Once the letter opening was dropped, Loretta just introduced the play, typified by “The Lamp” (19 September 1954), with Loretta as a superstitious homemaker who believes that her husband’s walking under a ladder cost him a promotion. When a package arrives with a present from her uncle, a lamp with the trademark “Aladdin,” she instinctively rubs it, and immediately receives a designer dress from her grandmother. Then her husband gets a dream job in Arizona, but to her dismay the wife learns that “Aladdin” is the manufacturer’s brand name. At message time, Loretta adopted a sober expression and reminded viewers that superstition is pseudo religion, and that its replacements are the virtues, faith and hope.
“Something about Love” (21 November 1954) could have been a gooey confection about two people with disabilities. Instead, it took an unsentimental approach to a relationship between a dancer, whose legs had been broken, and an embittered vet, once a promising architect, whose injured hands caused him to abandon his profession. Refusing to succumb to self-pity, the dancer reinvents herself as a singer, and her optimism inspires the vet to return to his trade. The conclusion is not a plot sweetener, but flows naturally from the action, in which one person’s determination affects another. It may have been a bluebird ending, but there was no chirping.
By now, Loretta knew that crisis stories were ratings boosters, especially if they involved children. “The Flood” (9 January 1955) was formulaic: The dilemma of rising waters, life-threatening condition and delay of doctor, was resolved by the doctor’s last-minute arrival and a successful surgery. A widowed nurse (Loretta), with a child in her care in need of an appendectomy, persuades a Korean vet, a former medic, to lay off the booze and help her perform the operation. Before they have a chance, the doctor arrives, the operation is a success, the vet embraces sobriety, and the nurse is on the verge of shedding her widow’s weeds. This time, one could almost hear the bluebird warbling.
“The Case of Mrs. Bannister” (6 February 1955) was atypical. A child has a doll that she has named “Mrs. Bannister.” When an actual Mrs. Bannister falls to her death from the terrace of the adjacent apartment, her death turns out to be the result of murder, not suicide. The child either had psychic powers or heard the name from conversations filtering in from the next apartment. For her adage of the evening, Loretta chose a quote from Seneca, more inspirational than apropos. A better one would have been “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet 1.5).” Regardless, that was the point.
Loretta may have toyed with the idea of a television spin-off based on a character from her show. There were two possibilities: Inga, a farm worker; and Sister Ann, a hospital nun. In “Inga” (3 January 1954), Loretta appeared in the title role as a Norwegian woman who runs a farm almost single-handedly. Believing that farm work would be a way of rehabilitating convicts, Inga persuades a prison psychiatrist to release some inmates to her custody. This was the kind of Janus-faced scenario that could go in one direction (lustful convicts menace helpless woman) or another (convicts bond with Inga and become veteran farm hands). Having played her share of imperiled women, Loretta preferred something upbeat and sunny, like The Farmer’s Daughter—clearly the inspiration for “Inga,” which also allowed Loretta to revive her flawless Scandinavian accent.
Audiences reacted so favorably to “Inga” that Loretta brought her back for the second season (“Inga II,” 20 March 1955). Although the rehabilitation (which the politically correct psychiatrist has termed “experimental retention”) is successful, Inga runs into a problem when the son of a local real estate honcho totals one of her cars. The indomitable Inga persuades the father to have his pampered son pay off his debt by working on the farm. The son reluctantly agrees, then disappears, but redeems himself by saving the farm from foreclosure. Inga returned two more times in the third (8 January 1956) and fourth (18 November 1956) seasons, suggesting that the character’s audience appeal might warrant a series of its own. An “Inga” series never materialized; if it had, it would have probably adhered to the timeworn crisis-resolution template, with either the convicts or Inga steering the narrative to a happy ending or a “to be continued” one. And how much drama could be extracted from a farm where the main concerns were crops and equipment? More to the point, Loretta was now in her early forties, not exactly the right age for a “farm girl.”
