Beverly Garland 1926- By Barry Brown

The role of heroine in movies is, traditionally, a showcase for some beautiful, empty-headed young starlet with a modicum of charm and a minimum of talent. Literally hundreds of actresses awarded these roles have come and gone with a by-now predictable regularity, particularly in the case of the B film. When the movie is a sci-fi or horror picture, the position of heroine is even more precarious -- not only is little histrionic ability called for (other than the talent to elicit horrified reactions and loud screams of fear), but when it is displayed (assuming it is present) that talent must yet play second fiddle to the monster, be it a resurrected caveman, a giant spider or menacing, mammoth monoliths. Occasionally, however, the grim pace of these films has been surmounted by the appeal of an actress whose vivacity and talent is too apparent to be smothered. Such an actress was personified in horror films of the Fifties by Beverly Garland, a saucy, outspoken, unreconstructed beautiful dame who can lay claim to being one of the few actresses capable of stealing the picture from the monster. As is generally know, Ms. Garland has in no way allowed her career to be bound by the fantasy genre; nevertheless, as classifications go, she was the foremost (and certainly the most accomplished) of the decade's horror film leading ladies.

James Fessenden, a native of New Orleans, was a member of the illustrious Fessenden family that included Jim's great-grandfather William Pitt Fessenden, Secretary of the Treasury under President Lincoln. Amelia 'Milly' Scherer, a native of New York of German descent, was a cosmetician when she met and married Jim. At that time, he was a singer in the Russ Columbo-Bing Crosby mold, flourishing on one-night stands. But the demands of marriage ended that and Jim became a salesman. For a while, Jim and Milly settled in Santa Cruz, California, a small, pleasant coastal town, where on October 17, 1926 their daughter, Beverly Lucy, was born.

When Beverly was four, the family moved south to Glendale, California and in 1931 she made her acting debut playing Cupid in a kindergarten play. It was a conspicuous performance -- as she shot an arrow into the heart of the hero, her costume fell off.

An only child, Beverly had a happy childhood. She flirted with acting by doing small parts at the Verdugo Little Theatre in Glendale and, while still in junior high, she studied voice for several months with a professional coach, Anita Arliss, sister of the renowed stage and screen actor George Arliss.

Jim's work obliged his family to move to Phoenix, Arizona when Beverly was of high school age. There she continued acting work, appearing in plays at the Phoenix Little Theatre with a young unknown named Steve Allen and acting in inspirational wartime playlets and plays for the local Community Chest over radio station KOY.

In 1944, while on a vacation to Catalina Island off the coast of California, the eighteen year-old girl met a twenty-year old fisherman named Robert Campbell. They eloped to Las Vegas and were married, but divorce came four months later. However, Beverly retained her married name and all of her subsequent acting work until her second marriage in 1952 was performed under the name Beverly Campbell.

After graduation from high school, Beverly's initial idea was to become a nurse as a career, as an actress, however desirable, seemed impractical. She even went so far as to send her five hundred dollar tuition fee to Stephens College in Columbus, Missouri -- yet, she wavered. Finally, it was her mother who brought the truth out of her and suggested that if she truly desired to give performing a try, she should write her former vocal coach, Miss Arliss, asking if she thought Beverly had something to offer and would she be readmitted as a student? Beverly did so, Arliss replied enthusiastically and, since Jim Fessenden wanted to return to southern California where he hoped someday to retire*, Beverly got a refund from Stephens and returned to the Golden State with her parents. But before she could begin her lessons, Anita Arliss died of a heart attack and Beverly had no place to go.

* Fessenden didn't retire right away. He became involved in selling hearing aids and eventually become an audiologist. He was affectionately called 'Doc' by his customers; ergo, the frequent mistake in publicity releases that Garland's father was a 'Doctor'. He died in an auto crash in Riverside, California in 1961.

She spent a year at Glendale College as a drama major, but life was becoming increasingly confusing to the young woman. She developed an allergy that was at first mistakenly diagnosed as leukemia but, in reality, as Beverly herself put it: "I guess I was just a nervous wreck."

At the invitation of her great-aunt, a wealthy eccentric who lived in Connecticut, Beverly travelled East, where she hoped to begin an acting career in New York. But the Big City "just panicked me". She didn't know the ropes and after three or four months, having spent the money she'd earned from various jobs and too proud to ask for the forty-five dollars bus-fare to return to California, Beverly sold the wedding-ring she still had and made her way back to her family, who were living now in Newport Beach.

