In the Golden Age of Hollywood no leading lady could hope for a better on-screen “wingwoman” than Eve Arden. A cucumber-cool blonde whose sharp tongue dispensed caustic quips at a Gatling gun pace, Arden was a supporting player mainstay in 1930s and ’40s films. By the mid-’50s she had become America’s favorite TV teacher, and 20 years later she would be introduced to a new generation of fans as a high school principal in the decade’s biggest movie musical.
Born Eunice Mary Quedens in 1908, the California native began her acting career with a stock theatre troupe shortly after leaving high school. Her film debut, under her real name, came as a conniving showgirl in Columbia’s 1929 musical, Song of Love. A move to New York and several Broadway roles followed. It was while appearing in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1934 that she came up with her stage name, courtesy of her makeup tray. In an interview she explained how she “stole my first name from Evening in Paris, and the second from Elizabeth Arden.”
The freshly-minted Eve Arden returned to Hollywood in 1933 for an uncredited turn alongside Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, and the Three Stooges (!) in MGM’s Dancing Lady. It was then back to Broadway for several more years. In 1937 Eve co-starred with fellow Scene Stealer Edward Everett Horton in the comedy feature Oh, Doctor! Later that year her breakthrough part came as Eve in the RKO ensemble comedy/drama Stage Door. The role of the wisecracking aspiring actress helped set the tone for Arden’s screen persona. Case in point: when asked by fellow boarding house resident Jean (Ginger Rogers) if she was attending the opening night of a new show, Eve replies “No, I’m going tomorrow and catch the closing.”
As the 1930s rolled on Arden appeared in films with Fred MacMurray (Cocoanut Grove), Loretta Young and David Niven (Eternally Yours), and her Stage Door co-stars Rogers and Lucille Ball (Having Wonderful Time). She was a daredevil aviatrix in 1939’s Women in the Wind, and that same year she held her own against The Marx Brothers as aerial performer Peerless Pauline in At the Circus.
Arden’s noteworthy 1940s efforts included playing a newspaperwoman in Stalin-Era Russia in Comrade X (1940); a fashion magazine assistant in Cover Girl (1944); a Soviet Army sniper temporarily sharing a Washington, DC, apartment in The Doughgirls (1944); and as the gal pal of gossip-plagued widow Barbara Stanwyck in My Reputation (1946). Her most memorable role at the time, though, was as Ida, the boss-turned-buddy of Joan Crawford’s restauranteur/single mother in 1945’s Mildred Pierce. Referencing Mildred’s ungrateful daughter Veda (Ann Blyth), it’s Ida who delivers the classic line, “Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.” Her performance earned Eve a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination.
Eve had a rare singing performance as a French chanteuse in the 1946 Cole Porter biodrama Night and Day. She also showed off her dramatic chops in a pair of noir-styled thrillers, The Unfaithful (1947) and Whiplash (1948), and would shine as the indispensable secretary to attorneys James Stewart and Arthur O’Connell in Otto Preminger’s controversial courtroom thriller Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Comedy, however, was still her forte, as she demonstrated in such films as One Touch of Venus (1948), Three Husbands (1950), and We’re Not Married! (1952).
Away from the motion picture set, Arden began winning over audiences in their homes in 1948 as the title star of radio’s Our Miss Brooks. While she was the third choice (after Shirley Booth and Lucille Ball) to play single high school English teacher Constance Brooks, Eve made it her own with her deadpan delivery and arsenal of snappy retorts for principal Osgood Conklin (Gale Gordon). In 1952 Arden and Gordon made the jump to video when CBS began the TV version in 1952. The part of Miss Brooks’ biology teacher boyfriend Philip Boynton, originally played on radio by Jeff Chandler, was filled by Robert Rockwell. Our Miss Brooks ran for four seasons on television and had a theatrical film released in 1956.
Arden won a 1954 Emmy for Best Female Star of a Regular Series and was even made an honorary member of the National Education Association. “I had always wanted to have a hit on Broadway that was created by me,” Eve recalled in a 1980s interview. “You know, kind of like Judy Holliday and Born Yesterday. I griped about it a little, and someone said to me, ‘Do you realize that if you had a hit on Broadway, probably 100 or 200,000 people might have seen you in it, if you’d stayed in it long enough. And this way, you’ve been in Miss Brooks, everybody loves you, and you’ve been seen by millions.’ So, I figured I’d better shut up while I was ahead.”
After Our Miss Brooks ended, Arden tried her hand at two more series. 1957’s The Eve Arden Show, with her as a widowed writer and mother, lasted one season. A decade later, she and Kaye Ballard made a memorable slapstick pairing as The Mothers-in-Law, which ran on NBC from 1967-69. In the ’70s and ’80s Eve was a frequent TV guest star, popping up on such shows as Maude, The Love Boat, Hart to Hart, and Falcon Crest.
Regularly returning to the stage, Eve was featured in productions of Auntie Mame, Hello, Dolly!, Butterflies Are Free, and Applause. One show she left while it was still in previews was 1983’s Moose Murders. The play would go on to make theatre history after its one-night performance and became synonymous with Broadway disasters. The actress would also make occasional appearances in such films as AIP’s Sergeant Deadhead (1965), Disney’s The Strongest Man in the World (1975), and Under the Rainbow (1981) with Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher. And she was fondly remembered as Rydell High School’s Principal McGee in both 1978’s Grease and 1982’s Grease 2, the latter Arden’s final big-screen turn.
Arden was married twice and four children, three adopted and the fourth with her second husband, actor Brooks West (the two both appeared in Anatomy of a Murder). Her autobiography, The Three Phases of Eve, hit the shelves in 1985. Eve died at her Beverly Hills home in 1990 from cardiac arrest at 82. Looking back on her life on- and off-screen, she recalled, “I’ve worked with a lot of great glamorous girls in movies and the theater. And I’ll admit, I’ve often thought it would be wonderful to be a femme fatale. But then I’d always come back to thinking that if they only had what I’ve had–a family, real love, an anchor– they would have been so much happier during all the hours when the marquees and the floodlights are dark.”