Margie

The 1950s were filled with sitcoms but I never warmed to very many of them, even the ones that remain incredibly popular today.

And it seems some of the stars of the 1950s were left behind there. Bob Cummings never got a series in the ‘60s. Eve Arden did, but her show never reached the heights of Our Miss Brooks. Same with Stu Erwin, reduced to an occasional role on a series that was cancelled after a year.

Then there was Gale Storm.

The woman with the improbable name (it was fake) had two sitcoms in the ‘50s, the second more popular than the first. They ended up in reruns in the next decade, but Storm never attempted a new series.

At the start of 1952, Storm wasn't sitting around. The Hollywood Reporter had stories about the production company she and husband Lee Bonnell operated, and that she had signed with James Schwartz Preoductions for a series of religious films. Finally, on May 20, the Reporter announced she would be co-starring with Charlie Farrell on the summer replacement My Little Margie. The series was quickly assembled as it debuted on June 16. A number of critics complained about the writing and situations of the debut episode, but the show climbed in the ratings and sponsor Philip Morris found a permanent place for it on the schedule.

Storm had settled into the role when the Detroit Free Press printed this feature story on May 24, 1953

'LITTLE MARGIE' RUNS INTO BIG TROUBLES
Gale Finds TV a Stormy Business
BY BETTELOU PETERSON
Free Press Staff Writer
Television can be hard on a girl.
In just over a year of playing "My Little Margie,' Gale Storm has met more hazards than a lady wrestler. She's had her nose broken, suffered a brain concussion and fainted from fright.
The fractured nose occurred when a bit player slammed a door in her face, the concussion was the result of a hit in the back of the head with a camera boom, the faint happened when a huge, balloon exploded in her face.
BUT FOR ALL the bad luck, Gale couldn't be happier than playing Margie. It was just over a year ago that Hal Roach, Jr., producer of the series, showed her the script of the proposed show in which she would play Charles Farrell's daughter. She liked the character of Margie immediately.
In June, 1952, when "Margie" replaced "I Love Lucy" for the summer, the critics landed on it and almost universally condemned it. But Gale said she "had a right feeling about the show."
It turned out she was right. By the end of the summer Margie had moved up to number three in the ratings. The public liked the show so well the sponsor moved it to a new spot on Thursday and started a radio version of the program. This year, Margie, both on radio and TV, will stay on during the summer.
BRIGHT-EYED Gale Storm is a lot like impish Margie off camera. But where Margie can't quite decide on her favorite beau, Gale is a dignified young matron. And where Margie can't quite make-up her mind about a career. Gale always had her eye on acting.
She was born Josephine Owaissa Cottle in Houston. Tex., in 1923 the youngest of three boys and two girls. Her middle name, given to her by a sister, is Indian for bluebird.
In 1939, at 16, she entered a national radio contest, "Gateway to Hollywood." The two winners were to receive movie contracts.
GALE DIDN’T care too much whether she won or not until she saw Lee Bonnell of Indianapolis In the boy's division. She says now, “I just knew he would win, he was so handsome. I wanted to win so I could meet him."
Lee did win, and so did Gale. Both were placed under contract by Universal Studios. In two years, on Gale's 18th birthday, Lee proposed and they were married.
Almost immediately, he was called into service and served four years in the Coast Guard. When he returned to civilian life, he went into the insurance business where he has been very successful.
TODAY THE Bonnells have three sons, Philip, 10, Peter, 7, and Paul, 6. They live in a white stucco ranch style house furnished in early American style. It's located in Sherman Oaks in San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles. Gale was recently elected mayor of Sherman Oaks.
Gale's TV filming and radio show keep her busy, but she leads a busy home life too. She enjoys cooking. (Her favorite dinner is ham, black-eyed peas, mustard greens and cornbread, a reminder of her Texas upbringing.)
ON SUNDAY, SHE teaches Sunday School at her San Fernando Valley church. She started six years ago with a kindergarten class and now teaches juniors.
Weekdays she uses any spare time she has taking singing lessons. Some of her movies were musicals, but she has an eye on opera.
Recently, she sang the lyric soprano role of the maid in Gian-Carlo Menotti's "The Old Maid and the Thief," presented by the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music.
Other times, she indulges in her hobby of oil painting. And it's not unusual to find her on a Saturday afternoon playing softball with her boys.
Gale Is five foot four inches tall, weighs 111 pounds. Her own brownette hair photographed too dark for television, so she is now a strawberry blonde. She'd rather young girls didn't know this because her fan mail shows the girls like to copy Margie's coiffure.

“Liked the character of Margie immediately”? Well, not quite. The passage of years allows one to tell a story that wouldn’t go over well at the time. Storm told the Copley News Service in 1974 that she didn’t like the script for the pilot because she “thought it smacked just a tiny bit of incest.” Producer Hal Roach, Jr. agreed to make some changes.

After her second show ended in 1960, she got out of the business because she “was tired.” Storm ended up performing on stage and raising her kids.

But there were problems, as she admitted in an interview with United Features, published Nov. 25, 1979.