In an atmosphere less foreboding to her, Beverly gradually resolved to begin her career in earnest. She began to work as an unpaid apprentice-actress at a professional stock company in nearby Laguna Beach. In order to become a bonafide professional with a union card from Actors' Equity, a person had both to work free of charge for a legitimate company and appear in at least three shows during a given theatre season. Beverly succeeded and her career was officially launched.

Between a variety of odd jobs, she managed to land some professional stagework. In 1949, while acting in a stock show in Tustin, California, she was spotted by an agent named Ray Cooper, who was impressed enough to sign her and soon after, Beverly did her first filmwork, two scenes in the low-budget suspense  D.O.A. (1950), starring Edmond O'Brien as a man who, literally, solves his own murder (he has been given a slow-working poison that has no physical effect until the moment of death, giving him time to find his killer before he dies). In a 1970 interview with Doug McClelland for Screen Facts magazine, Garland recalled: "I was a secretary and had two scenes. In one I got knocked around by Ed O'Brien. In the other he came to tell me my boyfriend will die"

Though her role was small, Beverly had at last broken onto the screen. But the next few years were to prove inauspicious, due to an innocent gaffe the inexperienced actress made when, in one of her first interviews, she was asked if she thought D.O.A. might win an Academy Award. She replied, flippantly: "I don't know. There're a lot of good pictures out this year". It was an honest comment made with a clear mind, but it irked the film's producers and her agent finally discovered that they were refusing to give Beverly any help with references. She felt herself, in fact, blacklisted throughout the industry (though that was probably a bit of an exaggeration).

Blacklist or not, the next few years were a struggle. Between 1950 and 1953, she pitched uncertainly from job to job. She did thirteen episodes of a half-hour TV show, Mama Rosa, playing the title character's daughter for nine dollars and forty-five cents per episode; she landed a few live TV commercials, acted out songs in pantomime for the Al Jarvis live TV show, had a few bit parts in films and did occasional stagework, including a short run with a road company of the play Happy Birthday, starring Miriam Hopkins and directed by Joshua Logan. But these jobs were punctuated with long periods of working in such glorious positions as waitress, elevator operator, model at I. Magnin's and even a mailgirl at Forest Lawn Mortuary.

In 1952, while working in the play Dark of the Moon at the Players' Ring Theatre in Hollywood, she met an actor named Richard Garland and in August of that year they married. Thenceforth, she was known as Beverly Garland.

The following year, Beverly's streak of no-luck broke when she was hired to play a pregnant leukemia victim in the pilot episode of the TV series MEDIC. To her astonishment, Beverly's performance won her an Emmy nomination in 1954 and proved to be the turning point of her career. She has never since been forced to work at anything other than acting. Ironically, the same year Garland leaped to respectability, her first horror movie was released.

The Neanderthal Man (1954) had, of course, been made prior to her Emmy nomination. Now this low-grade shocker boasted a newly-distinguished actress in its cast -- in a teentsy part. Robert Shayne starred in the title role, as demented anthropologist Cliff Groves, who is seeking a way to recapture Man's prehistoric past. He manages to turn a cat into a sabre-toothed tiger and himself into a barbarous paleolithic primate. Though Beverly was given fifth billing, she had but a few scenes as Nola Mason, a waitress whose boyfriend is attacked and slain by the creature.

The same year also saw her in the small role of Ludine in the 20th Fox fantasy The Rocket Man, in which a young boy (George 'Foghorn' Winslow) is given a 'truth-gun', which he proceeds to use on hypocritical adults. The seventy-nine minute film was co-scripted by Jack Henley and comedian Lenny Bruce.

These smaller roles, however, quickly became a thing of the past as the prestige of the Emmy nomination woke Hollywood to Beverly's talent. From a strong supporting role in The Miami Story (1954), she went to her first female lead, opposite Johnny Sheffield in Killer Leopard (1954), one in the series of the 'Bomba, the Jungle Boy' films. In television she worked unchecked: Playhouse 90, Science Fiction Theatre, Perry Mason, Climax, etc. By 1963, she had made well over two hundred TV appearances.

Interestingly, however, virtually none of Beverly's film credits were in 'A' movies. In The Desperate Hours (1955), a major project with Humphrey Bogart and Frederic March, she had but the small role of a schoolteacher. In 1957, she had an important supporting role as Eddie Albert's wife in the Frank Sinatra vehicle The Joker is Wild (Sinatra had asked for her specifically after viewing one of her TV appearances). Throughout the fifties, Beverly's strongest and best roles were on television where she was constantly called upon to play, as she once put it, "alcoholics, trollops, and pregnant women, the sick, psychotic and dying. I never play a sweet young thing because I don't look like one. But I am a good sufferer and crier,..I'm very good for shock value".

