Fifties (83 page)

No one understood that better than the people at Cadillac, and they hadn’t needed motivational-research people to figure it out for them. For years in their advertising they had pushed Cadillacs not just as the top-of-the-line car, the best that money could buy but, equally important, as a reward for a life of hard work: “Here is the man who has earned the right to sit at this wheel,” the ads said. Classically, the Cadillac ad pitched the Horatio Alger part of the American dream: “Let’s say it was thirty-one years ago on a beautiful morning in June. A boy stood by a rack of papers on a busy street and heard the friendly horn of a Cadillac. ‘Keep the change.’ The driver smiled as he took his paper and rolled out into the traffic. ‘There,’ thought the boy as he clutched the coin, ‘is the car for me!’ And since this is America, where dreams make sense in the heart of a boy, he is now an industrialist. He has fought—without interruption—for the place in the world he wants his family to occupy. Few would deny him some taste of the fruits of his labor. No compromise this time!”

That ad set the tone for much of the advertising that was to follow. The head of the family had worked hard and
selflessly,
and he had earned the right to bestow these hard-earned fruits upon his loyal family. It worked for grand and expensive products like the Cadillac, and also for small and inexpensive ones like the McDonald’s ten-cent hamburger. McDonald’s slogans began as “Give Mom a Break” and ended with the classic “You Deserve a Break Today.” America, it appeared, was slowly but surely learning to live with affluence, convincing itself that it had earned the right to its new appliances and cars. Each year seemed to take the country further from its old puritan restraints; each year, it was a little easier to sell than in the past.

THIRTY-FOUR

B
Y THE MID-FIFTIES TELEVISION
portrayed a wonderfully antiseptic world of idealized homes in an idealized, unflawed America. There were no economic crises, no class divisions or resentments, no ethnic tensions, few if any hyphenated Americans, few if any minority characters. Indeed there were no intrusions from other cultures. Nik Venet, a young record producer who grew up in a Greek-American immigrant family, remembered going to the real-life home of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson (which was strikingly like their television home) and being struck by the absence of odors. His had been a home where garlic and other powerful aromas from cooking wafted through the entire apartment; by contrast, the Nelsons’ home seemed to reflect a different, cleaner culture. Invented by writers, producers, and directors, that America was the province of the television family sitcom of the mid- and late fifties.
There were no Greeks, no Italians, or no Jews in this world, only Americans, with names that were obviously Anglo-Saxon and Protestant; it was a world of Andersons and Nelsons and Cleavers.

Since there were no members of ethnic groups, with the unlikely and eccentric exception of Desi Arnaz/Ricky Ricardo, whom Lucille Ball had virtually blackmailed CBS into accepting and who existed as a kind of running gag, there was no discrimination. Everyone belonged to the political and economic center, and no one doubted that American values worked and that anyone with even an iota of common sense would want to admire them. In that sense the family sitcoms reflected—and reinforced—much of the social conformity of the period. There was no divorce. There was no serious sickness, particularly mental illness. Families
liked
each other, and they tolerated each other’s idiosyncracies. Dads were good dads whose worst sin was that they did not know their way around the house and could not find common household objects or that they were prone to give lectures about how much tougher things had been when they were boys. The dads were, above all else, steady and steadfast. They symbolized a secure world. Moms in the sitcoms were, if anything, more interesting; they were at once more comforting and the perfect mistresses of their household premises, although the farther they ventured from their houses the less competent they seemed. Running a house perfectly was one thing; driving a car one block from home on an errand was another. Then things went wrong, although never in a serious way. Above all else, the moms loved the dads, and vice versa, and they never questioned whether they had made the right choice. Ward Cleaver once asked June, “What type of girl would you have Wally [their older son] marry?” “Oh,” answered June. “Some very sensible girl from a nice family ... one with both feet on the ground, who’s a good cook, and can keep a nice house, and see that he’s happy.” “Dear,” answers Ward. “I got the last one of those.” Parents were never unjust or unwise in the way they treated their children.

