw gunplay, and a showdown with a bad guy in the saloon. The episode also, intentionally or not, reflected the ongoing popularity of a genre that would soon threaten to take over prime time TV altogether, leaving sitcoms and comedic actresses in short supply.
Retaining the same Friday time slot, and the same competition from The Life of Riley, Jeffreys’ show in its second year began to challenge its highly rated NBC competition. Though Riley still emerged the victor in the 1954-55 ratings race, it lost several points in the Nielsen ratings, and the gap between it and Topper narrowed considerably, with both shows ranking among the season’s Top Twenty-Five.
Although Camel continued its sponsorship of Topper into a second year, the company took advantage of a then-new wrinkle among TV sponsors when it relinquished a half-interest in the popular show to an alternate-week sponsor, General Foods, in early 1955. Although the TV medium was still young, changes such as this one were becoming increasingly common, as the typical single-sponsor pattern of early TV gave way to the reality that not every company could, or wanted to, assume sole sponsorship of an expensive weekly series.
Solidly popular with viewers, Topper by all indications should have been settling in for a multi-season run. Instead, in the late spring of 1955, trade papers printed the surprising news that the show’s second season on CBS would be its last. Having cut its sponsorship of the show in half only a few months earlier, Camel was the instigator of this move, declining to sign on for a third year as sponsor. Although General Foods was happy with the show, and willing to foot half the bill for a third year of episodes, Camel’s pullout cost Topper its spot on the CBS schedule, where it aired for the last time in September 1955.
The cigarette company’s surprising decision to relinquish sponsorship of a hit series was probably for reasons similar to its rival Philip Morris’ abandonment of an even more popular CBS show, I Love Lucy, the same year. In the early days of TV, sponsors paid for a network time slot in the hopes of reaching the largest possible audience, with the assumption that, given exposure to enough potential customers, their products would sell accordingly. Despite Topper’s sophistication, however, it shared with Lucy a considerable appeal to kids, who loved the ghost-com’s special effects and made up much of the audience available in the show’s early-evening time period.
Topper may simply have failed to draw the type of viewers inclined to smoke, though in those days before the Surgeon General’s warnings and the eventual banning of cigarette advertising on television, Jeffreys and Sterling made sophisticated and elegant spokespeople for the brand in Topper commercials and related magazine advertisements. Though it would remain legal for quite some time to advertise tobacco products on TV, there was also much in the news in 1955 about the possible health risks of smoking, and this resulted in some rethinking by R.J. Reynolds and other manufacturers about the substantial budgets they were sinking into the sponsorship of television shows.
Reynolds would eventually decide that a show targeted primarily at male viewers would be a better investment of its advertising dollars, allowing Topper to fall by the wayside despite its more-than-acceptable ratings. That fall, Reynolds would assume sponsorship of a new CBS sitcom, The Phil Silvers Show—a.k.a. You’ll Never Get Rich—as a promotional vehicle for Camel cigarettes.
For Jeffreys, the surprise cancellation of Topper despite its healthy ratings interrupted plans to combine her career and raising a family. She and Sterling had already planned to enlarge their family, hoping to time things so that she could be pregnant again during the hiatus between the show’s second and third season. As it turned out, she would have more time than she’d realized to devote to her family, though unfortunately at the expense of some career momentum.
If Topper was unable to land a deal to continue production of new episodes, it did not, nonetheless, vacate the prime time schedule. In two seasons, the cast had completed 78 episodes, and Loveton and Schubert quickly leased rerun rights to ABC. The third-place network made no new episodes of Topper, but scheduled an entire season of repeats of the CBS episodes in a 7:30 p.m. Monday time slot, where it aired through the spring of 1956 under the sponsorship of Standard Brands. That summer, NBC took its turn with Topper, scheduling yet another round of reruns in an early Sunday evening slot and giving the show a rare distinction of having played in prime time on all of the “Big Three” networks of the time.
