April 20 - Betty Lou Gerson

Image courtesy otrcat.com

On this day, in 1914, Betty Lou Gerson was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Betty’s family spent most of her formative years in Birmingham, Alabama, where her father was a steel company executive. When she was sixteen, the Gerson clan moved to Chicago, Illinois and she got her first taste of performing on a radio show called The First Nighter Program. What made First Nighter different from other serials of the day is that it technically wasn’t a serial. It was the first anthology program meaning a new, complete story was presented each week. If you missed last week’s episode because your cousin was in town and wanted to see the sights, you won’t be confused as to what is happening in this week’s episode, a concept we’re used to but was novel in 1930. Romantic comedies were the usual fare on First Nighter and for the two years she spent with the show, Betty was frequently paired with a young Don Ameche.

Betty’s career didn’t really take off until she was 21 and living in New York City. For the latter half of the Thirties, she became a staple in several radio soap operas. She played the title role in Arthur Grimm’s Daughter, lead the cast as Julia in Midstream, was one of the main Lonely Women and appeared on the radio version of Guiding Light. It wasn’t all melodrama for Betty though, as she continued being the resident romantically comic lead (although some weeks she was comically romantic for a change of pace) on anthologies like Curtain Time and Grand Hotel.

Image copyright Disney

In the mid Forties, Betty changed locations by moving to Los Angeles but continued working in the medium of radio. She reestablished herself on the airwaves in dramas like The Whistler, Crime Classics, Mr. President and Johnny Modero, Pier 23. She also had several roles on Lux Radio Theater including a turn as Glinda the Good Witch in a 1950 production of The Wizard of Oz.

1950 was also the year Betty first became part of the Disney family, when she was cast as the narrator of Cinderella. Her most enduring contribution didn’t come until eleven years later when her voice burst into our eardrums as the deliciously over-the-top Cruella de Vil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. She also played Mrs. Birdwell, a contestant on the show-within-a-movie, What’s My Crime, that Horace and Jasper watch while the Dalmatians escape from de Vil Manor. Her final Disney role was a rare live action one when she did a cameo in Mary Poppins as an old Crone.

Image copyright 20th Century Fox

Betty was seen on the big screen only a handful of times in her career. For instance, she played Nurse Anderson in the 1958 version of The Fly, Yvonne Kraus in the 1949 anti-communist propaganda film The Red Menace, Kate Peacock in 1959’s The Miracle on the Hills and a half dozen small, mostly uncredited roles in mostly B-Movie film noirs. She did about the same number of live action roles for television, appearing on Perry Mason three times and once each on The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Hazel, Wanted Dead or Alive and The Rifleman. In 1966, she retired from acting but not from working. When she married her second husband (her first husband had died the year before), she supported him at his telephone answering service.

In 1996, Betty was made an official Disney Legend not only for trying to skin puppies in the name of fashion but for making us love her as she did it. She came out of retirement just once, in 1997, to provide the voice of Frances the Fish in Cat’s Don’t Dance, the only animated feature ever produced by Turner Feature Animation. Just over a year later, Betty suffered a fatal stroke on January 12, 1999 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 84.