EVE ARDEN AS THE BRAINY BACHELORETTE, "OUR MISS BROOKS"
ALL ABOUT EVE
Eve Arden was 40 in 1948 when she became known to millions as Our Miss Brooks. She had plugged along in radio just as she had in the movies - mostly in supporting roles to the stars. The native Californian was born Eunice Quedens in Mill Valley and made her stage debut at 16 in a local stock company. For marquee purposes she adopted the stage name Eve Arden in 1934 and appeared in several Broadway productions including the Ziegfeld Follies. (1)
Returning to California, the pert, strawberry blonde had appeared in over 40 films by the mid-1940’s and was in demand as a dependable professional. Usually cast as the female star’s wise-cracking, level headed best friend - she was cited with an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for playing that familiar, best friend role in Mildred Pierce, her fourth film of 1945. (2)
In addition to her film commitments, she entered radio on January 6, 1945, in a supporting role with Danny Kaye’s highly promoted new Saturday half hour on CBS. (3) The show was generally criticized its under-use of Eve Arden who left the show after its last broadcast of the season on June 1st. But her unique voice and smart delivery were noticed by NBC producers, scrambling to replace comedienne Joan Davis who had left the network’s Sealtest Villiage Store for greener pastures at CBS. (See The 1945-46 Season on this site.)
On September 20, 1945, Arden replaced Jean Carroll as Jack Haley’s co-star on the Sealtest show. (4) A sample from her first season as “manager” of the store, November 15, 1945, is posted. Ratings from that first season reflected the loss of Davis, who was the most popular comedienne of the postwar era. Although Sealtest Village Store won its time period handily, its season rating dropped from 21.5 to 16.9 and it fell from the Annual Top Ten to 13th. Meanwhile, Eve was also busy with her day job, appearing in three high budget films - Danny Kaye’s The Kid From Brooklyn at Goldwyn, plus Barbara Stanwick’s weeper, My Reputation, and Cary Grant’s critically panned biography of Cole Porter, Night And Day, at Warner Brothers.
Her second season on The Sealtest Village Store was faced with competition from a studio drama at CBS, Casey, Crime Photographer. Nevertheless, Haley and Arden won their time period and remained in Thursday’s Top Ten. But Village Store’s 1946-47 season ratngs dropped again to 12.3 and finished 36th in the Annual Top 50. The show from March 20, 1947, is posted. Juggling her two careers, Eve’s film assignments were heavier than ever in 1947 with four more movies in which she played best gal pal to Ann Sheridan, Yvonne DeCarlo, Frances Gifford and Eleanor Parker. (5)
Jack Carson replaced Haley as Sealtest Village Store’s lead comic in September, 1947, while Eve remained its “manager.” In the 1947-48 season of generally inflated ratings, the show’s average increased to 14.5, but lost its time period to Casey on CBS and sank out of the season’s Top 50 to 56th in its rankings. It was still a funny show as this sample from May 27, 1948, illustrates, but the Village Store closed its doors at the end of the season.
While all of this was going on, CBS was busy trying to mount a new sitcom based on the misadventures of a high school English teacher developed by comedy writer Don Ettlinger with contributions from Norman Tokar and Ed Jurist. (6) Originally titled, Meet Miss Brooks, then Our Miss Booth, an audition recording of Our Miss Brooks was performed in New York on April 9, 1948, with Shirley Booth cast in the lead. The show's weak script was considered a loser by Booth who backed out, leaving CBS with a need to find a new lead or abandon the project.
One story has Joan Blondell turning down the role after auditioning. Another has Lucille Ball recommending her friend Eve Arden as Our Miss Brooks. Yet another has CBS boss Bill Paley encountering Eve at a Hollywood night club and suggesting that she audition for the job. Whatever the circumstances behind it, Arden cut her audition record of Our Miss Brooks with the original script, polished to her liking by Al Lewis and Joe Quillan, on June 23, 1948. Everyone involved agreed that Eve Arden was a natural to play the lovesick high school English teacher with a warm heart, sharp wit and snappy comebacks. Except for the "lovesick" part, the role was the mirror image of her personality.
