By Michael Buckley
24 Nov 2002

After returning to the Big Apple for the 50th anniversary (Jan. 14, 2002) of the "Today Show," on which, from 1958 to '59, she was a "Today Show Girl" (as female co-hosts were then called), Betsy Palmer decided to move back to New York, where she enjoyed a prosperous TV and Broadway career.

Chatting in her Upper West Side digs, the affable actress observes, "For a little girl from East Chicago, Indiana, my life has been touched by a lot of interesting people." On the first of November, Palmer turned 76, though source books have her three years younger. "When I made my screen test," she explains, "the man in charge changed the year of my birth to 1929." Part of her summer was spent starring in a production of The Foreigner in the Berkshires, and she would like to do more stage work.

During television's Golden Age, Palmer acted in numerous live dramas, including the Paddy Chayefsky classic, "Marty" ("Philco Playhouse," 5/24/53). She recalls, "Rod Steiger [as the lonely Bronx butcher] kept wanting to cry, and [director] Del Mann would say, 'Let the audience cry for you.'" With James Dean, whom Palmer dated "for about nine months," she appeared in "Sentence of Death" ("Studio One," 8/17/53), and she played the prostitute, opposite Jackie Gleason, in William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life" ("Playhouse 90," 10/9/58). "I adored Gleason. Some people expected Jackie was going to be difficult, but he wasn't." Palmer preferred live TV: "When tape came in, they'd re-do and re-do scenes—until all the freshness was gone."

There were also countless game-show appearances, including "Masquerade Party" and her ten years (1957-67) on "I've Got a Secret." Says Palmer, "That created a double-edged sword." While the exposure made her a popular summer-stock attraction ("They wanted to see me in the flesh"), the identification cost her at least one Broadway role. "Frederick Knott wrote Wait Until Dark for me, but Fred Coe [who produced the 1966 thriller] said, 'No, she plays games on television.' They went with Lee Remick. I did get to do it later [on tour] for a whole summer."

Once a student of Sanford Meisner's (in a class with Grace Kelly), the dedicated actress recalls the teacher's advice: "'Look and see, listen and hear. That's what one does, if one is going to be in the moment.' Theatre is life in the moment—everything's alive and on fire."

Among her Broadway credits are a few short-lived comedies (such as Roar Like a Dove), a couple of lengthy runs as a replacement (Cactus Flower; Same Time, Next Year) and the role of Alma Winemiller in Tennessee Williams' Eccentricities of a Nightingale. "Blythe Danner had done it on TV [in 1976]. It's Tennessee's reworking of Summer and Smoke, which had made a star of Geraldine Page, who, incidentally, directed me in my first one-act [play] at school."

Palmer did a production of Eccentricities in New Hampshire, and the director invited Williams. "He brought Tennessee to my cottage. We had a glass of wine and smoked a joint. [Laughs] We had a wonderful time getting to know each other. Later, Tennessee told the director, 'I like this girl so much. What am I going to say if she can't cut it?' The next night in my dressing room, there were two-dozen roses [from the playwright].

"After the performance, Tennessee was the first one backstage. He put his arms around my shoulders and whispered in my ear: 'Baby, you busted my balls!' That's when he decided to mount the play for Broadway. We opened [in Nov. '76], and the critics took him to task for reworking an old piece. It broke Tennessee's heart."

She associates certain career events with two of the first movies that Palmer and her brother, Jack, were taken to see: "Treasure Island," with Jackie Cooper, and "The Good Earth," starring Luise Rainer and Paul Muni. "My first TV job was 'Hollywood Screen Test.' They teamed an unknown with a known [actor]. I played opposite Jackie Cooper. My first summer-stock play, Biography, starred Luise Rainer, and my first pre-Broadway tryout was as a Cockney barmaid in Home at Seven, starring Paul Muni."

In "Actor," his biography of Muni, Jerome Lawrence writes of Home at Seven, which closed in Syracuse, New York: "The supporting cast was good. Muni was particularly enchanted with a new young actress, the beautiful, bubbling Betsy Palmer, who was later to play in the film 'The Last Angry Man' with Muni."

"The Last Angry Man" (1959) is what she considers her most recent feature, dismissing "Friday the 13th" (1980), even though her role as the murderous Mrs. Voorhees in the low-budget horror epic nets Palmer "fan mail from all over the world." She claims, "There are two generations who wouldn't know my name if it weren't for that movie."

A need for a new automobile coincided with the offer to play her girl "Friday". The vehicle cost just under $10,000, and the part paid $1,000-a-day for 10 days' work. "I thought: Nobody's going to see this trash, and I'll have my car. Well, you know what happened." The movie made a fortune and spawned several sequels, some of which include stock footage of Palmer. "One used a mock-up of my head." She gets $15 a year in residuals, and jokes, "It probably costs them more to send me the check." Asked to do the latest chapter, shooting in Vancouver, she replied, "'I'll do it for a piece of the action.' [Laughs] Instead, they offered me $20,000. I declined."

Her gallery of musical portraits include Lorelei Lee, Anna Leonowens, Peter Pan ("Sandy Duncan was my Wendy") and Liza Elliott (Lady in the Dark). I tell Palmer that I fondly recall her Nellie Forbush, opposite Ray Middleton, in a 1965 New York City Center production of South Pacific, and at a Gala Tribute to Josh Logan at the Imperial (5/2/75), where she and Ray Walston performed "Honeybun." She also toured as the "Cockeyed Optimist," with Jean-Pierre Aumont as Emile de Becque. Among other musical roles: Vera Charles—"I was more right for Mame"—and Aunt Alicia in Gigi: "We toured almost a year, with Louis Jourdan in the [Maurice] Chevalier role."