In the context of her overwhelming familiarity as a television actress and the fact that her fantasy film credits in the 1950s are really but a handful, it is a testament to Garland's talent that she is, in fact, regarded as the top 'Scream Queen' of the era (a position, incidentally, that she does not relish). This regard is due, simply, to four films: It Conquered the World; Curucu, Beast of the Amazon; Not of this Earth and The Alligator People. In fact, even if one counts her small roles in The Neanderthal Man and The Rocket Man, Beverly appeared in but six fantasy films between 1954-59 and a heft seventeen other pictures having nothing to do with the genre.

The association, however, begins with Roger Corman, for whom she first worked on a Louisiana-based film, Swamp Women (1955), portraying one of a trio of female ex-cons whom a policewoman (Carole Mathews) tricks into leading her to a cache of diamonds. Corman then cast her in the lead in his Gunslinger (1956), about a woman sheriff who tries to clean up a small town. Her main antagonist was played by Allison Hayes (she and Beverly had previously appeared together in The Steel Jungle) and it is interesting to see the two top fantasy film actresses of the decade playing opposite one another. For their fight scene near the climax of the picture, Beverly's ankle was shot full of novocaine -- she'd broken it the day before attempting a stunt where she was to jump on a horse and ride away. Before the picture was over, Allison, too, had been injured, suffering a broken arm in a fall from her horse.

Beverly's next work for Corman came in the ludicrous 1956 release, It Conquered the World. Embittered scientist Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef) aids a Venusian alien to establish itself upon Earth, believing its motives are benign. His wife (Garland) and best friend, Dr. Paul Nelson (Peter Graves) unsuccessfully try to dissuade him and it is finally Beverly's sacrifice of her own life to the monster that shocks Van Cleef into reality and he destroys the creature with a blowtorch. Beverly seemed uncomfortable playing a docile, self-sacrificing woman and the film itself, excepting a certain naïve charm, is significant only because it introduced, through the shenanigans of Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze, the element of humor which would later so profoundly affect Corman's product. As for the cucumber-shaped monster itself? As Beverly reportedly said when she first saw the get-up, designed by Paul Blaisdell: "That conquered the world?"*

* A 1968 remake, Zontar: the Thing from Venus, produced and directed by Larry Buchanan, starred John Agar in the Van Cleef role.

Her next film, Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956) in which, as a woman doctor, she co-starred with John Bromfield, was shot by Universal over a three-month period on location in Brazil.

It is hardly a horror film, as the beast terrorizing the natives turns out to be a conniving tribesman (Tom Payne) who uses disguises to frighten his fellowmen into obedience. For the film, the 5'5", 110 pound Beverly decided to appear as a redhead, a change from her normal dark-blonde.

After another non-horror film for Corman, Naked Paradise (1957), she made her last, and best, picture for that producer, Not of this Earth (though Beverly's own favorite of her Corman vehicles remains Gunslinger).

In Not of this Earth (1957), Beverly played Nadine Storey, a nurse who comes to care for a strange man (Paul Birch), who continually hides his eyes behind dark glasses and requires regular injections of blood plasma. In reality, the man is an alien from the planet Davanna who, like of the rest of his race, is dying from a disease in which the blood evaporates. Beverly took the role of the nurse and used a blend of impudence and coyness to deliver one of the most effective performances of the heroine's role in any sci-fi movie one could care to name.

Ironically, Not of this Earth was co-billed and released with Attack of the Crab Monsters, starring Richard Garland. Beverly and Richard had divorced in 1956, after four years of marriage. He went on to appear in a few more films (including Corman's The Undead) but his career faded as an alcoholic problem grew and he died, tragically, in 1969.

In 1958, Beverly was starred in her first television series. Filmed entirely in New York City, aired in syndication, DECOY had Garland as Casey Jones, policewoman. It lasted thirty-nine episodes.

Beverly's last foray into horror films as the decade came to its end was in a 20th Century Fox release, The Alligator People (1959). She plays Jane Marvin, whose husband (Richard Crane) a disfigured war veteran, disappears on their wedding night because treatments he has been receiving are causing him to develop the characteristics of an alligator. Jane finally tracks him down to a remote clinic in the Bayou area where a Dr. Sinclair (George Macready) has been using a serum extracted from alligators that, he hopes, will help humans regrow mutilated body parts just as reptiles do. Trouble occurs, however, when Jane's husband forces the doctor to try an untested formula on him and, as a result, he becomes an alligator-man, eventually dying in a pool of quicksand. The film also featured Lon Chaney, Jr. as a lascivious drunk.

