Before Endora

Agnes Moorehead’s name isn’t one you associate with ditzy dames.

But that was her typecasting at one time.

Yes, it was long before Bewitched and before Orson Welles cast her in the Mercury Players.

Here’s a feature story from February 2, 1936 in “Screen & Radio Weekly,” one of those weekend newspaper supplements. If you want to know some of her background, it’s revealed below. Yes, the word “witch” comes up.

She Admits She Doesn’t Like Her Work
Agnes Moorehead Longs to Escape ZaSu Pitts Roles
By Mary Jacobs
YOU'RE going to interview a radio star, young, feminine star.
You make your appointment, you get there on time, and after awhile SHE arrives. That's fine; you're glad she got there at all. So you get set to hear how wonderful her work is, how she loves, simply LOVES radio, how happy she was when she got her present role and how everything is perfectly adorable. She will probably wind lip by telling how, when she was 5 and making her debut in the Sunday school class play, she knew that she would never be happy unless she could become an actress and do just what she is doing now.
If she tells you just that, you sigh and shrug your shoulders; that's what you expected anyway. But if she tells you something else, tells you, in fact, just the opposite, that, folks, is something to write about. And that is what Agnes Moorehead told me.
Since Agnes came to radio in 1930, she has played one dizzy female role after another, including her present jobs. She is, you may know, one of Phil Baker's stooges on CBS, and the nosey Mrs. Van Alastaire Crowder on Helen Hayes' NBC show, "The New Penny." And how does she feel about it all?
"Invariably, when there is a pain-in-the-neck role for a girl to play, the directors start yelling 'Agnes.' And Agnes comes running, except once to while when I get so fed up that I refuse the job.
"If I could get just one decent dramatic role to play, it wouldn't be so bad. But do I get it? No! I’m ZaSu Pitts of the radio, and apparently I've got to keep on being ZaSu Pitts until my hair is white and the bones of my ringers rattle when I wring my hands."
WE WERE talking in Miss Moorehead's sitting room, a huge, paneled white room, very modern and not at all ZaSu Pitts-ish. She sat on a brown linen box-like sofa, one foot restlessly tapping the floor as she spoke. Dressed in a simple white flannel suit, trimmed with navy braid and a navy sailor tie, she looked about 18. Actually, she is in her twenties.
Tall, blue-eyed, titian-haired, Agnes Moorehead is the kind oi girl the men are just k-krazy about.
My first impression of her was that she was very aloof and self-contained. That was when I entered her apartment. But as she warmed to her subject this reticence left her. She went on:
"When I first got my chance on the air I felt grand. You would, too, if you were an unemployed actress down to your last nickel, and a job on the air landed like manna from heaven.
"I had pawned my diamond ring. I lived on oatmeal soup and apples. Nourishing enough," with a shrug of her shoulders, "but no diet for little Agnes.
"Joseph Bell, who had been one of my instructors at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, started to work for NBC and sent for me. He gave me the role of Sally, the tough girl in 'The Mystery House.' She was so tough she seemed worse than Capone to me. But I played the role for over a year.
"MY NEXT job," she said, "was as Lizzie Peters, the shrilly sharp-spoken New England spinster on the Seth Parker program. I toured with Phillips Lord in his Seth Parker show for 20 weeks." A smile lighted her face. "I got the thrill of my life then," she confessed. "Henry Ford entertained our troupe, and he danced with me. But that didn't make me like my role."
Agnes offered me a cigaret. "Don't mind my not smoking," she said; "just a remnant of my childhood days. I'm a Presbyterian minister's daughter. And if you are a minister's daughter, you don't smoke or do a lot of other things. "After the Seth Parker stint was finished," she continued, frowning at the fireplace in front of the sofa, "I tried my best to get a dramatic role on the air. I auditioned and auditioned.
"And I landed up as Nana, the most fluttery, helpless little half-wit who ever lived. I was Nana for three years, on the 'Evening in Paris' program. Somebody, with nothing but the best of intentions, I am sure, phoned CBS after the show one night. She wanted to talk to ZaSu Pitts, she insisted, 'But,' the attendants told her, 'Miss Pitts is in Hollywood.' She kept insisting that she had just heard the movie star broadcast from their New York studios.
"It wasn't till she mentioned Nana, on the 'Evening in Paris' program that they realized she thought I was ZaSu. Then all the directors began to say I was the ZaSu Pitts of radio—and I've been that ever since."
Looking up for a minute, she smiled briefly at me, then her eyes wandered back to the fire again. "When Mr. Griffith, the famous movie producer who had discovered ZaSu went on the air,'' she continued, "he clinched matters. He wanted someone to impersonate ZaSu." Dozens of actresses were tried out, including Agnes Moorehead.
After he had heard her, he said, "She's more like ZaSu than ZaSu is herself. It's amazing."
"YOU KNOW," Miss Moorehead told me, "I almost did play one swell emotional role on the air.
"I was ambling through the halls at NBC when a director came running out of one of the studios and literally pulled me after him.
“'You've got to help us out,' he gasped. 'Miriam Hopkins hasn't appeared for the dress rehearsal of her program, and the sponsor's listening in. Please, Miss Moorehead, go in and act for all you're worth. The sponsor must be pleased.'”

