Most people think of Donna Reed as the stereotypical 1950s housewife. But in reality,
she was a working mother of four, a leader in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement,
an Oscar winner, and much much more.
According to Donna Reed's own account in Guideposts, she was fortunate to have an
aunt out in Los Angeles who let her stay after Reed graduated from high school so
she could attend Los Angeles City College. Reed had $60 on her person when she set out for L.A.
But once there, she quickly settled in and before long was dubbed the "Campus Queen."
At LACC, Reed studied stenography and office efficiency. Whether it was the publicity
surrounding that "Campus Queen" title, or her performances in college productions,
Reed soon drew the notice of Hollywood talent scouts. This led to a contract
with MGM. Reed's daughter Mary Anne Owen was quoted in Closer Weekly, saying:
“I always feel that people don’t understand how intelligent she
was and how she easily could have been a college professor if she hadn’t won that
beauty contest at City College. It literally changed her life.”
Before long, Donna Reed was gracing the silver screen. While she's best known for The Donna Reed
Show and the film It's a Wonderful Life, she appeared in a laundry list of lesser
films over the course of a decade-plus before those opportunities came her way.
Reed's very first movie was 1941's The Getaway, a now-forgotten film about a federal agent,
an escaped convict, and the convict's sister, played by Reed, who tries to reform her brother
and leaves the agent smitten. It was a relatively minor role in a less-than-stellar vehicle.
More serious movies followed, if not more substantive roles. Reed had a
bit part in the Shadow of the Thin Man. Next, she appeared in The Bugle Sounds,
The Courtship of Andy Hardy, and The Human Comedy. Then, in the mid-1940s,
Reed began getting bigger roles alongside major stars, including Calling Dr. Gillespie,
opposite Lionel Barrymore, and See Here, Private Hargrove, with Robert Walker.
In 1945, Reed co-starred with George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Peter Lawford in The
Picture of Dorian Gray, a box office smash based upon the classic Oscar Wilde story. There was no
critical consensus on the film — some reviewers liked it, others panned it — but it helped to
make Reed an A-list leading lady and led to her next and most memorable film role.
It's a Wonderful Life is the poignant tale of George Bailey, a small-town man with big
dreams who grapples with the meaning of life when the tiny hometown that needs him gets
in the way of his plans. Donna Reed played George's wife Mary, opposite Jimmy Stewart.
"Do you want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down."
When Reed starred alongside Stewart in the now iconic film, she was only 25. On set,
Stewart was reportedly nervous around Reed. And according to Reed's daughter,
Stewart held Reed accountable for the movie's poor box office performance when it opened.
Despite a disappointing showing upon its release, It's a Wonderful Life withstood
the test of time and landed Reed in the pantheon of classic movie stars.
By 1946, Reed had clearly been pigeonholed as the girl next door. She was able to break out,
however briefly, when she played a seasoned sex worker in 1953's From Here to Eternity.
"Donna Reed brought something extra to the role of Alma, a kind of poetic dimension."
The movie was critically acclaimed, with Variety commenting that:
"It would be hard to imagine anyone else playing the characters,
even though some of the assignments are off-beat to the extreme."
Included in the rave review was Reed's performance as a call girl
at the New Congress Club, a fictional brothel frequented by American soldiers
during World War II. Variety went on to praise Reed, saying that,
"Miss Reed, too, has a change of pace and reveals an ability for meaty,
dramatic work scarcely suspected from her previous assignments."
The role would earn Reed the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1954,
beating out Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter, among others. In her acceptance speech, Reed said,
"It was a wonderful experience, From Here to
Eternity, but I think even more wonderful is from Eternity to here."
Notwithstanding that Oscar, The Donna Reed Show, which ran from 1958 to 1966,
could be Donna Reed's most enduring legacy. Set in the fictional middle-class town of Hilldale,
the show was developed and produced by Tony Owen, a fellow Midwesterner and Reed's second husband.
Reed's sitcom rarely if ever tiptoed close to divisive topics like feminism, social inequality,
race relations, and so on, preferring instead to explore issues like misplacing one's wedding ring,
a teenage son's misadventures in buying a car, and trying to sleep on a long plane trip.
"Donna has her faults."
"See? Tell them, dear."
"Like what?"
"Well, she can't hit left-handed pitching."
Still, Reed insisted that the show had universal appeal. She told a 1960
interviewer from the Pennsylvania newspaper Standard-Speaker that
the show aimed to depict 1950s life in places like her old hometown, saying,
"The series is more like my life might have been had I never left my hometown of Denison,
Iowa. On the show we have our problems, laughs and, above all, our need for love and friendship."
If Reed detected any contradiction in her own pursuit of a career while
telling stories about a woman happy to be a homemaker, she didn't seem troubled by it.
"Every woman you call 'just a housewife' is a nurse,
a psychologist, a diplomat, and a philosopher."
The show did provide an entertaining escape for millions during the early to mid-1960s,
a time during which the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement were gaining steam
and Second Wave feminism was finding its voice.
The Donna Reed Show went off the air in 1966, the same year the National Organization for Women
launched in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr. began speaking out against war,
and America ramped up its military presence in Vietnam. Despite being a lifelong Republican,
Donna Reed was against the Vietnam War and went
public with her opposition to it. She helped lead Another Mother for Peace.
"I am here really because
of the deep pain of war which has come to all mothers down through the ages."
