The Fluttering Actress

There’s one thing I could never figure out watching Bewitched—was Aunt Clara really having trouble remembering her lines or was she acting?

I guess it’s still hard to say. Marion Lorne was playing confused people before she ever exchanged words on screen with Elizabeth Montgomery.

Lorne worked steadily on television through the 1950s. She was in the supporting cast of Mr. Peepers, she had a regular role on The Garry Moore Show, and she co-starred on a sitcom called Sally which had the misfortune of being scheduled opposite Jack Benny.

Let’s read what Lorne had to say about the whole matter in the days before she popped onto the set of Bewitched. This UPI column ran January 25, 1959.

Yes, Marion Lorne Is Not Always Like That
BY FRED DANZIG
NEW YORK (UPI)—"Is Marion Lorne always like that?"
The question comes up each time Garry Moore steps forth to chat with members of the studio audience after his Tuesday night show on CBS-TV.
By "that," the questioner refers, of course, to Miss Lorne's inspired performance as a fluttery, fluffy little old lady caught in the grip of acute befuddlement.
"I must listen to Garry's answer some day," said Miss Lorne. "I'm told he nods his head yes and shakes his head no. And he says, 'she knows everything she's doing.'
"But if they asked me," Miss Lorne added, "I'd say I think I'm the same always. I don't think I'm faking. Not at all."
This interviewer's answer to the question of what Miss Lorne is really like: she's a charming, lovable old pro whose jitters seem to diminish as distance from the TV camera increases. The panic now is an acting job more than Lorne realism, but some of it does stick off camera.
How did she get that way?
"I worry all the time. Big things, little things. I worry. And even when I'm convincing myself that it's silly to worry so much, I worry. Oh, my agent has a dreadful time getting me to make up my mind.
"I'm just a girl who can't say yes. I'm a mixed-up kid," said Miss Lorne, who was born in Wilkes Barre, Pa., some 71 years ago, but picked up her slight British accent in England. Before World War I, she and her playwright husband, the late William Hackett, went to England to do a play. They stayed 30 years, ran the Whitehall Theater in London, and returned to America in 1942.
While her ardent fans write letters demanding that she be given more to do on the Moore show, Miss Lorne seems quite happy with the brief spots she does. "I was hired as an interrupter. I was supposed to arrange everything, you know, and then have nothing come out right. But that could get dull week after week. So I just wander in now and do everything all wrong. Now, I just come in and say 'boo.' I find it very difficult to stop with one 'boo.' I want to say, 'Boo, boo, boo.'
"But I love everybody on the show—I adore Garry—so I do whatever they. And even though my part is small, I must be at rehearsals. It's just as much work. It's a strenuous routine. It's the routine that kills you in this awful TV," Miss Lorne said.
In March, the Moore crew will do three shows from Hollywood and Miss Lorne is looking forward to it.
"I was there last year and stayed in the same hotel as Sophia Loren. We kept getting each other's mail and phone calls. It was all so interesting for me. The phone would ring and I'd answer it and these charming gentlemen would say these things and it all sounded so enchanting, you know. Then I'd say something and they'd mumble and hang up. It was frightfully frustrating. I wonder how Sophia got on with my callers," said Miss Lorne.
Her approach to comedy acting is simple. "The more serious you are, the funnier you are when you play comedy. If you try to be funny, good night People who don't know me well try to give me comic hats to put on. I say no comic hat, no red nose, no dots over the eyes like a down. I can be just as funny without all that. Oh, my. Maybe that's not so good. Oh, my," Miss Lorne said. She said it with a smile—and a flutter.

Now, a little further back. The Associated Press interviewed her in 1957 and this column appeared on October 13th. It gives you a good idea of Lorne’s career, which dated almost from the turn of the century. She recreated the “Harvey” role for television opposite Art Carney in the lead.

