Well, I guess it’s Hef, although I always wondered why people took someone so artificial and synthetic seriously, but I’m going to lead with Anne, shown above with co-star and husband Robert Sterling.
I knew Anne and Bob entirely through Topper, as George and Marion Kerby, spirits who haunted the eponymous “Cosmo Topper” (Leo G. Carroll). Topper was a early-fifties TV show that only ran for two years. The source of the show was the 1926 novel by Thorne Smith, also eponymous—if “eponymous” simply means “the same name”—and its sequels and the 1937 movie Topper and its sequels.1
Both the books and the movies were considered sophisticated—the first book, utterly forgotten now2, was once a “Roaring Twenties” classic, along with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—and the TV show followed suit. George and Marion dressed elegantly, smoked up a storm and drank endless martinis, very much in the fashion of Nick and Nora Charles. But somehow all this ended up as Saturday morning fodder for kids, where I watched it religiously, along with Rod Brown and His Rocket Rangers, Tales of Texas Rangers, and Space Patrol.
The Kerbys rather reminded me of my parents—though my dad never wore black tie and my mom certainly never had a fur3—because they smoked and drank martinis as well. The Kerby’s had a lovable dog—“Neil”, a St. Bernard—which was probably why the show was considered kid fodder, although the real “joke” with Neil was that he drank martinis too, gulping them down by the quart!4
Anne was easily the sexiest thing on Saturday morning TV, and Marion definitely made the show, her casually flirtatious ways constantly upsetting the buttoned down “Cosmo” and getting him in trouble with his ladies who lunch wife Henrietta (Lee Patrick), as well as his pompous boss “Mr. Schuyler” (Thurston Hall)—because, of course, only Cosmo can see or hear them. I can’t remember how many years I spent watching the 78 episodes that constituted the entire Topper œuvre, but the characters were embedded in my brain. Somehow, I never saw either Anne or Bob in anything other than Topper, but Lee and Thurston were hard-working character actors and I was frequently “shocked” to see Henrietta or Mr. Schuyler show up “out of character”. I was totally bewildered when I started watching Hitchcock films, to see Cosmo as an unfeeling hard-ass (North by Northwest) and even a murderer! (Spellbound).
Way back in the VHS era I sought to revisit the past, which naturally proved to be a mistake. With only three networks, and ABC still barely functional at that, people would watch just about anything. “Comedy” shows like Topper needed only about one joke every five minutes to hold the viewers’ attention.5 Still, I do remember one Topper classic: Marion, irritated by Henrietta’s terrible attempts at redecorating, snatches up a chair and carries it across the room to where it “belongs”. “Cosmo!” gasps Henrietta, “that chair just flew across the room all by itself!” “Yes, dear. A wing chair.”
That would stand as the acme of wit for me until, a few years later, bandleader/comedian Spike Jones, noted for his endless succession of flashy suits, cracked “I have more suits than Howard Johnson has flavors!”
Afterwords
Several years after Topper went off the air, I was visiting my grandparents by myself. They took me along to visit some friends, which in retrospect must have had some serious overtones (about which I never knew) because I was sent off to play in the “library”, not at all grand but a room that was lined with books. Among them I found Topper. I never knew that Topper was a book but naturally I set down to read it. The visit was so long that I read the whole thing. It was probably the first “adult” book I ever read, though it was not at all racy, although at one point Henrietta does buy a pair of somehow racy “step-ins”, whatever they are, to arouse Cosmo, although as I recall nothing happened.
As I remember it, the book had a wistful tone, not really funny at all, Topper glimpsing the fun life he could have had rather than actually having it, although his capacity for alcohol does “improve” and his thigh becomes so muscular that the family cat no longer likes to lie against it. I barely understood all this at the time and wonder if I read the book now—which I’m not going to do—if I could imagine why it once caused a stir.
- The first Topper movie (but not the sequels) starred Mr. Sophistication himself, Cary Grant. I tried to watch it but gave up after the first half hour. An Awful Truth it ain’t. ↩︎
- Particularly by the New York Times, which was unaware of them in their obit, and for which they received a biting letter of correction from one indignant subscriber, not that they’ll ever have the nerve to print it. O the Times! ↩︎
- However, several of her friends had furs. In those far-off, grotesque days, women—the la di da ones, at least—wore fur “boas” (you can still buy them), which were more or less fur scarfs. They were usually fox fur, and the cooler ones had the head, feet, and tail still on them, the heads with glass eyes so they didn’t look gross. The coolest ones of all had heads at both ends. Through a variety of furrier tricks, the boas were stretched out and shaped so that it didn’t look like the wearer was traipsing around with a dead animal on her shoulders. When my mom’s boa-wearing friends would come by, when they were leaving they would bend down so that I could look at the fox heads. ↩︎
- Anyone of my age bracket “knows” that St. Bernards used to rescue stranded travelers in the Alps and always carried little casks of brandy around their necks to help revive chilled spirits. This bit, referenced in literally hundreds of books, movies, cartoons, TV shows, etc. seems to have disappeared. Kids these days probably don’t even know what the Alps are! Kids! ↩︎
- Easily the funniest thing about the VHS version were the commercials from the original evening broadcasts, which I never saw. In those days, the cast often did the commercials, so you get Anne and Bob, as people rather than ghosts, taking ecstatic drags on their Pall Malls (unfiltered, of course, because only complete sissies smoked filters back then). So easy on the throat! ↩︎
