More Than Hazel

At first, it would seem ridiculous that a woman who won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Tony for a heavily dramatic role in Come Back, Little Sheba would be cast in a light-weight domestic sitcom on TV. But Hazel was far from Shirley Booth’s first stab at comedy. For that, you have to go back to radio and “Where the Elite Meet to Eat.”

Here’s a feature column from the Associated Press, Sept. 17, 1961.

Shirley Booth Late to TV
By CYNTHIA LOWRY
HOLLYWOOD — The last time Shirley Booth had a continuing role in broadcasting was 20 years ago when she played Miss Duffy, the waitress, in radio’s great and well-remembered Duffy’s Tavern.
On September 28, Miss Booth comes to television as the star of NBC’s Hazel, a situation comedy revolving about the maid who runs the Baxter family with an iron glove on a velvet hand.
Between Miss Duffy and Hazel, she has become one of the great stars of the American stage and screen, winner of a bucketful of acting awards, including an Oscar and the official title of “world’s best actress,” for her performance in “Come Back, Little Sheba.”
Booth fans may legitimately be a little nervous about the vehicle which will bring this versatile performer into their living rooms each week. Hazel was born as a cartoon character in a weekly magazine in 1942 and has been appearing regularly ever since. It is hard enough to give life to a cartoon character. It is even harder when the background is upper-middle-class family life, so thoroughly explored in TV comedy it has become a cliche.
Miss Booth, however, feels confident and calm.
“I guess I’m a little late getting into weekly television,” she said, almost apologetically. “But then I always get in at the tail-end of everything. But as long as I’m occupied and busy with plays, I’m perfectly content.”
She has had Hazel on her mind for several years, however, Ted Key, the cartoonist who created the character, wrote a play about his brainchild several years ago and presented it to Miss Booth.
“I didn’t feel that it was right—I thought even then that one play was not as good for Hazel as an episodic medium.
“But once we were under way, the thing I had to do was get some depth, a different dimension to her character. The comedy will take care of itself, but the problem was to give her warmth. The only really important job of the actress is to get the audience interested in and caring about the character.”
‘Create a Character...’
Key’s job as a magazine cartoon-1st is to produce one laughter-evoking picture a week. Miss Booth’s job in creating a flesh-and-blood Hazel was “to create a character, not a caricature.”
“So the audience won’t always laugh,” she continued seriously. “That would ruin everything. To build up comedy, you must build up some protection around the funny lines. You must have arid spaces—a desert—before you can have an oasis. So you must have contrast to humor to make it effective.”
Now in her early 50s, Shirley Booth has been an actress since she was 12 and joined a Hartford, Conn., stock company.
In 1925 she was the ingenue (with Humphrey Bogart, another youngster) in the Broadway production of “Hell’s Bells.” In 1939 she won critical notices that topped those of Katharine Hepburn for her acting in “The Philadelphia Story.” But although the rave notices—for serious parts and for comedy—rolled in over the years, stardom came with “Come Back, Little Sheba” in 1950, when she played the poignant, lost Lola Delaney in the Broadway play.
Has Two Poodles
A small, round-faced woman with a quiet wit and easy smile, Miss Booth has hedged her Hollywood bets. She continues to maintain her New York City apartment, is having an addition built on her Cape Cod home—and is sharing her apartment-hotel quarters with her two poodles, “Prego” and “Grazia.”
Her marriage to comedian Ed Gardner ended in divorce in 1942—and it also ended the best years of his Duffy’s Tavern because she left the cast. She subsequently married investment broker W. H. Baker Jr. who died 10 years ago. “I keep very busy,” she confided. “My emotional life now? You can see the answer to that easily: I own two poodles.”

Booth’s Hazel caught the eyes of viewers. Among them were Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, always looking for sources for new cartoon characters. In 1962, The Jetsons debuted. Just as they tagged The Honeymooners on The Flintstones, TV critics equated The Jetsons with Hazel, thanks to Jean Vander Pyl’s portrayal of the robot maid, Rosey, who suspiciously sounded like Booth’s Miss Duffy. Writers had her calling George Jetson “Mr. J,” just as Hazel addressed her boss as “Mr. B.”

There is only so much you can do in a domestic sitcom, and Hazel staved off disappearing from prime time in 1965 by switching networks and replacing almost all of the cast. Hazel polished the silver for one more season. Booth had been hospitalised for exhaustion and likely didn’t want to carry on with a weekly series.