Our Miss Brooks debuted by transcription on the CBS Monday schedule on July, 19, 1948, as the summer fill-in for first half of Lux Radio Theater’s time period. (7) The cast for Its eventual nine season run was taking shape with Jeff Chandler as Connie Brooks’ romantic interest, biology teacher Philip Boynton, Gale Gordon as Madison High School’s pompous principal, Osgood Conklin, Jane Morgan as Connie’s widowed landlady, Margaret Davis, Richard Crenna as Miss Brooks’ student and frequent chauffeur with a cracking teenage voice, Walter Denton, Gloria McMillan as the principal’s daughter and Walter’s high school sweetheart, Harriet Conklin, and Leonard Smith as Madison’s star athlete, slow-witted Stretch Snodgrass. (8)
After its summer run for Lux, the show opened its first full season on CBS at 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 19, 1948. Colgate-Palmolive-Peet snapped up sponsorship of the sitcom and moved if back to 9:30 on October 3rd. But 1948-49 was an uphill season for Our Miss Brooks as it suffered from the weak lead-in provided by Helen Hayes’ dramatic anthology series, The Electric Theater, and both lost audience to television. (9) Nevertheless, it was attracting listeners who enjoyed its well defined characters - particularly its smart heroine - and its often silly plots.
Silliness was probably the reason why a group identifying itself as The Committee On Radio of the National Council of Teachers of English complained to the press in April, 1949, that Our Miss Brooks, “…puts many English teachers to ridicule.” A few weeks earlier, however, Eve Arden was crowned by Radio Mirror as the Top Comedienne of 1948-49. Her response to the award presentation - near the end of the March 13, 1949, episode - smacks of Al Lewis' clever writing. Motion Picture Daily followed with a similar award and she was later made an Honorary Member of The National Education Association.
With the revamped CBS Sunday schedule of 1949-50, Our Miss Brooks was moved back to the choice position of 6:30 p.m. as the lead-in to Jack Benny's Top Ten show. The Madison High gang responded by breaking into Sunday’s Top Ten and the season’s Top 50, beginning its four year climb to the annual Top Ten among all prime time programs. Hooper tracked it from 56th in 1948-49, to 40th with its move to 6:30, then 26th, to 16th and finally, sixth place in 1952-53 to close out Network Radio‘s Golden Age. Samples of Our Miss Brooks episodes from those seasons are posted from January 23, 1949, July 3, 1949, January 1, 1950, February 25 1951, and March 9, 1952. (10)
Arden led the same cast into CBS-TV’s adaptation of Our Miss Brooks in 1952 for a four season run on Friday nights. The sitcom peaked in 1953-54 as a Top 15 show, (14th), and the most popular on the CBS Friday schedule with more viewers than another popular radio transplant, My Friend Irma, or Edward R. Murrow’s Person To Person. Eve Arden was also honored with the 1954 Emmy for her performance. The television series came to an end of its storyline in 1956 when the plot had Principal Conklin and Connie Brooks moving on to an elementary school in the San Fernando Valley after their Madison High was demolished.
However, the Warner Brothers’ film, Our Miss Brooks, was released in 1956 with Eve Arden, Gale Gordon, Richard Crenna, Robert Rockwell, Jane Morgan, Gloria McMiIlan and Leonard Smith reprising their familiar roles and retelling the highlights of her entire career at Madison High, climaxing with a "resolution" to her long awaited romance with the clueless biology teacher.
The radio series left CBS on June 30th 1957 after 368 episodes. Eve Arden continued in television with the 26 episode sitcom Eve Arden Show on CBS-TV in the 1957-58 season and co-starred with Kaye Ballard in NBC-TV’s sitcom, The Mothers In Law, from 1967-69. (11) Before her death in 1990 she appeared in dozens of television roles and played Principal McGee in the filmed musicals Grease and Grease 2.
But to most everyone of Madison High age, Eve Arden is best remembered as their favorite English teacher, Our Miss Brooks. The lady truly had class - in more ways than one.
(1) Eve Arden reportedly took her stage name from the cosmetics counter: Eve from Evening In Paris perfume and Arden from Elizabeth Arden.
(2) Joan Crawford won the 1945 Oscar as Best Actress in Mildred Pierce. Ironically, one of Eve Arden’s first films was an uncredited role 1933’s Dancing Lady also starring Joan Crawford.
(3) Eve Arden had a leading role in Danny Kaye’s Broadway stage hit musical, Let’s Face It, in October, 1941.
