This month we are learning about sitcoms with one name, and today is Angie. Angie had a short run from February 1979 until September of 1980, producing 36 episodes. It was one of the few Garry Marshall shows not to be a long-running hit. He created it with Dale McRaven. We all know Marshall’s amazing career with Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, The Odd Couple, not to mention all of his great movies. McRaven also had a prolific career as a producer and writer. He’s listed as producer for The Partridge Family, The Betty White Show, Mork and Mindy, and Perfect Strangers. His writing credits includes all of these shows, as well as The Dick Van Dyke Show, That Girl, Get Smart, The Odd Couple, and Room 222 among others.
📷ihearthollywood.com
The cast was quite talented: Donna Pescow played Angie, Robert Hays was her boyfriend-later-husband, the amazing Doris Roberts was her mother Theresa before Raymond came along, and Debralee Scott played her sister Marie.
Bradley Benson is a young pediatrician who comes from a wealthy family comprised of his stuffy father Randall (John Randolph), his overbearing sister Joyce (Sharon Spelman), and her daughter Hillary (Tammy Lauren). The show is set in Philadelphia.
Angie is a coffee-shop waitress who falls in love with Brad. Many scenes are set in the diner with Angie’s friend and co-waitress Didi (Diane Robin). When their families argue about wedding plans, Brad and Angie elope. Later Angie’s mother plans a small family wedding for the two families to get to know each other, and Brad buys the coffee shop for Angie.
At the beginning of the second season, Angie sells the coffee shop to buy a salon with her mother.
📷imdb.com
The theme song was “Different Worlds,” written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox. Gimbel is still hard at work and has amassed 494 credits so far while Fox has 131 credits for many impressive television series and big-screen films. Maureen McGovern sang it; she’s best known for her top-forty hit “The Morning After.”
The show was sandwiched between Happy Days and Three’s Company on Tuesday nights, which ensured great ratings. This one was fifth its first week. The show just could not find its fan base. By the end of the season, the Nielsen ratings had fallen drastically, and the show had moved to Monday nights following Monday Night Football. Angie wasn’t the only show to struggle in this time slot. Once it was moved, three other shows—One in a Million, Goodtime Girls, and Laverne and Shirley—all tried this scheduling spot. I’m not sure if the shows were just not very good in 1979, if people were too busy to watch television, or the network heads were inexperienced, but when you look at the schedule from 1979 most prime times had a different show in the slot every season of the year. When it’s not only one show on a network moving, but many shows on a network moving and then all networks having a bunch of shows moving, how are viewers supposed to figure out where anything was? Out of the 54 new shows debuting in 1979, by the next season every network basically had one hit show out of the bunch: ABC-Hart to Hart, CBS-Trapper John MD, and NBC-The Facts of Life. While these are all decent shows, none of them were classics in my opinion. In 1980 another 30 shows were brand new.
📷rewatchclassictv.com
The show was put on hiatus. It did return in April on Saturday nights, but it was officially canceled in May.
When you look at this show on paper, it had all the right elements. First of all, we have Garry Marshall and Dale McRaven, very successful creators and writers. The cast was amazing. Even the theme song was composed and sung by extremely talented people. Then you have the fact that there were not a lot of great shows debuting this year; a decent show should have crushed it. So, what happened here?
I think I’m putting the blame for this one on the network. I watched the pilot and while pilots are meant to pull you back for the next one, most pilots aren’t the best of the series. Some of the pilots for shows I love are almost dreadful. This pilot was not dreadful. The characters were likable, the writing was funny, and the theme was not overdone over the years. It was similar to The Mothers-In-Law from a decade earlier but more of a Dharma and Greg (which came two decades later) where they fall in love despite their economic differences.
📷youtube.com
This series was better than a lot of shows that are currently on the air. I did watch another later episode where the couple elopes. Once again, the writing was good and the characters were a bit eccentric, but the writers knew how far to go to keep them likable and charming rather than odd. If ABC had kept it in a time slot for more than a month or two and given it a bit of time, it might have been a big hit.
If you want to check it out, let me know what you think. For a late seventies/early eighties show, it’s aged very well.
This month we are exploring The Bill Dana Show for our blog series. Last week we talked a bit about the show itself, and for the rest of the weeks, we are looking at some of the other cast members’ careers. Today we begin with Bill Dana himself.
📷findagrave.com
Dana was born William Szathmary in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1924. He was the youngest of six children. His older brother Arthur was fluent in several languages and inspired Bill to learn different accents.