Half-Czech in heritage ("My father was born in Prague; my mother was adopted and never knew her nationality"), Palmer was born Patricia Betsy Hrunek (RUE-nek). Following high school, she worked as a stenographer and took night classes at Indiana University. An aptitude test determined that she was artistic and should do something that involved people. Combining those results with the memory of teachers encouraging her to participate in school plays led Palmer to seek an acting career. Her father knew an out-of work actor, who recommended a teacher, but Palmer couldn't afford to take lessons. Upon learning that the instructor also taught nights at Chicago's DePaul University, she enrolled. "That's where I learned the Stanislavsky Method," she says. "I still work from inside to out."

The surname Palmer was chosen from a telephone book, and when Actors Equity already listed a Patricia Palmer (the first Mrs. Jerry Lewis), Betsy dropped her first name. She remembers "doing winter stock for six months in 1949. There were 11 of us, including Paul Newman. Back then, we called him P.L." Work as the resident ingenue with an acting company preceded her arrival in New York.

In 1955, she debuted on Broadway (The Grand Prize) and in movies. Delbert Mann wanted Palmer to reprise her role as the wife of the butcher's cousin in the film version of "Marty," but she was under contract to Columbia and studio head Harry Cohn scoffed, "Who ever heard of Paddy Chayefsky?" ("Marty" won the Oscar for Best Picture.)

John Ford, whom she "loved," directed her first two movies. In "The Long Gray Line," Palmer played the wife and mother of West Point cadets. She has fond memories of the film's co-stars: Tyrone Power ("so sweet and kind") and Maureen O'Hara ("a wonderful woman"). While making "Mister Roberts," she began to think that her characterization of the Navy nurse whom Jack Lemmon's Ensign Pulver seeks to seduce "was going to come across as lesbian, because Ford was making me so butch. He said, 'Palmer, just shut up and do it the way I'm telling you to.'" Her third '55 release, "Queen Bee," cast her as the sister-in-law of Joan Crawford. "She and I stayed friends till the end of her life. Recently, I was able to say that in a documentary [about the late star]."

Palmer's decade as an "I've Got a Secret" panelist was enjoyable: "It was live but required no preparation. [Producers] Goodson and Todman knew how to cast their game shows. Bill Cullen was 'Joe College'; Jayne Meadows was a glamour girl; Bess Myerson, who replaced Jayne, had been a Miss America; Henry Morgan was acid; and I was sweet." (Incidentally, Big Apple insomniacs who subscribe to Time Warner's Digital TV may watch Palmer on "I've Got a Secret," mornings at 5:20, on the Game Show Channel: 117.)

Of her year on the "Today Show," Palmer recalls, "You had to be at work at 5:30 in the morning. Everything was live in those [pre-tape] days. I loved working with Dave Garroway. The chimpanzee [the show's mascot] adored me, but hated Garroway—and Garroway hated him. David taught me how to interview people. There was a script, but David said, 'Listen to what the person is saying. If it's interesting, go with what's happening.' He was a remarkable man! Barbara Walters was working in the office; she probably had her eye on my job [which Walters eventually took over]. It was a full-time job, and I wanted to be an actress. Since I couldn't split myself, I chose to leave."

Asked her favorite stage role, Palmer usually responds, "The one I'm doing [at the time]—not all of them, but most. I loved Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Alma was very special. I enjoyed Cactus Flower very much, and I loved Same Time, Next Year.

"I did [Same Time] first with Don Murray, a short while with Monte Markham, and then with Charles Kimbrough, who became known from TV's 'Murphy Brown.' I loved working with him; we seemed to breathe together onstage."

Long divorced, following a 20-year marriage, she has an artist-daughter, Melissa, who lives in Arizona. Among the media, concludes the charming Betsy Palmer, "My preference has always been the legitimate stage. I love it! That's why I'm back in New York!"

***

STAR GAZING: Linda Lavin, currently starring on Broadway in Hollywood Arms, plays a strong-willed mother in the Dec. 1 "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."

END QUIZ: Which of the following Tony Award winners played the Jewish mother in Paddy Chayefsky's "The Catered Affair" ("Goodyear Playhouse," 5/22/55. For the 1956 film, the mother was changed to Irish, and played by Bette Davis): a) Gertrude Berg; b) Shirley Booth; c) Thelma Ritter? (Answer: Next column, Dec. 22)

The Nov. 24 question was: Carol Burnett starred in two TV versions (1964, 1972) of Once Upon a Mattress. Which pair of actors appeared in both: a) Jane White and Jack Gilford; b) Shani Wallis and Elliott Gould; c) Bernadette Peters and Wally Cox?. The answer is A.

White and Gilford also created the roles of the Queen and King Off-Broadway. When the show transferred to Broadway, White remained, but the King was played by Will Lee. Shani Wallis and Elliott Gould played Lady Larken and the Jester in the 1964 TV-version; Bernadette Peters and Wally Cox had those roles in 1972.

—Michael Buckley also writes for TheaterMania.com and The Sondheim Review.