Although her shows seldom earned kudos from TV critics, and were conspicuously absent from the annual Emmy nominations, Gale Storm was a favorite of 1950s TV audiences, who consistently tuned in for the unpretentious fun they found on My Little Margie (CBS and NBC, 1952–55) and, later, The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna (CBS and ABC, 1956–60). Not only did Storm’s fans faithfully watch her sitcoms, they also bought her records, placing her on the Billboard charts as a pop singer, and later knew her as one of the first celebrities to talk unashamedly about her alcoholism and successful rehabilitation.
Before becoming a sitcom star in the early 1950s, Storm was a reliable B-movie player who enlivened a string of mostly low-budget genre films. Born on April 5, 1922, as Josephine Cottle, Storm grew up in rural Texas, her family often strapped for money. Nevertheless, the actress remembers her upbringing with fondness. “I’m sure life wasn’t easy for Mother,” she later wrote. “She was a seamstress and worked long hours, but she was serene and so were we. There just wasn’t any pettiness in the Cottles.”1
Looking back, she would comment, “You hear a lot about people ‘going Hollywood.’ That could only happen to those who’ve never had a secure childhood, a teenage where the values are sound. I was lucky. And all of you are lucky who live in a home where there’s love and faith. Don’t ever sell it short. It’s something no money in the world can buy.”2
Though enjoying chances to perform in school plays, Storm never entertained serious thoughts of a performing career. But in 1939, while still in high school, she gave in to the urging of two of her teachers, and entered a Star Search–type talent contest called “Gateway to Hollywood.” This CBS radio show, produced as a tie-in with RKO Pictures, offered unknowns auditioned in regional competitions around the United States a shot at a movie contract.
The show’s ultimate winners would be a young man and woman chosen to assume the pre-selected screen names Terry Belmont and Gale Storm. Finalists from around the country were sent to Hollywood, where each week three different pairs performed in brief playlets for CBS radio listeners. Against all odds, the teenager representing Texas emerged victorious. On December 31, 1939, she was presented with her RKO contract and membership in the Screen Actors’ Guild, both bearing the stage name that seemed to have been invented by a weatherman, Gale Storm.
“At the time I was so impressed, I didn’t even see the humor in the name,” she later recalled. “It was so exciting and so thrilling. It’s like a Cinderella story.”3 Adding to the fairy-tale quality was her real-life romance with “Terry Belmont”—her fellow “Gateway to Hollywood” winner, aspiring actor Lee Bonnell, whom she married on September 28, 1941.
Storm’s tenure as an RKO contract player would be brief. She made her film debut in a minor role in Tom Brown’s School Days (1940), and then advanced to playing the female lead in One Crowded Night the same year. While launching her acting career, she simultaneously worked to complete her senior year of high school in RKO’s studio school.
Unfortunately for Storm, the fast track to stardom that the radio show seemed to promise didn’t pan out. “I lasted a fast six months on the contract I won,” she said, “and out I flew.”4 Having reaped the full benefit of the radio show publicity, the studio let Storm go, telling her that they did not see a substantial future for her in the industry. Bonnell, who’d fared no better, would soon leave the acting profession altogether. His wife, however, persisted.
While the “Gateway to Hollywood” proved no great boon at RKO, the tenacious young actress had gotten her foot in the door, and parlayed her skimpy resume into jobs at other studios. She would appear in three dozen films between 1940 and 1952, most of them low-budget genre films. Sure that a Texas-born girl could ride, studio executives assigned her to B Western films like Roy Rogers’ Red River Valley (1941).
In 1942, she signed a contract at the Poverty Row studio Monogram, where she was cast in quickies like the East Side Kids comedy Smart Alecks (1942). In the early 1940s, moviegoers could see her multiple times per year in low-rent Monogram vehicles. Her comedy Nearly Eighteen, for example, issued on November 12, 1943, was followed seven days later by the release of a musical, Campus Rhythm. After that, eager fans had to bide their time until January, when Where Are Your Children?, a drama about juvenile delinquency, appeared.
Low-budget films had no time or patience for star temperament—Storm later recalled that the studio wouldn’t even allow actors to watch dailies of the films being shot, for fear they’d demand retakes that definitely weren’t in Monogram’s minuscule budgets. (Only by pleading with producer Lindsley Parsons—“I just nagged at him, nicely, until I wore him down”5—was she allowed to view dailies, which she treated as a learning opportunity).
Her specialty was the “six-day wonder”—the B films cranked out in less than a week. The schedule was intense—she remembers that on one such film, they reached the end of the last day of shooting without having filmed the entire script. At Monogram, extra shooting days were out of the question, and so what had been completed was somehow edited into a releasable film, minus the missing footage.
Glamorous Gale Storm attends a 1950s movie premiere with real-life husband Lee Bonnell.
Grateful for the career opportunities she’d been given, and held in higher regard at the low-rent studio than she might have been at a classier operation, Storm worked steadily and happily throughout the 1940s, earning a reputation as cheerful, cooperative, and extremely capable. Others might have been daunted by the workload, but Storm wasn’t. “The hours weren’t so bad,” she says today. “I don’t remember feeling overworked.” Her ability to do creditable work on a tight shooting schedule would serve her in good stead as a sitcom star in the next decade.