Dana served with the US Army during WWII as a machine gunner and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
After the war, Bill enrolled at Emerson College. After graduation, he was hired as a page at NBC’s Studio 6B, or 30 Rock. He was also trying to break into comedy performing around New York. During the fifties he appeared on The Imogene Coca Show. He also did some writing and producing for The Spike Jones Show.
He met Don Adams and began writing routines for him in the fifties. He and Don would be part of each other’s lives for a bit. Don would be one of the cast members on The Bill Dana Show. Dana would appear on Adams’ show Get Smart, and Dana’s older brother Irving was the composer of the Get Smart theme song. Bill would also cowrite the script for the Get Smart film The Nude Bomb.
📷thenewyorktimes.com
In the late fifties, Steve Allen hired Dana as a writer. Bill created a character, Jose Jimenez, for the “Man in the Street” segments of Allen’s show. Soon Jose became his alter ego. He made appearances as Jose on The Red Skelton Show, The Spike Jones Show, The Danny Thomas Show, and The Ed Sullivan Show. He even had a comedy album featuring the character.
Dana told a story on Ed Sullivan’s show that some people truly thought he was Jose Jimenez. One lady who met him out and about asked if his birth name was Jose Jimenez and he told her, “No, it’s Bill Szathmary.” She said “Wow, no wonder you changed it to Jimenez.”
In 1961, Dana began a recurring role on The Danny Thomas Show. He played Jimenez as an elevator operator. People responded so well that Danny Thomas and Leonard Sheldon spun off the character, now a bellhop at a luxury New York hotel, and The Bill Dana Show was created. In addition to Adams, Jonathan Harrison was part of the cast and Maggie Peterson joined them in season two. The show was on the air for one and a half seasons.
As we discussed last week, some people saw Jimenez as a hard-working immigrant who noticed some of the crazy things Americans did, and others saw him as a stereotyped Latino caricature. The pre-show Jimenez fit the second description better and the show Jimenez leaned more toward the first portrayal. However, as the character developed, viewers were not flocking to the show. It was also up against Lassie which at the time was a huge family show on Sunday nights.
📷wikipedia.com
The last time Jimenez was on the screen as a character was a 1966 episode of Batman in a cameo on the famous wall. Later Dana apologized for his caricature of Jimenez and became a bit of an activist for Latino causes. The National Hispanic Media Coalition endorsed the Jose Jimenez character and invited Dana to sit on their advisory board.
Dana jumped back and forth from actor to writer for a couple of decades. He wrote the script for All in the Family’s episode “Sammy’s Visit” starring Sammy Davis Jr. He also wrote for Bridget Loves Bernie, Chico and the Man, Donny and Marie, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and Matlock.
His acting landed him in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Love American Style, The SnoopSisters, Police Woman, McMillan and Wife, Ellery Queen, Switch, Vega$, Fantasy Island, The Facts of Life, and Empty Nest among a few others.
He had recurring roles on two additional shows during his career. He was on St. Elsewhere as Howie Mandel’s character’s father for three episodes. He also was Angelo on six episodes of The Golden Girls.
One of his last projects was founding the American Comedy Archives at Emerson College. He and Jenni Matz interviewed more than 60 comedians for this archive, including Phyllis Diller, Norman Lear, Carl Reiner, Betty White, and Jonathan Winters.
Dana was a man of many talents. He also ran a talent management company and an advertising agency. He wrote a book, The Laughter Prescription, with Dr. Laurence J. Peter.
Dana passed away in June of 2017 at his home in Nashville.
Certainly, Dana had a full career. I think starting off with the Jose debacle probably kept him from getting different roles early in his career. He also didn’t seem to know what he wanted to be when he grew up. Was he a comedy writer? A dramatic writer? A variety show writer? Was he an actor? A talent agent? An author? Not that you can’t be more than one thing in life, but in the span of three decades he never seemed to settle on one or two careers. Hopefully he had fun and enjoyed all the different hats he wore.
This month our blog is all about Sibling Rivalry. It’s a bit unusual because it features two sitcoms and two dramas. I thought it might be fun to start and end with the sitcoms, and today we are learning all about My Sister Sam.
From 1986 to 1988, My Sister Sam aired on CBS. Samantha Russell (Pam Dawber) is a freelance photographer who lives in San Franciso. Her life is turned upside down when her 16-year-old sister Patti (Rebecca Schaeffer) shows up on her doorstep to live with her. They are 13 years apart in age, and Patti had been living with their aunt and uncle in Oregon since the death of their parents. In real life, Schaeffer grew up in Oregon.
