The shows’ role as display models for the new family values makes you think a little differently about how formally the characters dress. After all, it wasn’t just June Cleaver in her crisp shirtdresses, pearls, and pumps who dressed up. Ward and Ozzie are frequently in suits and ties at home; if they’re chilling on the weekend, they don the cardigan over dress shirt and slacks look. Beaver and Wally wear suits and ties if the family goes out to a restaurant. Even just hanging out in the neighborhood, they sport neatly pressed plaid or checked shirts tucked into slacks or cuffed jeans with a belt. Wally and the Beav are frequently seen polishing their shoes. Since the characters are dressed at home as though they were at work, the effect is to remind viewers that family life is work, the most important work of all. Yes, people did dress up much more in the 1950s—just look at the hats on the men and the white gloves on the women in photographs of city streets from the era—but most loosened up a bit more than the Cleavers do at home. On the show they’re staging what family life should look like. As the sociologist Nelson Foote noted in 1955, families living in their new showcase homes, with TV families for company, were more aware of themselves as “performers” of family roles than they had been before. (Lynn Spigel points out that this was a common motif of sociological commentary on the suburban family in this period.) “The husband may be an audience to the wife, or the wife to the husband, or the older child to both.”
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IN HIS ARTICLE FOR CALIFORNIA MAGAZINE, Steve recalled the work routine at home during the years when he and our dad were helping to project this new family ideal. “When my dad went to work in the morning, he climbed into the station wagon and drove twenty minutes to General Service Studio, on Las Palmas in Hollywood. On Stage 5, he slipped into the obligatory cardigan and played Ozzie Nelson’s stocky, good-natured neighbor. At home he smoked a pipe and was my stocky, good-natured dad. On Goodland Avenue he was never a buffoon, he was my sometimes-imposing father, and his blonde wife was much younger and more attractive than his ditzy TV wife with the whiny voice. Many mornings he waved good-bye on his way to Ozzie’s while my mom and I took off for Beaver—two sidekicks on their way to work. My commute was shorter: Beaver was filmed at Studio City’s own Republic, shifting later to nearby Universal. The way my father saw it, we were two professionals doing a job. It happened that the job was acting and it was usually fun and we made good money, but that didn’t alter the fact that it was a job with certain responsibilities: know your lines, be on time, hit your mark, listen to the director.”
Lyle enjoyed and felt lucky to have the Ozzie and Harriet gig. He wasn’t close to Ozzie Nelson, but he had respect for him as a businessman who wrote, produced, and often directed the shows; as a college graduate (Ozzie went to Rutgers; neither of his own sons, who were too busy playing his sons on TV, graduated from college); and as a perfectionist, who always insisted, for instance, on having real flowers when flowers were called for in the script. Lyle didn’t mind that the show was bland. He seems relaxed in his affable role and his banter with Ozzie. And he liked the routine, the money he could count on, and the fact that it was a show his kids could talk about at school. In one five-year period, he’d gone from Ed Wood movies shot on the sly behind a brothel to a popular sitcom featuring “America’s Favorite Family” and sponsored by Quaker Oats. My sister remembers being at a Back-to-School Night with our father when she was in seventh grade and he was still on Ozzie and Harriet. As they walked down the aisle of the auditorium, she could hear people whispering eagerly, “There’s Lyle Talbot!” When it was time to go look at the individual classrooms, Lyle said to Cindy, “Now, which shall we go to first? Or what do you say we just ad-lib it?” She hoped that other people around them could hear—“It just sounded so chic to me.”
When TV production knocked off for the summer, Lyle did live theater in summer stock companies around the country, which he loved—enjoying his star turns and his “as seen on TV” billing, as well as the chance to work with my mother, who often took roles in these productions. She’d pack up the whole family and bring them along, including my grandparents as resident babysitters. “We would travel like gypsies across the country in our station wagon,” says my brother Steve. He remembers our grandmother sitting in the backseat sewing pink flowers on my mother’s underwear for her appearance in a play called Champagne Complex, in which she “played an innocent Marilyn Monroe type who started undressing as soon as she sipped a bit of the bubbly.”