A more likely series (which also never came off) would have been the one about Sister Ann, the head nurse and trainer of nurses at an urban hospital. The first episode was “Three and Two, Please” (“Sister Ann’s Christmas,” 16 December 1956), the title referring to the emergency code used to summon Sister Ann. Loretta had a great affinity for the character. The three “Sister Ann’s”—the second and third being “Sister Ann” (11 January 1959) and “Faith, Hope and Mr. Flaherty” (8 May 1960)—revealed a different Loretta, an accomplished character actress who did not have to rely on makeup and wardrobe. “Sister Ann” was inspired by a nun, Sister Mary Rose, who was Loretta’s nurse in 1955 during her four-month hospitalization at St. John’s Hospital in Oxnard. The two became close friends. When Loretta’s television career ended, they joined forces to establish a home for delinquent boys in Phoenix, Arizona. Loretta even went so far as to purchase a mansion and have her mother decorate it. But what began as an act of charity backfired when the neighbors vehemently objected to the presence of a rehabilitation center on their block. If her show were still on television, Loretta might have commissioned a teleplay, in which an act of benevolence, such as hers and Sister Mary Rose’s, ran into opposition and triumphed over it. That was not the case in Phoenix, which was located in real life, not happy land. Still, Loretta and Sister Mary Rose remained close friends, and when Loretta last heard from the indomitable nun, she was running an orphanage in the former Yugoslavia.
If Sister Mary Rose were anything like St. Ann, it is no wonder that Loretta was attracted to her. In “Three and Two, Please,” the best of the Sister Ann’s, Loretta bustled about in her white habit, dealing with emergencies, consoling the sick, staging a Christmas pageant, arranging a wedding for a unmarried couple, and turning a curmudgeon into a humanitarian on whom she practices a bit of Christian trickery by cajoling him into paying for a bicycle that she bought as a Christmas present for a lonely young patient—and she accomplished everything in a single day. “I must be about my Father’s business” is her mantra, as she solves one problem after another, interspersing her good works with a visit to the chapel. Bespectacled and wearing a costume that made her appear plumpish, she is the embodiment of benevolence, doing God’s will in her own way—which often required a bit of fabrication, but for a good cause.
A “Sister Ann” series could have been effective. If it had come off, it would have been the precursor of The Nurses, which debuted in 1962. An urban hospital offered more possibilities for a series than a Minnesota farm. However, a predominately Catholic series would have had limited appeal. Going My Way (1944) won an Oscar for Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley who, like Sister Ann, knew how to convert crusty millionaires into church benefactors. The television series, with Gene Kelly as Father O’Malley, only lasted a season (1962–63), while the movie is a television staple, especially at Christmas time. NBC’s Sister Kate fared somewhat better, airing from September 1989 to July 1990. But NBC could not find the right time slot for a series about a no-nonsense nun, moving it from Saturday to Sunday, and finally to Monday before it went off the air on 30 July. A Sister Ann, who was a sleuth like Father Dowling in the highly successful Father Dowling Mysteries (with Tom Bosley as the title character and the endearing Tracy Nelson as his sidekick-nun), might have worked. It certainly would have been a television “first.” But Loretta had done her share of sleuthing in the forgettable A Night to Remember and would have balked at the suggestion of reducing Sister Ann to Miss Marple in a habit. Sister Ann remained just one of the characters in her vast repertory.
