Quotes of the Day

It was in Nov. 1987 at a swank dinner for eight or ten people in the Hollywood Hills, and Jane Wyatt, who died last week at 96, was among the guests. She was happy to speak about her career to two longtime fans (Mary C. and me) who had grown up watching her as the wise and indulgent matriarch of Father Knows Best. I didn’t want her to be my mother (I had, and have, a fabulous one, thank you), but I recognized in Jane an emissary from a vanished age of better manners, cleaner diction, gentleness and gentility. She was a lady, when that word could be the ultimate compliment for a woman. This was so long ago, children.

Jane sat next to me during the meal, with the chat swaying from movies to domestic matters to politics. She asked me about a movie I had just seen, Cry Freedom!, the story of the South African nationalist Steven Biko (Denzel Washington) and his white friend (Kevin Kline), an editor who wants to publish a book on Biko. Halfway through, Biko is dead, and Cry Freedom becomes the editor’s publish-or-perish saga. I told Jane that, as much as I agreed with the film’s sentiments, it was one more example of Hollywood thinking it can’t make a movie about a black man without making it really about a white man.

Pow! Jane landed a powerful jab to my right triceps that Sugar Ray Robinson would have been proud of. To her, any criticism by liberals about liberals amounted to conversational treason. Jane was firm and fervent in her beliefs, and she had paid for expressing them. A non-Communist liberal, she had denounced the House Committee on Un-American Activities and been gray-listed from Hollywood acting jobs in the early '50s. Robert Young reinstated her into the American family when he engaged her to play Margaret Anderson on the TV version of FKB, which he’d done on radio since 1949.

That sock in the arm soldered our friendship. In the next few years Mary and I met her twice more, both times under the aegis of society doyenne Phyllis Jenkins (who deserved, and got, her own memorial tribute on this site). On each visit, Jane remained the decorous charmer she so often played on stage, in the movies and on TV.

In case you’re wondering, Jane is not the Hollywood actress who married and divorced Ronald Reagan and won an Oscar for playing a deaf-mute. That was Jane Wyman. Our Jane was married to the same man, businessman Edgar Ward, until his death in 2000, one day short of their 65th wedding anniversary. Her career spanned just about that length, from Broadway in the early '30s to a last TV movie role in 1996. The year before our first dinner, she had played Mr. Spock’s human mother in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home; and she had a recurring role on St. Elsewhere. But by then acting was a sideline. Her full-time employment was living graciously and making others feel better about themselves and the world because of her continuing and committed presence in it.

Life Before Father

Early in the evening of the Great Punch, I had attempted to ingratiate myself with the actress who had played so many ladies of breeding — in Lost Horizon, Gentleman’s Agreement and Task Force — with a clumsy complimenting. How good of her, I said, to retain the clear lilt of her New England accent, against what must have been the demands of the front office to dumb it down. She lasered a regal stare my way and said she was a New York City girl. (I can find endless ways of embarrassing myself in front of movie royalty.) Indeed, Jane was a Rensselaer, from the family that helped settle, and for a time owned, much of Manhattan.

After Chapin and Barnard, Jane went on the stage. She played one of the suspects in The Fatal Alibi, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (with Charles Laughton as Hercule Poirot). In Dinner at Eight she was the young belle having an affair with a roue. She did Philip Barry’s The Joyous Season, with Lillian Gish, and Clifford Odets’ Night Music, with the Group Theater gang, including Elia Kazan, who seven years later would direct Jane in Gentleman’s Agreement. In her gray-list period she co-starred in Lillian Hellman’s The Autumn Garden with Fredric March and (yes, that) James Lipton. And, this is weird, in 1934 she graced a fantasy called Lost Horizons.

That was the year Hollywood called, and she got the ingenue role in James Whale’s One More River, from a John Galsworthy novel. She played the beautiful, snobbish Estella, in a low-budget version of Great Expectations (1934); a society girl trying to live on $150 a month in The Luckiest Girl in the World (1936); and, her big break, the woman who wants to shake Ronald Colman out of his Shangri-La reverie in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. Oddly, she didn’t make another movie for three years, returning in a low-budget drama for Republic called The Girl from God’s Country.

She knew that the good roles were of bad women, and was vexed that she didn’t get them. (Her good friend Claire Trevor, another well-bred Manhattan baby, won an Oscar for playing a floozy in Key Largo.) Jane was resigned to be the hero’s steadying hand — an earlier, more refined June Allyson — in a dozen more movies. The characters she played were so well-behaved that it’s a shock to see Wyatt gaze at Cary Grant, in the 1944 None But the Lonely Heart, with a flash of ardor. But her screen persona suggested a warmth, not a fire, and was more suited to the small screen. As she would soon learn.

Flag of Our Father

At the moment, Father Knows Best is not being shown on any of the 500 or so channels carried on my Time Warner cable system. (I relied for this story on some old tapes I’d made, and on the very helpful TV.com website.) But in the six years FKB was on the air, in 203 episodes, from Oct. 3, 1954 to May 23, 1960, it set both the standard and the stereotype for the good-natured family sitcom.

Each episode would begin with an establishing shot of the Andersons’ handsome two-story house at 607 South Maple Street, with the picket fence out front and a back yard suitable for barbecues. Jim Anderson (Robert Young) would come home from work at the insurance company, give Margaret (Jane) a hello kiss on the mouth — they kissed a lot, in an affectionate way — then take off his work jacket and put on his sweater smock as the three children rushed in to greet him.