Lyle on the set of Ozzie and Harriet, with Ricky Nelson in the background.
Lyle happily touted the virtues of live theater. “That’s my first love and it always will be,” he told one reporter. “For an actor, nothing matches the challenge and stimulation of performing live. This is where the real rewards of being in the business are found. . . . Everybody knows it’s possible to fake a little bit here and there in film work without being obvious about it. But working live is the real test. You either have it or you don’t.” Asked by another reporter whether it got boring to do the same part night after night—this was during a production of My Fair Lady under a big tent in Sacramento—he said no, it didn’t, “because each audience is like a fingerprint, no two are the same. Each night is a different experience and a challenge unto itself.” When I was a kid I used to go see him perform three or four nights in a row sometimes, and it always fascinated me to see the range of audience response to the same lines—how, for example, one guy with a real guffaw could create a ripple effect. If I had the time and money, I think I’d go see plays that way now, deriving fastidious pleasure from observing how the dynamics between audience and performer shift around from night to night, and how an actor’s reading of the same line can be subtly altered. Maybe that’s why people became Deadheads (I mean besides the dope). They like immersing themselves in comparative iterations of the same material.
In the late 1960s and the 1970s, Lyle was flying all over the country to appear in everything from revivals of The Front Page and serious new plays like The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia at the Alley Theatre in Houston, to South Pacific at Lincoln Center, to frothy stuff like Barefoot in the Park, There’s a Girl in My Soup, and Never Too Late, sometimes in stalwart downtown venues and sometimes in suburban dinner theaters where you got to bring home the tacky cup your novelty drink came in. One of the young directors he worked with at the Alley, Robert Leonard, who cast him against type as the wheelchair-bound leader of a Klan-like group, wrote me recently to say that “Lyle was the most honest, collaborative, and supportive actor I ever met.” Lyle once told Leonard about having to audition for a road show of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple that was to be directed by the playwright’s brother, Danny. They met at the San Francisco airport, where Danny Simon was just flying in, and after an awkward lunch during which he put the make on the waitress, Simon told Lyle he’d have to do the audition in the bathroom—it was the only more or less quiet space—and for the part of Felix, though Lyle had been playing Oscar for three years in a different touring company. “So I stood in the men’s bathroom of the San Francisco airport and read with this jerk for the wrong role,” Lyle recalled. Indignant on his behalf, Leonard asked him, “Did you do the tour?” And, as Leonard wrote me recently, “Lyle replied with a twinkle in his eye, and that mischievous smile, ‘Are you kidding? Of course I did. The show paid five grand a week plus per diem. And I was a damned good Felix, too!’”
It was sort of thrilling for us kids to see how cool our dad stayed backstage before a show. “I was in a lot of dressing rooms with him, and he was never nervous,” Steve recalled. “He was always doing crossword puzzles, schmoozing with the prop guy. I asked him a couple of times, Do you ever get nervous? And he said, you get keyed up. If you didn’t you’d be dead. And you need the energy to perform. But stage fright? Jitters? Never.” David remembers “how present he was before a play when we were backstage with him. The stage manager would be coming in, saying ten
minutes, Mr. Talbot, five minutes, two minutes. I’d start to get nervous. My palms would get sweaty. But he’d be talking to us, asking about school. I remember thinking, What a pro!”
• • •
THERE WERE A FEW REASONS why my father proved so happily domesticable—my mother was a lot of fun to live with; she was right about his really wanting to be a father; he was old enough and he’d slept with plenty of women. I sometimes think that he also got some reinforcement from acting a part on one of the seminal family sitcoms. Here he was, convincingly making suburban family life look jolly and rewarding—even dropping in on Leave It to Beaver a couple of times to play the role of a “perfect father” Ward Cleaver gets jealous of. And with Paula as his wife, it was easier than it would have been with shrill Clara, his TV wife.
