Posted on 10/22/2006 4:26:57 PM PDT by lunarbicep
Jane Wyatt, the lovely, serene actress who for six years on "Father Knows Best" was one of TV's favorite moms, has died, said her publicist. She was 96.
Wyatt died Friday in her sleep of natural causes at her home in Bel-Air, according to publicist Meg McDonald. Her death also was confirmed by Bernard Johnson of the funeral home Gates, Kingsley & Gates Moeller Murphy Funeral Directors.
I remember driving to work the morning they announced on the radio that Lucille Ball had died. It instantly brought on tears and I was so shocked, and still a little weepy upon arriving at work.
Especially since they had said she was improving.
I still watch episodes of the original Andy Griffith Show 6 nights a week, in the middle of the night on my plain old MSM TV (no cable).
I'm on about my 2nd and 3rd go-round of a lot of the episodes, but not all. They just started over from the beginning again a few weeks ago and Elinor Donahue had come to town as Ellie Walker, the pharmacist and Andy's supposed girl friend.
I wondered last time that series of shows played why she disappeared all of a sudden. Then I happened to read the other day on an Andy-watching forum or somewhere an interview with them both, where they asked the question outright.
Andy said he wasn't comfortable with showing affection publicly or on TV, so he wasn't as warm as he could've been with "Ellie." She said they didn't have the chemistry they needed to take the relationship another step, so she felt she needed to leave the show and did.
I wasn't too crazy about her on the show, but it might be because I knew Helen Crump would come later and she was so perfect for Andy.
p.s. Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie was my boyhood television crush. (My boyhood musical crush was Astrud Gilberto.)
I see your point!
I'll go sit in a corner now.
:-) Thank you for setting me straight.
But, I love classic television. Right now I'm hopelessly hooked on the Match Game since I was never allowed to watch anything that racy as a child. Dawson so incredibly intelligent/brilliant it's unbelievable. (Which reminds me...Hogan's Heroes is fun.)
They have many physical similarities. You have impeccable taste.
Oh yeah, I remember that. Also, Roseanne had all the TV moms on her show one night as a surprise in her dream, I think it was.
(Heck, I've only seen it maybe 4 times in the past 2 years and now I can't think what the premise was - but I know Roseanne was being all "Leave it to Beaverish" and June Lockhart, Barbara Billingsley and some other sitcom moms were on it - Ouisie Jefferson, a couple of others who looked familiar but I didn't know. Maybe Florence Henderson, too - but Donna Reed had already died and I guess Jane Wyatt wasn't there, either.)
Oh, last night on Andy Griffith, there was a blonde in a convertible who went speeding into Mayberry and had to be arrested because she wouldn't pay the large fine for being in continual contempt of court in Andy's JP court.
Anyway, I kept thinking she looked familiar, but couldn't place her. I actually thought she was Della Street from Perry Mason, but "not quite." This was 1961, after all - kinda hard to tell and hard to remember.
So, I looked her up and it was Jean Hagen. She was Danny Thomas's first wife on "Make Room for Daddy" - which, of course, had spun off Andy to begin with. Yet another "sitcom mom."
Love him, love him, love him - will always love him. Used to hang out on the "street where his family lived" in Norman, OK, hoping to see him again. My friend's family lived next door to those Bumgarners, so we got introduced once or twice. *swoon*
I'm a big Cheers fan---did you know one of the co-masterminds of Cheers was the son of one of Duffy's Tavern's collaborators? (James Burrows is the son of Abe Burrows, who mentored under Duffy's creator/writer/star Ed Gardner and credited the experience for helping to inform his later work such as Guys and Dolls.)
Seinfeld may be a 90s phenomenon but I actually find myself enjoying it more with the 90s gone, perhaps because I've unearthed a classic radio show that could have been called the original "show about nothing" and find pleasant similarities in turning the apparently mundane into a good, unobtrusive laugh: Vic and Sade.
I've come to appreciate character humour at least as much as situational humour; if you can have both you've really got something---which I think is why I came to like Seinfeld as much as any other good comedy and why I fell in love with Easy Aces when I discovered it---to my delight, it was also a serial comedy, storylines extending as far as five or six weeks, in which writer Ace and his cast could really plumb a good piece of absurdism.
(Trivia: Goodman Ace eventually became one of television's most respected comedy writers; among his original television assignments was some very early television work for Bob Newhart, plus work for Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and ultimately fashioning the wry, easygoing camera persona Perry Como refined for over a decade.)
I'll go sit in a corner now.
:-) Thank you for setting me straight.
