The Theater: The Trouper

• Share

(5 of 8)

Now You Know. Her father's business kept the Fords on the move—from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Philadelphia to Hartford—and Shirley daydreamed her way through schools in ,three cities. Her formal education ended in the second year at Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School. When she was twelve, and already a passionate movie-and theatergoer, Shirley wangled a small part in a Hartford stock company production of Mother Carey's Chickens. She played through a season and then, over the protests of her father ("He retracted into an iceberg"), set off for Manhattan to live with family friends and begin her conquest of Broadway. Because her father had forbidden the use of his name on the stage, Thelma Ford became Shirley Booth. She made Broadway for the first time in 1925 as the ingenue opposite a young juvenile named Humphrey Bogart in Hell's Bells.

The next ten years were packed with varied experience on the road and on Broadway. As a stock actress, Shirley was able to try her hand at everything from Pirandello to Ibsen. Her favorite role is still Sadie Thompson in Rain. In 1929 Shirley met and married Ed Gardner (real name: Eddie Poggenburg), a piano salesman with theatrical ambitions. Marriage to Gardner, a bumpy course of tempestuous separations and tender reconciliations, was anything but dull.

Getting Laughs. Ed and Shirley were hungry together. As the Depression closed in, Ed switched from selling pianos to selling miniature golf courses, to being a director in the WPA Federal Theater Project. Shirley clung tenaciously to the lifeline of stock. In 1935 George Abbott, who had seen and remembered her playing a Dorothy Parker character in an off-Broadway play, was casting Three Men on a Horse. He signed Shirley for the role of Mabel, a dimwit ex-chorus girl with a horribly "refined" Brooklyn accent. Shirley was to play an extension of the same character for years on radio—as Miss Duffy of Duffy's Tavern, Dottie Mahoney on the Kate Smith Show, and in Hogan's Daughter. Meanwhile, Gardner was doing well enough as a radio idea man to suggest that Shirley retire from the stage and accompany him to California, where he was to direct radio's Believe It or Not. Shirley's arrival in Hollywood caused not a ripple of interest among the moviemakers, and she plunged into housekeeping.

Domesticity lasted a year, and then Gardner hustled back to Manhattan to peddle the idea of Duffy's Tavern to networks and sponsors. Shirley joined the cast of The Philadelphia Story, starring Katharine Hepburn, took another comedy part in the equally successful My Sister Eileen, and then turned down a third comedy part to try out for the serious anti-Nazi drama Tomorrow the World. Producer Theron Bamberger worriedly told her: "The public is used to thinking you're funny. You might get laughs in our play in spite of yourself." Shirley replied with the wisdom of a trouper's long experience:

"Don't worry. Getting laughs isn't quite that easy."