(4) Jean Carroll had replaced Haley’s original Village Store co-star, Joan Davis, on July 5, 1945.
(5) Late in her career Eve Arden said, "I've worked with a lot of great, glamorous girls in movies and the theater. And I'll admit, I've often thought it would be wonderful to be a femme fatale. But then I'd always come back to thinking that if they only had what I had - a family, real love, an anchor - they would have been so much happier during all the hours when the marquees and floodlights are dark." She and her second husband, actor Brooks West, raised four children, three of them adopted, during their 32 year marriage.
(6) Don Ettlinger sued CBS for $250,000 in 1951, claiming his contributions to the plot and characterizations of Our Miss Brooks led to the program’s success. The network settled for $50,000. Ettlinger later returned to CBS as head writer for the television serial, Love of Life.
(7) The second half of the 1948 Lux summer hour was occupied by The Amazing Mr. Tutt, a fast forgotten sitcom based on the Saturday Evening Post series by Arthur Train and starring Will Wright as, “…America’s most beloved lawyer.” Wright’s familiar face was seen in hundreds of movie and television roles as an elderly curmudgeon. Wright also played Osgood Conklin in Shirley Booth's Our Miss Brooks audition.
(8) Gale Gordon replaced Joe Forte as Osgood Conklin on the third show of the summer run. Robert Rockwell took the role of Philip Boynton when Jeff Chandler, (fka Ira Grossel), left the cast in 1953 to pursue a successful movie career.
(9) NBC-TV programmed the prestigious 60 minute anthology, Philco Television Playhouse, at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday in 1948-49, and CBS-TV countered with Ed Sullivan's popular hour long Toast of The Town.
(10) She also found time to appear in eleven more films from 1949 to 1953 when the radio and television versions of Our Miss Brooks absorbed most of her work time. Except for the film, Our Miss Brooks, She made no more movies until 1959's Anatomy of A Murder in which her husband, Brooks West, also had a key role.
(11) Television series Our Miss Brooks, The Eve Arden Show and The Mothers In Law were all produced at Desilu Studios, co-owned by Eve’s longtime friend, Lucille Ball, whom she first met when both worked in the 1937 film, Stage Door.
Copyright © 2017, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
Eve Arden was 40 in 1948 when she became known to millions as Our Miss Brooks. She had plugged along in radio just as she had in the movies - mostly in supporting roles to the stars. The native Californian was born Eunice Quedens in Mill Valley and made her stage debut at 16 in a local stock company. For marquee purposes she adopted the stage name Eve Arden in 1934 and appeared in several Broadway productions including the Ziegfeld Follies. (1)
Returning to California, the pert, strawberry blonde had appeared in over 40 films by the mid-1940’s and was in demand as a dependable professional. Usually cast as the female star’s wise-cracking, level headed best friend - she was cited with an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for playing that familiar, best friend role in Mildred Pierce, her fourth film of 1945. (2)
In addition to her film commitments, she entered radio on January 6, 1945, in a supporting role with Danny Kaye’s highly promoted new Saturday half hour on CBS. (3) The show was generally criticized its under-use of Eve Arden who left the show after its last broadcast of the season on June 1st. But her unique voice and smart delivery were noticed by NBC producers, scrambling to replace comedienne Joan Davis who had left the network’s Sealtest Villiage Store for greener pastures at CBS. (See The 1945-46 Season on this site.)
On September 20, 1945, Arden replaced Jean Carroll as Jack Haley’s co-star on the Sealtest show. (4) A sample from her first season as “manager” of the store, November 15, 1945, is posted. Ratings from that first season reflected the loss of Davis, who was the most popular comedienne of the postwar era. Although Sealtest Village Store won its time period handily, its season rating dropped from 21.5 to 16.9 and it fell from the Annual Top Ten to 13th. Meanwhile, Eve was also busy with her day job, appearing in three high budget films - Danny Kaye’s The Kid From Brooklyn at Goldwyn, plus Barbara Stanwick’s weeper, My Reputation, and Cary Grant’s critically panned biography of Cole Porter, Night And Day, at Warner Brothers.
