Lurene Tuttle

Lurene Tuttle
Lurene Tuttle (left) and Rosalind Russell in "The Sisters" on Suspense (1948)
Born	(1907-08-29)August 29, 1907 Pleasant Lake, Indiana, USA
Died	May 28, 1986(1986-05-28) (aged 78) Encino, California
Resting place	Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1934-1987
Spouse(s)	Mel Ruick (?-?) (divorced) 1 child Frederick W. Cole (1950-1956) (divorced)

Lurene Tuttle (August 29, 1907 - May 28, 1986) was a character actress, who made the transition from vaudeville to radio, and later films and television. Her most enduring impact was as one of network radio's most versatile actresses. Often appearing in fifteen shows a week, comedies, dramas, thrillers, soap operas, and crime dramas, she became known as the "First Lady of Radio".

Tuttle became interested in acting after her family moved to Southern California. She appeared in Pasadena Playhouse productions before joining the vaudeville troupe, Murphy's Comedians. By the time of the Great Depression, Tuttle had put her remarkable vocal versatility to work in radio, and within a decade she became one of the most in-demand actresses in the medium.

Radio roles

On radio's The Adventures of Sam Spade she played just about every female role, as well as Spade's secretary Effie Perrine. She appeared in such shows as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a role that testified to her vocal versatility: for while playing Harriet Nelson's on-air mother, she concurrently appeared on The Great Gildersleeve as the niece Marjorie Forrester, a character twenty years her junior. Tuttle had regular roles in such shows as Brenthouse (a soap opera, as Nancy), Dr. Christian (as nurse Judy Price), Duffy's Tavern (as Dolly Snaffle), One Man's Family (another soap opera; various roles), The Red Skelton Show (as Junior's mother and as Daisy June, roles that she shared with Harriet Nelson), Hollywood Hotel, and the soap opera Those We Love.

Dr. Christian was unusual in that the show, according to critic Leonard Maltin in The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio's Golden Age, solicited scripts from listeners (one of whom was a young Rod Serling) and put them on the air — with a little help. Tuttle recalled:

The real writers on the show had to fix them quite often a lot, because they were really quite amateurish. But they had nice thoughts, they had nice plots. They just needed fixing; the dialogue didn't work too well.

Tuttle guest starred on the NBC radio police series Dragnet, starring Jack Webb, Lux Radio Theater, The Screen Guild Theater and Suspense, in the episode "The Sisters", with Rosalind Russell. In The Whistler, she played good and evil twins and used separate microphones to stay in character for each twin.

It was during her time on Hollywood Hotel that Tuttle became an inadvertent co-catalyst in the founding of the American Federation of Radio Artists. According to Maltin, Tuttle's male counterpart on the show, veteran actor Frank Nelson (a frequent guest performer on Jack Benny's program), tried to get both a raise to $35-per-show — at a time when the show paid $5,000 an appearance to headlining guest stars. Nelson eventually got the raises, but the negotiations prompted him to become an AFRA co-founder and one of its active members.

Tuttle also remembered the day the Hollywood Hotel sound effects man was upstaged by a Hollywood legend:

The soundman was supposed to do a little yipping, yappy dog, like a terrier. He sounded like a Newfoundland dog or something, and the director kept saying, "That won't do." So Olivia de Havilland was sitting next to me, and she says, "I can do a very good dog." And I said, "Well, I don't think they'll let you do a dog. This is an audience show; you're a star, you can't do a dog." And Olivia says, "I'm going to do it." So she went over to the director, went into the booth and said, "I'd like to try doing this dog for you." So they put her behind the screen, and she went on the show and she did that yipping dog."

Films and television

Tuttle became a familiar face to millions of television viewers with more than one hundred appearances from 1950 to 1986, often in the role of an inquisitive busybody. On television and in films, Tuttle streamlined herself into a pattern of roles between wise, loving wives/mothers or bristling matrons. She was familiar to the early television audience as wife/mother Lavinia (Vinnie) Day in Life with Father (1953–1955), while she concurrently graduated to film roles in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and such other films as Heaven Only Knows, Orson Welles's Macbeth, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Fortune Cookie, and The Affairs of Dobie Gillis. In Don't Bother to Knock (1952) she portrayed a mother who lets a disturbed Marilyn Monroe babysit her daughter, and had a rare starring role as Ma Barker in Ma Barker's Killer Brood (1960).

