When the long-running sitcom Bewitched
(1964-1972) segued into syndication the year after its cancellation,
a whole new generation of fans began to discover it during the
afternoon and early evening hours. However, since black & white
was perceived to be passe and less desirable (except in cases such as
I Love Lucy, Perry Mason and The Addams Family, to name a few), many
TV stations chose to air mostly (or only) the color episodes of
seasons three through eight. Due to this, a great many youngsters
missed out on the chance to witness one of the most side-splitting
creations ever to hit the tube: the role of Gladys Kravitz as
portrayed by Alice Pearce. They tended to be far more familiar with
the second Gladys, Sandra Gould.
Before we get to that, though, we're
going to start at the beginning, when a little girl named Alicia
Pearce was born (as an only child) to a bank vice president and his
wife in New York City on October 16th, 1917. Her father's
business occasioned the family to reside in various parts of Europe,
where Pearce was educated. The sporadic movement from school to
school (country to country!) created an ease with strangers while her
solitude as the only youth at home sparked imagination.
Returning to “The Big Apple” as a
teen, Pearce then attended Sarah Lawrence College where she studied
until graduation in 1940. She (now going by the abbreviated Alice)
next began to find work in summer stock theatre and parlayed a rubber
face (unique and not conventionally attractive) into many
well-received nightclub gigs. Eventually, her riotous comedic skills
led her to a featured part in the Broadway revue New Faces of 1943.
(Another face in this crowd belonged to John Lund, seen to her right in the front row, who went on to
minor fame in Hollywood.)
Several months after the closure of New
Faces, Pearce won a featured role in the 1944 Broadway production of
On the Town, a Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical
about three sailors on leave in New York, each finding love along the
way. Pearce's comic role was of a sniffle-ridden blind date (not pictured) to one of
the sailors who winds up landing a wealthy judge by the end. Though
it was a non-singing part, it was memorable and would lead to
considerable success for her in the not-too-distant future.
The show closed in 1946 and she
proceeded to entertain in nightclubs, many engagements arranged by
the new love in her life, songwriter John Rox. (Rox penned “It's a
Big Wide Wonderful World” and “I Want a Hippopotamus for
Christmas.”) The two were married in 1948, a year in which she
appeared twice more on Broadway in Look, Ma, I'm Dancin' and Small
Wonder. Both On the Town and Look, Ma had starred the diminutive
Nancy Walker and the two would work together again later.
In 1949, Pearce even hosted her own
brief TV variety series, a fifteen-minute mix of comedy and music
that aired on Friday nights for a couple of months. However, far
bigger things were in store. That same year, MGM was putting together
the movie version of On the Town, to be co-directed by Stanley Donen
and Gene Kelly. While studio chief Louis B. Mayer disliked the
original play and had much of it reworked, Kelly was spellbound by
Pearce and insisted on using her in the movie. As a result, she was
the sole holdover from the Broadway production to be featured in On
the Town (1949.)
The role of her character's ultimate
beau, Judge Pitkin W. Bridgework (which I happened to have played
myself on a local stage!) was eliminated in the movie, but Pearce was
still given a fair amount of screen time and made a strong impression
as the perennially-sniffling blind date.
Strangely, considering the popularity
of On the Town and the effectiveness of her performance, it would be
three years before her next movie. However, she was hardly idle. She
was part of the original cast of Carol Channing's Broadway hit
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (she's seen here at a cast album recording
session) and began to appear on more television such as Lux Video
Theatre and Goodyear Playhouse.
1952 brought her second film, The Belle
of New York, in which she played the friend of Vera-Ellen (an On the
Town costar), who was the love interest of Fred Astaire, thus she
wound up working alongside Gene Kelly in her first movie and Fred
Astaire in her second, winning comic points both times.
Still a viable Broadway performer, she
worked in The Grass Harp and then was a replacement cast member of
John Murray Anderson's Almanac, a successful, star-studded revue.
Among her TV work during this time was a recurring role on the live
series Jamie (which starred young Brandon De Wilde), a guest spot on
The Goldbergs as a guest at a weight loss farm (shown here) and various teleplays
alongside actors such as Gene Lockhart, Estelle Winwood, Cedric
Hardwicke and Basil Rathbone.