Her second season on The Sealtest Village Store was faced with competition from a studio drama at CBS, Casey, Crime Photographer. Nevertheless, Haley and Arden won their time period and remained in Thursday’s Top Ten. But Village Store’s 1946-47 season ratngs dropped again to 12.3 and finished 36th in the Annual Top 50. The show from March 20, 1947, is posted. Juggling her two careers, Eve’s film assignments were heavier than ever in 1947 with four more movies in which she played best gal pal to Ann Sheridan, Yvonne DeCarlo, Frances Gifford and Eleanor Parker. (5)
Jack Carson replaced Haley as Sealtest Village Store’s lead comic in September, 1947, while Eve remained its “manager.” In the 1947-48 season of generally inflated ratings, the show’s average increased to 14.5, but lost its time period to Casey on CBS and sank out of the season’s Top 50 to 56th in its rankings. It was still a funny show as this sample from May 27, 1948, illustrates, but the Village Store closed its doors at the end of the season.
While all of this was going on, CBS was busy trying to mount a new sitcom based on the misadventures of a high school English teacher developed by comedy writer Don Ettlinger with contributions from Norman Tokar and Ed Jurist. (6) Originally titled, Meet Miss Brooks, then Our Miss Booth, an audition recording of Our Miss Brooks was performed in New York on April 9, 1948, with Shirley Booth cast in the lead. The show's weak script was considered a loser by Booth who backed out, leaving CBS with a need to find a new lead or abandon the project.
One story has Joan Blondell turning down the role after auditioning. Another has Lucille Ball recommending her friend Eve Arden as Our Miss Brooks. Yet another has CBS boss Bill Paley encountering Eve at a Hollywood night club and suggesting that she audition for the job. Whatever the circumstances behind it, Arden cut her audition record of Our Miss Brooks with the original script, polished to her liking by Al Lewis and Joe Quillan, on June 23, 1948. Everyone involved agreed that Eve Arden was a natural to play the lovesick high school English teacher with a warm heart, sharp wit and snappy comebacks. Except for the "lovesick" part, the role was the mirror image of her personality.
Our Miss Brooks debuted by transcription on the CBS Monday schedule on July, 19, 1948, as the summer fill-in for first half of Lux Radio Theater’s time period. (7) The cast for Its eventual nine season run was taking shape with Jeff Chandler as Connie Brooks’ romantic interest, biology teacher Philip Boynton, Gale Gordon as Madison High School’s pompous principal, Osgood Conklin, Jane Morgan as Connie’s widowed landlady, Margaret Davis, Richard Crenna as Miss Brooks’ student and frequent chauffeur with a cracking teenage voice, Walter Denton, Gloria McMillan as the principal’s daughter and Walter’s high school sweetheart, Harriet Conklin, and Leonard Smith as Madison’s star athlete, slow-witted Stretch Snodgrass. (8)
After its summer run for Lux, the show opened its first full season on CBS at 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 19, 1948. Colgate-Palmolive-Peet snapped up sponsorship of the sitcom and moved if back to 9:30 on October 3rd. But 1948-49 was an uphill season for Our Miss Brooks as it suffered from the weak lead-in provided by Helen Hayes’ dramatic anthology series, The Electric Theater, and both lost audience to television. (9) Nevertheless, it was attracting listeners who enjoyed its well defined characters - particularly its smart heroine - and its often silly plots.
Silliness was probably the reason why a group identifying itself as The Committee On Radio of the National Council of Teachers of English complained to the press in April, 1949, that Our Miss Brooks, “…puts many English teachers to ridicule.” A few weeks earlier, however, Eve Arden was crowned by Radio Mirror as the Top Comedienne of 1948-49. Her response to the award presentation - near the end of the March 13, 1949, episode - smacks of Al Lewis' clever writing. Motion Picture Daily followed with a similar award and she was later made an Honorary Member of The National Education Association.