It was an original dramatic sketch prepared for Miss Hopkins. Agnes Moorehead did her best. The sponsor was pleased. Everyone patted her on the shoulder and said she was superb.
But that was only for the dress rehearsal. When the show went on the air that night, Miss Hopkins played the role. No one outside the studio ever heard of Agnes' acting!
"I almost got a break that time," she told me, grimacing, "but almost doesn't count."
Just then a tall, slim, blond young man entered the room, smiled at me, and said to Miss Moorehead, "I'll be back at 6," as he leaned over and kissed her goodby.
"That's my husband, John G. Lee," she said. "We met when we both attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He's in the movies. And the swellest person you ever met."
Agnes glanced at her wrist watch. "Goodness," she exclaimed, "I'm due for rehearsal at NBC in 10 minutes. I've become so engrossed in talking about myself I’ve forgotten all about time. Do you want to come along to the rehearsal? It wouldn't take long, and we can finish our chat there."
The NBC Studios are just a few blocks from Miss Moorehead's apartment. We walked quickly, and soon we were in one of the small rehearsal studios on the third floor of the NBC Building. There were about 10 actresses sitting in a semi-circle. The production man sat in front at a table with his assistant.
I retreated to the piano stool. They were rehearsing for "Dot and Will," that long-lived sustaining feature at NBC. Perhaps you listen in. If so, you'll recognize Agnes as Rosie, the wholesome, ordinary housewife. She doesn't like that role, either.
Soon she had said her few lines in the day's program, and we sat outside in the lobby.
"TELL ME, was there any single role in radio you really liked?" I asked her.
"Yes." she told me, "Jeanne, the sweet ingeriue on ‘The Lady Next Door’ program. Of course it wasn't a particularlv dramatic part, but Jeanne was a nice girl instead of a witch-like female. That lasted over a year.
"I also played," she added smilingly, "the role of Betty on that program and Betty was as nasty a cat as ever lived."
“What is the most unsympathetic female role you've ever played?” I asked.
"I think my present role of Mrs. Crowder on the Helen Hayes show," she said. "I am the most terrible, malicious old cross-patch you ever heard of.
"For sheer hopelessness, though, I think my role at CBS with the Street Singer, a few years ago, was the worst. I was Lonesome Lulu, the original wallflower.
“When I was a youngster,” she told me, "everyone thought I'd turn out that way. I had a martyr complex as a child. I longed to attend the parties my classmates gave. But I was a minister's daughter. I couldn't stay out after 9:30 at night till I went to college. I never went to a dance till I was grown up and away from home."
YOU can imagine what went on in the Moorehead household when Agnes, a naturally gifted dancer, secretly tried out and was accepted for the ballet of the St. Louis Municipal Opera Co., when she was 15. And you can imagine how her family felt when, a few years later, she announced she was going to be, not a school teacher, but an actress!
"I came to New York to study at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts," she said. “I felt I could do as I wanted. I liked acting better than dancing that was all there was to it."
She graduated in 1929, in the heart of the depression. "John and I, without a-cent between us, got married as soon as we graduated. And then * * *
“I had an awful job getting placed,” she said, "I got my first job by pestering Al Woods, the producer, till he got so tired of seeing me around he gave me the part of the French maid in 'Scarlet Pages.'
"When that ended, I couldn't find any work to do. Aside from a few brief engagements in dizzy parts, like the Hindu in 'Soldiers and Women,' I was at liberty all the time."
Then along came radio.
"I think radio is O. K.," Miss Moorehead concluded, "but how I would like to be something besides a hard-hearted Hannah, a lunatic and Dumb Dora combined."