Her own favorite vehicle of this period was the comic Western The Dude Goes West (1948), in which she co-starred with future Green Acres star Eddie Albert. She also had a fondness for the 1947 Christmas story It Happened on 5th Avenue, which enjoyed holiday reruns on TV for many years before It’s a Wonderful Life became the perennial that it is today. More recently, she says that her horror melodrama, Revenge of the Zombies (1943), opposite John Carradine, has become a cult favorite for which she still receives frequent fan mail.
While her career progressed at a steady if unspectacular pace, Storm also devoted herself to her family, which had grown with the birth of her first child, son Phillip, in the spring of 1942. Before the decade was out, she would add two more sons to her brood, interrupting her hectic moviemaking schedule only when sidelined by pregnancy and childbirth.
By the early 1950s, Storm’s movie career was in a lull. Although she enjoyed working opposite future TV stars Eve Arden (“such a nice person to be with”) and Donald O’Connor in Curtain Call at Cactus Creek (Universal, 1950), few noteworthy roles followed. By the spring of 1952, Storm was “at liberty,” and, at the age of thirty, facing the possibility that her career had peaked.
Unbeknownst to her, producer Hal Roach, Jr. was then casting a sitcom to be called My Little Margie, centering on the relationship between an irrepressible young woman and her eligible bachelor father. The Roach Studios had earlier been home to the comic talents of Laurel and Hardy, and developed the Our Gang comedies, under the auspices of Hal Roach, Sr. His son wanted to establish the same type of leadership in TV comedy, and had begun to do so with The Trouble with Father (aka The Stu Erwin Show), which premiered as an ABC filmed series in the fall of 1950. The latest project, Margie, was being pitched to Philip Morris as a summer replacement for the sponsor’s unexpectedly popular show I Love Lucy, which had just completed its first season.
Writer Frank Fox, who created the series’ characters, was friendly with actress Marjorie Reynolds (later the TV wife of William Bendix on the 1953–58 NBC sitcom The Life of Riley), and Storm believes that he created “Margie” with her in mind. For reasons unknown, Reynolds wasn’t cast in the role, however, and Roach was shopping for a star. Originally intended to be not much more than a place-holder, to keep the audience tuning in to CBS Monday nights at nine during Lucy’s summer hiatus, Margie needed not a temperamental, expensive star, but rather a recognizable face who could handle the show’s comedy, and whose asking price was reasonable. Enter Gale Storm.
For the actress, by then a veteran of three dozen feature films, the offer to star in My Little Margie came out of the blue, and she wasn’t certain why producer Roach had thought of her. He later told reporters he’d been aware of her work for some time. “I watched her for years,” he explained, “and thought to myself that she had terrific possibilities that had never been exploited.”6
Storm, shown a pilot script for the series, was hesitant, despite the fact that her movie career was going through a lull. She and her husband thought the script, which dealt with Margie’s interference in her father’s love life, “was pretty good, but we both thought the relationship between father and daughter seemed a little incestuous.”7 After a rewrite, she decided to take the plunge, signing on for an unimpressive $750 a week. Her co-star in the series would be Charles Farrell (1901–1990), a popular movie leading man of the late 1920s and early 1930s who’d done little or no acting in recent years.
My Little Margie cast its star as 21-year-old Margie Albright, who lived in New York City with her widowed father, an investment counselor. Not unlike Lucy Ricardo, Margie was an inveterate schemer, someone who constantly found herself mixed up in a mess (often of her own making), and could unfailingly develop a wild and impulsive plan to handle the situation. Her father Vern, whose function in the series was not terribly different from the husbands in I Love Lucy and I Married Joan, tried in vain to keep Margie under control, and her nose out of his business.
Storm had done comparatively little comedy in her days as a movie ingénue, and credits Margie director Hal Yates as a mentor. “I thought comedy was something you had a flair for, or you happened to have good timing,” she says. “I had no idea that there were definite rules. It’s a whole field of learning that Hal Yates knew. He was just a master at that.” One of his key rules was that comedy required a brisk pace, and he kept his Margie actors hopping.
Storm did in fact have comedic gifts that the show spotlighted. She gave her TV character beauty, charm, and an uninhibited sense of fun. Like I Married Joan, which would make its bow a few months later, My Little Margie was nobody’s idea of a highbrow show. Even I Love Lucy had more claim to substance and character development than Storm’s and Davis’ shows. The plots on Margie were pure fluff, a grab bag of mistaken identities, convenient coincidences, punches thrown, and setups for sight gags. Viewers lapped it up.
Critics, on the other hand, didn’t cut the show much slack. After viewing the introductory episode, which aired on June 16, 1952, Variety predicted that Lucy fans would tune out, criticizing Storm’s show for its “contrived situations and overly-coy dialog.”8 As the show continued to play out its thirteen-week summer run, however, ratings made it clear that viewers disagreed. The unambitious summer replacement sitcom was a bona fide hit. It was too late to find the show a spot on CBS’ fall 1952 schedule, but it was clear that the audience wanted to see more.