As important as it was for Loretta to integra
te message and story, it was just as necessary for her to show Hollywood the range of types she could have played on the big screen if moguls like Zanuck and Mayer had believed in her potential. The greater the challenge the role posed, the more eagerly she embraced it. In the movies, Loretta had only played non-whites twice: in The Hatchet Man, with lacquered face and eyes elongated into slits, and, more naturally, in Ramona, where dark makeup and a wig did the trick. On television, Loretta was in her element when she played Asians. She understood their quiet demeanor, often interpreted as subservience. But she would not take a role that reduced a woman to an inferior status. She found the tranquility in the character, realizing that such women do not flare up in anger or display embarrassing emotion. In “I Remember the Rani” (1 May 1955), a British journalist recalls a proto-feminist maharini, who, when told about Queen Victoria, wonders why she herself couldn’t be called “queen.” Wiser than her male advisors, she knows that irrigation alone provides the solution to the lingering drought. Although the journalist and the maharani fall in love, an interracial marriage would have been unacceptable in India or on network TV. Instead, the maharani teaches him to say “I love you” so that it echoes through the palace halls. Unlike the lovers in The King and I, the two do not “kiss in a shadow,” but in an echo chamber. At least the maharini achieves her goal: Irrigation, and with it, the arrival of the twentieth century. “I Remember the Rani” is almost a chamber piece in its orchestrated simplicity and avoidance of dissonance or sudden changes of tempo.
Loretta was a Muslim in “Incident in India” (25 January 1959). Then, casting white actors as nonwhites was not denounced as racist, although it certainly was. The time of “Incident” is shortly after India received its independence from Britain in 1947, followed by the separation of India from Pakistan. The sectarian violence is never mentioned. The show was feminist but apolitical—unless a clever Pakistani woman (Loretta) is considered a political tool. Hardly, in 1959. The woman succeeds in outwitting the Indian slave traders who captured her and her attendant. Loretta may have modernized the character, but she looked and acted authentically Muslim, showing a police officer how he can capture a notorious bandit in exchange for allowing her to return to her husband. Naturally, the woman succeeds, and at the end, Loretta dispenses her weekly bromide: “Where love is, there is no fear.” It may have been an uplifting sentiment in 1959, but, in the twenty-first century, staying alive as a hostage in the Middle East requires much more than cleverness.
Her finest portrayal of an Asian was in “The Pearl” (13 February 1956), as the wife of a Japanese fisherman who finds a pearl in an oyster and begins fantasizing about what he can buy with it. To prevent him from squandering his money when he goes to Tokyo, the wife substitutes a stone. In his absence, she uses the pearl to purchase a boat, christening it “The Pearl,” so he can have the latest model. Loretta found the core of the character, the still point within the wife that is unaffected by the turning world—her eyes bespeaking wisdom without sending up flares. It was her subtlest interpretation: minimalist, perhaps, but magnanimous in its expression of the inner tranquility that accompanies true wisdom. The moral: “Therefore, get wisdom, but with all the getting, get understanding.” The wife had both.
As the series grew in popularity, ratings increased to the point that, by 1954, Loretta was honored with an Emmy for “Best Actress Starring in a Regular Series,” which, of the thirty top TV programs, ranked twenty-eighth. (Interestingly, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show was twenty-sixth.) Loretta was now a television celebrity, whose image graced the cover of TV Guide twelve times between 1953 and 1962. Two more Emmys followed in 1956 and 1958. Movie actors, whose careers were moribund, but whose names still carried weight (e.g., Virginia Bruce, Virginia Mayo, Merle Oberon, Jan Sterling, Teresa Wright, Phyllis Thaxter, John Hodiak, Robert Preston, and Herbert Marshall) signed up as guests. No longer a movie star, Loretta was honored for her work in television. For three consecutive years, 1957–59, she received the National Education Association’s “School Bell” for “distinguished service in the interpretation of education”; for six consecutive years (1954–59), she was awarded the TV-Radio Mirror gold medal as “favorite dramatic actress on television.” Organizations as diverse as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, California Teacher’s Association, Hollywood Women’s Press Club, Fame magazine, Dell Publications, Radio and Television Women of Southern California, and the American Legion added to her laurels. Perhaps Loretta’s proudest moment occurred in 1960 when TV Guide’s readers’ poll voted her “the most popular female personality.”