In 1955, she worked on Broadway once
more in Tallulah Bankhead's Dear Charles, then appeared in another
movie, How to be Very, Very Popular, a college-set musical starring
Betty Grable and Sheree North as runaway showgirls, with Pearce as a
kooky housemother (shown here with Tommy Noonan.) The film was not a success (Grable never made
another one), but Pearce's career as a valued character actress
continued.
In 1956, she won the role of an amusing
maid in a Broadway revival of Noel Coward's Fallen Angels (again
starring Nancy Walker.) She also appeared in
The Opposite Sex, a
musical remake of The Women (1939), in which she adeptly played the
gossip-spreading manicurist Olga, who sets the main storyline of the
movie in motion with her tales of adultery.
1957 brought a horrible shock when her
beloved husband John died of a heart attack at only age fifty. She
returned to the Broadway stage in Copper and Brass (a short-lived
musical which, again, starred Nancy Walker! The two are seen together on stage in this photo at right.) and as a replacement in
Bells Are Ringing, taking over Jean Stapleton's role in the Judy
Holliday musical.
The stage manager of Bells Are Ringing
was a man named Paul Davis, who became a close friend of the
recently-widowed Pearce. Before long, a romance developed between
them and eventually, several years later, they wed (in 1964.) In the
meantime, she worked on an episode of The Twilight Zone (as seen
here) with Dean Jagger as a fellow resident in a rooming house and
appeared twice on Shirley Temple's Storybook (once as The Goblin Queen and costarring Mary Wickes), among other projects.
A close friendship with
actor/dancer-turned-photographer Cris Alexander (who'd been in On the
Town with her) led to her being part of the outre and amusing
portraits he supplied for the showbiz parody book Little Me (later to
be augmented into a Broadway musical starring Sid Caesar.)
Alexander,
by the way, was the longtime partner of ballet dancer
Shaun O'Brien
and their lives make for an interesting read. Together for over sixty
years, they died within days of one another, yet lived to be made
husbands under New York's same-sex marriage laws.
Also in 1961, Pearce worked once more
with Talullah Bankhead on Broadway in Midgie Purvis, a short-lived
play by Mary Chase (the author of Harvey) and then made her final
appearance on The Great White Way in Sail Away, a Noel Coward
shipboard musical starring Elaine Stritch, which underwent many
changes along the way. In 1962, she played a nurse to
wheelchair-bound Angela Cartwright in the movie Lad: A Dog.
1963 brought a spate of supporting film
roles including
My Six Loves (with Debbie Reynolds),
Tammy and the
Doctor (with Sandra Dee) and
The Thrill of It All (with
Doris Day.)
These were interspersed with parts on
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,
The Donna Reed Show,
Dennis the Menace (shown below with a myriad of
expressions) and even
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
More film work was to come in 1964 with
Dear Heart (starring Glenn Ford and Geraldine Page), Kiss Me, Stupid
(with Dean Martin and Kim Novak) and the Jerry Lewis comedy The
Disorderly Orderly. In the latter film, Pearce played a chatty
patient who rattles on endlessly about the details of her ailments
while Lewis, a hypochondriac, begins to experience each of them in
turn!
1964 brought about a new opportunity
for her when she was hired to play a semi-regular role on a new TV
sitcom. Bewitched focused on the newlywed relationship between a
bright, but harried advertising executive (played by Dick York) and
his charming, beautiful bride (Elizabeth Montgomery) who also happens
to be a witch! The unusual goings on at their suburban home wind up
baffling and exasperating their across-the-street nosy-neighbor Gladys
Kravitz, played of course by Alice Pearce.
Paired with George Tobias as Gladys'
husband Abner, Pearce was able to conduct a little witchcraft of her
own, summoning goggle-eyed reactions and uproarious takes as her
character kept seeing things that no one else ever seemed to witness.
A common occurance in early episodes was for one of her sightings to
be followed by Tobias administering a dose or two of her medicine, a
tablespoonful of prescription liquid.
Many an episode of Bewitched was
enlivened by a bug-eyed, slack-jawed expression from Pearce, usually
accompanied by an ear-splitting screech of “Abner!!” as she
scrambled to find her disbelieving husband. Invariably, whatever
madness it was that she'd come upon would be either fixed, reverted
or utterly absent by the time she forced him to take a look for
himself.