When CBS was unable to find a vacant time slot for its unexpected hit, Margie resurfaced on NBC in October, in a 7:30 p.m. Saturday slot. By early 1953, CBS obliged Philip Morris with a spot for what was by then being acknowledged as “one of the prize situation comedy properties,”9 having recently gone as high as #2 in the Nielsen ratings. In January, Margie jumped to a 10 p.m. Thursday berth.
The leapfrogging from network to network, and time slot to time slot, wasn’t doing much to help the show maintain its following, and Philip Morris dropped its sponsorship at the end of the 1952-53 season. Some observers thought they’d seen the last of My Little Margie, but once again the little show that could would prove to be stronger than expected.
Scott Paper, which had been sponsoring a musical variety show on NBC, abruptly resurrected Margie in the fall of 1953. NBC placed Storm’s show in a more favorable early evening time slot, as part of a Wednesday sitcom block that found it following the compatible I Married Joan. The combination gave fans of sitcoms—and funny ladies—a pleasant hour of undemanding fun that was very easy to take.
Aside from Storm and Farrell, the show drew on a larger-than-usual supporting cast, with five recurring characters aside from Margie and her father, not all of whom would be seen in any given episode. Vern’s boss George Honeywell (played by Clarence Kolb) was a crotchety older man who, not unlike Larry Tate in the later Bewitched (ABC, 1964–72) left the show’s leading man in weekly peril of losing his job. Elderly neighbor Mrs. Odetts (Gertrude W. Hoffman) was Margie’s loyal sidekick, who, unlike Lucy’s Ethel Mertz, was always game for another crazy stunt and entered into them with relish.
Veteran African-American comic actor Willie Best played the apartment house’s friendly elevator operator and general handyman, Charlie. It was a slightly more dignified role than some the talented actor had essayed in movies of the 1930s and 1940s, where he was cast as a succession of Stepin Fetchit-type porters and other characters generally addressed as “boy.” With his character not seen in every episode, Best alternated this gig with a similar one on ABC’s The Stu Erwin Show (1950–54), also filmed on the lot, and eventually with yet a third role on the syndicated adventure series Waterfront. Both Margie and her father had off-and-on love interests. Hers was genial, not especially bright Freddie Wilson (Don Hayden), whose inability to get and hold a steady job made him the object of Vern’s scorn. Vern, meanwhile, kept company with attractive neighbor Roberta Townsend (Hillary Brooke), though he seemed in no hurry to make a commitment.
Most Margie episodes followed a fairly basic formula that found father and daughter scheming against one another, with the original scheme often received with a retaliatory counterattack. In “A Horse for Vern” (5/14/53), for example, Vern and Freddie conspire to put a damper on Margie’s burgeoning relationship with a newspaper journalist, and her aspirations of becoming a cub reporter. When the men compromise Margie’s credibility with her new beau by tricking her into reporting a wild horse loose in the apartment building, and then promptly hide the horse in question, Margie soon realizes she’s been had.
Her own, even more elaborate scheme, enacted with the help of her reporter friend, soon has her father convinced that the disappearing horse incident has traumatized Margie, requiring the care of a psychiatrist. The phony psychiatrist recommends a remedy that first requires Vern to act out the presence of an invisible horse (to soothe his “disturbed” daughter), and then allow the real horse to sleep in their tenth-floor apartment, and join them for breakfast in the dining room. Naturally, boss Mr. Honeywell shows up with an important client, as he so often does, just in time to find Vern Albright pulling another crazy stunt, and, once again, barking, “Albright, you’re fired!”
Unlike Lucy Ricardo, who tended to wind up with the short end of the stick by the end of most episodes, Margie Albright almost always emerged victorious from the weekly butting of heads with her male authority figure. When Vern, who does not want her to go on a trip, is unable to prevent her doing so, Honeywell suggests “one good swat with an old-fashioned razor strap” to bring her into line. Instead, they invent “Margie’s Phantom Lover” (10/28/53), a secret admirer whose invitation to a rendezvous disrupts Margie’s travel plans. Naturally, she soon grows wise to the gag, and leaves both her father and his boss with egg on their faces by episode’s end. “I wonder if they’ll ever learn not to try and trick Margie,” she says with a satisfied grin.
If the show occasionally relied too heavily on far-out plots and wild coincidences, its saving grace was Storm, who played every scene with infectious enthusiasm. Another typically zany episode, “Corpus Delecti” (3/23/55), begins when Margie buys an old trunk at Charlie’s church rummage sale. Margie finds a mysterious diary in the trunk, and thinks she’s reading the written confessions of a murderer. Meanwhile, the writer of the diary, a novelist and screenwriter who coincidentally happens to be Vern’s latest client, is desperate to retrieve it. Roping in Freddie, who’s an aspiring detective, Margie tracks the author of the diary to a deserted movie studio. In the episode’s fantastic final act, everyone winds up on a haunted house set, the kind that features spooky portraits with eyes cut out over the fireplace, and a hidden trap door in the floor. Once a gun or two has been drawn, and a vase crashed over Vern’s head, each cast member in turn falls through the trap door into a giant net in the basement, and the episode is over.
