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A lot of actresses got tagged as "perky" or "the perfect screen wife" back when the terms meant far more than they do now. But June Allyson so owned the mold that when she finally played a shrew in 1955's flop The Shrike, it was akin to, say, casting James Stewart as Public Enemy No. 1. And thus got treated as genuine news.
Allyson, who died Monday at 88 in Ojai, Calif., of respiratory failure and acute bronchitis, played Stewart's supportive wife three times, two of them in popular biopics. She was also teamed six times with then-superstar Van Johnson -- back when he still oozed his boy-next-door image (which, by implication, told you what his girlfriend was like).
But Allyson became a star at 1940s MGM, where musicals ruled the roost in a Technicolor universe whose inhabitants had no need of Depends. These were the incontinence protection products she later pitched on TV -- and led to her becoming a spokeswoman for the affliction, which in turn led to the creation of the June Allyson Foundation to publicize the cause.
One never knows for sure what's going to capture the public's imagination, and in an odd way, she became as well known for these commercials as for a movie career that remained top-rung for more than a dozen years.
After a tough Bronx childhood of semi-poverty and years spent in a steel brace following a youthful fall, the 5-foot-2 tomboy who also looked good in a corsage capped a long showbiz apprenticeship with success in 1943's Best Foot Forward. Its high point by far is a socko school-dance number -- The Three B's -- performed by Allyson, Gloria DeHaven and Nancy Walker. It's the kind of number the That's Entertainment! documentaries were born to anthologize.
Allyson came to MGM having studied enough dance to confidently enter the frequent rug-cutting contests of the 1930s. And despite a slight lisp and an unusual voice that's been described as both "cracked" and "smoky," she could carry a tune in affecting ways given the right song, as in the ballad Just Imagine from 1947's Good News -- another school musical, the best one ever and, slightly more arguably, Allyson's best film.
Musicals eventually faded, but wives never do. She played the baseball spouse to Stewart's pitcher in 1949's The Stratton Story and donned a catcher's mitt for a game of mother-son toss in 1954's big-business drama Executive Suite. She was Mrs. Miller opposite Stewart in 1953's The Glenn Miller Story, his equally perfect SAC-wife in 1955's Strategic Air Command and a ditzy but earthbound corporate wife in Woman's World, which told "the woman behind the man" how she was supposed to comport herself.
This last was not the kind of vehicle destined to withstand time, except as perversely fascinating anthropology. And Allyson probably didn't do her late career much good by playing the female leads in two dead-on-arrival remakes of '30s screen institutions: My Man Godfrey (1957) and the previous year's You Can't Run Away from It (a remake of It Happened One Night). By the late '50s, her big-screen career was over, but there was always TV.
In addition to a short-lived anthology series she hosted in Loretta Young/Jane Wyman style, her small-screen appearances ran the gamut from Zane Grey Theater to Love Boat to The Incredible Hulk. There were also several on The Dick Powell Show, an anthology produced and named for her actor-mogul husband, who died at 58 in 1963.
Amid a long off-and-on romance with writer Dirk Wayne Summers, she later married and divorced Glenn Maxwell twice and then wed David Ashrow for an almost 30-year union that lasted until her death.
A lot of Allyson movies aren't on DVD, but Good News is -- as is her "Jo" in 1949's Little Women and her delightful Cleopatterer number in 1946's Till the Clouds Roll By, a musical that needs all the high points it can get.
And The Stratton Story, which puts Oz's Wizard, Frank Morgan, in a baseball unform, will be out Aug. 15.
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