Formulaic as these events may have
been, they were funny nonetheless (though perhaps I am not the best
one to assess this since I have also always found the work of
Patricia Routledge uproariously funny on
Keeping Up Appearances, a
show which was based on repetitive situations much to the dismay of
some viewers.)
There were some episodes which featured
Pearce and Tobias far more than usual and she gamely rose to the
challenge. However, like many other peculiar funny folk (like that
series' other recurring actor Paul Lynde and like countless other
supporting players on classic sitcoms), less typically equalled more
in her case.
Bewitched was an instant hit and
catapulted its stars into the limelight, with Pearce at last getting
some widespread recognition for her comic gifts and gleefully loony
body language. She found herself profiled in the pages of TV Guide
(as shown here) and poked fun at herself in advertisements (such as
the one for Coty lipstick below, also featuring Joey Heatherton!)
More film work also came along, with
small roles in Dear Brigitte (with James Stewart, 1965), Bus Riley's
Back in Town (which starred Ann-Margret, 1965) and The Glass Bottom
Boat (another film with Doris Day, shown at right, 1966.) This elastic-expressioned
crank with the soft chin was at the peak of success as a character
actress.
However, Alice Pearce had a secret.
Prior to starting work on Bewitched, she had undergone exploratory
surgery and been given a dire prognosis. She had terminal ovarian
cancer. Never revealing this fact, she plodded onward, with the
caring assistance of her husband Paul, and proceeded to bring
rib-tickling joy to millions of TV viewers.
As the show continued into its second
season, Pearce became noticeably thinner. Though she'd worn wigs
throughout, their bouffant quality began to engulf her and her
features became drawn. It's a sad thing to see, though she still gave
every single moment of her screen time everything she had, pro that
she was. Ultimately, she had to give up her work on the show and
scripts were hastily rewritten to have Gladys out of town visiting
while Tobias' sister (Mary Grace Canfield) filled in the blanks as
his temporary housekeeper.
When the show appeared for its third
season (now in color), Tobias was still Abner Kravitz, but Gladys was
now played by Sandra Gould. Gould had her own set of skills and
charms, but was quite a different type. (The series was punctuated by
these types of changes, with York's boss' wife being played by two
actresses, unannounced in the storyline, and eventually York himself
being replaced without fanfare when his back injuries became too
unbearable to endure.)
Alice Pearce died on March 3
rd,
1966 of ovarian cancer at only age forty-eight. Prior to her death,
she issued the following quote: “I feel the progress of the disease
in my case is unusual because of my mental attitude. I am a supremely
happy woman. I have never been beautiful, but I have been blessed
with a rich career and the love of two fine men. The strength I have
found in the devotion of my dear Paul is beyond measure.”
Elizabeth Montgomery and her
then-husband William Asher (producer of the show, both seen at right) hired Paul Davis on
to direct a couple of episodes of
Bewitched in order to reignite the
career he'd put on ice in order to take care of his wife and also to
help keep him occupied in the lonely days that came after her
passing. In one of those Underworld ironies, Davis later had a small
part in that hooty, super-obscure movie we profiled once here,
Dinah East
(1970!)
Pearce's remarkable work on Bewitched
was recognized when Emmy voters awarded her with a statuette as
Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a
Comedy (her competition included Rose Marie of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
and her own
Bewitched costar
Agnes Moorehead.) In 1968, another
Bewitched star, Marion Lorne who played Aunt Clara in the same number of episodes as Pearce played Gladys (27), won the same award... but died ten days prior to the ceremony!
Even more indicative of Pearce's enduring
popularity, however, is the fact that between thirty-seven and
forty-two years after her death, Alice Pearce was still winning
awards! Shared with her successor Sandra Gould, she won the following
TV Land awards: Nosiest Neighbor (2003), Favorite Nosy Neighbor
(2005) and Neighbor You Try to Avoid (2008) for the role of
hysterical Gladys Kravitz.
We applaud the comic gifts of Alice
Pearce, but also salute her workmanlike professionalism under duress
and her commitment to making audiences happy, even as she faced the
fact that she was leaving this earth. A lesser mortal might have
given up and taken to her bed at the very word “cancer” in 1964.
She defined the word “trouper.”