Heavens, no! Don't go sit in the corner. There are too many good laughs to be had when you relax and pop in one of the shows I noted above. :)
Speaking of Man from UNCLE, I've been dying for that to come up in convo here, lol.
On NCIS (and on JAG before that), the TV show with Mark Harmon about the CSI of the Navy, the head coroner/pathologist/ME - "Ducky" Mallard - is Ilya Kuryakin!
He's been working all these years, but I had never laid eyes on him since UNCLE, that I remembered. He was sooooo exotic and worldly back then, and very mysterious - and now he's this silly, bumbling old man! But very endearing.
It's just funny "knowing" who he "was."
Well, I was MAD about Rick. Insane, I mean.
Oh, I hear you on that one! What I did was refine my insanity to concentrate on David, because he was older and more serious - so I thought I might have a better "chance" with him than with Ricky, lol.
Besides, I was already doomed to attract the Wallys of the world.
Thanks for the trivia. Wow! You know your stuff. I'm going to have to look some of that material up. I've heard of Easy Aces mostly because I'm a fan of George and Gracie and their work is sometimes compared to it. I haven't heard or seen it though, so now I'll have to go looking. I haven't heard of Vic and Sade either. Another for the list.
You know, I found some old Burns and Allen in a dvd discount rack and it is excellent. My favorite part is watching them hawk Cold Evaporated Milk to make things like whipped cream as part of the plot. It is just so funny to me and I can't imagine it tastes all the good. Ha!
Awww, wasn't he a cutey?
As it happens, my library includes all four of Goodman Aces' books: three collections of pieces from his years writing a weekly humour column for the old Saturday Review and one collection of the old radio scripts, Ladies and Gentlemen---Easy Aces. Easy Aces actually beat Burns and Allen to radio by a couple of years, but there was another difference: with Gracie it was illogical logic, with Jane Ace it was clever malaprops that inserted actual words instead of the kind of made-up words that characterised most malaprops of the time (Amos 'n' Andy, for example: malaprops like "I's regusted!"). In later years, Goodman Ace swore Jane came by some of her original malaprops honestly and gradually became a near-full blown malapropper out of the occupational hazard of having delivered them on radio for fifteen-plus years. (It was Jane who first uttered, by the way, "Time wounds all heels.")
I'm a big Burns and Allen fan, too, and my collection includes all the installments of the "Gracie for President" gag campaign of 1940. (The sad part today is that we'd probably be better off with Gracie Allen in the White House, but let's not go there for now.)
Do you remember the following from Burns and Allen's Maxwell House Coffee Time show? Howard Duff guested as Sam Spade . . .
Announcer: Many people say that Gracie is responsible for George being where he is today. And that's certainly true. Gracie is also responsible for Sam Spade being where he is today. You see, George and Sam Spade are both in jail. How did it happen? Well, let's listen as George is being questioned by a police lieutenant.
Regan: Alright, let's start at the top. Name?
George: George Burns.
Regan: Occupation?
George: I'm married to Gracie Allen.
Regan: No. No, no. What do you do? What keeps you busy?
George: I'm married to Gracie Allen.
Regan: Let me put it this way. What's your source of income?
George: I'm married to Gracie Allen.
Regan: Alright, skip it. What's your age?
George: Approximately 42.
Regan: How come you look older?
George: I'm married to Gracie Allen.
Regan: What's your address?
George: 360 North Camden.
Regan: Alright, Burns, now suppose you tell me why you're in this jam.
George: I'm married to Gracie Allen.
Regan: You're in a rut. Hey, Spade, how come you're in this jam?
Sam Spade: He's married to Gracie Allen.
You know, I found some old Burns and Allen in a dvd discount rack and it is excellent. My favorite part is watching them hawk Cold Evaporated Milk to make things like whipped cream as part of the plot. It is just so funny to me and I can't imagine it tastes all the good. Ha!
You should have heard Henry Morgan lampoon his sponsors on the air. Adler Shoes wasn't thrilled with his barbs about Old Man Adler until the company discovered hundreds coming into their stores demanding to meet Old Man Adler. Later, Morgan was sponsored by Eversharp, who made the pens and the Schick razor blades. During a show saluting school days, Morgan jibed, "Schick injector blades. They're educational. Try one. That'll teach you." (His sketch of the old "Take It or Leave It" radio game show as the BBC might crack it---Morgan called it "Take It; or, If You'd Rather Not"---is a classic. Small wonder Fred Allen championed him; Morgan guested on the Allen show several times, including the final Allen show, a hilarious sketch about Morgan having about no time left to get his furniture payment to the finance company . . . whose president just so happened to be Mary Livingstone's husband. ;) )
LOL.
I thought Lucille was great as well.
She was a little young to die for sure.
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