JANE WYATT OBITUARY IN “THE INDEPENDENT” IN 2006.
Jane Wyatt was a warm loving presence in many films and television roles from the early 1930’s. She was born in 1910 in New Jersey. In 1937 she made her most famous role in “Lost Horizon” opposite Ronald Colman. Her other films include “None but the Lonely Heart” with Cary Grant”, “Gentleman’s Agreement” with Dorothy McGuire whom she physically resembled and “Boomarang”. On television she played Robert Young’s wife in the very long running “Father Knows Best” and Norman Lloyd’s wife in “St Elsewhere”. Jane Wyatt died in 2006 at the age of 96.
Tom Vallance’s obituary of Jane Wyatt in “The Independent”:
Jane Wyatt had an exceptionally long acting career in film, television and on stage. Petite and pretty, she had an innate warmth that permeated her performances in such films as Lost Horizon and Pitfall, and brought her many roles as congenial, understanding wives – an image she had great success with on television in the series Father Knows Best, for which she won three Emmy Awards. Later a new generation discovered her as Spock’s mother in Star Trek.
She was also a leading figure in Hollywood society, as befitting a descendant of early Dutch settlers – a paternal ancestor, Philip Livingston, was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence
Wyatt’s mother was a Colonial Dame of America, her father of English and Irish stock. When Jane Waddington Wyatt was born in Campgaw, New Jersey, in 1910, they were part of New York’s famed “Four Hundred” but, contrary to some reports, they did not threaten to disown their daughter when she declared her ambition go on the stage. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be an actress,” she recalled:
I’ve read reports that my family didn’t want me to act and disowned me. Not a bit of it. My mother was a dramatic critic for 35 years. I was surrounded by drama. All my father’s side of the family were Episcopalian ministers, and he said, “What’s the difference between the pulpit and the stage?”
Attending Barnard College, part of Columbia University, Wyatt performed in school plays and during the summer acted with the Berkshire Playhouse:
They asked me to come back the next summer, so I thought, “I’m not going back to college. I’m going to get a job and learn how to act.” So I walked up and down Broadway trying to get a job. It was fun, but I don’t know if you can do that today.
She made her Broadway début as the ingénue in Give Me Yesterday (1931) by A.A. Milne, playing the daughter of the English prime minister (Louis Calhern). Other small roles followed, while she studied with Miss Robinson Duff, whose other pupils included Katharine Hepburn and Ina Claire. Plays in which she appeared on Broadway included Fatal Alibi (1932), starring Charles Laughton and based on Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Somerset Maugham’s For Services Rendered (1933), and Evensong (1933), in which she played the niece of a temperamental opera star (Edith Evans):
Evans had had a big hit with the play in London, and I remember the director telling us that this was one of the greatest actresses in the world, but somehow on the opening night she was awfully nervous and she did not get good reviews. I got spectacular reviews.
Offered a Hollywood contract that allowed her to take stage work in New York, she made her screen début as the younger sister of Diana Wynyard in James Whale’s One More River (1934 – “I adored Diana,” she said), and then played Estella in Great Expectations (1934), co-starring Phillips Holmes as Pip. “He was beautiful-looking and just as nice as could be,” recalled Wyatt, “but he was on drugs. He was the first person I had heard of being on drugs – it was to ruin his career.”
After roles in We’re Only Human and The Luckiest Girl in the World (both 1936), Wyatt was cast in her most memorable role, in Frank Capra’s enduring fantasy Lost Horizon (1937), which put the word Shangri-La (the dream city in which people hardly age) into the English language:
Frank said he needed an unknown, but somebody experienced in movie-making, and since I’d only done flops I fit the bill . . .
Lost Horizon was “a hit but not a smash”. She attributed much of the film’s appeal to its cast:
Those great character actors are gone. In 1937 we’d see them in every other picture so they seemed less special. Now we can sit back and appreciate them because that kind of acting will never be seen again.
Her next films were inconsequential, and in 1940 she returned to Broadway to star alongside Elia Kazan and Morris Carnovsky in Clifford Odets’s Night Music, a Group Theatre production that ran for only 20 performances, though the three leading players received glowing reviews. She returned to Hollywood to appear in wartime morale boosters such as Army Surgeon and The Navy Comes Through (both 1942) and the westerns Buckskin Frontier and The Kansan (both 1943):
They were fun because I loved to ride. My leading man in both was Richard Dix from the silent days, and he was old enough to be my father. By the time he’d put on his hat and his dentures in and he had his corset on and high heels, he was more romantic than anyone in the picture.