Moms and dads never raised their voices at each other in anger. Perhaps the dads thought the moms were not good drivers, and the moms thought the dads were absentminded when it came to following instructions in the kitchen, but this was a peaceable kingdom. There were no drugs. Keeping a family car out too late at night seemed to be the height of insubordination. No family difference was so irreconcilable that it could not be cleared up and straightened out within the allotted twenty-two minutes. Moms and dads never stopped loving each other. Sibling love was always greater than
sibling rivalry. No child was favored, no one was stunted. None of the dads hated what they did, though it was often unclear what they actually did. Whatever it was, it was respectable and valuable; it was white-collar and it allowed them to live in the suburbs (the networks were well aware of modern demographics) and not to worry very much about money. Money was never discussed, and the dark shadow of poverty never fell over their homes, but no one made too much or they might lose their connection with the pleasantly comfortable middle-class families who watched the show and who were considered the best consumers in the country. These television families were to be not merely a reflection of their viewers but role models for them as well.

They were to be as much like their fellow citizens as possible and certainly not better than them. There was no need for even the slightest extra dimension of ambition which might put them ahead of the curve. Being ordinary was being better. Ozzie Nelson of
Ozzie and Harriet,
who had been, in an earlier incarnation, a successful radio bandleader, changed professions when he took his family to television in order to create the model all-American family. But a bandleader was a show-business person and show-business people were different: They were Hollywood, they made money and hung out with a fast crowd. Therefore, when Ozzie and Harriet, his wife and the band’s singer, left radio to go on television, the band was gone. Instead, he took some kind of middle-class job.

He was pleasant and loving and also something of a bumbler, on occasion stumbling over things, often getting his children’s simplest intentions wrong, when for example he decided that David, his older son, was going to elope with his girlfriend, Ozzie raced to the justice of the peace’s office only to learn that David was there to pay a speeding ticket. Ozzie was clearly no genius; but then it was not his job to be smarter than the people watching him, it was his job to be just a little less smart than the average dad. He worked at a pleasant, unspecified white-collar job. In a way, Ozzie and other sitcom dads seemed to have it both ways compared to the new breed of real-life suburban dads, who had to go off every day very early to commute to work and often returned late at night, when the children were ready for bed. By contrast, Ozzie seemed to work such flexible hours that he was home all the time. He never seemed to be at work, and yet he was successful.

If sitcom parents were just like the same upbeat, optimistic people whose faces now peopled the advertisements of magazines, then it was the duty of sitcom kids to be happy and healthy, too.
They were permitted to be feisty—which was better than being a goody-two-shoes—for the latter were not only distinctly unlikable to millions of young people across the nation, but they offered far too little chance for a scriptwriter to get them into the kind of minor trouble that could be solved in the last few minutes. After all, things could go wrong in a small way, but never in a way that threatened the families watching at home or cut too close to the nerve in dealing with the real issues of real American homes, where all kinds of problems lay just beneath the surface. Things in sitcoms never took a turn for the worse, into the dangerous realm of social pathology. Things went wrong because a package was delivered to the wrong house, because a child tried to help a parent but did so ineptly, because a dad ventured into a mom’s terrain, or because a mom, out of the goodness of her heart, ventured into a dad’s terrain. When people did things badly, they almost always did them badly with good intentions.

In this world the moms never worked. These were most decidedly one-income homes. The idea of a strike at a factory was completely alien. Equally alien was the idea that the greater world of politics might intrude. These families were living the new social contract as created by Bill Levitt and other suburban developers like him and were surrounded by new neighbors who were just like
them.
The American dream was now located in the suburbs, and for millions of Americans, still living in urban apartments, where families were crunched up against each other and where, more often than not, two or more siblings shared the same bedroom, these shows often seemed to be beamed from a foreign country, but one that the viewers longed to be part of. One young urban viewer, hearing that Beaver Cleaver was being threatened yet again with the punishment of being sent upstairs to his room, could only think to wish for a home of his own with an upstairs room to go to. But neither he nor anyone he knew had a home with an upstairs, let alone a room of his own.