The cast is rounded out by coworkers Jordan Lucas, Sam’s agent (Joel Brooks); her assistant Dixie (Jenny O’Hara); and neighbor/photojournalist Jack (David Naughton), who is a ladies’ man.
The sisters have great chemistry, but they have very different personalities. Sam is a bit uptight and alphabetizes her juices in the refrigerator. Patti is a Valley girl, very laid back and a wanna-be rock star who plays the guitar.
In a Chicago Tribune interview in 1987, Dawber gave her philosophy of the show: “I see Sam as a woman who’s successful, who has a beautiful apartment but who doesn’t have the answers. Plus, she has to cope with a teenager who’d put her sister on a pedestal—she moved in because she thought Sam’s life was perfect—but finds out that she’s pretty neurotic. I mean, here is a woman, for openers, who’s compulsively neat, who needs to have control in her life.”
📷imdb.com
Their personal relationship mirrored their television one. Dawber said she considered Schaeffer a sister. She mentored her and even invited her to move into her home in LA where Dawber lived with Mark Harmon, her then-boyfriend, now husband. Dawber said that “We just kind of fell into this sisterly thing, . . . Cause I’d had a sister. My sister passed away when she was 22 and I was 25. And so having another young girl in the house was something I was very comfortable with. It was good for us.”
Pam Dawber’s production company, Pony Productions, developed the show created by Stephen Fischer. The screenplay was written by Fischer and Diane English. Dawber wanted to base her character a bit on Mindy from Mork and Mindy. She said that she was “not a comedian. I’m a reactor to all the zany people who revolve around me.” English and Mimi Weber took on the producer role, with the show filmed at The Burbank Studio. English would go on to write for Murphy Brown.
The theme song, which I admit I don’t remember, was called “Room Enough for Two,” and it was written by Steve Dorff and John Bettis. Kim Carnes, who had a hit with “Betty Davis Eyes,” sang the song. Dorff later was the composer for Murphy Brown and Murder She Wrote. Bettis worked on The Godfather, Part III and Star Trek V.
The show had a great time slot between Kate and Allie and Newhart on Monday nights. It ranked 21 overall. Of course, the networks rarely leave well enough alone, so they moved the show to Saturday nights opposite The Facts of Life. The end of the second season found the show down 50 points at 71overall. The network was toying with canceling the show, but after receiving a lot of fan letters, they brought it back in March of 1988. It moved to Tuesday nights and the ratings increased. However, the ratings did not stay that high, probably because the competition was Who’s the Boss and Matlock. In April, CBS canceled it outright, leaving 12 unaired episodes.
Sadly, a year after the show was canceled, Schaeffer was murdered in her home by an obsessed fan. After living with Pam, Schaeffer got her own place. She was living in West Hollywood when she was killed. Dawber said she told Schaeffer not to put her real name on her mailbox. Dawber had a scare with a stalker earlier in her career, and she learned not to put her real address on her driver’s license or anything that a fan could track you down with. Schaeffer didn’t listen and her name was on her mailbox.
The man who killed her, Robert Bardo, said he saw her in a promo in 1986 and began watching the show. He sent her fan letters. At one point, he flew from Arizona to LA to the studio to look for her. He took gifts to the studio several times, but studio security always stopped him. Bardo returned to Arizona. After the show was canceled, Schaeffer took on several movie roles which were very different from her role as Patti. One love scene enraged Bardo. Bardo was stopped from buying a gun due to mental health issues. He convinced his brother to buy him one for target practice. Then he boarded a bus to LA. He hired a private detective to find Schaeffer’s address; the detective located it through the Department of Motor Vehicles.
One morning Schaeffer was waiting for delivery of a script of The Godfather III for an audition with Francis Ford Coppola. Bardo rang her bell, and she answered thinking it was the delivery person. He introduced himself and told her she had sent him a card and photo after receiving fan mail. She explained she was busy that day, so he went to a local diner. He returned to her house, and she said he was wasting his time expecting any relationship with her. Then he shot her point blank. He got away and returned to Tucson but was apprehended a day later after running in and out of traffic, shouting that he was the one who killed Rebecca Schaeffer.