Marion Lorne—Typical Featherbrain
By CYNTHIA LOWRY
(AP Newsfeature Writer)
NEW YORK (AP)—It is a pleasure to report that Miss Marion Lorne bears a remarkable resemblance to Mrs. Gurney of television's dear, departed "Mr. Peepers" show and to Mrs. Banford of the current "Sally" series.
Miss Lorne in the flesh, of course, is far from a charming idiot. But those wonderful vague, fluttery ladies she portrays bear the likeness of a caricature to the original.
There is a nice question—unanswered by the principal—whether this is because Miss Lorne has been playing scatterbrained females for so many years that the character has rubbed off a bit. Or whether she, a skillful comedienne, has shrewdly made a natural tendency a little bit larger than life.
Whatever the cause, Miss Lorne does tend to flutter a bit.
She laces her conversation liberally with "bless you." She wears a slightly harassed expression, as if the business of getting through a day was pretty confused and complex.
And she communicates magnificently by a combination of words, not necessarily complete sentences, plus gestures and facial expressions.
The meaning is completely clear to the listeners, although she doesn't provide very comprehensible quotes for literal newspaper writers.
No Easy Life
Life, however, has not been one long, joyous progression for the gentle, smiling little lady who, if the British "Who's Who in the Theatre" may be trusted, passed her 69th birthday last Aug. 12.

A successful, well-established stage star in London for three decades, 1943 found Miss Lorne back in New York, newly widowed, financially wiped out and 54 years old the age when most actresses " are thinking about plastic surgeons and fretting about chin lines.
A native of Wilkes Barre, Pa., Marion attended the American Academy of Dramatic Art, was a member of a Hartford, Conn., stock company and had made her Broadway debut before she married Walter Hackett, a newspaperman and playwright. One year she and her husband made a combined vacation and business trip to England, where one of his plays was being produced. They remained for 30 years.
Great Success
As a husband-wife team they were a great success. Hackett wrote plays carefully tailored to his wife's comedy abilities. They never had a show which ran less than 125 performances and by 1929 the Whitehall Theatre opened, virtually built just for his plays and her acting.
After war started and the blitz came, Hackett and his wife returned to the United States for a three months visit. Hackett died suddenly. War wiped out their fortune and Miss Lorne was alone, penniless and out of work in New York. That was 15 years ago and she still doesn't like to think about those days.
Wins Prize Role
In 1946, however, she won the Josephine Hull role in the national company of "Harvey" and played it long enough to establish an American acting reputation. Next came an unexpected summons from her old English friend, Alfred Hitchcock.
He wanted her to play the murderer's mother in "Strangers On a Train," and she told him forcefully she didn't think much of his casting. Hitch, however, persisted and now, after the critical notices, Miss Lorne thinks maybe he knew what he was about.
The Hitchcock part led her to the Peepers Show and that firmly established Miss Lorne as an American television star.
Her "Mrs. Gurney" replaced the Helen Hopinson lady as the typical matronly tea room customer figuring the size of the tip. With all her silliness, she was still warm, generous and lovable.
They've changed her name to Mrs. Banford, and she's impossibly rich in "Sally" (NBC-TV, Sunday, 7:30 P.M. EDT). But it's still Marion Lorne, playing her favorite role.
IN NEW YORK catching up on some live theater, changing apartments and getting some rest, Miss Lorne expressed one serious reservation about working in Hollywood. She said seriously, "I get up in the morning at 4:30, get to the studio at 6 and am made up and ready for work at 8. At night I get back to the hotel at 8:30 or 9 and am so tired I tumble straight into bed. "This is very difficult for one accustomed to sleeping comfortably into the morning and staying up late at night."
She likes the "Sally" series in which she co-stars with Joan Caulfield.
"They're sweet little things, I think. Of course, they're not designed to change the shape of the world, but they are good-humored and amusing and I think the whole family can get together to watch them. "I do think that's something don't you?"

Lorne was reviewed by the New York Press in March 1904, the same month she graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Art. The Morning Telegraph reported on the 11th: “[W]hen Miss Marion Lorne, as Bess Van Buren, in ‘The Charity Ball,’ said anything amusing, as she was expected to do about every other minute, there was a hearty and hilarious response in the lower left section of the orchestra circle, which indicated that the young woman’s friends were there in considerable force and one or two rows of seats.” 64 years later, she never heard the crowd’s final applause for her. She was awarded the Emmy for best supporting actress in a comedy series. Marion Lorne had died ten days before.