None but the Lonely Heart (1944), written by Odets, starred Cary Grant in the offbeat role of a cockney down-and-out:
A lot of the Group Theatre were in that. Cary, who told me this was as close as he ever got to revealing his true self to audiences, should have won an Oscar, but people didn’t like him in that sort of role.
After a Broadway hit, Hope for the Best (1945), and a tour as Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth (1946), Wyatt co-starred with Adolph Menjou and Gail Russell in the amusing film comedy The Bachelor’s Daughters (1946), then played a small role in the Oscar-winning film about anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), directed by her friend Elia Kazan. She then appeared in another distinguished Kazan film, Boomerang! (1947), as the wife of an an attorney (Dana Andrews), and followed this with one of the finest of her “wife” roles, that of the wife and mother whose husband (Dick Powell) has an affair in André de Toth’s highly regarded film noir Pitfall (1948). The French critic Philippe Garnier wrote of the moment when Wyatt discovers the affair,
It is on Jane Wyatt’s haggard face that one’s attention finally rests. This pretty little face, usually so strong and witty, is suddenly broken by pain, humiliation and incomprehension. And this is the same face found in the last scene, eyes fixed on the car windscreen in order not to look at her husband while, in a feeble voice, she announces the sort of pardon which has nothing to do with a happy ending . . . One of the most chilling endings in the history of cinema. And also one of the most realistic.
Wyatt next played Gary Cooper’s wife in the 1949 naval drama Task Force (“Cooper, who had casting approval, jokingly told me he asked for Jane Wyman and got me by mistake”) and a wife and mother distressed at her eldest daughter’s reaction upon discovering she was adopted in Our Very Own (1950), then returned to film noir with Fritz Lang’s The House by the River (1950). She starred with Lee J. Cobb in The Man Who Cheated Himself (1951), but too many of her roles were inconsequential – such as Betty Grable’s best friend in My Blue Heaven (1951) – and movie offers became scarce after she joined a group of stars who flew to Washington to protest at the hearings of the Un-American Activities Committee.
Film offers already made were rescinded, and further offers were unforthcoming. “So I went to New York and did live television, which I loved doing.” Wyatt returned to Hollywood when asked to appear in the television version of a radio show, Father Knows Best
I was asked time and again and said, “No.” I didn’t want to be in a TV series. To me it seemed so way down below you and so boring to be stuck in a part. My agent called and said it was the last chance, and my husband said, “Look, you’ve been in New York all this time and haven’t had a decent play. Why don’t you read the script?” Well, I read it and it was charming, so I agreed, returned to Hollywood, and did it for six years [1958-63], and it was fun. It could have gone on forever, but the children had grown up.
Each show started with the husband (Robert Young) arriving home from work, taking off his sports jacket and putting on a comfortable sweater before dealing with the everyday problems of a growing family. He and his wife Margaret (Wyatt) were portrayed as thoughtful, responsible adults (in contrast to the majority of situation comedies of the time) and when the series ended it was at the peak of its popularity. Wyatt won Best Actress Emmy awards for her role in 1958, 1959 and 1960.
A later television role was to bring Wyatt notoriety, that of Spock’s earth-born mother in the Star Trek episode “Journey to Babel” (1967), a role she reprised in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986):
I get fan mail from Father Knows Best and Lost Horizon, but the Star Trek mail gets more and more. I’m a human who married a Vulcan – someone has written a whole book about the mother.
Wyatt once said, “My dream of being in a great Broadway play never did come true.” Asked by Michael Gartside in 1998 what her philosophy was, she replied,
To have a happy marriage. I have been married for 63 wonderful years, and I adore my sons. But it is hard to act and be a family person.
Her husband, Edgar Ward, died the day before their 65th wedding anniversary. She said, “The acting was the icing on the cake, really.”
Tom Vallance
Time magazine appreciation of jane Wyatt
America’s Mom
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 solong 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.
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 Eightshe 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 Horizon
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.
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.
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 Zoneepisode. 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 maker.
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