📷plex.com
Dawber was filled with grief and anger. She reunited with the cast of My Sister Sam for a Public Service Announcement for gun control, and she testified before Congress for stricter gun laws. After Schaeffer’s death, California passed an anti-stalking law in 1990. Now all fifty states have one on the books. Bardo was sent to California where he was found guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
My Sister Sam was a ground-breaking show having women in so many of the critical roles. During the Chicago Tribune interview, Dawber said that “the significant thing is that My Sister Sam is a show about women that is run by women. . . . Not only are three of our five regular cast members women, but we have a female executive producer, two writer-producers, and a director. It really wasn’t intentional. It just happened that way.”
It would have been interesting to see how the show fared if it had kept its original time slot and the plots that would have been written as Patti became an adult. Did she begin to resemble her sister more or did she keep her carefree personality? And would her sister adopt some of her less serious traits? Almost every review I read about the show said it was genuinely funny, adorable, relatable, etc. With all the moving around the schedule and “is it on the air or not” decisions, only 44 episodes were created, so there aren’t enough for syndication or DVDs.
And of course, it’s devastating what happened to Rebecca Schaeffer. She was a rising star, and you have to wonder what type of career she would have had if she had lived more than 22 years. Dawber had to experience the death of another sister much too young to die. I’m glad a lot of laws came out of the experience, but it was such a brutal murder. Now, 35 years later, our country is still dealing with devastating murders because not enough laws have been created.
We are discussing some of our favorite actors who were typically supporting actors. In the case of today’s subject, he did star in a television show, but he was so great in other assisting roles, we are including him here as well. Today we get to know Dick Van Patten.
📷nypldigitalcollections.com Off Broadway
Van Patten was born in 1928 in Queens, New York. His father was an interior decorator, and his mother worked in advertising. Joyce Van Patten is his sister. Van Patten began working as a model and actor while he was still a child. He was only four when he joined John Robert Powers, a modeling agency, where made $5 an hour.
His first Broadway appearance was in “Tapestry in Gray” when he was seven, and he appeared in many plays by the time he graduated from the Professional Children’s School in New York City.
At that time, he moved to Hollywood. In 1949 he accepted the role of Nels Hansen on the early sitcom, Mama, about a Norwegian family living in San Francisco. The show was on the air until 1957, for a total of 327 episodes.
In 1954 Van Patten married Patricia Poole. She was a professional dancer, part of the June Taylor Dancers on The Jackie Gleason Show. Their son Vincent was on Apple’s Way in the mid-seventies, with 65 credits to his name. He is married to Eileen Davidson, who is Ashley Abbot in The Young and the Restless.
📷wikipedia.com On the set with friend Dick Van Dyke
Van Patten’s sister Joyce also began her career as a child. With 160 acting credits, she also has been very busy for decades, starring in The Good Guys. She was married to Martin Balsam from 1957-1962, another prolific actor. Van Patten’s niece Talia, who has also amassed more than 100 acting credits, was married to George Clooney and then John Slattery, star of several shows including Mad Men. So, this is a well-known family in entertainment.
In the fifties and sixties, most of Van Patten’s roles on television were in dramas and a few westerns. In the seventies, he took on his first comedy roles, appearing on I Dream of Jeannie, The Governor and JJ, Arnie, That Girl, Sanford and Son, The Doris Day Show, The Paul Lynde Show, Love American Style, The New Dick Van Dyke Show, Maude, Phyllis, Happy Days, and One Day at a Time, among others. He also accepted a few drama roles on shows such as Cannon, Adam-12, The Streets of San Francisco, Medical Center, and Barnaby Jones. After appearing on The New Dick Van Dyke Show in 1971, Van Patten and Van Dyke became life-long friends.
He appeared in 36 movies, his first being Violent Midnight in 1963. Spaceballs, RobinHood: Men in Tights, and High Anxiety, all with Mel Brooks, were probably his best-known films. In 2014, Van Patten said working with Brooks was “great. It’s like a game. It’s not like work. He keeps you laughing the full day on the set. He’s just a funny man.” Van Patten also accepted 28 made-for-tv movie roles.
In 1977, he took on the role that would make him a household name: that of Tom Bradford on Eight is Enough. He played a newspaper publisher with eight kids. His wife dies early in the series, and Tom remarries.
Van Patten auditioned for the role of Tom Bradford but was not given the part. When the producers watched the first day of shooting, they scrapped the entire production. Fred Silverman then hired Van Patten.
