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Relationships can last
a long time in show biz
of TheColumnists.com
People who are sophisticated about show business (people such as you and me) know one thing for sure: Show business is an unstable endeavor of quickie alliances. Actors get together for a play, or a movie, do their performances, and move on to other projects. At least they hope there are projects for them to move on to. If they are lucky enough to land a part in a play that runs for six months--maybe even a year!--they count themselves as amazingly lucky, and they’re right.
But flighty show business, strangely enough, also boasts quite a lengthy list of productions that lasted for decades. It’s not as common any more, but show business history is replete with shows that had the same cast members year after year after year. It certainly is not the norm, but it happens more often than you might think.
The outstanding example is “Gunsmoke,” which ran on CBS for 20 years from 1955 to 1975. Before going on television, it was a longtime radio drama, running for nine years between 1952 and 1961. So for 23 years, between 1952 and 1975, audiences had some version of “Gunsmoke” before them.
(When radio “Gunsmoke” went on the air, it bumped a show called “Suspense” that occasionally featured an actor named Ronald Reagan.)
James Arness played Marshall Matt Dillon during all of the 20 years that “Gunsmoke” was on television. Milburn Stone played Doc during the entire run, and Amanda Blake played Kitty, the pretty saloon owner, for 19 of the 20 years. In the unstable world of show business, those actors were together longer than most civilians are on their jobs. And announcer George Walsh was there for the whole time on radio and television.
More recently, “Law and Order,” on television for 15 years, is currently the longest-running television drama. But it has had a shifting cast over those years. By contrast, another long-running drama, “JAG,” came to a close April 29 in its 10th year with pretty much the same crew of actors. Star David James Elliott was there from the beginning, and co-star Catherine Bell had been aboard for nine years.
In today’s Hollywood, if an actor and actress are in more than one movie together, they become a team, with “chemistry.” For instance, Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas were a romantic twosome in “Jewel of the Nile” and “Romancing the Stone,” but hated one another in “The War of the Roses.”
That’s movieland small potatoes compared with William Powell and Myrna Loy. They made 13 pictures together between 1934 and 1947. That has to be some sort of record or at least near-record for a movie leading man-leading lady combination. And they were friends for 50 years off the set.
“Star Trek” is a unique situation. The original series ran for only three seasons on NBC, ending in 1969, but William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and the gang have been together in the public’s mind for about 40 years now, courtesy of the post-television “Star Trek” movies and all those conventions. Shatner and Nimoy even made at least one commercial together.
One of the longest-running show business partnerships ever was the one between Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding. “Bob and Ray” was on radio, off radio and on radio again from just after World War II, in 1946, to Goulding’s death in 1990. As Gerald Nachman put it in “Raised on Radio,” his magistral book about the medium, they were creatures of radio whose “entire career consisted of mocking radio in all of its vast, unending inanities and banalities.”
Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll--radio’s “Amos ‘n’ Andy"-were together from at least the early 1920’s until their radio show ended in 1960. The show had lasted 32 years, but their partnership had begun probably five years earlier, so Gosden and Correll were closing in on a 40-year comedy partnership.
Then there were the soaps. Oh, Lord, the soaps. “Ma Perkins” and “The Romance of Helen Trent,” come to mind as among the longest-running. “Helen Trent” asked the question for decades: Could a woman find romance if she was over 35? Or even (gasp!) beyond? She looked for romance over a goodly span of the 20th Century, but Helen never got hitched.
The class act among the long-running soaps was “One Man’s Family,” set in San Francisco. It ran from 1932 until 1959, and the actors who played the four main characters were together for the whole 27 years.
Of course, there was the devoted ensemble cast of Jack Benny’s radio program; Burns and Allen; Abbott and Costello; and Laurel and Hardy.
Go ahead. There has to be more in our pantheon of long-running show business combinations. I’m sure you can think of some I haven’t mentioned. Ah! Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn!
©2005 by Charles M.
McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel.
This column first posted on May 16, 2005. The poster from "The
Thin Man" is courtesy of Turner Broadcasting. The photo
of Abbott & Costello is courtesy of Universal Pictures.
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