Not that our family life looked much like the Cleavers’ or the Nelsons’. Like all families, we took the basic roles and worked our own variation on them, for, with apologies to Tolstoy, families find their happiness in infinitely different grooves. In ours, as my sister said, “Dad was gone a lot, on the road, but when he was home, he was really home. He would do a lot around the house. Make all the breakfasts. Cook half the dinners. Loved to do the grocery shopping. They were not a traditional couple of the time.” Our mother did the emotional heavy lifting in the family; if you had a problem, if you wanted a heart-to-heart, you went to her. At the same time, as my sister says, “I never experienced Dad as distant. He was very loving, kind, very solicitous and appreciative of us. He always wanted to do something special for you—make you something good to eat.”
I was born in 1961, when my sister was eight and my brothers were ten and twelve. My mother was thirty-four and my father was just shy of sixty. Still, I never experienced my father as old, exactly. He had his booming actor’s baritone; he did accents and sang a lot around the house. He still memorized parts easily, whispering to himself increasingly large chunks of dialogue as he sat on our den couch with a script, and always arriving for the first rehearsal off book. He sprang out of bed in the morning, childishly eager for breakfast. He took me miniature golfing and bowling. He seemed zippy. The ways in which I was reminded of his advanced age were agreeably strange; they connected me to the past, with a thin but real and glowing filament, and I, a kid who loved history books and fantasized regularly about traveling just for a day or two to the 1880s or the 1920s, loved that. There were moments when it felt distancing: how different his life had been. But, especially as I got older, I learned to savor the easy intimacy with the past that my father’s advanced age and keen memory offered me. He remembered a time before electricity! He called early sound movies “talkies”! When I tried on the new school clothes my mom had bought me and modeled them for him—a family tradition—he’d say, “Oh, that’s a very smart outfit.” It was 1930s lingo—“smart” was not how we praised clothes in the 1970s. Yet it was kind of impressive because it was coming from a man who had known some very smartly dressed stunners in his day, a man who’d kissed Carole Lombard and Loretta Young.
An older father—take comfort if you are one or are married to one—is at a gentle remove from Oedipal struggles, from overt generational conflict. It was nice, it was cozy, to be a teenager with a father who was vital but also white-haired and courtly. All through my sister’s and my own pimply, braces-wearing adolescences, on through the years when Cindy wore hiking boots every day and refused to shave her legs, and when I had a haircut that looked like Rod Stewart’s in the seventies, my father told us we were lovely, which is something that sticks with you. It’s shining armor a woman can don when she needs it the rest of her life.
Easter on Goodland Avenue, 1961, with Lyle holding baby me, and my siblings, Cindy, Steve, and David.
For my mother, the 1960s were a kind of second youth. She once told my sister that her happiest period as a parent was the years when her children were teenagers. Since that’s not a common refrain from parents, I figure that it’s partly because that’s when she got to experience some fun version of adolescence herself. She’d always been so responsible. When she was a teenager, she was working and helping to support her family, not to mention keeping peace between her parents. It wasn’t as though she ran wild in her second youth. She was staunchly anti-drug and she still never drank. But going on long barefoot walks after dinner with my sister and her friends, skipping down the street with me hand in hand, cranking the Doors up really loud while she cleaned the house: these were her little youth-culture rebellions, her be-ins, her flower power. When one of the neighborhood teenagers said something intolerant at the breakfast table, she poured a pitcher of orange juice over his head. But when Steve and his friend accidentally put laundry soap instead of dishwashing soap in the dishwasher and the whole kitchen filled with suds, she took one look, started to laugh, and got us all to come play in the bubbles. She had always been a person who made a gift of her own happiness to the people she loved: when she was happy, and especially when you had made her happy, she wanted you to know it right then. She wanted to tell you that you’d “made her heart sing.” And in her own way, she resonated with the emotional openness of the time, the spirit of letting the sun shine in. She didn’t want to shock people, exactly, but she liked surprising them a lot.
Once she was asked by a radio interviewer if she and Lyle had a song. “Yes,” she replied. “Maybe you know it. It’s called ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’” When my sister missed a day of high school to attend an antiwar demonstration, our mom wrote a note for her that said, “Please excuse Cindy’s absence yesterday. She was sick. Sick of War.” And she could never agree with the school when they chided Cindy for wearing her skirts too short. The girl had great legs, for goodness’ sake!