📷showbizcheatsheet.com Cast of Eight is Enough
It’s interesting to wonder what his career would have been like if he had declined Eight is Enough and accepted the role he was offered of Dr. Adam Brinker on The Love Boat. Since he had already agreed to appear on Eight is Enough, the role went to Bernie Kopell.
In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times in 1989, Van Patten discussed his character on Eight is Enough: “Tom Bradford is a lot like the real me. He’s a man who always put his career second to his family. As long as everything was OK at home, he was OK too.”
Sadly, the cast did not learn of the cancellation of Eight is Enough from the network. Van Patten said “nobody called me to tell me it was canceled. I read it in the paper.”
Van Patten never received a starring role again, but he did keep very busy in the eighties and nineties appearing in many popular shows, including Love Boat, Murder SheWrote, The Facts of Life, Growing Pains, and Diagnosis: Murder.
He was in a handful of shows in the 2000s with Hot in Cleveland in 2011 being his last appearance on television.
He published a book in 2009 titled Eighty is Not Enough!, his memoir. He had also written Launching Your Child in Show Biz: A Compete Step-By-Step Guide and Totally Terrific TV Trivia. In 2001, he was honorary mayor of Sherman Oaks, California.
Van Patten was an animal advocate, and he created Natural Balance Pet Foods and the National Guide Dog Month to raise awareness and money for nonprofit guide dog schools.
Van Patten also participated in a variety of hobbies. Like Tom Bradford, he loved spending time with this family. He also owned thoroughbreds and attended horse racing events. He enjoyed playing poker, golf, swimming and reading. Most Sundays he headed to the tennis courts to meet Alan Alda, Mel Brooks, and Gene Wilder.
📷latimes.com
In 2006, Van Patten suffered a diabetic stroke. He made a full recovery and lived another nine years, passing away in 2015 from diabetes complications. He was still married to Patricia.
His son Tommy on Eight is Enough, Willie Aames, said Van Patten “was truly a gem who will be missed.” His second wife, Abby, on the show played by Betty Buckley, recalled that “every day on the set he was a happy, jovial person, always generous and ready to play, tease, and always keep us laughing. He was the consummate professional, a wonderful actor, master of comedy, and a kind and generous human being.”
📷imdb.com
Van Patten had an extremely successful career. For more than seven decades he was part of the entertainment community. In addition to his stage productions, films, and television work, he appeared in more than 600 radio show episodes and was in Weird Al Yankovic’s music video “Smells Like Nirvana.” He said that he had “fun doing this and going through my life. I’ve had a great life. It was exciting. I worked with the most interesting people, and I traveled all over the country.”
His reflection on his work is great advice for all of us. Van Patten said that he wanted to express the “single idea that has governed my entire life, that every moment of life is precious, that every step we take is an adventure, that every day on earth is a gift from God.” Thanks, Dick Van Patten, for leaving us with this inspiration and for taking your gifts and presenting them to us in the form of many wonderful memories.
We are in the midst of our blog series “I Robot.” If you read last week’s blog, you will remember we were discussing My Living Doll, a science fiction comedy from the mid-sixties created by Howard Leeds.
Cast Photo: twitter.com
Today we are moving ahead two decades to look at another Howard Leeds’ show from the mid-eighties called Small Wonder, another science fiction sitcom.
The concept of the show is that Ted Lawson (Dick Christie) and his family–wife Joan (Marla Pennington) and son Jamie (Jerry Supiran)–live in a typical residential area. Lawson has created V.I.C.I., an android that contains Voice Input Child Indenticant whom he calls Vicki (Tiffany Brissette). Lawson created the robot to help handicapped children, and she looks like a ten-year-old girl. Lawson has to take her home to learn about family environments and be “trained” for home service. Similar to Rhoda on My Living Doll, Vicki has an outlet under her right arm, a data port under her left arm, and an access panel in her back. She possesses superhuman strength and speed. Seth Green auditioned for the role of Jamie and, Candace Cameron Bure was up for the role of Vicki, along with 398 other girls.
The Lawsons have to keep her identity a secret and pass her off for a daughter they adopted. Their neighbor, ten-year-old Harriet (Emily Schulman), a la Gladys Kravitz, was very nosy and made the secret hard to maintain. Jamie works hard to scheme and find ways to get Vicki to make his life easier.
Rounding out the cast were Brandon and Bonnie Brindle (William Bogert and Edie McClurg) who were Harriet’s parents; Brandon was also Ted’s boss; Reggie (Paul C. Scott), Jessica (Lihann Jones), and Warren (Daryl Bartley), Jamie’s friends.