She guest starred twice on Edmond O'Brien's 1960 syndicated crime drama Johnny Midnight. She then played a supporting role in the 1961 Father of the Bride television situation comedy. She made six guest appearances on CBS's Perry Mason, with Raymond Burr, during the nine-year run of the show between 1957 and 1966. In most of her appearances she played the role of the defendant, such as Anna Houser in "The Case of the Substitute Face" in 1958, Sarette Winslow in "The Case of the Artful Dodger" in 1959, and Josephine Kempton in "The Case of the Grinning Gorilla" in 1965. She appeared six times between 1981 and 1984 on the CBS medical drama, Trapper John, M.D., starring Pernell Roberts. She guest starred with Andrew Duggan in his ABC/Warner Brothers crime series, Bourbon Street Beat.

In 1958 and 1959, she was cast in two episodes as Gladys Purvis, the mother of series character Kate McCoy, played by Kathleen Nolan, in his ABC sitcom, The Real McCoys, with Walter Brennan and Richard Crenna.

Tuttle appeared three times each on the CBS sitcoms The Danny Thomas Show and Petticoat Junction and twice on the following: Leave It to Beaver, The Bob Cummings Show, The Ann Sothern Show, Pete and Gladys (as Mrs. Slocum), The Andy Griffith Show, Hazel, General Electric Theater, Switch, and Fantasy Island.

In 1960, she was cast as Mrs. Courtland in the episode "The Raffle Ticket" of the CBS sitcom based on the Hank Ketcham comic strip, Dennis the Menace, with Jay North and Joseph Kearns.

Tuttle guest starred in such westerns as Buckskin, The Restless Gun with John Payne, Colt .45 with Wayde Preston, Johnny Ringo with Don Durant as well as The Cowboys, Little House on the Prairie, The Californians, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Adventures of Jim Bowie, Lawman, and The Iron Horse.

Lurene Tuttle's best known role to the general public was her stint as Lloyd Nolan's senior nurse in thirty-two episodes of the Diahann Carroll NBC series Julia (1968–1971) as the humorless but still warm-hearted Hannah Yarby.

In 1980, Tuttle appeared as Mrs. McIntyre in the Bette Davis television movie, White Mama.

Tuttle married Melville Ruick, an actor whom she had met during her radio years; the couple had a daughter, Barbara Ruick, a musical comedy actress who married famed film composer John Williams before dying unexpectedly in 1974. Tuttle and Ruick eventually divorced; Tuttle remarried, but her second marriage didn't last long. She became a respected acting coach and teacher—something she had always done, even at the height of her acting career (she often re-trained radio actors who had been away from the craft during service in World War II)—until her death from cancer in 1986, aged 78. She was survived by three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Her Sam Spade co-star, Howard Duff, who delivered her eulogy, remembered Tuttle:

She could just take hold of a part and do something with it... I think she never met a part she didn't like. She just loved to work; she loved to act. She's a woman who was born to do what she was doing and loved every minute of it.

Quotations

• "I could play opposite Jimmy Stewart or Fredric March or Cary Grant or Gary Cooper and Leslie Howard, and on the air I could be the most glamorous, gorgeous, tall, black-haired female you've ever seen in your life. Whatever I wished to be, I could be with my voice, which was the thrilling part to me."---On radio acting with major film stars doing radio guest turns.

• "There are very clever people in the business now who are just voice characters, who... turn on Voice 36 or Voice 9 or Voice 12 or something. But we always worked from the full person, at least I did, and I know that all of us tried to work that way because that's the only honest way to do it. You have to have a person who lives and breathes and walks and is alive, rather than just turning on a voice. You could conjure up, through imagination, anything you wanted to be." — On whether she was merely a voice artist.

• "He got steamed up and the half-hour show didn't really satisfy him, so he kept the audience there afterwards... He did at least an hour, sometimes an hour and a half." — On Red Skelton's being unable to stop performing after each installment of his half-hour show was done for the night.

• "Dear Lurene, Thank you for pulling me through so many broadcasts---fondly, Ronnie."—A note Tuttle received from actor Ronald Colman, who was fond of radio and accepted numerous radio jobs himself when film roles became harder for him to come by in his later years.

Listen to

• The Great Gildersleeve, "Marjorie's Cake" (7 September 1941)
• The Adventures of Sam Spade, "The Dry Martini Caper" (1 August 1948)
• Suspense, "Can't We Be Friends?" (25 July 1946)
• Suspense, "The Sisters" (with Rosalind Russell, 9 December 1948)

References

• Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, The Big Broadcast 1920-1950.
• Leonard Maltin, The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio's Golden Age. (New York: Dutton, 1997.)
• Gerald Nachman, Raised on Radio. (New York: Pantheon, 1998.)

External links

• Lurene Tuttle at IMDb
• New York Times Obituary
• Lurene Tuttle at Find a Grave