Although the physical comedy Storm was given on Margie was a bit less restrained than what Lucille Ball or Joan Davis often tackled, nonetheless costumes, funny accents, and disguises were all in a day’s work for the star, who in various episodes impersonates Vern’s twelve-year-old daughter, an opera singer, a hillbilly, and a countess, among others. Still, starring in a raucous comedy had its risks. In October 1952, Variety reported that Storm “was kayoed when assistant director Nate Watt, indicating to audience of extras count of the ref during a wrestling match scene, accidentally brought his fist down on her, scoring a knockout.”10
Storm doesn’t remember that particular incident, but vividly recalls another one, in which the script called for her to struggle with a bad guy, trying to push a door closed in his face. A mistimed cue by the other actor resulted in his fist smashing into the actress’ face. “He broke my nose,” she says, remembering that she had to be rushed to the MGM studios for treatment, because the Roach facilities lacked an infirmary or medical personnel.
Even worse, though not for the star herself, was the accident that occurred during the filming of “Buried Treasure” (4/2/53). The script called for Margie to fall from a ceiling skylight while trying to throw a net over a couple of jewel thieves. Stunts of this type were accomplished with the use of a double, so Storm was able to go home while her stand-in took the fall. Thanks to faulty set construction, the stunt was more dangerous than it should have been, and Storm was horrified to learn the next day that her double had broken her back in the fall.
As Lucy Ricardo had her famous “spider” sound, Margie too had a way of expressing her dismay and frustration. When things were headed to hell in a hand basket for Margie, as they often were by the show’s midway point, Storm would turn and look into the camera, making a gurgling, saliva-sloshing sound that became her trademark. “Wherever I would go, people would ask me to gurgle,” she remembered. “It wasn’t the classiest of sounds, but everyone loved it.”11
If we credit All in the Family (CBS, 1971–79) as being a groundbreaking attempt to bring realism to the world of the TV sitcom, My Little Margie was surely the anti–All in the Family, the show that did its darndest to steer clear of same. Viewers never knew or cared whether Margie and her father were Democrats or Republicans, and if the characters had any opinions on the then-current Korean War, they kept them to themselves. My Little Margie was pure, unadulterated escapist entertainment.
It’s the prototype of the show that scholars and media critics would later call upon to demonstrate what was wrong with television, and with the images of women on TV. Margie, as critics were quick to point out, was a young woman who didn’t seem to have a job, or any serious career aspirations, and whose principal goal in life seemed to be to find a man. For those who wanted television comedy to be sophisticated, erudite, or reflective of the problems and concerns of contemporary life, criticizing the zany plots and innocent situations of My Little Margie was all too easy.
Did viewers tune in hoping to see stark reality? Not likely. Storm’s show was never intended to be anything more than light entertainment, and at that it was quite successful. Though it’s commonly said that the female sitcom characters of the 1950s were not overly imbued with brains, Margie is actually pretty clever, certainly more so than her father (who’s somewhat reminiscent of The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s Ted Baxter in his handsome vacuousness). Her boyfriend Freddie was generally running neck-and-neck with Vern in the numbskull sweepstakes.
Nor can she be considered in any way downtrodden. Like other sitcom heroines of the era, Margie paid a minimal amount of lip service to the social codes of the day, such as the idea that she abides by her father’s rules. Having done so, she then proceeds to do exactly as she pleases, her father helpless to prevent her. In “Margie and the Shah” (5/12/54), when Vern wants to keep his daughter from meeting a promising new client, it costs him a hefty bribe—“Just let me handle this business all by myself, and you get [a] new car, and a new wardrobe besides.” Minutes later, she’s been smuggled into the Shah’s hotel suite in a laundry basket, dressed herself up as one of his harem of dancing girls, and is soon being offered a chance at becoming his sixty-sixth wife.
By the end of each episode, of course, everything came out all right. Each segment closed with a scene in which Margie and Vern’s framed photo came to life, and the two stars exchanged a final bit of dialogue. Inevitably, after a few choice words from Storm, Farrell would say ruefully but lovingly, “That’s my little Mar-gie!” (Though, given Farrell’s Boston-bred accent, the r was largely missing from “Margie”).
Once it was clear that My Little Margie had caught on, even critics finally began to acknowledge that there might be something there—as when Variety, a year after publishing its initial pan, called the show “network quality programming ... [that has] proven its value as a property by the way it catapulted Gale Storm back into the public eye.”12 Another writer, Storm recalls, said of the show, “Nobody likes it but the people.”
Unlike later sitcom stars who found the work confining, or disparaged their TV stardom, Storm was happy with Margie. “I loved the character, I loved my co-workers, I loved the show, I loved doing it,” she later said. “I’d get tired, but I’d wake up every morning looking forward to the day’s work.”13 Nor did she apologize for the show’s focus on lightweight entertainment.
Gale Storm studying the script with My Little Margie co-star Charles Farrell (Vern).
Much as she enjoyed the sitcom, Storm readily admits that the workload was demanding, much more so than her B movie work at Monogram in the 1940s. She and her colleagues shot two episodes of My Little Margie back-to-back each week, working every weekday and Saturdays. “You really had to love it to live through it,” Storm says.