The show was on for four seasons and, of course, Brissette continued to grow and age, so in season three Ted gives Vicki an upgrade which allows her to wear current fashions, eat, and drink, making it easier to conceal her identity.
Photo: smallwonderreviewed.blogspot.com
Unfortunately for Leeds, this show has also been dubbed one of the worst sitcoms of all time, despite the fact that it was on for four years. Robert Bianco, TV critic for USA Today, wrote in 2002 that it was a contender for one of the worst TV shows of all time, and the BBC described it as the worst low-budget sitcom of all time (as an aside, the first season provided $300,000 per episode). Lest you think Leeds could not come up with a successful show; know that he also produced The Brady Bunch, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Silver Spoons, and The Facts of Life. He also wrote scripts for forty-two different shows.
Although it was not popular with critics, viewers seemed to enjoy it. The show was later sold to more than twenty countries, including Brazil, France, India, and Italy.
In 2015, Dave Nemetz spoke with Marla Pennington Rowan and Emily Schulman Webster about their time on the show. They both felt sorry for Brissette. She had a lot of skills such as singing, dancing, gymnastics, and piano playing, but all she could do on the show was to be a robot. She had to talk in a monotone while showing no emotions. Webster said it was so challenging for her but she was a pro. She mentioned that “she had to bite the inside of her cheeks to keep from smiling. That was tough. My heart sort of broke for her.”
Photo: pinterest.com
Both stars mentioned how hard the special effect filming was for Tiffany. It might be her head spinning around and around or lifting the couch with one arm to clean under it. Those scenes were filmed on Thursdays with the use of green screen technology. Webster said it was not easy and that “Tiffany had to endure it, it would take a lot of trial and error.” In addition to these talents, Vicki could shrink down to the size of a doll, extend to ten feet tall, channel electricity through her hands, and she possessed unlimited learning ability to improve products.
Rowan and Webster said the cast got along great, just like one big family. However, the parents of the minor stars surely did not. Three tutors were employed on the set because the parents could not agree on choosing the same one. Rowan mentioned that apparently, the parents thought they were the stars of the show.
The show was very popular with kids especially. However, power struggles were not confined to overbearing parents; the corporate level had plenty of controversy as well. I’m not sure why, but the show was owned by five different companies, and they did not agree on much either. Once they knew there were enough shows to put it into syndication the show was done. No one knew if they were going to be picked up for the next season or not; they weren’t, so there was never any finale produced.
One of the most memorable parts of the show might be the theme song. It’s lyrics are:
She’s a small wonder; pretty and bright with soft curls.
She’s a small wonder; a girl unlike other girls.
She’s a miracle and I grant you, she’ll enchant you at first sight.
She’s a small wonder, and she’ll make your heart take flight.
She’s fantastic, made of plastic; microchips here and there.
She’s a small wonder, brings love and laughter everywhere.
We understand her pain at watching the show. Photo:smallwonderrevisited.blogspot.com
So how did it work out for the trying parent/managers? None of the three children are actors any longer. Brissette is a nurse in Colorado, Supiran was broke and homeless in 2012 but is in a better place today, and Schulman Rowan writes cookbooks and is considering acting again. Her last role was in the show Christy in the mid-nineties.
If you watch Antenna TV you might be very familiar with the show. It’s no longer in the rotation, but I have watched it several times on the network in the past. It definitely is not anything I would clear my schedule for. I’m not sure I would classify it as the worst sitcom of all time; it seems in the past 40 years, we have come up with some pretty bad options. However, I certainly would not spend my time watching this one. I’m just going to chalk it up to fulfilling a need in the eighties on Saturdays that does not age well.
This week we are winding up our series of favorite female actors with Charlotte Rae. If you remember last week we learned about June Lockhart. Charlotte was born a year after June and died a year before her, and their careers were very similar. Both were actresses for more than six decades, appeared in Broadway, movies, and television.
Rae was born in Milwaukee, WI in 1926. Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. Her mother Esther had been friends with Golda Meir since childhood. For her first ten years, the family lived above her father’s tire business. In 1936 they moved to a home in Shorewood. At age 16, she became an apprentice with the Port Players, a professional theater company that came to Milwaukee for the summer. After graduation, Charlotte did some radio work and did some performing with the Wauwatosa Children’s Theatre.
