Perhaps I’m getting a little obsessive in my game of linking the dots between classic TV shows with actors who certainly achieved success but maybe never received their just due. I’ve covered history’s spookiest soap opera and one of the very first adventure series based on a hit comic book character. There’s much more to come, but today we’re going to link three delightful actresses whom I adore. 

You probably don’t know their names, and you would probably only vaguely recognize two of their faces. But I’ll bet you would get a jolt of memory if you heard their voices. All of them had thriving careers on the radio, and their most distinctive movie roles were voices they played in Disney films. If I wanted to spend a few days cross-referencing their TV careers, I would probably find dozens of shows they all appeared in. I know they were all on I Love Lucy, one of them in one of the most iconic scenes in that series’ history. And I know they all played funny roles in my favorite sitcom of all time, The Dick Van Dyke Show; one of them repeated her role several times. 

Best of all, each one appeared in Perry Mason: two of them each performed in a pair of episodes, and one appeared in three. We’re going to talk about three of these episodes today. 

ELVIA ALLMAN

Born in 1904 in North Carolina, Allman had a distinctive look and voice that was made for comedy. She moved to L.A. and worked in local radio and then went to New York and began to work for NBC in a variety of shows, including The Pepsodent Hour starring Bob Hope. In most of the nearly two dozen films she made, she had comic bit parts (she was the Librarian in Breakfast at Tiffany’s but most often played homely women who pursued the star). Probably her biggest role was as Edwina Kelp, nagging mother to Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor (1963). That, however, was not the most notable part she played: Walt Disney made her the voice of Clarabelle the Cow, which she played in over two dozen cartoons. 

Allman worked primarily in television from the industry’s beginnings almost up to her death in 1992. Her sharp looks and alarming voice made her the perfect foil in sitcoms. She made regular appearances in a host of them, her most famous being as the head of the assembly line of a chocolate factory that Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz joined in an effort to prove to their husbands that they could find and keep jobs. (They couldn’t!) She had semi-regular roles on a pair of rural comedies: Petticoat Junction (as Selma Prout) and The Beverly Hillbillies (as Elverna Bradshaw). They were similar character: brash and bossy women who sent everyone scurrying to get out of her sight.

She played two different guest characters on the best sitcom of all time, The Dick Van Dyke Show. In Season 3, she hopped from The Nutty Professor to play another nagging mother, that of Herman Glimscher, Sally Roger’s nebbishy boyfriend. And in the final season, she played one of Van Dyke’s greedy relatives in a lovely episode with mysterious overtones, “The Great Petrie Fortune.” 

Before that, Allman made two guest appearances on Perry Mason; unfortunately, Perry Mason did not do right by Elvia Allman. I understand: her brand of humor was going to relegate her to small roles on the law series. She has all of forty seconds of screen time in “The Case of the Crying Cherub,” the twentieth episode of the third season that premiered on April 9, 1960. Allman plays a neighbor who thinks she saw what she saw, giving the prosecution an early leg up on a case they cannot hope to win. Mala Powers (whom we will further discuss in a future post) plays June Sinclair, the new assistant to Richard Harkens (Tom “The Boy Next Door” Drake), who runs an L.A. art museum for his nasty old mother (Kathryn Givney, who played tight-assed old biddies three times in PW). A rival art expert (Abraham Sofaer) arrives and tells June and Richard that the gorgeous Matisse they recently bought and hung is a fake. Richard’s evil mother accuses June and her boyfriend, artist David Lambert (Joe Maross) of switching the painting with a forgery that David painted. 

The true villain here is David’s estranged wife, Lisa. If evil could be measured by amounts of mascara and eye liner, then Lisa is the wickedest character ever to appear in Perry Mason. She is played by an actress named Carmen Phillips, who is so bad in the role that you can’t wait for her to die. (Her final credit is Easy Rider, where she is credited as “Mime #2.” How I wish she had used those skills here!) Lisa dies, June is arrested, and Mason not only unmasks the true killer (I had it narrowed down to this guy and Tom Drake) but he finds the Matisse and reveals it in a bit of TV ridiculousness. 

