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'Blondie' Forever  |
Dagwood had to share her
with all the rest of us
of TheColumnists.com
Back in 1938, a 30-year-old "B"-movie actress named Penny Singleton dyed her hair blonde, put on an apron and set up shop in what was to become one of America's most familiar homes--the Dagwood Bumstead household.
As the title character in the first film version of Chic Young's phenomenally popular comic strip--"Blondie"--Singleton was bound to be noticed. Millions flocked to theaters to see Columbia's "Blondie"--and kept on coming at the rate of two new movies a year until the series finally ended in 1952.
Meanwhile, Singleton joined movie co-star Arthur "Dagwood" Lake on the CBS radio network and started playing Blondie Bumstead on the radio, too. Though Singleton eventually turned the radio role over to a string of other actresses, the radio series continued to run until 1950--with most folks still picturing Penny Singleton whenever they heard Blondie's baby-ish voice, scolding husband Dagwood, as usual.
Singleton, who died last week at age 95 after suffering a stroke, surely played other roles both before and after "Blondie," but even though CNN seemed to pay more attention to the fact she provided the voice for the cartoon character Jane Jetson in the 1962-63 animated TV series "The Jetsons," most mature adults will remember her only as the quintessential screen Blondie--the role that swallowed up her entire career.
Singleton was a very pretty young woman with a trim, but curvaceous figure when she first played Blondie in 1938. She had married Dr. Lawrence Singleton in 1937 and gave up her previous name, Dorothy McNulty, both on screen and in her private life. They were divorced in 1939, but Penny retained his name, which by then had become very famous indeed.
On screen, Singleton was the perfect Blondie: Calm and reasonable most of the time, which was a miracle considering she was married to one of the most dither-prone dimwits in American pop media. Thinking dispassionately, I always wondered why Blondie stuck with Dagwood. She was very pretty while he was a human dipstick with the rumpled look of a husband who hadn't even learned how to dress himself or comb his own hair. Couldn't she have done better?
Perhaps Singleton's Blondie enjoyed being the competent one in the family. She certainly was the one in charge at home. In the opening moments of the first "Blondie" movie, Singleton warns a salesman to position himself safely a block away from the house to avoid being bowled over by the fast-moving Dagwood as he storms out the front door and off to work, invariably late again. Then she takes time to scold her youngest child, Baby Dumpling, for telling a whopper.
"Baby Dumpling," she said in that stern tone she could get in her Baby Snooks-ish voice, "Do you know what happens when you tell stories?"
Then, she basically clears the way for Dagwood as he rockets through the kitchen on the way to the front door, where the mailman is almost always waiting to be run over by Dagwood, scattering his mail to the winds.
My childhood reaction to Singleton's Blondie was essentially that of any heterosexual male adolescent of the early 1940s: Relief that she wasn't living in my neighborhood. If she had been, of course, I'd have been mowing her lawns for free, carrying her groceries in for her and the garbage out, all for the precious chance she'd invite me in for a moment or two. I'd have tried real hard to become the best friend of her son Alexander, which is what they called "Baby Dumpling" when he got out of diapers, on the chance I'd be offered milk and cookies by his gorgeous Mom.
Though Singleton made a few other movies--you can see her in "After the Thin Man" (1936) "The Mad Miss Manton" (1938) with Barbara Stanwyck and "Go West, Young Lady" (1941)--she mainly resigned herself to playing Blondie, which had a run of 28 feature films, one of the longest movie series in history.
In her post-Blondie days,
Singleton was the vacation replacement for Ruby Keeler in the
Broadway revival of "No, No Nanette." She also was
in "The Best Man," the 1964 film version of Gore Vidal's
political novel.
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Arthur "Dagwood" Lake |
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Yet her most time-consuming job in the post-Blondie era was as a salaried union officer for The American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), which negotiated contracts for actors. Legend has it that Singleton was a tough negotiator and turned any number of management negotiators into dithering Dagwoods while working for her union.
Singleton married movie producer Robert Sparks in 1941. She was widowed in 1963. She had two daughters, Dorothy Grace ("DeeGee") and Robin. Though she never attended college, she was awarded a "Doctor of Letters" degree in Fine Arts from St. Johns University in 1974. She outlived her old partner, Arthur "Dagwood" Lake, by 17 years.
The "Blondie" films are all available on home video, so we can rest assured that generations to come will continue to celebrate the charm and appeal of the original--Miss Penny Singleton.
©2003 by Ron Miller.
TO
READ ANN JILLIAN'S COLUMN ABOUT PENNY SINGLETON, CLICK HERE:
BLONDIE
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