These families were optimistic. There was a conviction, unstated but always there, that life was good and was going to get better. Family members might argue, but they never fought; even when they argued, voices were never raised. In the Cleaver family of
Leave It To Beaver,
the family always seemed to eat together and the pies were homemade. June Cleaver, it was noted, prepared two hot meals a day. The Cleavers were not that different from the Nelsons, who had preceded them into television suburbia: No one knew in which state or suburb they lived, and no one knew what Ward Cleaver, like Ozzie
Nelson, did for a living, except that it was respectable and that it demanded a shirt, tie, and suit.

To millions of other Americans, coming from flawed homes, it often seemed hopelessly unfair to look in on families like this. Millions of kids growing up in homes filled with anger and tension often felt the failure was theirs. It was their fault that their homes were messier, their parents less human (in fact they were, of course, more human) and less understanding than the television parents in whose homes they so often longed to live. As Beaver Cleaver (a rascal, with a predilection for trouble, but harmless and engaging trouble) once told June Cleaver (who was almost always well turned out in sweater and skirts), “You know, Mom, when we’re in a mess, you kind of make things seem not so messy.” “Well,” answered June, “isn’t that sort of what mothers are for?”

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
was hardly the most brilliant show, hardly the best written (looking back on some of the scripts, which were always written by Ozzie Nelson, it seems amazing that the show succeeded), but it lasted the longest—fourteen years.
Leave It To Beaver,
arguably a more interesting, better written show, lasted only six years, and
Father Knows Best
lasted nine. But
Ozzie and Harriet
had the added fascination of using the Nelson family members playing themselves; therefore, ordinary viewers had the benefit of watching the Nelson boys grow up in real life in their own living rooms. Harriet was a television mom right up there with June Cleaver, a wonderful all-purpose homemaker. In truth, because she had grown up as the child of show-business parents and she herself had been an entertainer at an early age, most chores in her home had always been done by servants. If she had not always been the person portrayed on television, she gradually became that person in real life. She was genuinely nice in real life. Her family came first, and she became, particularly as her younger son reached a difficult adolescence, the stabilizing influence. If, in a prefeminist era, she had doubts about who she was and how she was presented to her fellow Americans, she never showed them or talked about them. Both on television and in real life, she accepted her life, for it was a good one, far better than what anyone who had grown up in the Depression had any right to expect. Ozzie Nelson’s decision to use the family as a performing troupe did not bother her much; for this was a show-business family that, unlike the one of her childhood, never had to go on the road. As a girl she had traveled all over the country with her show-business parents, who had not made a particularly good living and who had eventually divorced; now, without traveling,
without leaving their home—all they had to do was drive a few minutes to a studio and inhabit a set that was a virtual replica of their real home—she and her husband and her children were being well paid and for a long time they seemed a family very much like the one they portrayed.

She did not seem, even in her home, as strong a personality as June Cleaver. She cooked and she cleaned. She seemed to approve of what the others did, and she might say near the end of a show that whatever had been proposed was a good idea as far as she was concerned. She was certainly a good sport, but why shouldn’t she be, with a family as easy as this to deal with? Her own personality was never that clearly defined; her role was to make life better for her husband and children. When she was on the phone (her phone calls, by Ozzie’s orders, were limited to thirty seconds, though of course, Ozzie always interrupted her), her calls, as Diana Meehan pointed out, were never revealing of her own personality but were always updates on what Ozzie and the boys were doing. She knew her role and accepted it gladly and without complaint. She did not challenge the accepted sexism of the time, most specifically her husband’s vision of what a woman could do. At one point on a show she suggested that if she could join the local volunteer fire department, to which Ozzie already belonged, she would see a good deal more of him. “Are you kidding?” Ozzie answered. “You gals take too long to dress.” “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “We can be pretty quick.” But Ozzie would have none of it: “By the time you got your makeup on, the fire would be out.” The only housewife who fought back—but by doing so only served to prove that men were right and that women had no place in the serious world of business and commerce—was Lucy. Indeed, it was the very manic, incompetent quality of her rebellion that showed she should be at home burning the dinner and that women were somehow different than men, less steady, and less capable.