A Mother To Many

There are people who appeared on TV screens so often at one time, it was almost impossible to remember when you first saw them.

One is Rosemary DeCamp.

Since I grew up in the 1960s, I probably saw her first on That Girl. Or maybe it was on Petticoat Junction. By then, she had been around a long time. DeCamp grew up in Jerome, Arizona, and appeared on stage in Phoenix for the first time in October 1927. Next, she enrolled in Mills College in Oakland in the late ‘20s and continued to appear on stage.

In 1935, she was in New York and not only assisting the drama critic of the Journal-American, but was heard on the CBS network supporting singer Frank Parker in a show for Atlantic Refining. It wasn’t long before her biggest radio break—playing next to Jean Herscholt on Dr. Christian.

As time ticked on, she signed a motion picture contract during World War Two and was handed mother roles. She was still playing them 20 years later on TV.

This story appeared in papers starting around June 2, 1967

Rosemary Has Knack With Mother Roles
By DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Rosemary DeCamp, a fine-looking figure of a lady, has that special isolated knack that seems to fit her for the role of playing someone’s mother or sister.
At the moment she is playing Mario Thomas’ mother in “That Girl” and before that she was Bob Cummings’ sister (and, at the same time, Dwayne Hickman’s mother) in the old series of fond memory when Cummings as a photographer, with all the models, seemed to be occupied so often in the darkroom.
“It’s been nine years now since the Bob Cummings Show was on TV,” Miss DeCamp said, “and still people see me in public and they recognize me and they wonder why is it that I’ve aged in those nine years when, of course they obviously haven’t. And people sidle up to me and ask me about Bob Cummings. ‘How old is he really?’ they want to know. And I say ‘Oh he’s a man of great talent. By the way have you seen me lately in ‘That Girl’?”
And long before the Bob Cummings show in the early 1940s, there was Rosemary DeCamp playing James Cagney’s mother in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and Ronald Reagan’s mother in “This Is The Army” — using a very heavy makeup job since she is, it turns out, younger than the aforementioned men.
Still, as Rosemary notes, portraying someone’s mother is less a matter of makeup than of demeanor, of stance and attitude.
"I have this nonaggressive, motherly look,” Rosemary concedes with a mock frown. “In characterization, I go for the mother everybody would like to be — that I’d like to be, too, with my four daughters.
“We all fail, I suppose, but it’s good to try. Now, as Bob Cummings’ sister, I was Miss Practical, saying, ’Oh come on!’ to Bob, who was the perpetual dreamer. Ah, but every woman with a dreamer for a husband or brother or son could identify with me.”
ROSEMARY was taking her ease with a pre-luncheon vodka and tonic, just before accepting an award from the California Federation of Women’s Clubs. For the last 15 years, she has voiced the commercials on "Death Valley Days,” the most durable Western of them all — “They call me the 21st mule,” she says — along with playing an occasional role as some cowpoke’s mother.
She is a great booster for the series. “The Old West, you know, wasn’t really settled by men,” Rosemary said. “The women did the settling.

“The men were all too busy fighting one another, but before they knew it their women were planting gardens and having kids and organizing an early PTA and then when the men went back into the house to get some more ammunition — lo the West was settled.”
Rosemary DeCamp is herself a product of the West, born in Prescott, Ariz., the daughter of a mining engineer. “You know about Bodie, once a big mining center and now a ghost town off the highway as you get near Death Valley.
“My grandmother and grandfather were married there in Bodie. Very beautiful woman, my grandmother, but there was always some question in the family as to just what she was doing in a town like Bodie.
“Grandfather was a wetback from Canada — by that I don’t mean he swam across the Great Lakes but he did sneak across the border. His name was DeChamps but he figured, when he hit the West, that was too fancy a name for a miner. So he called himself DeCamp instead. Which led in time to Rosemary DeCamp. Sounds like a stripper doesn’t it?”
THE WIFE of Superior Court Judge John Shidler, Rosemary is a woman of many sides and undoubtedly the only actress equipped with a masters degree in psychology (from Mills College).
Several years ago, she spent four months in Pakistan in a State Department cultural exchange program, lecturing on drama and poetry while her husband spoke on law at Pakistani universities.
She’s a member of the fund-raising arm of the USO. She’s written newspaper columns and a successful children’s book entitled “Here Duke!” and she’s won awards for her enameling.
And long ago in the pleistocene age of TV, she played wife to Jackie Gleason in a series which later in form and concept would form the basis for “The Honeymooners.” The show won the very first Emmy in 1949.
“Jackie,” Miss DeCamp, recalled “stayed sober, he dieted, he was nice and he was awfully funny. He was always so shiny and immaculate and, the odd things that you remember, he always smelled so nice.
“We had a producer who shelled out to buy caps for Jackie's teeth. Well, he and Jackie got embroiled in a big feud and this producer would yell at Jackie, ’Remember, Gleason every time you smile — you’re smiling with my TEETH!”