The most fun about this one is that, in a brief auction scene near the end, Mason bids against a woman named Mrs. Vandercord, who is played by Isabel Randolph, another wonderful broad who happened to play Clara Petrie, Dick Van Dyke’s mother, in four episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Allman’s role in the twelfth episode of Season Five, “The Case of the Brazen Bequest,” which debuted on December 2, 1961, is twice as long as in the last one, and she makes the most out of her cameo turn on the stand as a chambermaid who cleaned the victim’s hotel room. This is a much better story, with a university setting, and it is bursting with other character actors, including Strother Martin, Will Wright, and James Millhollin. The plot concerns Dr. Charles Cromwell, the dean of a prestigious small college that is badly in need of funds, who is about to accept a huge bequest from wealthy James Varden (Will Wright). Varden admires Cromwell because he is so morally upright, so when a taxi drives up to the campus green as the staff is setting up for graduation and a drunken old woman comes out and asks for “Curly” before collapsing back into the cab and driving off, Cromwell is deeply concerned that his past relationship with this woman will unearth old skeletons in his past and jeopardize the bequest. 

It’s all a scheme on the part of Varden’s financial assistant (William Allyn), who desperately needs to stop the bequest. Naturally, the assistant is murdered, and Cromwell is only one of many university residents who have reason to wish him dead. For a long time, the issues that Cromwell and others skirt around seem dated, especially since a major subplot involving a student (who could be named Biff or Chuck but is here called Dick) with a crush on Cromwell’s wife seems silly by today’s standards – but in the end, it turns out that the old woman was shielding “Curly” from some bad stuff that would have fit right into an early 40’s Perry Mason novel. Unfortunately, the killer is so obvious that he might as well be wearing a button saying “I Dun It.”

ELEANOR AUDLEY

With her distinctive aristocratic voice and penchant for comedy, Miss Audley is my clear favorite here. That may be because she tackled the voice role of my favorite Disney villain of all time: Maleficent, the evil fairy from 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. Before that, in 1950, she had played the equally odious Lady Tremaine, stepmother to Cinderella. A nice Jewish girl from New Jersey, Audley made her Broadway debut at the age of 21 and changed her professional name sometime before 1940. 

She had an extensive career on the radio, appearing in such shows as Father Knows Best and My Favorite Husband (the precursor to I Love Lucy, a show where Miss Audley, like Elvia Allman, would make several appearances.) Aside from the Disney voices, her film career was inauspicious, but she is one of those faces you saw on the most popular sitcoms (and many other shows) of the 1960s. She nearly always played delightfully aristocratic women, with names like Mrs. Millicent Schuyler-Potts, Mrs. Pernandina Atwood, and Mrs. Juniper Carlton Murdock. 

Audley appeared as a party-goer in the premiere episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, but she would return three times to play my favorite of her roles: Mrs. Billings, the head of the P.T.A., who would barge into Rob Petrie’s home or office and say, “Do you know what time it is, Mr. Petrie? It’s show time!” before roping Rob into directing the fundraising show. She’s hilarious every time, but I especially love the episode where she tells Rob she won’t be needing him this year because her husband has written a musical version of Hamlet. (SPOILER: it’s a trick!) 

Audley appeared in two episodes of Perry Mason. We’ll be discussing the later one when we tackle a different actress in the future, so here we’ll talk about her debut: Season Two, Episode Three, “The Case of the Pint-Sized Client,” which debuted on October 4, 1958. I’m never thrilled when detectives take on a kid for a client; it adds a layer of “cute” that often wears me down. Agatha Christie did it best with Julia Upjohn in Cat Among the Pigeons, who should have said, “Hey, Poirot, step aside – I’m gonna solve this case!” Nero Wolfe didn’t take his pint-sized client seriously in The Golden Spiders, and the kid wound up dead. 

Here we have Nicky Renzi, an orphaned teen living with his grandfather. Nicky is played by Bobby Clark, a kid who didn’t have much of a career, although he did play Jimmy Grimaldi, the boy who thinks his mother isn’t his mother in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Here, he’s perfectly poised as a typical boy who finds a stash of stolen loot from a recent finance company robbery and brings it home – not to engage in a spending frenzy for himself, but to buy his gramps a warm coat for winter. Awwwwww. Grampa (Edward Cianelli, who really turns on the waterworks here) is trying to perfect an invention of a safe lock that will emit an alarm if tampered with, and when he discovers what Nicky has done, he demands that they return the money to the police. For that, he is arrested for the murder of the gangster who led the robbery. Awwwwwwwww. 