Things changed quickly. Let’s move ahead a few years, with this feature piece in the May 3, 1943 edition of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Virginia Wright
Drama Editor
Agnes Moorehead has come to accept it as a compliment when people remark, on meeting her for the first time, that she’s not at all what they expected.
Her red hair and freckles invariably come as a surprise to those who think of her as the stern faced mother of the boy Kane in “Citizen Kane” or as the hysterical maiden aunt of young Amberson in “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
The fact that she looked entirely unlike her former self in “Big Street,” as the wife of Eugene Pallette, was completely discounted by the public. They decided she was someone else, and one producer, at least, put her down in his memory as Alina MacMahon.

In “Journey Into Fear,” currently at the Hawaii, Agnes Moorehead is back in character as the shrewish wife of a phony radical, and in “Jane Eyre” she plays the cruel Mrs. Reed.
The comedy talents of Agnes Moorehead have been completely unexplored since she came to Hollywood with other members of the Mercury Players to appear with Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane.”
It probably would be hard to convince local producers that the actress once toured the country in support of such comedians as Phil Baker and Lew Lehr.
Special fame
The Phil Baker tour, one of the vaudeville shows staged in the summer by radio companies, brought Miss Moorehead a very special kind of fame. Her part in the proceedings demanded that she execute “three bumps.”
When the show played Boston where Sunday blue laws existed, a special performance had to be given for the censor. All material in questionable taste was eliminated there on Sundays. In this case, however, the censor did not eliminate Miss Moorehead’s three burlesque routines. “Never,” he said, “have I seen such ladylike bumps.”
If Miss Moorehead is a “Puritan at heart,” as she has been labeled in the past, it probably can be put down to the fact that her father was a Presbyterian minister.
And like most minister's daughters she was on display from an early age. She was singing in the St. Louis opera house—in the chorus—when she was 12. And in 1923 she did her first stint on radio singing for reception on the old crystal sets.
Educated at a small Ohio college and at the University of Wisconsin, Agnes Moorehead turned from singing to the serious business of acting when she enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
It was there she met and married Jack Lee (who just completed the role of an American radio correspondent in Columbia's “Appointment in Berlin”). Since the days of the Academy they have never played together. In the commercial theater Agnes Moorehead seemed always to be cast in character parts, while Jack Lee drew juvenile roles.
Introduction to radio
Even in radio Miss Moorehead's first audition in 1929 was for the part of an old lady. But as her career in that field progressed she became the most versatile actress on the air.
Beatrice Lillie, whom she supported in radio, once remarked that Agnes Moorehead has the best sense of timing of any comedienne I have known." Miss Moorehead's best imitations. Incidentally, are of that British star.
Agnes Moorehead was with Helen Hayes on all the Campbell soup programs. When they did Jane Eyre" on the air Miss Moorehead played five characters, Including the Mrs. Reed she plays in the picture.
It was in radio that she became acquainted with Orson Welles, and became one of the original members of the Mercury Players, working with him in the WPA theater project, on the commercial stage and in radio. When Welles came to Hollywood he brought his Mercury Players along. It was a gamble for them, of course. Miss Moorehead had won a big name for herself in radio and she had no way of knowing what kind of success she would meet in motion pictures. She decided, however, to take the chance, and Hollywood rewarded her last year with the nomination for supporting actress Academy award.
It was inevitable that Agnes Moorehead would be called back into radio on this coast. She is on the Lionel Barrymore show and the Lockheed program. And now that radio has rediscovered her, perhaps Hollywood will recognize her versatile talents.

Of course, film roles came, and so did television. In 1967, she was nominated for Emmys in comedy and drama categories, and won in the latter. No one was comparing her to ZaSu Pitts any more.