TV Trivia
by Michael Karol
& Craig Hamrick

Sitcom Queens: Eve Arden
By MICHAEL KAROL; originally posted 09.01.06

Eve Arden
Birthdate: April 30, 1908
Birth Place: San Francisco
Birth Name: Eunice Quedens
Death: November 12, 1990, Los Angeles; cardiac arrest

Key TV Programs:
Our Miss Brooks, as Connie Brooks, 1952-1955, 127 episodes, co-starring Gale Gordon, Don Porter, and Richard Crenna

The Eve Arden Show, as Liza Hammond, 1956-1957, 26 episodes, co-starring Frances Bavier and Allyn Joslyn

The Mothers-in-Law, as Eve Hubbard, 1967-1969, 56 episodes, co-starring Kaye Ballard, Herb Rudley, Roger C. Carmel, and Richard Deacon

Though Eve Arden didn't invent her caustic, best-friend-of-the-star movie persona, she certainly had a patent on it. The woman who would become one of movies’ and televisions’ best-loved wisecracking dames was born north of San Francisco and left school at 16 to join a stock company; apparently, performing had always been in her blood. More tidbits follow. (For much more, click on the book cover to Sitcom Queens, below.)

• • •
By the late 1930s, after another small movie role, she hit the big time, appearing in Stage Door, a 1937 comedy/drama about a group of aspiring actresses living together in a New York boarding house. Slinking around, petting her pussycat and dropping lines like acid, Arden stole scenes from veterans like Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn. Lucille Ball, who played similar types of roles, co-starred in the film, one of the few times she and Arden appeared together, though their careers would intersect many times. • • •

">Stage Door set Arden’s film persona in stone: she played the role for the rest of her career, but she played it better than anyone else who came along. And beneath the humor she exuded a warmth that made her a favorite of 1940s and 1950s audiences. She one-upped Groucho Marx in At the Circus (1939) and was hysterical as a helpful Russian sharpshooter in the war comedy The Doughgirls (1944). • • •

Perhaps her best known role from this period is as Joan Crawford’s steely but loyal best friend in the classic Mildred Pierce (1945), for which Arden won an Oscar nomination as best Supporting Actress. She also began working in radio, where her quick wit and sardonic tone were a plus. In 1948, she started the show with which she would become best associated, Our Miss Brooks, playing a sweet-natured but practical English teacher, Connie Brooks (Lucille Ball had been offered the role, but turned it down, recommending her friend Arden). • • •
When CBS moved the show to television in 1952, Arden of course went along, and had a merry four years, winning an Emmy in 1953 and being nominated each year thereafter. The show was so popular that a 1956 feature film was made based on the characters. • • •
In 1955 Eve made a cameo in friend Lucille Ball’s TV series I Love Lucy. (Ironically, playing herself, Vivian Vance as Ethel Mertz is star struck when she realizes she’s touched Arden; in real life, Eve and Viv co-starred on Broadway a decade earlier in Let’s Face It.) Arden continued in films straight through the early 1950s, then appeared sporadically in movies while she made a name for herself on TV. She gave one of her best screen performances in the 1959 classic Anatomy of a Murder, as James Stewart’s secretary. By then, Miss Brooks was a memory, and she had tried her own self-titled show in 1957. Playing a widowed mom with two daughters, Arden got another Emmy nomination, but the show only lasted a year. • • •
After that, with the exception of a two-year stretch playing opposite Kaye Ballard in the minor hit The Mothers-in-Law, Arden guest-starred on TV, made TV movies, and did the occasional film. Her return to the screen in 1978 as the principal in the mega-hit Grease was a perfect fit, proving that, if anything, the actress had gotten better with age; it gained her a legion of brand-new fans. Eve retired in the early 1980s after a cameo in one final film comedy (Pandemonium, 1982), and wrote her autobiography, The Three Phases of Eve, in 1985. She died in 1990 after several years of heart problems.

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Michael Karol has written four books about Lucille Ball: Lucy A to Z, The Lucille Ball Encyclopedia, the revised, expanded 4th Edition, published in 2008, with exclusive pictures for the first time; Lucy in Print, looking at press coverage of Lucy and her costars over the past 60 years; The Lucille Ball Quiz Book; and The Comic DNA of Lucille Ball: Interpreting the Icon. He has also written the best-selling TV Tidbits book The ABC Movie of the Week Companion. A date gone wrong sparked his vampire/mystery novel Kiss Me, Kill Me. Its prequel, Sleeps Well With Others, was published in the fall of 2006. All are currently available on Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, and many other online and in-store sources. Visit here for more information.