The ”awwws” continue: Perry gets involved when Nicky consults him about the legality of the “finders keepers” rule. And Della goes into full “mother tiger” mode after Gramps is arrested, feeding and hugging and comforting little Nick. The mystery is a fun one, and it even includes a clue (which I glommed onto immediately and thus figured out the killer). But the cast that isn’t giving off cute vibes is fun: Elisha Cook, Jr. plays an ex-con who is roped into the robbery (we’ll talk more about Cook next time), Nita Talbot is one of themore interesting and quirky femmes fatales as the victim’s girl, and Eleanor Audley makes the most of her small role as the finance company secretary. You keep expecting to hear her call Perry Mason “You dear boy!” 

I love that this is an early episode of the series because the gang of five (Mason, Della, Paul Drake, Burger and Tragg) are relatively young and pretty and on their mettle, and the dialogue snaps – including a very sexy scene between bad girl Talbot and Paul Drake. It all ends with the court journeying to the finance company for a demonstration that plays right into Perry Mason’s tricky hands.

BETTY LOU GERSON

Anyone who loves old radio would recognize Betty Lou Gerson’s voice. It could be snide and patrician or silky and seductive and was therefore perfect for playing a femme fatale. When Betty Lou guest starred on Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, one of my favorite crime series, odds were good that Johnny would get all breathy and romantic with her and then have to unmask her as the killer at the end. Another nice Jewish girl, this one from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Betty Lou and her family moved to Chicago where she started radio work at the age of 16. Then she moved to New York and worked regularly over the airwaves, doing soap operas and other dramatic work. 

Her film work was sporadic and unexceptional – with one exception. If Malifecent is my favorite Disney villainess, the very best villainous was Cruella de Ville in One Hundred and One Dalmations – and that was Betty Lou. She also played the Narrator in Cinderella and had an uncredited cameo in Mary Poppins. 

Like Elvia Allman and Eleanor Audley, Miss Gerson did very well on television, although she never scored anything approaching a “regular” role. (Rumor has it she played some non-credited roles on I Love Lucy, but I couldn’t verify it.) Betty Lou did make two appearances on The Dick Van Dyke Show: in “I’m No Henry Walden,” she plays a snobbish literary follower named Venetia Fellows who can’t fathom that Rob Petrie works on a TV variety show (“I’m afraid that I don’t have a television machine.”) And she plays a party hostess in “Who and Where Was Antonio Stradivarius?,” a tour de force for Dick Van Dyke about Rob getting conked on the head with a violin and developing amnesia. 

Miss Gerson showed up on Perry Mason three times and was the best served, acting-wise, of these three ladies. In one of the two adapted episodes in which she appeared, she even played the murderer. The only original teleplay she was in was her final appearance: Season Four, Episode 22, “The Case of the Cowardly Lion,” which debuted on April 8, 1961. This episode has two distinctions: first, exteriors were filmed almost entirely on location at the world-famous San Diego Zoo, where most of the action takes place. And secondly, it’s awash in references to The Wizard of Oz, beginning with the title, and including a baby gorilla named Toto as a central character, a sign on the zoo’s path directing people to “Lions, Tigers, Bears,” and the fact that the first initials of the actor playing the murderer are “O.Z.”!

There is a trial at the end, but mostly the episode functions as a closed circle mystery with all of the characters running around the zoo performing all sorts of disreputable acts. First, Toto is kidnapped, and then a dentist contracted to pull out one of the lions’ painful tooth is found in the animal’s den, seemingly clawed to death. Betty Lou Gerson plays the victim’s angry wife, and she does the best she can with a smaller role. But the teleplay is poorly written and horribly acted by most of the cast. Half of them manufacture the worst European accents I have ever heard; even Phyllis Coates, the first (and, to me, the best) of the Lois Lanes on the early Superman show, is unbearable as a femme fatale dental assistant. We also have to endure a lot of shots of Perry, Paul and Della petting monkeys and stroking elephant’s trunks. In this case, the animals are the real stars – and they act better!

Coming soon: a two-parter featuring actors who appeared on both Perry Mason and another beloved sitcom – as if by magic!!!