About the original Riley TV show, DeCamp told Arizona Republic columnist Maggie Savoy in 1962: “Nobody had any sets; we shot our ‘Life of Riley’ series with two cameras and old radio scripts. It was rugged: We’d shoot 50 pages of dialogue every five days. But we invented many techniques that are in use today—and walked off with the first Emmy award.”

She had more to say about Riley and playing a mother in this syndicated column from April 8, 1967. Evidently the “teeth” story played well with the media.

Sabu To Marlo Thomas, She’s Forever A Mom
By RICHARD K. SHULL
She'd probably give you a belt in the chops if you said it to her face, but Rosemary DeCamp is the mother of television.
For more than a quarter-century, she's been the Hollywood image of the all-American mom. Way back in 1942, before the first of her own four daughters was born, she played Jimmy Cagney's mother in the movie "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Cagney was colder than Rosemary.
Her dozens of celluloid progeny range from Sabu to her current child, Marlo Thomas, in the "That Girl" TV series.
Of course, that's not to consider her radio mom roles in her earlier days during the 17 years she also played Jean Herscholt's nurse on the "Dr. Christian" series.
For the past 15 years, she's been the motherly pitchwoman from U.S. Borax Co.'s products on TV, even using her own children as props in the early days.
"I had the first TV commercial contract with the Screen Actors Guild," she said. "It's historical now, but at the time I was looked down upon for doing commercials because I was still doing feature films."
Now the members of the Screen Actors Guild draw more than one-third of their combined incomes from TV pitchwork, and the actors scramble for the privilege of commenting on "really good draft-brewed beer" or declaring "boss, you have bad breath."
The change in attitude on commercials is only one of many passing moods Miss DeCamp has witnessed in her long career.
Sitting at lunch, she recalled one of her earliest ventures into a TV series—"that was in 1949 when there were 47,000 sets in the country," she said.
"Jackie Gleason and I did 26 episodes of 'The Life of Riley.' That show won the first Emmy for filmed TV in 1950."
Gleason? "Life of Riley?"

"Yes, Jackie Gleason. I'd already done the movie version with Bill Bendix [in 1949], but Bill wouldn't stoop to nickelodeon TV in those days. So they brought in this unknown from New York," she recalled.
"Jackie was marvelous. He had no temperament. He was a quiet, hard-working guy. Of course, the show itself was a nightmare. In the 26 weeks we filmed, we ran through eight directors and five cameramen. One director committed suicide, but I don't know if it was because of the show," she said.
"Irving Brecher was the producer, and he paid to have Jackie's teeth capped. When he'd get mad at Jackie, he'd say, 'Remember, when you smile, that's my smile.’
Jackie told him, 'I'll never mention your name again.' If you've ever noticed, in any biographies of Jackie or in his interviews, he never mentioned 'Life of Riley' or Irving Brecher," Rosemary said, smiling with her own teeth.

Later on TV, DeCamp played Shirley Jones’ mother on The Partridge Family and Buck Rogers’ mother in an episode of the 1981 series. In the movies, she was George Gershwin’s in Rhapsody in Blue. There was one other mother DeCamp almost played. She was signed by Leonard Stern (who had his own Gleason connection as writer on his variety show) in 1975 to portray Patty Duke’s mother and “no-nonsense” landlord in a sitcom co-starring Duke’s husband, John Astin. It evidently went nowhere.

When Bea Benaderet was ill, she filled the “mom” breach on Petticoat Junction as Aunt Helen. Perhaps she was simply too busy to be a permanent addition to the cast when Benadaret died; June Lockhart was hired instead. She was exhibiting her copper enamelling work, raising money for the USO and active in the Democrat Party. On top of that, her memoirs, Tales From Hollywood was turned into an audio book.

Despite all that, the Institute of Family Relations once granted her its Mother of Distinction award for doing “more to glorify American motherhood through her film portrayals than any other woman.”

She died of pneumonia at age 90 in early 2001.