Photo: legacy.com
Although she never completed her degree, Rae attended Northwestern University. She and Cloris Leachman became friends there. She also met Agnes Nixon, Charlton Heston, Paul Lynde, and Claude Akins. In later years she would always recommend wanna-be actors get a degree first.
Photo: thejewishnews.com
In 1948, she moved to New York City where she performed in theater and nightclubs. She worked at a variety of clubs including the Village Vanguard and the Blue Angel. During her early days, a radio star told her that her last name of “Lubotsky” would not work well, and she replaced it with her middle name of Rae.
In 1951 she received her first television job on Once Upon a Tune. She would appear on ten other drama theater shows during the fifties. In an interview with Milwaukee Talks in 2016 she said, “When I started out, I wanted to be a serious actor, I never thought I’d get into comedy.”
The same year, Rae married composer John Strauss. They had two sons, but in the mid seventies he came out as a bisexual. Rae was not interested in an open marriage, so the couple decided to divorce in 1976.
Charlotte also loved singing, and she released an album in 1955, Songs I Taught My Mother. Rae also loved being on the stage. In the seventies, Vanguard Records went out of business, and Rae was able to buy back the album for $5000.
She would have stage roles in “Three Wishes for Jamie” in 1952, “The Threepenny Opera” in 1954, “Li’l Abner” in 1956, and “Pickwick” in 1965 among others. Later in her career she would also appear in several off-Broadway shows.
Photo: amazon.com
In 1958, she got a break with a guest spot on The Phil Silvers Show which led to her getting the part of Sylvia Schnauzer, the wife of Leo Schnauzer (Al Lewis) on Car 54 Where Are You when it debuted in 1961. Her husband John did the music for the show. Apart from that role, most of the other television work she did in the sixties was in drama series.
Photo: pinterest.com
Rae also appeared in 14 big-screen movies. Can I take a shameless plug and say that one of my favorite Charlotte Rae roles is in Hello Down There? This movie from 1969 screams IT’S THE SIXTIES from the moment it starts until it ends, but it’s a great sit-back-and-just watch movie. If nothing else, it has an amazing cast including Tony Randall, Janet Leigh, Ken Berry, Jim Backus, Merv Griffin, and Richard Dreyfuss among others.
Photo: muppet wiki fandom.com
The seventies were her busiest decade of work. She started with a recurring role on Sesame Street as Molly the Mail Lady. During the early seventies you could see her on The Partridge Family, McMillan and Wife, Love American Style, and The Paul Lynde Show. I always appreciated her character on The Partridge Family. When Danny is thinking about quitting school to get on with life, she plays his very smart and creative guidance counselor.
In 1974 Rae moved to Los Angeles. She did guest spots on All in the Family and Good Times, both Norman Lear shows. In 1975, she became a regular on Lear’s show, Hot l Baltimore. She played Mrs. Bellotti, whose son lived at the hotel. The show was a bit controversial and was cancelled after the first season.
During the remainder of the seventies, Rae kept busy working for a variety of genres. You could have seen her on The Flying Nun, Barney Miller, The Rich Little Show, All’s Fair, CPO Sharkey, Family, The Eddie Capra Mysteries, and on her friend Cloris Leachman’s show Phyllis.
In 1978 Norman Lear was working on Diff’rent Strokes about a single father who adopts two brothers whom he raises along with his daughter with help from his housekeeper. Lear signed Rae on as the housekeeper. Charlotte wanted to do the series, but as she related in a Television Academy interview, she was under contract at CBS when NBC made the offer. She had a few weeks left on her CBS option. The network offered her the role of a lady sheriff on a new western but it didn’t ring true to her, and she didn’t want to do it. While she was filming an Eddie Capra Mystery episode, she drove over to explain her predicament to Lear. He said that Bud Grant owed him a favor and he did indeed get her out of the contract.
One episode on the first season was “The Girls’ School” when Edna Garrett is asked to help out at Kim’s private school called East Lake. She does but at the end of the episode decides she’d rather be working in the Drummond home.
Photo: imdb.com
In an interview with the Television Academy, Rae said she thought she was going to be fired from Diff’rent Strokes. She noticed her lines getting fewer and fewer and when she was called into talk with the producer, she thought that was it. However, they proposed a spinoff show for her based on “The Girls’ School” episode called The Facts of Life. They wanted Edna to become housemother for the boarding students at the school. It was a prestigious private school now called Eastland. The writers were focusing on issues affecting high school age girls including weight gain, dieting, depression, drug and alcohol use, dating, mental illness, and other subjects that kids that age deal with. Rae said the show was about growing up, family, love, and working out problems. “I had a lot of input with issues like suicide, divorce, death. I’m really very proud.”