Although it seems odd today that such a popular show would be relegated to reruns, rather than finding a sponsor willing to keep it going, 1955 was also the year when TV decision-makers seem to have fully embraced the viability of the filmed sitcom rerun. In 1952 and 1953, trade papers were full of items about the growing popularity of filmed shows over lived ones, and the realization, not then taken for granted, that they could profitably be shown more than once. Original syndicated sitcoms like Guild Films’ Life with Elizabeth, starring Betty White (q.v.), were snapped up by stations around the country, where they were seen as an easy alternative to locally produced live broadcasts.
By 1955, if anyone had ever doubted viewers’ willingness to watch filmed sitcom episodes more than once, they no longer did. Early network sitcom hits like Joan Davis’ I Married Joan were among the first to demonstrate the popularity of the sitcom rerun that year, and such shows were hugely popular with both networks (for daytime schedules) and local stations starved for programming to fill the hours that networks didn’t. The decision to cease producing new Topper episodes, and lease rerun rights to the episodes already available, may have been made by the packagers with an eye to quick profit.
Although those 78 episodes comprised a smaller number than would later be deemed necessary for the syndication market (where at least 100 episodes to re-play were preferred), that would not keep Topper off the air. After finally leaving the prime-time schedule in 1956, having played all three networks, syndicated Topper reruns would be a staple of local programming for another decade.
Added to the show for its rerun cycles was the opening sequence familiar to baby boomer rerun watchers, in which Jeffreys’ and Sterling’s names first appear onscreen while they remain invisible, their presence represented only by free-floating accoutrements like opera gloves and a cigarette. Only in the intro’s closing seconds, as the letters spelling out Topper slide across screen, do the actors “materialize” alongside co-star Leo G. Carroll, Jeffreys sporting a beguiling Cheshire Cat grin. The sequence replaced the opening titles used during the show’s CBS run, which included a prominent plug for the original sponsor’s cigarettes.
Not only would the original show remain popular with viewers, but networks would make two attempts to revive the Topper franchise in the 1970s. A 20th-Century Fox TV-movie and series pilot, Topper Returns, starring Stefanie Powers as Marion and Roddy McDowall as Cosmo, aired on NBC in 1973. A few years later, ABC gave Kate Jackson a stab at Jeffreys’ old role, starring the Charlie’s Angels veteran opposite her then real-life husband, Andrew Stevens. Neither pilot landed a series slot on the prime time schedule, nor did the leading ladies’ performances erase the image of Jeffreys as Marion Kerby.
Topper’s influence would also be seen in the plethora of fantasy comedies that populated network TV in the mid–1960s. The resounding success of Bewitched (ABC, 1964–72), whose star Elizabeth Montgomery even resembled Jeffreys somewhat, paved the way for Barbara Eden’s I Dream of Jeannie (NBC, 1965–70) and others less successful. A few years later, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968–70), which played a season each on NBC and ABC, also mined the vein that had begun with Topper. For much of the decade, comedies laden with special effects would be a viable commodity on TV.
Meanwhile, although Topper had met an early demise, Anne Jeffreys was still popular with viewers, and it didn’t take long for her to resurface on prime time TV. Even before Topper wound down, she displayed her musical comedy gifts in a 90-minute “Max Liebman Presents” special that aired on NBC, “The Merry Widow” (4/9/55). When that show was well-received, she returned for “Dearest Enemy” (11/26/55), in which she co-starred with Robert Sterling. (“The Jeffreys-Sterling team delivered the pop song material in tuneful style,” Variety commented).14 For viewers who knew her only as Marion Kerby, the musical “spectaculars” were a revelation.
Having enjoyed their first collaboration as sitcom co-stars, Mr. and Mrs. Sterling soon signed to re-team for a new series assembled by producer Alex Gottlieb (The Gale Storm Show), under the auspices of the Hal Roach studios. Originally announced as “Jacques and Jill,” a test film of the romantic comedy show had been completed by the spring of 1957, and was being shopped to sponsors.
Jeffreys’ new vehicle didn’t surface that fall, however. By the time it ultimately made its bow on ABC, in early 1958, it had been re-titled Love That Jill, and would be sponsored by Max Factor Cosmetics. Network publicity for the new sitcom proclaimed of the show’s stars, “She’s lovely! He’s in love! You’ll love them!”