On the set from early morning until late in the day, she had little time even to learn lines. Falling into bed at night, “I’d put the script on my chest, and hope I got it by osmosis,” she says with a laugh. Fortunately, she was able to remember the words with little rehearsal—“thank the Lord, that came easily to me.” On the other hand, she remembers co-star Charlie Farrell struggling to get his lines down. “He would always have the pages from the next scene in his jacket pocket,” she says, which allowed the actor some impromptu study anytime there was even a momentary break in the shooting schedule.
Unlike I Love Lucy, Storm’s show was a “one-camera” sitcom, which was not played to a live audience. “We filmed Margie just as you film a motion picture,” she explains. The method used was tiring for actors, as it required them to play scenes over and over, while different camera angles were captured. So that the film could be edited together seamlessly, it was important for Storm to repeat her actions each time exactly as she had before. Under those circumstances, the energy and spontaneity that she brings to her performances is even more impressive.
With her hectic workload, Storm says she never took the time to wonder whether she might have preferred doing a three-camera show in front of a studio audience. If anything, “I think it would have been a lot easier,” she says today. She liked her co-stars—“everybody was very considerate, there was no jealousy”—but admits that the busy workday kept them from becoming close on a personal level.
My Little Margie show was so popular that, in a reverse of the usual circumstances of the early 1950s, the TV Margie spawned a radio offshoot. At first, when the possibility of a radio show was raised, she balked, protesting with good reason that there was no room left in her schedule. Hal Roach, Jr. grudgingly rearranged shooting of the TV episodes in order to accommodate the radio assignment.
Although some executives tried to maximize their profits by doing radio and TV versions using the same scripts, Storm and Farrell would instead star in original Margie segments for radio. Rather than using the TV supporting cast, however, radio’s Margie, which would be broadcast live, featured seasoned talent from that medium, including Doris Singleton and Verna Felton of TV’s December Bride. Margie also spawned a popular comic book series that would far outlast the show’s original network run, surviving into the 1960s.
Some of Storm’s contemporaries (like Lucille Ball and Joan Davis) were much more highly paid as sitcom stars than she was for Margie. She was amused when a fan magazine proclaimed her to be “the richest person in Hollywood.” Still, she was earning what in most 1950s households would have been an astronomical salary, and was careful to see that her husband’s pride wasn’t threatened. “I learned very quickly to be really stupid about money,” she says today. Though she was the primary breadwinner, husband Lee Bonnell gave her career guidance and emotional support, also handling her funds in addition to his work as an insurance agent.
Fortunately for Storm, she had never prized the financial rewards of movie or TV stardom over her personal life. “I wasn’t working for the money,” she explains. “I wasn’t that aware of the money. I never had time to shop, anyway!”
Storm shot 126 episodes of the popular sitcom between 1952 and 1955. At the end of the show’s third full season, Scott Paper executives pulled the plug on Margie, opting instead to sponsor a newer show called Father Knows Best, which would be moving to NBC after a season of so-so ratings on CBS.
My Little Margie’s inventory immediately went on the auction block. A popular sitcom with a goodly bundle of episodes available was a hot property for the syndication market in 1955. Margie was ultimately sold to Official Films, which also acquired The Stu Erwin Show from Roach in the same deal. Storm’s sitcom would quickly become one of the most frequently rerun shows of the decade, filling countless half hours on local stations across the country. When one of the first stations to air the show, the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia, drew the highest ratings of its entire daytime schedule with Monday-through-Friday Margie episodes, other stations were quick to follow suit. Variety reported that New York’s WCBS paid $225,000 for the rights to five airings of the 126 Margie films, a hefty sum for the time but cheaper than the costs of producing local programming was by then.
In the wake of the show’s cancellation, Storm launched an unexpected second career when she became a recording artist. She’d played her first professional singing gig a couple of years earlier, headlining a well-received musical act in Las Vegas. That led to bookings on TV variety shows. In the fall of 1955, shortly after Margie concluded its original run, Storm recorded her first song for Dot Records. Her cover of “I Hear You Knocking,” released that October, would net the star a gold record. The songs she recorded were mostly chosen for her by her producer, Randy Wood. Although she doesn’t have a favorite among them—“I don’t believe in favorites,” she says—she would place five more singles on the charts before winding down her brief recording career in 1957. Records like “Teen Age Prayer” and “Dark Moon” were promoted in the mid–1950s through her TV guest appearances with Milton Berle and Perry Como, among others.
Although she would soon curtail her career as a pop singer, largely because of husband Lee Bonnell’s jealousy of the record producer with whom she worked, Storm was still popular with TV audiences. Busy with guest appearances and musical performances in 1956, she’d shied away from the possibility of a second TV series, leery of jumping back into the intense work schedule that a sitcom entailed.
Despite her hesitation, however, she couldn’t resist an offer that came her way that spring, courtesy of former Margie colleague Lee Karson. His pitch consisted not of a sample script, or even a series outline. What he brought the star was a magazine ad.
“All he had was the back cover of a Time magazine with a beautiful luxury liner ad,” Storm recalled. “It spoke of all the wonderful places and how your social director would see to it you had a grand time. A marvelous idea for a series because you could go anywhere.”14 If that wasn’t temptation enough, Karson added that the series would naturally lend itself to sequences in which Storm could sing. She was sold, as was Hal Roach, Jr., who readily entered into a second major production with Storm.