Better make that “weakly” series. The new Mr. B., Ray Fulton, complained to Dick Kleiner of the Newspaper Enterprise Association that the scripts stunk; they were full of basic grammatical errors, plot flaws and repetitions, and sloppy writing. “What’s amazing,” he said, “is how Shirley Booth can make something out of nothing. It has been an education to watch her work.”

The Associated Press talked to her again after the cancellation. This is from April 16, 1966:

Shirley Booth Chooses ‘Menagerie’ Role on TV
By CYNTHIA LOWRY
HOLLYWOOD (AP)—A Hollywood trade paper recently carried a note that a producer of a television series was trying to get Raymond Burr, whose “Perry Mason” series recently came to an end, to play a trial lawyer in one episode. It is extremely doubtful that, no matter how attractive the series, money or role, Burr could be persuaded to take the assignment. This is typecasting, more dreaded by actors than a low Nielsen rating.
“Well,” said Shirley Booth with a smile as she concentrated on maneuvering her hardtop into a right-hand lane for a turn onto Sunset Boulevard, “nobody has offered me any parts as a domestic.”
Miss Booth, an Oscar winner—“Come Back Little Sheba”—and a three-time winner of Broadway’s “Tony,” has wound up five busy years of playing the title role in “Hazel,” a comedy that earned her an “Emmy” as well.
* * *
The first assignment she accepted was the lead in a CBS special, Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” which will be produced in London in October for broadcast early in December.
“Of course, I’ve been offered lots of guest star roles,” she continued, moving into the noon-hour stream of traffic. “And some series. I really don’t want to get into another series but I’m very reluctant to say ‘never’ about anything because something might come along and I’ll change my mind.”
When the chance to do the Williams play turned up, she said, she was even reluctant about that, at first.
“I remember Laurette Taylor in the Amanda part,” she said. “I remember that performance so vividly — she really contributed something important to theater with it. I didn’t feel as if I wanted to take on something in which I’d just be doing an imitation of somebody else.”
She drove into a driveway of a handsome little house on a hillside in a secluded section and there followed a leisurely luncheon in the patio. One eye was on the clock, however, for she was due back at the studio in midafternoon to wind up chores on a two-hour film, “Package Deal” she is making for NBC’s “World Premiere” series next season.
“I also decided to do this film, even though it broke into my Cape Cod summer,” she continued. Pleasant parts — women with humor and wholesome outlooks — are hard to find these days, and I just didn’t feel like playing a lady drunk or a woman of loose morals and those parts are all over the place now.”
* * *
Meanwhile, re-runs, of “Hazel” will be on television channels all over the lot—which provides a painless steady income for the star.
Miss Booth, still remembered fondly as “Miss Duffy” in radio’s immortal “Duffy’s Tavern” and as a musical comedy star of Broadway’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” has four homes.
Her voting residence is the hillside house in Los Angeles. For weekends and holidays in winter, there is her recently acquired desert home beyond Palm Springs. Back East she has her summer home in Chatham on the Cape, plus the co-op apartment she owns in New York.
A widow, she enjoys movie and theater going, does a little Sunday-type painting, collects antiques, and is a passionate art collector. Most of all, though, she likes acting.

There were plenty of pre-broadcast newspaper publicity interviews by Booth for The Glass Menagerie. She got an Emmy nomination for that role, too.

One more sitcom awaited Booth. She played a widow in A Touch of Grace, that ran on ABC in 1973. Why did she come back to television? She told a press junket (as reported in the Omaha World-Herald) she had read the scripts for three series and preferred Grace. “I like the regimentation of doing the show, because I like to be a certain place at a certain time. For a lonely woman, it’s nice to have a built-in family.”

The show had a very good cast—J. Pat O’Malley, Warren Berlinger and the wonderful Marian Mercer—but eked out only 13 episodes. The finale featured a monologue by Grace to a table that represented her late husband’s gravestone. O’Malley and producers Saul Turteltaub and Bernie Orenstein cried when Booth rehearsed the scene and, as reported by Cecil Smith of Los Angeles Times syndicate, the two long-time TV show-runners quietly marvelled to each other about her acting abilities.

Booth decided to retire not much later and lived until the age of 94, passing away in 1992.