Charlotte was a single mother and afraid to lose her Diff’rent Strokes income on a possibility that might not pan out. The producers wrote into her contract that if the show was cancelled, she could return to Diff’rent Strokes, so she agreed.
Photo: redbook.com
The first season gained some fans, but ratings were so-so. For the second season, some cast changes were made and the show was moved from Fridays to Wednesdays. The show finished in the top thirty that year, and Rae became a household name. In 1982, Rae received an Emmy nomination. (She lost to Carol Kane from Taxi.) During the 1984 and 1985 seasons, Rae asked to be used less. She felt that the girls were older and would rely more on each other than a housemother for discussions about life issues.
When discussing the character of Edna, Rae explained “I want to bring in as much humanity as possible, as well as humor. I’ve tried to make her a human being with dimensions. The way they write her now is with a great deal of sensitivity and understanding. But I don’t want her to be Polly Perfect, because she must have human failings and make mistakes. She’s also a surrogate mother to the girls. I told them I wanted to be firm with the girls because I know it’s important. Parents must lay down ground rules for their children to help them grow up and to learn responsibility for their actions. They must learn to stand on their own two feet.”
No doubt that this show took place in the 1980s Photo: pinterest.com
Rae wanted to do more theater and she wanted to travel. When she decided to leave the series, Cloris Leachman replaced her in the role. The two-part finale of the eighth season had Edna Garrett marrying and moving to Africa with her husband to work for the Peace Corps. Her sister Beverly (Rae’s real sister’s name) comes for the wedding and then decides to stay with the girls at school. Cloris Leachman was signed on for two seasons. At the end of her time, she was willing to continue for another season, but cast members Nancy McKeon and Mindy Cohn were ready to end the show and take on new projects. It was not the end of the show, however. In 2001 a television reunion movie aired with much of the original cast. In 2007 the entire cast was invited to the TV Land Awards where they sang their old theme song.
Murder She Wrote Photo: backofthecerealbox.com
Charlotte took on several other roles after leaving the show. During the eighties and nineties, she appeared on The Love Boat, St. Elsewhere, Murder She Wrote, Sisters, and Alex Mack among others.
She was busy until she passed away, and continued to act throughout the 2000s, including an appearance on King of Queens, and a recurring role on ER. Her last acting credit on television was in 2014’s Girl Meets World.
In 2015, Rae wrote her memoirs with her son Larry. At many of her book signings, adults came to purchase the book and told her over and over that they had been latch-key kids and saw Edna as a second mother to them. A description from Amazon sums up the book: “Charlotte Rae’s career spans more than seventy years, from the golden age of television to Shakespeare in the Park, the New York Cabaret scene of the late 1940s and 50s to her hit series, The Facts of Life and well beyond. Off stage and screen, Charlotte’s life has been one of joy and challenge, raising an autistic son, coming to terms with alcoholism, the heartache of a broken marriage, the revelation of a gay husband and the sudden challenge of facing middle-age with financial and emotional uncertainties–a crisis she ultimately turned into the determination that brought her stardom. The Facts of My Life is the first opportunity for Charlotte’s fans to explore the fascinating story of her extraordinary life: poignant and hilarious, a story of courage and triumph, one that speaks for a generation of women breaking barriers, taking on challenges, overcoming personal tragedy, and paving the way for others.”
Rae suffered from several health issues. In the early seventies, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous which was a critical part of the rest of her life. In 1982, she had a pacemaker implanted. It worked well for thirty years, but then stopped, requiring surgery for another smaller device. She also had open heart surgery to replace her mitral valve. Pancreatic cancer ran in her family, so she was screened often and when she was diagnosed with cancer, it was early so she had six months of chemotherapy and was then declared cancer free. In 2017, she was diagnosed with bone cancer. She died at her home in 2018. Todd Bridges from Diff’rent Strokes, tweeted, “You were loved by everyone on our show.”
Photo: doyouremember.com
Charlotte said she never minded fans coming up to her because she realized that in being a television actor you were in people’s homes. “It was an intimate relationship.”
She said she wanted to be remembered as someone who took people out of themselves into a different world and allowed them to laugh or cry, and that would make her happy because we need as many laughs as we can get.
Thank you, Charlotte for making us cry a little and laugh a lot.
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