Given Storm’s track record, Nestlé quickly signed to sponsor the fledgling series, which would debut on CBS in the fall of 1956. Officially titled The Gale Storm Show, it would later be syndicated under its better-remembered subtitle, Oh! Susanna. Storm’s character was named Susanna Pomeroy in order to justify the title. As it happened, Storm was pregnant when filming was set to begin, and would name her new daughter after her second TV character.
Also featured in The Gale Storm Show was the veteran movie comedienne ZaSu Pitts, who would play Susanna’s best friend and “Ethel Mertz,” Nugey, employed in the ship’s beauty salon. For Pitts, working at the Roach Studio was like old home week. In the 1930s, she’d co-starred opposite Thelma Todd in a series of comedy shorts produced by Hal Roach, Sr. Pitts’ expressive hands had long been her best-known feature, though she denied “fluttering” them, and said, “I never consciously plan to move them in any special way. They just go by themselves.”15
Roy Roberts, in a characterization not unlike what he would later contribute to The Lucy Show (CBS, 1962–68) as stuffy bank president Mr. Cheever, played Susanna’s boss, ship’s captain Hurley. For the first three seasons, there was also a teddibly British steward, Cedric, played by Jimmy Fairfax, who was often a willing participant in Susanna’s schemes.
A bit more settled than Margie Albright, Storm’s new character was a fun-loving, impulsive, but basically responsible working woman who had a tendency to take a bit too much interest in the lives of her passengers. Late 1970s viewers who thought that ABC’s The Love Boat (1977–86) was a fresh new concept might have been surprised to encounter The Gale Storm Show, which CBS would even air at the same night and time (Saturdays at 9 p.m.) that Aaron Spelling’s show would later inhabit.
In an innovative format for the time, The Gale Storm Show would include a musical sequence in every third episode. Given that Susanna’s job responsibilities entailed planning entertainment for the ship’s passengers, as well as the star’s singing ability, this was a logical feature that enhanced the show’s appeal.
The show opened every week with the sound of a horn emitting from the ship’s smokestack, followed by a view of Storm smiling through a porthole, then looking to the side, where ship’s flags flapping in the breeze turned over to spell out the show’s title. Seen later was a shot of each of Storm’s co-stars in turn, spouting, “Oh, Susanna!,” to which the star would cheerily reply, “Someone call me? I’ll be with you in a moment!”
Storm had been somewhat underestimated since the days of My Little Margie, and in some ways for much of her career. Naysayers were surprised when The Gale Storm Show emerged as the actress’ second hit series, drawing strong numbers despite considerable Saturday night competition from Lawrence Welk on ABC and Sid Caesar on NBC. Although not initially a Top Twenty show, The Gale Storm Show: Oh, Susanna! would attain that status during the 1957-58 season, when it landed in 16th place.
At a time when several big-name comedians were seeing their ratings drop, and when other sitcoms were falling by the wayside, TV Guide questioned why Storm’s show was doing so well. Never one to take herself too seriously, the star provided a ready answer:
“The reason Oh! Susanna is so popular,” she helpfully explained, “is because nobody watches it—so nobody complains. It’s quite simple.”16 Pressed to expound on this theory, the actress admitted that her show’s romantic and appealing setting might also be a factor in its popularity.
Thirty-five when the show began, Storm played a more adult character in her second series than she had in My Little Margie. Still, in the great tradition of sitcom characters everywhere, Susanna is, of course, a well-intended buttinsky who can’t resist involving herself with the passengers. Her boss, Captain Huxley, tries in vain to squelch this impulse, as in the early episode “Passenger Incognito” (10/13/56):
Huxley: Now, for the millionth time, will you tell me what your job is?
Susanna (holding up her hand as if taking an oath): To entertain our passengers at all times.
Huxley: And not do what?
Susanna: And not to meddle in their private lives, nor try to solve their personal problems.
Huxley: I have never heard it said more insincerely!
Naturally, in the very next scene, she takes on the challenge of bringing a plain–Jane passenger (played by future Beverly Hillbillies “Jane” Nancy Kulp) out of her shell, taking her in for a makeover and spreading a rumor that she’s really a countess traveling incognito.
Also a running theme in The Gale Storm Show was Susanna’s own romantic life. A few weeks later, in “The Witch Doctor” (12/8/56), for example, Susanna takes an interest in a shy but handsome college professor who lacks the confidence to approach women. Taking him ashore when the ship docks, she persuades him to buy a love charm from a local witch doctor (in fact a relocated American, played by soon-to-be Rifleman Chuck Connors). Scornful of such superstitious nonsense, he begrudgingly agrees to wear the pendant. Trying to give him the extra bit of confidence he needs to make friends with some of the single women on board, Susanna flirts with him and boosts his confidence. Unfortunately for Susanna, whose boss has a tendency to show up just when she’s making a little headway with the eligible bachelor, her would-be suitor warms up to a fellow passenger instead of her.
Publicity photo for The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna.
The ambience of foreign travel that Storm’s show attempted to convey was largely an illusion, as the series never left the soundstage. A set representing the Ocean Queen’s deck was perhaps the most frequently used, with Captain Huxley’s office and the ship’s dining room also seen regularly. Shore visits were largely depicted with the use of stock footage to set a scene, followed by a jump to an indoor set depicting a cafe or shop in the port city. Occasionally the studio’s set designers would convert the soundstage into a facsimile of the Swiss Alps, or whatever other exotic setting was needed.