Reed's daughter told Closer Weekly that her new role provided a source
of fulfillment for Reed while her career was on the decline, saying,
"She just dove headfirst into that,
because they rented a warehouse in Beverly Hills which was this huge place. These women
were writing speeches and strategizing on how to reach across political lines."
Work-wise, Reed turned down many of the roles sent her way and didn't appear
onscreen for a while after Donna Reed ended. In Reed's obituary,
The Los Angeles Times quotes her about this period, saying,
"I just wouldn't do the junk I was offered. I didn't like the way films
were treating women. Most of the roles were extremely passive — women in jeopardy,
poor stupid souls who couldn't help themselves."
Since Reed disliked the options available to her professionally, she dropped out of the workforce.
Donna Reed married three times over the course of her life and had four children with her second
husband. In some ways, her family life took off when her acting career stalled. Mary Anne,
Tony Jr., Timothy, and Penny were always a priority for Reed, even when she was working,
but she had more time to spend with them after The Donna Reed Show went off the air.
Mary Anne would go on to try her luck at acting,
appearing in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Tony Jr. stayed in Los Angeles for a while,
too, going the academic route and teaching at a community college before becoming president of
the Donna Reed Foundation for the Performing Arts after his mother's death. Timothy and Penny Jane,
meanwhile, seem to have avoided the spotlight, so little is known about their lives.
What would have been unheard of for her TV housewife character — divorce — became a
reality for Donna Reed after the show she had collaborated with her husband
on ended and their children grew up. In 1971, she split from Tony Owen,
ending 25 years of marriage. Reed's daughter, Mary Anne Owen, told Closer Weekly that,
"She and my father kind of climbed this mountain together doing the show,
and then she really blossomed doing the anti-war work and really became a liberal."
Owen pointed out that, despite it being Reed's second marriage, her mother was relatively young
when she married Tony, and Reed had been working nonstop since she joined MGM at the age of 21.
Without the TV show and their young family to hold them together,
Reed and Owen found it hard to make things work. Reed told The Morning Call around that time:
"Getting divorced was terrible. But it was also terrible being married. You have to
decide which is worse. Nothing new really happened. He didn't change and neither did
I. It was always a difficult marriage. We were so different in temperament."
In her later years, Donna Reed would make a triumphant return to television as part
of the cast of Dallas, the popular 1980s primetime drama about the fractious family
of a Texas oil tycoon. In Season 8 of the show, Reed appeared as Miss Ellie Ewing,
the matriarch of the clan, briefly replacing Barbara Bel Geddes in the role.
According to her daughter, Reed liked the idea of playing another mother who
holds her family together. Ellie Ewing, after all,
is a stand-by-your-man kind of woman who teaches her children that blood
runs thicker than water (if not necessarily oil). Owen went on to tell Closer Weekly that,
"She was interested, again, because it was another family show and she thought that's
why it was so popular. Not because it was a good family; it was a family,
and the mother wielded a certain amount of power being the matriarch."
Whether Bel Geddes had left Dallas over health issues, as was widely reported,
or a contract dispute as some believed, she soon returned. And Lorimar,
the production company behind the show, welcomed her back,
writing Donna Reed out of the series a year after she'd joined it. Reed was suddenly out of a job.
In 1985, Reed sued Lorimar for breach of contract. Reed had signed a three-year
contract with Lorimar and had been let go after only one. The actress eventually accepted a $1
million settlement that included the freedom to work for whomever she wanted. But before
she had a chance, fate intervened in the form of a devastating medical diagnosis.
In mid-1985, Donna Reed, then 64 years old, went to the hospital with
ulcers. Doctors found a malignant tumor in her pancreas. Then, that December,
she was admitted to Cedars Sinai Medical Center for bleeding ulcers.
The hospital released her so she could spend Christmas in
her Beverly Hills house with her family. She died at home on January 14, 1986,
with her third husband Grover Asmus beside her, just two weeks before her 65th birthday.
Reed was buried at Westwood Cemetery in Los Angeles. In an AP interview,
Reed's younger brother, Bill Mullenger, an Iowa real estate agent, said,
"We expected it. Her death was imminent. It was kind of rough. I saw her at Thanksgiving.
She was about like any normal person would be when they find out they have
cancer – depressed. There was not much hope of remission or that it could be treated."
Upon Donna Reed's passing, her widower Grover Asmus established the Donna
Reed Foundation for the Performing Arts, based in Denison, Iowa, Reed's hometown.
According to the foundation's website, it holds education workshops and sponsors scholarships and
internships for young Iowans interested in show business. Now run by Reed's son
Tony Jr., the foundation also encourages children's musical theater. Additionally,
there is a Donna Reed Museum in Denison showcasing Reed's prizes,
honors, and personal correspondence. The museum aims to pay tribute to
Reed's memory while also celebrating "the lives and achievements of all Iowans."
But perhaps Reed's greatest legacies are her children and the performances that live on
after her passing. It's not necessarily true that Reed's time was a simpler one. The era of
her prime was fraught with the anxiety of the Cold War and the social unrest of the 1960s.
"People still say, 'Well, I want a mom just like Donna Reed,'
and I had a mom just like Donna Reed."
But the fictional worlds she helped create offered an escape from all that,
and audiences can re-watch them today to find whichever Donna Reed — girl next door,
wartime sex worker, or housewife and mother — they prefer to see.