Premiering on January 20, 1958, with an episode titled “Tonight’s the Night,” Jeffreys’ new show cast her as Jill Johnson, owner of a Manhattan modeling agency, Model Girls, with Sterling heading a rival firm. The supporting cast, aside from the beautiful models who would be seen regularly, included Jimmy Lydon as Jill’s male secretary, Richard, and Betty Lynn (later Thelma Lou of The Andy Griffith Show) as Jack’s assistant. Jill would be competing with the final episodes of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on CBS, and a Western drama called The Restless Gun on NBC, for viewers’ attention.
Unfortunately, the show Jeffreys and Sterling had envisioned didn’t really materialize. Variety’s review of the series opener complained that the script unwisely “inject[ed] sillyisms into a sophisticated farce about dog-eat-dog New York business society,” and carped that Jeffreys’ contributions to the proceedings were “a sly grin and a silly wiggle.”15
Before long, nobody was happy, especially the stars. “We got into big altercations about how the scripts were going,” Jeffreys later remembered. “They started out very good ... slick and well written. Then they became slapstick, incomprehensible and stupid, really. Finally, after we did the twelfth show, we went to Hal Roach, the head of the studio at the time, and expressed our unhappiness. He expressed his unhappiness, and we said, ‘Why don’t we just call it quits.’”16
With ratings unimpressive, neither the network nor the sponsor was inclined to disagree. The new show was off the ABC airwaves by April, not even kept around for a summer rerun cycle.
For a time in the early 1960s, in the wake of Love That Jill’s quick demise, Jeffreys concentrated on raising her family, which grew to include sons Jeffreys, Dana, and Tyler. While Robert Sterling tried another sitcom without his wife, Ichabod and Me, which aired on CBS in the 1961-62 season, before making a mid-life career change out of show business, Jeffreys was seen on TV only in occasional guest spots for the next several years. She made a brief return to the film world in 1962, after an almost fifteen-year absence, playing the wife of suburban husband and wannabe playboy Howard Duff in MGM’s Boys’ Night Out.
By the mid–1960s, she had resumed work in the theater, touring in productions of musicals like Camelot and The King and I. In 1965, she was onstage at the Music Theater of Lincoln Center, co-starring opposite Alfred Drake in a revival of Kismet. She supplemented her stage work with occasional guest appearances on popular series like Wagon Train (NBC and ABC, 1957–65).
Not until the early 1970s did the actress resume regular TV work, when she took on a recurring role in the NBC daytime soap opera Bright Promise. Cast as well-to-do Sylvia Bancroft, Jeffreys was part of a then-current trend for name actors finding a second career in daytime television. Following in the footsteps of film stars Joan Bennett (Dark Shadows) and Promise’s original top-billed star, Dana Andrews, Jeffreys took on the grind of a daily show like the trouper she had always been. Her work on that show was short-lived, as was the show itself, cancelled in 1972, but the industry was on notice that Jeffreys, still beautiful at fifty, was ready to work in television again.
A year later, she was seen as co-star to Laurence Luckinbill in ABC’s spy thriller The Delphi Bureau (1972–73), part of a rotating trio of one-hour shows seen under the umbrella title The Men. Her role as a mover and shaker on the Washington, D.C., social scene traded on Jeffreys’ trademark style and charm, and netted her a Golden Globe nomination as Best TV Actress (Drama), but the series was not a hit.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Jeffreys was a favorite of mega-producer Aaron Spelling, who used her often as a guest star in his crowd-pleasing ABC shows, with her appearance in a first-season episode of Fantasy Island (1978–84) followed by a return visit, as well as stints on Vega$ (3/7/79) and Hotel (1/11/84). Other producers followed suit, with Jeffreys seen in multiple episodes of CBS’ prime time serial Falcon Crest during the 1983-84 season, playing Amanda Croft, romantic rival to series lead Angela Channing (Jane Wyman). On NBC’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, she played the regal Prime Minister of an alien world in “Planet of the Amazon Women” (11/8/79).