If such nationally recognized organizations as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and American Legion honored Loretta, it was because her show raised television to the level of edifying entertainment, going beyond anything that existed at the time. ABC tried an anthology series, Summer Theatre, from July to September 1953, when The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet was off the air. Summer Theatre never found an audience, suggesting that the concept was not viable. The Loretta Young Show disproved that myth, raising the bar several notches higher than sitcom and providing viewers with a series that guaranteed a different story each Sunday evening with an Oscar-winning actress in the lead.
The Loretta Young Show debuted at the right time. In fall 1953, the Red Scare had become the latest American bogeyman with its supporting cast of nuclear spies, media-infiltrating subversives, and screenwriters accused of injecting communist propaganda into their scripts. This was the time of Reds and pinkos, denunciations of “godless, atheistic Communism” from church pulpits, informants, Fifth Amendment pleaders, sycophants, exiled writers working through fronts or pseudonyms, and unrepentant radicals. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a much-honored World War II hero, was in the White House. Richard Nixon and Senator Joseph McCarthy were attempting to combat the (non-existent) communist threat to America’s internal security, shattering reputations in their zealotry. Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver’s televised hearings on organized crime garnered high ratings. Morality, with its concomitant self-righteousness, dictated the tenor of mass entertainment that, in 1953, meant television.
A few movies of the late forties and early fifties addressed social issues such as juvenile delinquency (The Blackboard Jungle [1955], Rebel without a Cause [1956]); blacks passing for white in segregated America (Lost Boundaries [1950]) and those who refused to pass (Pinky [1949]); suburban class-consciousness (All The Heaven Allows [1955]); the Ku Klux Klan (Storm Warning [1951]); and corruption on the docks (On the Waterfront [1954]). On the other hand, 1950s television offered an alternative: idealized families (Father Knows Best); model high schools (Our Miss Brooks); ditzy wives/exasperated husbands (I Love Lucy, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, I Married Joan, My Favorite Husband); impish daughters and benevolent fathers (My Little Margie); and smart kids with a bellowing father (Make Room for Daddy). Such programs were evening entertainment for mass audiences who turned a deaf ear to McCarthyism. The Loretta Young Show never played politics; Loretta, who was probably apolitical, knew her target audience.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living, which bore the same title as his popular television show, became a best seller in 1954, as did Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and the revised standard version of The Holy Bible. Song hits included “Little Things Mean a Lot” and “Young at Heart,” both with lyrics that in an age of gangsta rap seem hopelessly square. Radio’s best-loved soap, Ma Perkins, was still on the air, and would be until 1960. When Letter to Loretta premiered, South Pacific, The King and I, and Guys and Dolls were still on Broadway, and the new musicals—Wonderful Town, Kismet, and The Pajama Game—would pass muster as family entertainment. These were shows that seem, in retrospect, disarmingly innocent despite a few risqué moments that would have sailed over the heads of most tourists and even precocious adolescents. How many of them would have picked up on the interracial affair in South Pacific and the nurse’s subtle transformation from racist to liberal? Concubinage in The Ki
ng and I? The hooker with her calling cards in Wonderful Town? The aphrodisiac song in Kismet? Loretta entered the medium at the right time.
But The Loretta Young Show might not have continued as long as it did if the star had become as disillusioned as some of the characters in her series. Before the second season ended, Loretta was vacationing at her Ojai ranch when she experienced severe abdominal pains that seemed to signal an attack of appendicitis—but turned out to be more serious. On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955, she was rushed to St. John’s Hospital, where she was diagnosed with peritonitis. A four-hour surgery followed that supposedly was successful. The prognosis was good, and Loretta was expected to be discharged in three weeks. But doctors also discovered abdominal adhesions that required another operation, a hysterectomy—although the press was only told about the “abdominal adhesions. “ Still, there was speculation about the nature of the surgery, which increased when the hospital refused to divulge information about Loretta’s condition or even accept phone calls. Questions were answered guardedly, suggesting knowledge of her condition but an unwillingness to reveal it. Three weeks dragged out to four months, and Loretta was finally discharged on 1 August.
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