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It’s funny the twists and changes that an article such as this can go through between inception and publication. About two months ago–shortly before the theatrical release of the Ben Stiller seriocomedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and the long-awaited DVD debut of the 1947 film version starring Danny Kaye as the daydreaming title hero and Virginia Mayo as the mysterious beauty who involves him in a real-life adventure–I considered doing a dual review of the two movies. My plan was to simply compare them against one another, as well as versus the original short story by writer/cartoonist James Thurber (who apparently wasn’t too thrilled with the Kaye adaptation and must still be doing 360s in his Columbus, Ohio grave over the Stiller iteration).
Well, after seeing both Mittys and not being impressed with the way both deviated from the source material, I then thought about writing a piece on Thurber’s big-screen history in general. It’s a rather small and eclectic list that includes Rise and Shine, a zany 1941 college football comedy with Jack Oakie, Linda Darnell, Milton Berle and Walter Brennan; Henry Fonda as a college professor who fears losing both his position and his wife in 1942’s The Male Animal, based on a play co-written by Thurber; and 1952’s She’s Working Her Way Through College, a song-filled and very loose revamp of The Male Animal starring Mayo and future Commander-in-Chief Ronald Reagan. My first exposure to the humorist’s work, however, came from TV viewings of a 1953 cartoon version of his contemporary fable The Unicorn in the Garden. Produced by UPA, makers of the Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing shorts, The Unicorn in the Garden was animated in Thurber’s trademark drawing style and eloquently sums up his recurring theme of gentle fantasy running smack dab into hard, unrelenting reality in its seven-minute running time (Fun Fact: the cartoon was originally planned to be part of Men, Women and Dogs, a never-made, feature-length UPA anthology inspired by Thurber’s writings).
I would have to wait until the end of January for any retrospective, though, because the final Thurber-based theatrical feature prior to last year’s Mitty–the 1972 Jack Lemmon/Barbara Harris comedy The War Between Men and Women–was about to make its DVD premiere, and I had never seen it. In one of those Hollywood-style coincidences, the same day I got a copy of the film, my MovieFanFare colleague George Allen published an article chronicling his TV character girlfriends. Why do I call this a coincidence, you ask? Because, after I read George’s romantic reminiscence and as I watched the story of Lemmon–a curmudgeonly cartoonist modeled on Thurber who was apprehensive about commitment and his failing eyesight–falling for divorced mother of three Harris, I was hit with a blast from my own past. There, playing Harris’ straightforward, stuttering younger daughter, was my very first TV crush, child actress Lisa Gerritsen.
And speaking of coincidences, there is, of course, another James Thurber link to all of this. In the fall of 1969, NBC premiered My World and Welcome to It, a delightful and innovative sitcom that, like The War Between Men and Women, mixed live-action with animated sequences as it brought to life “drawings, stories, inspirational pieces and things that go bump in the night” by Thurber. William Windom starred as family man and magazine cartoonist John Monroe and Lisa played Lydia, his 11-year-old daughter. Wise beyond her years, Lydia’s no-nonsense way of looking at things often conflicted with her father’s imaginative flights of fancy, but she was still a typical young girl who worried about having to wear braces. And, as a quiet and bookish 6th-grader who was about to get braces that same year, I felt as though I had found a small-screen kindred spirit in Lydia Monroe. Oh, sure, I had seen attractive older women on TV before: Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) of The Avengers, Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) on Dark Shadows, and–like George–Get Smart’s Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), but Lisa Gerritsen was an age-appropriate infatuation about whom I could have Mittyesque daydreams where she would wind up moving to Delaware and attending my school.
Like so many other delightful and innovative shows, My World and Welcome to It was cancelled after just one season (ironically, it would go on to win a pair of Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series), but Gerritsen was able to hit the ground running and landed a role on a new sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. As Bess Lindstrom, daughter of Mary Richards’ snobbish landlord/neighbor Phyllis (Cloris Leachman), Gerritsen was still precocious and added a bit of early adolescent independence (calling her mother by her first name, for example). Bess was prominent in several first-season episodes, but her scenes diminished as time went on.
In 1975 the Lindstroms–minus Phyllis’s never-seen husband Lars, who was killed off–left Minnesota for San Francisco in the MTM spin-off series Phyllis. Gerritsen was on-screen more, but the relationship between the by-now-teenage Bess and her mother evolved to include talks about dating and other topics over the course of the series’ two-season CBS run, and by now I was busy dating being rejected by real-life classmates. By the time Bess was married off (to future Body Double star Craig Wasson) in the final few episodes, my sixth-grade crush was similarly concluding.
What also concluded after Phyllis was canceled in 1977 was Lisa Gerritsen’s acting career, one which I later learned began at the age of 10 in 1968. The great-granddaughter of silent film actors and granddaughter of screenwriter/actor True Boardman, Lisa had guest starring roles in such series as The Doris Day Show, Family Affair, The Odd Couple, Gunsmoke, and The Virginian (the last two in episodes written by Boardman) and racked up a number of glowing reviews as a top child performer. Along with The War Between Men and Women, she also had big-screen parts in 1970’s Airport (as Burt Lancaster’s daughter) and in a 1974 comedy, Mixed Company, in which Harris played her mother again. After Phyllis, though, Gerritsen retired from show business for good. According to IMDB and other web articles (looks like I wasn’t the only middle-schooler who took notice of her), she finished her education, worked for a software company in central California for several years, and now lives the life of a wife and mother, out of the spotlight. Considering the sad downturns and sometimes tragic fates of other young performers from the ’60s and ’70s, Lisa was indeed as wise as her on-screen presence indicated.
Oh, and that Odd Couple guest turn, along with her first-season work on Mary Tyler Moore, earned Lisa a TV Guide cover article in the spring of 1971. I picked up that magazine at my local A&P and held onto it for as long as I could, but it got lost in the shuffle when my family moved the following year. Several decades later, a friend and co-worker of mine managed to obtain a copy and gave it to me (thanks, John). Seeing it after all those years brought back a pleasant, wistful nostalgia for childhood that I feel even a curmudgeon like James Thurber would have approved of.