June 29, 2009
Gale Storm, 87, Is Dead; Earned Television Fame for Her Wholesome Roles
By ANITA GATES
Gale Storm, the Texas-born actress who made wholesome perkiness a defining element of television’s golden age on two hit sitcoms, “My Little Margie” and “The Gale Storm Show,” died Saturday at a convalescent hospital in Danville, Calif., according to a representative of the hospital. She was 87.
Ms. Storm had been a B-movie actress for more than a decade when “My Little Margie” had its premiere on CBS in June 1952 as a summer replacement for the era’s biggest hit series, “I Love Lucy.” Ms. Storm played a young Manhattanite living with her widowed father (Charles Farrell), an affluent businessman, and often trying to keep amorous single women away from him. Critics dismissed the show as silly, but the public disagreed and the series ran for three full seasons.
A year later Ms. Storm returned to television with another sitcom, “The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna.” The title character was a social director on a cruise ship who, with her beautician sidekick (ZaSu Pitts), regularly confounded the ship’s stuffy captain and, every third episode, burst into song (a condition of Ms. Storm’s contract). The show ran from 1956 to 1960.
During the same decade Ms. Storm had a successful recording career, with a gold record for “I Hear You Knockin’ ” and other pop hits including “Teenage Prayer,” “Tell Me Why” and “Dark Moon.”
After her decade of television fame, Ms. Storm turned to stage work in Las Vegas and to regional theater. But she also battled alcoholism in the 1970s and wrote about her struggle in her 1981 autobiography, “I Ain’t Down Yet.”
“I was the star of my own cornball B movie,” she wrote, alluding to her success and her stable, happy home life, “and suddenly it turned into a horror story.” She gave the credit for her recovery to a California hospital’s aversion-therapy program.
Josephine Owaissa Cottle was born on April 5, 1922, in Bloomington, Tex., a small town near the Gulf of Mexico. She was the youngest of five children (an older sister suggested her middle name, an American Indian word for bluebird). Her father, a potter, died when Josephine was a year old, and her mother became a seamstress to make ends meet.
The family moved to Houston, where Josephine was active in high school dramatics. Two teachers there persuaded her to enter the Gateway to Hollywood talent contest, sponsored by the producer Jesse L. Lasky, RKO Radio Pictures and Wrigley, the chewing gum manufacturer.
In 1939 she won the local competition and traveled with her mother to Hollywood, where she won the national prize, which included the preordained screen name Gale Storm and an RKO contract. In a fairy tale twist, she also met and fell in love with the contest’s male winner, Lee Bonnell, a young actor from Indiana. She married him in 1941.
Ms. Storm made her film debut in the boys’ boarding school drama “Tom Brown’s School Days” (1940), starring Cedric Hardwicke. But RKO soon canceled her contract, and the three dozen or so movies she made during the next decade were less than artistic triumphs.
They included “Freckles Comes Home” (1942), an action-comedy-romance in which the “Our Gang” star Johnny Downs played the title role; “Revenge of the Zombies” (1943), which involved Nazis in Louisiana; “Sunbonnet Sue” (1945), a musical comedy about a tavern owner’s daughter; and “Curtain Call at Cactus Creek” (1950), a comic western with Donald O’Connor.
“Where Are Your Children?” (1943), an early treatment of juvenile delinquency starring Jackie Cooper, garnered some positive attention. She played opposite the cowboy star Roy Rogers in three films, including “Red River Valley” (1941). But her personal favorites among her films were “It Happened on Fifth Avenue” (1947), a holiday comedy with Don DeFore, in which she was cast as a millionaire’s daughter, and “The Dude Goes West” (1948), a Western comedy with Eddie Albert.
After her second series went off the air, Ms. Storm’s screen-acting career largely ended. She did two episodes of “Burke’s Law” in the 1960s and one of “The Love Boat” (considered something of an “Oh! Susanna” copycat) in 1979. Her final screen appearance was on the CBS drama series “Murder, She Wrote,” playing a bridegroom’s mother in a 1989 episode.
Ms. Storm’s marriage to Mr. Bonnell, who abandoned his acting career early on and became an insurance executive, lasted until his death in 1986. They had four children. In 1988 she married Paul Masterson, a former ABC television executive, who died in 1996.
She is survived by three sons, Phillip, Peter and Paul; a daughter, Susie; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
In her memoir, Ms. Storm looked back on her greatest success, “My Little Margie,” and the difficulties of doing a weekly series for several years.
“I’d get tired, but I’d wake up every morning looking forward to the day’s work,” she wrote. “I think that the secret to happiness is being surrounded by people you love and having work that you look forward to doing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/arts/television/29storm.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print