Having populated the ABC schedule with the aforementioned hits, Aaron Spelling tried yet another three-vignettes-per-hour anthology show in the fall of 1984, with Jeffreys among the regular players in his Finder of Lost Loves. The show starred Tony Franciosa as the self-appointed title character, who took on the task of reuniting lovers separated by circumstance. Jeffreys played his office manager in the series, which vanished after one season of so-so ratings in the Saturday night time slot long held by Fantasy Island.
The cancellation of her prime time show left Jeffreys free to resume another role she had begun a year or so earlier. Cast as wealthy widow Amanda Barrington of ABC’s General Hospital, Jeffreys launched what would be an almost twenty-year association with ABC’s daytime lineup. Originally cast by producer Gloria Monty (who’d worked with Jeffreys on Bright Promise) as part of a short-term storyline about a handsome and unscrupulous spa masseur who seduced and then blackmailed his older female clients, Jeffreys remained part of the soap’s landscape for the next several years. Not under full-time contract to the show, she worked on it sporadically over the next fifteen years, simultaneously juggling other recurring assignments like her role as David Hasselhoff’s mother on the syndicated Baywatch. For a time, she also served as a hostess introducing nostalgic films on the American Movie Classics network.
Anne Jeffreys as the regal Amanda Barrington of the daytime soap Port Charles.
Unlike many actresses whose careers are unfairly curtailed after they reach the age of forty (sometimes sooner than that), Jeffreys maintained a busy professional schedule throughout her sixties and seventies. Her glamour, cultured speaking voice, and air of sophistication made her a natural for roles as worldly, often affluent mature women, her characters tending mostly toward the upper end of the economic scale.
In 1999, Jeffreys’ daytime character, Amanda Barrington, was transferred to the General Hospital spin-off, Port Charles, where she would appear more frequently than she had in recent years on the original series. Her most prominent storyline, in the early 2000s, positioned her as the source of conflict in her young granddaughter’s star-crossed romance with a working-class African-American boyfriend. In her mid-seventies, Jeffreys was still not only the picture of elegance but astonishingly beautiful, causing the decades-younger actor who played her granddaughter’s love interest to comment publicly on what a stunner she was.
Not every actress whose credits stretched back to the classic films of the 1940s would relish the grueling work schedule of daytime television. As Port Charles’ former casting director Mark Teschner points out, “You have to come in and be ready to act. It’s all about the work.” But Jeffreys, he says, was up for the challenge. “She’s an actress that loves to work. She is tireless, in the best sense.”17
As it happened, Topper, popular and innovative as it was, would be only one of the many roles Anne Jeffreys would inhabit in a career that lasted more than fifty years. Still highly visible in her early eighties, she regularly attends Broadway openings and has received awards for her extensive work with charities like ChildHelp USA, and serves on the board of nonprofit organizations such as the Young Musicians’ Foundation. Her happy marriage to Sterling lasted nearly 55 years, until she was widowed on May 30, 2006.
The cancellation of Port Charles in 2003, shortly after Jeffreys’ 80th birthday, might have been expected to bring the veteran star’s career to a close. While she stayed closer to home during Sterling’s last years, Anne Jeffreys remained game for new adventures nonetheless. Not ready to call her career finished, she told a Playbill reporter who asked about her future acting plans, “Make me an offer.”18 A year or so later, writer-director Scott M. Anderson did exactly that, casting Jeffreys in a key role as the Duchess of York in his film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III, scheduled for 2007 release.
The timeless appeal of fantasy has kept Topper and its beautiful leading lady popular with audiences for more than fifty years. Jeffreys may have best explained the show’s lasting appeal when she said, “We live in a real world. Why do we have to take that as our entertainment?”19
As for Jeffreys herself, her star quality remains undiminished. Says her soap opera colleague Teschner, “Without even trying, she is innately stylish and glamorous. She still retains that special aura about her that she’s always had. She is one of a kind.”