Just as 1953, bringing with it her role in Medic, proved a milestone year for Beverly so, in 1960, another radical crossingpoint was reached. In late 1959 she had met, on a blind date, a handsome fellow named Fillmore Crank, a land developer and builder with two grown children from a previous marriage. They had courted for many months when Beverly received an offer to replace Anne Bancroft in the Chicago company of The Miracle Worker, William Gibson's powerful play about Annie Sullivan's early dealings with Helen Keller. There was a good possibility the production would move to New York. It might prove to be the biggest break of Beverly's career.

"So, Fill said, 'Well, that's great, honey, just great and I may be here when you get back and I may not' … So I went home and I said to myself, 'Beverly, I guess this is the one time in your life you're going to have to make a choice…Is it going to be that the career comes first or is it going to be that a marriage will come first'." Beverly decided, finally, that "I really do want a home and children and my career will just have to get along by itself as best it can". She turned the role down (it then went to Suzanne Pleshette) and on May 23, 1960, she and Fillmore were married in Las Vegas.

Since that decision to 'settle down', Fillmore and Beverly have been blessed with two children: a daughter, Carrie, born in 1964 and a son, James, in 1968. And in interview after interview, Beverly has stressed her devotion to family over career. "I operate under Fillmore's rules" she once said. "No Broadway show, no job when I'll be away from home a month".

Beverly's last legitimate horror film appearance to date was in the 'House of the Seven Gables' segment that made up one of three stories in United Artists' Twice Told Tales (1963). As Alice Pyncheon, she has to deal with the curse put upon her unscrupulous husband (Vincent Price) and, in doing so, comes into contact with the ghosts of the house. Shot in Technicolor, it is probably the most technically accomplished of her horror films, but by no means the most interesting.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Mirror News of September 14, 1957, Beverly had spoken, in her usual off-handed way, of her horror films: "I got those parts because I could scream louder than any other actress in town". By 1965, she was positively virulent about the subject. She told Hedda Hopper: "No one in this town puts me in anything except monster films and I don't want anymore, thank you."*

* Los Angeles Times, Calendar section, March 28, 1965.

She did play prominent roles in two gory murder thrillers a few years later: Pretty Poison (1968), in which she is killed by her daughter (Tuesday Weld), who has taken up with a paranoiac (Anthony Perkins) whom she believes to be a CIA agent and The Mad Room (1969), a story of two supposedly psychotic children who discover it was actually their older sister who committed the murders, including those of their parents, of which they are accused. Beverly's character in the film was pregnant -- and so was Beverly at the time of filming (with her son, Jim).

Regardless of the above exceptions, Garland's image has indeed undergone a gradual metamorphosis since the early sixties. Beginning with her appearances as a regular panellist on the game show Stump the Stars, the lighter side of Beverly began to evidence itself. It became clear that she was as adept at light comedy as she was with heavy drama. In the 1964-65 TV season, she played Bing Crosby's wife on The Bing Crosby Show and from 1969-71 was Fred MacMurray's wife on the My Three Sons TV series.

With her husband, Beverly, in the early 1970s, opened the Beverly Garland's Howard Johnson's Resort Lodge, a 154-room hotel near Universal Studios. She resides with her family in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles and works constantly. In 1975, a longtime Garland fan, Carl Del Vecchio, began a fan club for Beverly that issues, on a regular basis, a valuable journal comprised of personal interviews with the actress and information on her career and films that is of more than meagre value to film historians, a characteristic uncommon among the reams of adulatory tripe turned out by the majority of 'fan club' publications.*

* Beverly Garland Fan Club c/o Carl Del Vecchio, 174 Hackensack Street, Wood-Ridge, New Jersey 07075.

The edge is not off the brassy broad of the fifties. Still independent and outrageously frank, she recalled that Fillmore once said to her: "I think the best acting you've ever done in your life, Beverly, is My Three Sons, because anybody like you who can be that goddam sweet for three solid years has got to be a hell of an actress."

But Beverly's own appraisal of herself is even more revealing. In a 1965 interview with TV Guide, she is quoted as saying: "Maybe I do come on strong, and people sense in me a strength and a positiveness….It's really the way I look and act, not the way I am….Once you cut through the protective coating, I'm strictly molasses." This best sums up that quality Beverly Garland possesses that gave life to a series of awkward horror-film roles whose cardboard dimensions defeated lesser actresses.