Lurene Tuttle
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Lurene Tuttle (b. August 29, 1906, Pleasant Lake, Indiana - d. May 28, 1986, Encino, California) was a character actress on radio and television and in film, but it was in radio that she made her most enduring impact.
She was one of classic network radio's most versatile and often-employed actresses, often appearing in as many as 15 shows a week — earning the nickname the First Lady of Radio for her effort. In the 1960's and 1970's, Tuttle became a familiar face to millions of television viewers with over 100 TV appearances from 1950 to 1986, notably her three-year stint on the 1960's sitcom Julia.
On radio, she may be identifiable most immediately for her work on The Adventures of Sam Spade, where she played just about every female role as well as Spade's man-hungry secretary Effie Perrine; and, on The Great Gildersleeve, where she played late-teen/young adult niece Marjorie Forrester, a character who was at least 20 years her actual junior.
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[edit] Early career
She became interested in acting as a teenager herself, after her family moved to southern California and she took training at the Pasadena Playhouse, in some of whose productions she appeared before joining the vaudeville troupe known as Murphy's Comedians. By the Great Depression, however, Tuttle had put her remarkable vocal versatility to work in radio and became, within a decade, one of the most in-demand actresses in the medium.
[edit] The radio years
She appeared in such shows as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a role that testified to her vocal versatility: she played Harriet Nelson's on-air mother at a time when she played, concurrently, a late-teen/young adult on Gildersleeve. Tuttle also had regular roles in such shows as Brenthouse (a soap opera, as Nancy), Doctor Christian (as nurse Judy Price), Duffy's Tavern (as Dolly Snaffle), One Man's Family (another soap; various roles), The Red Skelton Show (as Junior's mommy and as Daisy June, roles she shared with Harriet Nelson), Hollywood Hotel, and the soap opera Those We Love.
She made numerous guest appearances on such shows as Dragnet, Lux Radio Theater, The Screen Guild Theater, Suspense (in "The Sisters", with Rosalind Russell), and The Whistler (in which she played good and evil twins, and somewhat daringly used separate microphones to help her stay in proper character for each twin).
Dr. Christian was an unusual proposition in that the show, according to critic Leonard Maltin (in The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio's Golden Age), solicited scripts from listeners (one of whom was a young Rod Serling) and put them on the air — with a little help. "The real writers on the show", Tuttle was quoted as saying, "had to fix them quite often a lot, because they were really quite amateurish. But they had nice thoughts, they had nice plots. They just needed fixing; the dialogue didn't work too well."
It was during her time on Hollywood Hotel that Tuttle became an inadvertent co-catalyst in the founding of the American Federation of Radio Artists. According to Maltin, Tuttle's male counterpart on the show, veteran actor Frank Nelson (a frequent guest performer on Jack Benny's and other radio shows), tried to get both a raise to $35-per-show — at a time when the show paid $5,000 an appearance to headlining guest stars. Nelson eventually got the raises but the negotiations provoked him to become an AFRA co-founder and one of its active members.
But Tuttle also remembered the day the Hollywood Hotel sound effects man was upstaged by a Hollywood legend: "[T]he soundman was supposed to do a little yipping, yappy dog, like a terrier. He sounded like a Newfoundland dog or something, and the director kept saying, 'That won't do.' So Olivia de Havilland was sitting next to me, and she says, 'I can do a very good dog.' And I said, 'Well, I don't think they'll let you do a dog, this is an audience show; you're a star, you can't do a dog.' And she says, 'I'm going to do it.' So she went over to the director, went into the booth, and said, 'I'd like to try doing this dog for you.' So they put her behind the screen, and she went on the show and she did that yipping dog."
[edit] Films and television
On television and in film, Tuttle streamlined herself into a pattern of roles between wise, loving wives/mothers or bristling matrons. She was familiar to the early television audience as wife/mother Lavinia (Vinnie) Day in Life with Father (1953-1955), while concurrently graduating to film roles in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and such other films as Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Orson Welles's Macbeth, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Fortune Cookie, and The Affairs of Dobie Gillis. Her best-known feature film may be Don't Bother to Knock (1952) playing a mother who lets a disturbed Marilyn Monroe babysit her daughter. She later played supporting role in the short-lived Father of the Bride (1961 television situation comedy.
Lurene Tuttle's best known role to the general public was her stint as Lloyd Nolan's senior nurse in the Diahann Carroll series Julia (1968-1971) as the humorless but still warm-hearted Hannah Yarby. In 1980, Tuttle appeared in the Bette Davis television movie, White Mama.
[edit] Family and Post-Acting Life
Tuttle married Melvin Ruick, an actor she'd met during her radio years; the couple had a daughter, Barbara Ruick, a musical comedy actress who married famed film composer John Williams before dying unexpectedly in 1974. Tuttle and Ruick eventually divorced; Tuttle re-married but her second marriage didn't last very long, and she became, ultimately, a respected acting coach and teacher — something she'd always done, even at the height of her acting career (she often re-trained radio actors who'd been away from the craft during service in World War II — until her death from cancer in 1986, aged 79. She was survived by three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
Her Sam Spade co-star, Howard Duff, who delivered her eulogy, remembered Tuttle thus: She could just take hold of a part and do something with it... I think she never met a part she didn't like. She just loved to work, she loved to act. She's a woman who was born to do what she was doing and loved every minute of it.
[edit] Quotations
- I could play opposite Jimmy Stewart or Frederic March or Cary Grant or Gary Cooper and Leslie Howard, and on the air I could be the most glamorous, gorgeous, tall, black-haired female you've ever seen in your life. Whatever I wished to be, I could be with my voice, which was the thrilling part to me.---On radio acting with major film stars doing radio guest turns.
- There are very clever people in the business now who are just voice characters, who... turn on Voice 36 or Voice 9 or Voice 12 or something. But we always worked from the full person, at least I did, and I know that all of us tried to work that way because that's the only honest way to do it. You have to have a person who lives and breathes and walks and is alive, rather than just turning on a voice. You could conjure up, through imagination, anything you wanted to be. — On whether she was merely a voice artist.
- He got steamed up and the half-hour show didn't really satisfy him, so he kept the audience there afterwards... He did at least an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. — On Red Skelton's being unable to stop performing after each installment of his half-hour show was done for the night.
- Dear Lurene, Thank you for pulling me through so many broadcasts---fondly, Ronnie.---A note Tuttle received (and cherished) from actor Ronald Colman, who was fond of radio and accepted numerous radio jobs himself when film roles became harder for him to come by in his later years.
[edit] Listen to Lurene Tuttle
- The Great Gildersleeve, "Marjorie's Cake" (7 September 1941)
- The Adventures of Sam Spade, "The Dry Martini Caper" (1 August 1948)
- Suspense, "Can't We Be Friends?" (25 July 1946)
- Suspense, "The Sisters" (with Rosalind Russell, 9 December 1948)
[edit] References
- Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, The Big Broadcast 1920-1950.
- Leonard Maltin, The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio's Golden Age. (New York: Dutton, 1997.)
- Gerald Nachman, Raised on Radio. (New York: Pantheon, 1998.)