Gale Storm Marks Return To TV After Long Absence
By Marilyn Beck
When Gale Storm showed up on the 20th Century-Fox lot to film the Nov. 3 segment of “Love Boat,” it marked her first TV acting appearance in 19 years. It was also going to mark, her friends assured her, the road to other work. “They said," said Ms Storm, “that I was sure to be asked to guest on ‘Fantasy Island,’ because both series are produced by Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg. Well, I'm still waiting to be asked — and am I ever available!”
Ms. Storm had been the darling of the airwaves in the '50s when she starred first in “My 'Little Margie,” and then “The Gale Storm Show” — filming a total of 269 half-hour films in a period of eight years.
On "The Gale Storm Show,” she portrayed a social director on a luxury liner, and considers it fitting that her return to TV should be aboard the “Love Boat” ship. And, she doesn't consider it at all peculiar that she's had to wait so long to make what she hopes will be her comeback trip.
“I don't blame anyone. People don’t see you working, so they assume you don’t want to work. I’ve been doing a lot of dinner theater engagements around the country, but nothing here in Hollywood. In Hollywood, they pretty much forgot about me.”
She also has spent much of the last five years trying to cure herself of alcoholism — a subject she mentions when she raises a glass of water to her lips, and a few drops fall on her lap. “When I used to drink vodka martinis, I was always telling people I spilled most of them. Of course, I didn't,” she said with a laugh.
What she was, she says, was “a very careful drinker. By that I mean I would never drive if I had been drinking, would never drink at work, because I have always respected my profession too much for that. And, oh, I was always careful never to drink in front of my three grown sons or my teen-age daughter.”
It was when she was alone or with her insurance agent-husband, Lee Bonnell, that Ms. Storm let her pretenses down and began to rely more and more on drink.
“I can't pinpoint any traumatic experience that got me started on alcohol,” she said. “I had absolutely no excuses — I had a wonderful supportive husband, a family who cared for me. And that made me feel worse. I was filled with guilt shame and disgust.”
She recalled that “until about five years ago, I had never been more than a social drinker. In the last five years, I spent time in three hospitals for alcoholic help — with absolutely no results. The feeling of shame and disgust got worse. Then, in January of this year, I went to the Raleigh Hills facility in Oxnard, Calif.”
She was discharged from that alcoholic rehabilitation center on Feb. 6, and “things have been wonderful ever since,” she said. So wonderful that — overcome with a sense of wanting to share her good fortune with others who might be suffering from alcoholism — she volunteered to cut a commercial for Raleigh Hills.
That commercial has been airing since August, and she said with a merry giggle, “It's amazing — the response. People I know said they never had any idea, even my own publicist.
Lauren Tewes plays the social director of ABC's “Love Boat,” and as Ms. Storm pointed out, “Well I was the Lauren Tewes of the '50s.”
Stepping back into the TV scene she left so long ago, Ms Storm. reveals “brought with it quite a few qualms. I didn't expect that it would. I told myself, ‘Certainly someone with your experience isn't going to get butterflies.’ But I did get them! They went away fast, though, because everyone in the cast, in the crew, was so terribly, terribly nice.”
More than anything else, the “Love Boat" guesting reminded her of how nice it was to work somewhere just a short drive from her Tarzana home.
“Out-of-town dinner theater performances have been wonderful experience,” she said. “You settle into a town for seven or eight weeks, and there’s usually a lovely condominium or apartment at your disposal.
“And my husband he's wonderful. He always manages to commute to wherever I'm appearing. But we both agree that it would be lovely.” The smiled ebbed, but her eyes still twinkled with delight as she added, “What has pleased me most, have been the strangers who've approached me to say my message has helped them.”
The 55-year-old actress still makes a weekly trip to Raleigh Hills, “for reinforcement. And because, well, sometimes new patients are so insecure, and it helps them to speak to someone who’s made it. Besides, I feel I owe the Raleigh Hills people so much. They took away my shame — taught me that alcoholism is a disease — one I could overcome.”
She considers it somewhat ironic that it is a commercial on alcoholism that has given her her greatest degree of fame in the last 19 years. After the long span of years since she last starred on TV she said, “I find it hard to believe that people remember me. That maybe someone, well, that anyone would be excited about meeting me.”
Cast Seemed Excited
She did get a kick out of the fact that the "Love Boat” team seemed excited, indeed, about meeting Gale Storm, and that “Lauren Tewes acted as if I were someone special.” If life could be settled, if I could drive to a Hollywood studio every day, if I could have another series, perhaps.”
And if not her own series, then at least some regular work on other performers’ shows.
“I'm ready! I’m willing! Let the town know that I’ve never been more available!” she said.

The Love Boat harboured guest stars who had seen better days, ones whom the elderly viewers may have been surprised were still alive. Storm ended up shooting three episodes, and continued with stage work, and a little bit of television. She went into detail about her boozing in a 1981 autobiography.

Bonnell died of a heart attack in 1986 and Storm re-married two years later in a ceremony covered exclusively by The National Enquirer. In her final two decades, she was more a “do you remember” subject in newspaper columns than anything else. She died in 2009 at the age of 87, with her son telling reporters she had been delighting in receiving mail from fans until the very end. The ‘50s were gone, but My Little Margie was not forgotten.