At lunchtime every day, she watched dailies of the previous day’s work, as she had done since her employment at Monogram. “It’s very easy when you’re working so hard and so fast to fall into habits of overdoing—or underdoing,” she explains. By doing her “homework” during her lunch hour, she felt more comfortable that she was keeping her characterization on track.
While Storm’s recording career was still active, The Gale Storm Show also served as an effective promotional vehicle for her singles. The second-season opener, “Pat on the Back” (9/14/57), paired her with fellow Dot Records stalwart Pat Boone, whose Pat Boone—Chevy Showroom series premiered on ABC a couple of weeks later. The tuneful half hour featured the duo singing a duet of Boone’s song “Would You Like to Take a Walk?” as well as individual solos for each, Storm’s in a dream sequence in which Susanna fantasizes about a recording career. The main plot, which largely took a back seat to the music, concerned Susanna’s attempts to spotlight Boone in a musical show on board, threatened by his confinement to sick bay with a diagnosis of measles. Susanna is, of course, not so easily dissuaded, and fills in for the downed singer herself, lip-syncing to his record album while she’s silhouetted behind an opaque screen.
In 1959, The Gale Storm Show jumped to ABC, which would air a fourth season of the series, as well as retain the rerun rights to the show for two years, in a deal reported to be worth $2.5 million. The Roach Studios, in serious financial trouble, had sold the profitable show to Independent Television Corporation. Storm wasn’t surprised when reports of Roach’s problems surfaced. She’d seen him in the company of some “not very savory” associates, including one questionable character who visited the Gale Storm Show set and “was going to give me an emerald mine.” (She’s still waiting).
In hindsight, she says, “I think our show was paying for a lot of others.” Warned that problems at the Roach studios were coming to a head, “we knew when they were going to lock the gates. We had to get all our sets off the lot and get them set up at Desilu,” where the show’s remaining episodes would be filmed.
ABC added Storm’s still-popular sitcom to its Thursday night schedule, where sponsor Warner Lambert would use it to sell Listerine, and began “stripping” it in daytime reruns that would continue until 1961. That summer, awaiting the move to ABC, Storm sensed that her sitcom, despite its healthy ratings, had gotten off track. Wanting to pinpoint the problem, she asked cast and crew to take another look at the pilot episode that had originally sold the show to CBS three years earlier. “I knew we all needed a new grip on things,” she said, “and boy, we got it.”17
She sensed that the show’s comedy and characterizations had grown too broad. “I remembered then the way I originally wanted Susanna to be. She was not a Margie. Susanna had to have intelligence and good taste or she couldn’t hold down her job with an important steamship line.”18 Not exempting herself from criticism, Storm decided that her performances had grown too broad, and resolved to reel herself in. The show’s producers also raised the budget allotted to scripts.
Despite the overhaul, during which supporting character Cedric fell by the wayside, critics were no more enchanted than they had ever been with the show, though its star sometimes received some grudging praise. Reviewing the fourth-season opener, Variety dismissed Oh! Susanna as “a haven for those who’d rather not look down the barrel of a rifle or maneuver their gray matter coping with pesky intellectual ideas. To ‘escape,’ viewers need only seek out Gale Storm.”19
Ratings in the show’s new berth on ABC were only so-so, despite being paired with the increasingly popular Donna Reed Show, and the show was canceled in the spring of 1960, after 126 episodes. Although the series vacated the prime time schedule that summer, viewers could still see Storm in reruns on ABC’s afternoon schedule.
One of the biggest female sitcom stars of the 1950s, Storm would make a surprisingly quick exit from TV in the wake of her second sitcom’s cancellation. In fact, she would be little seen on TV in the next decade, aside from frequent reruns of My Little Margie and Oh! Susanna. Although Storm herself preferred the latter show, it was the ubiquitous Margie for which she would always be best known. “I don’t know why I’m not as well remembered for ‘Susanna’ as for ‘Margie,’” she said years later, “but I’m not.”20
She made two appearances on ABC’s Burke’s Law (1963–65), an early Aaron Spelling detective show that was among the first to introduce his guest-star policy that would later emerge on The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. In 1962, when Lucille Ball was having difficulty luring her sidekick Vivian Vance back to TV for The Lucy Show, Storm’s name was said to be on the short list of candidates who could possibly take Vance’s place, but nothing came of this. (Asked about this, she says she was never approached with an offer, though she has heard that such an idea was considered. “I don’t know how I would have felt about it,” she says about the prospect of playing such a role, though she knew Ball slightly, and liked her).
Gale Storm dreaming up another fishy explanation for Captain Huxley (Roy Roberts) on The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna.
With few exceptions, Storm spent most of the 1960s and early 1970s pursuing her career onstage. Regional theater had become extremely popular, and Storm welcomed the opportunity to share her gifts in productions of well-known shows like The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Plaza Suite. Having spent much of the 1950s playing to an audience composed of cameramen and other crew members, Storm enjoyed the live performances.