Some of her schemes were like wacky gimmicks from an I Love Lucy episode. One time she got the idea of filling our wood-paneled station wagon with balloons on which she had written risqué messages for my father. I think she’d read about it somewhere, in some article about keeping the spark in your marriage. Unfortunately the first person to get into the car was the very buttoned-down driving instructor from my brothers’ school who had come to the house to give David his lesson.
She loved holidays and was especially besotted with Christmas. One year when my father was doing a play in San Francisco during the Christmas week, and we were staying at the St. Francis Hotel, my mother dragged an enormous fir tree through the lobby to put in our room. That was the same Christmas when the stage manager of the play my father was in arranged a cast party that turned out to be at a topless bar. My whole family showed up there—I was five—and my mother took one look, laughed, then sat down at a table with me and ordered us two Shirley Temples. Another year, she decided the way to get the best tree in Los Angeles was to wake up very early and go down to the train station, where retailers from the Christmas tree lots got their trees. She took my cousins and my sister and me, along with a thermos of hot chocolate. It would have turned out fine except that you got the trees by auction, none of us knew what we were doing, and we all bid against one another, driving the costs up wildly.
In the crucible of our 1960s, Paula even transformed Lyle into a liberal Democrat. After he’d stopped drinking, politics was the one thing that continued to divide them—though the conflict flared up mainly during the presidential elections. My mother was a progressive Democrat, and fairly impassioned about it. Franklin Roosevelt was a real hero to her. Whenever I had to write a paper on some great figure in history, she’d press me to write about FDR or one of her other two heroes, Jonas Salk and Louis Pasteur. For presidential debates, she put us all in the car and took us to my grandparents’; they had a color TV before we did. (That’s where I went, in footed pajamas, to watch the annual broadcast of The Wizard of Oz, too.) In the 1960 election, my mother supported Adlai Stevenson during the primaries, then switched her allegiance to John Kennedy. Lyle was a Nixon man. He even took the kids to the Van Nuys Airport with him—
Paula pointedly stayed home—to greet Nixon when he arrived there once. It’s hard to say why, except that he was a reflexive Republican and, as my mother always said sotto voce, “from Nebraska.”
In the early 1950s in Hollywood, you had to be on one side or the other of the anti-Communist crusade, and Lyle had fallen into the anti side in part out of identification with the Screen Actors Guild. He didn’t do a whole lot about that, but he did a few things. When an actress named Anne Revere resigned from the SAG board in 1951, after refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether she’d ever been a Communist, Lyle was identified as a neutral party who could take her place—and he did. Steve remembers him watching the televised rallies led by a peculiar figure named Dr. Fred C. Schwarz, an Australian who would take over the L.A. Sports Arena for a few days to work Southern California into an anti-Communist lather. “The whole spectacle had this sort of dark, tacky feel to it. Roy Rogers and other actors would go down and testify. Dad never went, but he’d watch it on TV and get kind of worked up.” For a while he was doing a television show, The Real McCoys, with the actor Walter Brennan, who was very conservative and would send him home with piles of overheated literature about the Communist threat. Paula would dump the leaflets in the trash.
Gradually, his convictions started to shift. He had always been sympathetic to the civil rights movement. He turned against the Vietnam War—partly, no doubt, because he had draft-age sons and partly because the draft-age sons were so opposed to the war and so articulate about it. In the 1960s my father still liked to hold forth at the dinner table, to tell his long stories about old Hollywood, and David began to chafe against that. “He expected to set the tone, and he told those stories. And if you interrupted them at all, it was like interrupting a play. It was like, Who’s this heckler in the audience? So I was kind of a wiseass and I started to throw out these one-liners, getting everybody to laugh, and I think it began to hurt him. It began to rankle. He was intellectually somewhat un-self-confident, but he was a voracious reader and he had lived a very full life. So one afternoon, he took me into the den, and he said, ‘You know I’m not as educated as you are, but I know about the world.’”
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