With the revamped CBS Sunday schedule of 1949-50, Our Miss Brooks was moved back to the choice position of 6:30 p.m. as the lead-in to Jack Benny's Top Ten show. The Madison High gang responded by breaking into Sunday’s Top Ten and the season’s Top 50, beginning its four year climb to the annual Top Ten among all prime time programs. Hooper tracked it from 56th in 1948-49, to 40th with its move to 6:30, then 26th, to 16th and finally, sixth place in 1952-53 to close out Network Radio‘s Golden Age. Samples of Our Miss Brooks episodes from those seasons are posted from January 23, 1949, July 3, 1949, January 1, 1950, February 25 1951, and March 9, 1952. (10)
Arden led the same cast into CBS-TV’s adaptation of Our Miss Brooks in 1952 for a four season run on Friday nights. The sitcom peaked in 1953-54 as a Top 15 show, (14th), and the most popular on the CBS Friday schedule with more viewers than another popular radio transplant, My Friend Irma, or Edward R. Murrow’s Person To Person. Eve Arden was also honored with the 1954 Emmy for her performance. The television series came to an end of its storyline in 1956 when the plot had Principal Conklin and Connie Brooks moving on to an elementary school in the San Fernando Valley after their Madison High was demolished.
However, the Warner Brothers’ film, Our Miss Brooks, was released in 1956 with Eve Arden, Gale Gordon, Richard Crenna, Robert Rockwell, Jane Morgan, Gloria McMiIlan and Leonard Smith reprising their familiar roles and retelling the highlights of her entire career at Madison High, climaxing with a "resolution" to her long awaited romance with the clueless biology teacher.
The radio series left CBS on June 30th 1957 after 368 episodes. Eve Arden continued in television with the 26 episode sitcom Eve Arden Show on CBS-TV in the 1957-58 season and co-starred with Kaye Ballard in NBC-TV’s sitcom, The Mothers In Law, from 1967-69. (11) Before her death in 1990 she appeared in dozens of television roles and played Principal McGee in the filmed musicals Grease and Grease 2.
But to most everyone of Madison High age, Eve Arden is best remembered as their favorite English teacher, Our Miss Brooks. The lady truly had class - in more ways than one.
(1) Eve Arden reportedly took her stage name from the cosmetics counter: Eve from Evening In Paris perfume and Arden from Elizabeth Arden.
(2) Joan Crawford won the 1945 Oscar as Best Actress in Mildred Pierce. Ironically, one of Eve Arden’s first films was an uncredited role 1933’s Dancing Lady also starring Joan Crawford.
(3) Eve Arden had a leading role in Danny Kaye’s Broadway stage hit musical, Let’s Face It, in October, 1941.
(4) Jean Carroll had replaced Haley’s original Village Store co-star, Joan Davis, on July 5, 1945.
(5) Late in her career Eve Arden said, "I've worked with a lot of great, glamorous girls in movies and the theater. And I'll admit, I've often thought it would be wonderful to be a femme fatale. But then I'd always come back to thinking that if they only had what I had - a family, real love, an anchor - they would have been so much happier during all the hours when the marquees and floodlights are dark." She and her second husband, actor Brooks West, raised four children, three of them adopted, during their 32 year marriage.
(6) Don Ettlinger sued CBS for $250,000 in 1951, claiming his contributions to the plot and characterizations of Our Miss Brooks led to the program’s success. The network settled for $50,000. Ettlinger later returned to CBS as head writer for the television serial, Love of Life.
(7) The second half of the 1948 Lux summer hour was occupied by The Amazing Mr. Tutt, a fast forgotten sitcom based on the Saturday Evening Post series by Arthur Train and starring Will Wright as, “…America’s most beloved lawyer.” Wright’s familiar face was seen in hundreds of movie and television roles as an elderly curmudgeon. Wright also played Osgood Conklin in Shirley Booth's Our Miss Brooks audition.
(8) Gale Gordon replaced Joe Forte as Osgood Conklin on the third show of the summer run. Robert Rockwell took the role of Philip Boynton when Jeff Chandler, (fka Ira Grossel), left the cast in 1953 to pursue a successful movie career.
(9) NBC-TV programmed the prestigious 60 minute anthology, Philco Television Playhouse, at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday in 1948-49, and CBS-TV countered with Ed Sullivan's popular hour long Toast of The Town.
(10) She also found time to appear in eleven more films from 1949 to 1953 when the radio and television versions of Our Miss Brooks absorbed most of her work time. Except for the film, Our Miss Brooks, She made no more movies until 1959's Anatomy of A Murder in which her husband, Brooks West, also had a key role.
(11) Television series Our Miss Brooks, The Eve Arden Show and The Mothers In Law were all produced at Desilu Studios, co-owned by Eve’s longtime friend, Lucille Ball, whom she first met when both worked in the 1937 film, Stage Door.
Copyright © 2017, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
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