“It was hard work,” she said of her theater days, “but there is a connection between a live actor and a live audience that is electric—more thrilling for the actor, I think, than any other kind of performance.”21
By the 1970s, however, Storm’s career, as well as her happy family life, was being threatened by her growing addiction to alcohol. Looking back, she would be unable to pinpoint exactly why she began to drink, as she was not unhappy with her life. But she had discovered, at midlife, after previously being a light drinker at best, that she liked the taste of vodka. Soon she was hooked.
Her initial efforts at treatment failed. “I went through three hospitals,” she recalls. “They didn’t know what to do with an alcoholic then.” Detoxed while hospitalized, she found that the impact was short-lived. “I’d go home and I’d just make a beeline for the bottle.” Nor was psychotherapy the answer.
She was ashamed of her inability to stop drinking. “At that time, alcoholism was really a stigma for women,” she points out. Alcoholics were often regarded as being weak-willed, rather than sick.
In January 1979, Storm checked into Raleigh Hills Hospital in Oxnard, California.
Compounding her embarrassment over entering yet another treatment program was the celebrity factor, as she was readily recognized by other patients and hospital staff. “If I could have crawled under the rug, I would have,” she says today of her initial visit to the facility. “I was just so humiliated.”
Unbeknownst to Storm, however, the recovery program she was entering would be a turning point in her life. The program at Raleigh Hills Hospital used an intense form of aversion therapy that would permanently cure her taste for liquor. “After the fifth day, you felt like you could smell someone pouring a drink five miles away, and it’s revolting!” she says. “I knew when I finished those treatments that it was done.”
Just as important as the method of treatment was the outlook on alcoholism that she was given at Raleigh Hills. There she was told for the first time that alcoholism should be regarded as a disease, a belief not universally held in the 1970s. “That was like being given the greatest gift in the world,” she says, emphasizing that for the first time she was able to begin letting go of her shame about her illness.
Storm says that, in the quarter-century since, she has never fallen off the wagon. “I never had ‘white-knuckle’ sobriety. I never ever needed it [liquor] or wanted it again.” On the road to recovery in mid–1979, Storm made her most noteworthy public appearance in several years when she turned up as a guest star in an episode of The Love Boat aired in early November. It was a fitting tribute from a show that had often been compared to Storm’s 1950s sitcom.
In early 1980 came the first of several TV commercials for the Raleigh Hills hospital chain that Storm would film. She was not asked by the hospital to do endorsements; “I begged to do those commercials.” At a time when few celebrities talked openly about their addictions, Storm courageously “outed” herself in the hopes that others in her predicament would be encouraged to seek help. For those who remembered her fondly as girlish Margie Albright, it was a bit of a shock to see where life had taken Gale Storm. The publicity helped the hospital chain expand, reaching thousands of new patients, and Storm is proud of the times she was told that her candor led to someone seeking treatment. She later accepted a position as a consultant to the hospital chain, cutting ribbons at new facilities being opened, and regrets that management problems within the company, which she attributes to one highly placed executive, have since led to its demise.
Back in the spotlight, Storm not only made a second appearance on The Love Boat, but published her memoirs, I Ain’t Down Yet, co-authored with Bill Libby, in 1981. She would continue to accept occasional TV acting jobs, such as a 1989 appearance on Murder, She Wrote, over the next several years.
In 1994, Dark Moon: The Best of Gale Storm made several of her key Dot recordings from the 1950s available on CD, including “Teen Age Prayer” and “I Hear You Knocking.” More recently, she has recorded an inspirational CD called “Poems from the Heart,” featuring selections from Rudyard Kipling and Emily Dickinson as well as excerpts from the Bible.
On a personal note, her longtime marriage to Lee Bonnell, who had a successful career in insurance after giving up acting, came to an end with his death from a heart attack in May 1986. Two years later, the widowed actress married for a second time, to former television executive Paul Masterson. Her second marriage was also a happy one—“I showed him the best eight years of his life,” she says with a smile—though briefer, as she was again widowed in 1996.
Now in her eighties, the talented actress and singer remains active, appearing in recent years at numerous film festivals and nostalgic events. She is appreciative of the support and encouragement she has receive from fans of her television work, several of whom she says have become “just like my extended family.” Her official fan club, the Gale Storm Appreciation Society, publishes a newsletter, Gale Lore, and recently hosted 50th anniversary commemorations of My Little Margie and The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna. She has a website, www.galestorm.tv, and is flattered by the e-mails she regularly receives complimenting her work.
She also takes pride in the influence she has had on female sitcom stars of a later generation. Storm remembers meeting Cindy Williams of Laverne & Shirley (ABC, 1976–83) at a collectors’ show, when the younger actress made a point of seeking her out. “She was so cute,” Storm recalls of Williams. “She hugged me, she picked me up, and said, ‘I want you to know that I learned everything I know from you and your show.’”
Modest about her professional accomplishments, and recognizing her good fortune in coming from a modest background to enjoy the career she did, Storm is hesitant to take personal credit. “Whatever I’ve done in my career, it’s something that God gave me,” she says today. “God gifted me—and I don’t mean that I’m so gifted. God just plucked me up by the scruff of my neck and put me where I was supposed to be.”