The kids were Betty, known as Princess (Elinor Donahue), who during the life of the show sailed through high school and college; Jim Jr., aka Bud (Billy Gray), earnest and accident-prone; and Kathy, or Kitten (Lauren Chapin), the runt of the litter. They were decent kids with cute problems — no abortions or drug use — that Father, or very occasionally Mother, would resolve as the ultimate arbiter in a kind of domestic civics lesson. Similarly, Jim and Margaret had a relationship free of dark clouds or even cold fronts. Adultery, frigidity, alcoholism were unknown to this couple who were so devoted to the proper resolution of their kids’ anxieties that they discussed them in bed — rather, in the separate beds the censors ordained for all of TV’s married couples.

Cancelled by CBS before the first season had run its course, FKB was an early example of a show saved by the fans. By popular demand it returned for five more seasons, with Wyatt winning three Emmys as Best Actress in a Comedy and Young two as Best Actor. After its retirement, FKB was rerun in prime time on all three networks till 1967. It lingered in syndication for another few decades, and in the pop-cultural mind as a time capsule of '50s decency (if you liked the show) or white-bread smugness (if you didn’t). Springfield, Jim and Margaret’s home town, was so generically, maybe genetically, perfect that Matt Groening just had to use it as the site for his Simpsons, who in their bickering and perennial father-knows-worst scenarios qualify as the anti-Andersons.

In retrospect, one or two of the show’s cast saw it as a toxic fantasy. “I wish there was some way I could tell kids not to believe it,” said Gray (who was, by the way, one of the great child actors). “The dialogue, the situations, the characters — they were all totally false. The show did everybody a disservice. The girls were always trained to use their feminine wiles, to pretend to be helpless to attract men. The show contributed to a lot of the problems between men and women that we see today.” (Chapin later had her own problems, like many a TV kid star. She was forced into heroin abuse and prostitution by a boyfriend and never quite regained her footing. Gray was mistakenly reported to have been a drug dealer, but no, he only played one in a movie. As for Donahue, she apparently enjoyed a maturity as pleasant and undramatic as the show had mapped out for Betty.)

Whether any modern children would be tempted to believe the parables served up on FKB is debatable in an age when kids are bred on cynicism. But back then, to me, growing up in a nice middle-class clan with a passing resemblance to the Andersons, the show had the ring of familiarity, if not of gospel truth. Though I didn’t always follow the precepts peddled by Jim and Margaret, I was raised on them. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that FKB was the documentary of my 1950s — the way the '70s PBS series An American Family might have mirrored real life for younger kids, but with the accent on the positive, not the corrosive.

And on its own terms, the show worked. It was put together by a unit as tight as the Andersons; all of the episodes were directed by either William D. Russell or Peter Tewksbury, and almost all were written by either Paul West or Roswell Rogers (from the Andy Hardyish family created by Ed James for the radio show). Did the writers and directors, and the cast, believe in the small world they reinvented each week? I think they believed in it as a TV reality. What’s more, they sold that reality to the audience with the entrepreneurial conviction Jim must have used on his clients. It was a slick construct, and it was good.

What About Mom?

Of course, like any idealized fiction, FKB was a fantasy. Maybe more than most, since in this neighborhood we learned almost nothing about the neighbors. The show got along without supporting characters in the families next door or across the street. The Andersons solved their little dilemmas with no outside help. Their home might have been some enclosed universe in a Twilight Zone episode. What happened at 607 stayed at 607.

The typical plot had one of the kids getting into a social gaffe or an ethical scrape before Jim stepped in to adjudicate. OK, but where did that leave Margaret?

Margaret was the image of suburban chic in her short-sleeved blouses, her slim waist cinched by a kitchen apron, her pretty face set in a near-permanent smile. As each episode’s plot played out, she would be baking cookies or measuring the living-room couch for new slip covers, assuring that the mother ship was shipshape. In a show that ventured infrequently into Jim’s office or the kids’ school, where the home was the essential set, Margaret — the only Anderson without a nickname — was also the only one whose daily business didn’t take her away from the house. She was the rock, the one the others came home to. She was the home.

For a while, Margaret was invisibly chained there; she didn’t learn to drive until season four. But she also was allowed yearnings of escape. She wants a weekend away from the kids — perhaps because, in the lodge, they won’t have to sleep in those separate beds. She takes a college English class (where Betty happens to be a fellow student), and dancing lessons (dragging Jim, the perennial square, against his will). In a 1958 episode that won the show an Emmy, Jim announces he’s building a trophy case for the scholastic and athletic prizes the kids have amassed, and Margaret realizes she has no medals. Darned if she doesn’t go out and try to win one. Inevitable moral: Mom, here’s a medal you’ve earned just for being you.

She is also the most openly liberal member of the family. She has a soft heart for immigrants: the Spanish immigrant she hired to do lawn work, the Korean refugee kid a friend’s family adopted. And the year after she learns to drive, she wins a car and donated her time shuttling kids from an orphanage. All this suggests that the show’s writers applied Jane’s own beliefs to Margaret, allowing her to do good within the confines of a non-controversial, pre-'60s America.

Jane always defended Margaret’s role in the show. “She was the power behind the throne,” she told the New York Times in 1986. “She helped her husband out. Mother always knew best, too.” Spoken like a real-life good wife, good mother and do-gooder. But Jane was also a career woman, embodying an ideal of feminine grace and pluck that may seem antique today but was a beacon for her age. She was a great lady, a terrific person. And I’d say that even if I thought that, if I did, Jane would reach out from the beyond and punch me on the arm.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss fondly recalls Jane Wyatt, the matriarch of Father Knows Best