The Working Girls

Of all the TV networks, CBS is unquestionably the outstanding friend of the working girl. CBS has four shows devoted exclusively to the trials and tribulations of three secretaries and a schoolteacher. But, in refreshing contrast to real life, the girls are seldom asked to do much work. On Private Secretary, blonde Cinemactress Ann Sothern occasionally pecks at a typewriter, but mostly she is shown trading wisecracks with her boss (Don Porter), getting mink and sable coats from the firm's clients or having her superior business acumen vindicated (dumb as the girls are, they are all far brighter than the men who employ them).

Meet Millie's Elena Verdugo once in a great while carries a piece of paper from her desk to a filing cabinet, but, with that chore over, she takes it easy by necking with the boss's son (Ross Ford). My Friend Irma's Marie Wilson is portrayed as a bosomy sub-cretin who spends her office hours listening ecstatically while the recorded voice of a telephone operator recites the time of day.

As the schoolteacher in Our Miss Brooks, Eve Arden is the intellectual superior of her rivals, as evidenced by the fact that she always gets a pained expression when one of her students says "ain't," which they do with dismaying regularity. But not even Eve is often seen in the classroom. Usually she cruises the high-school corridors on the heels of Bob Rockwell, a biology instructor who is impervious to the most blatant advances from Teacher Brooks. In fact, much of Miss Brooks's humor derives from remarks made innocently by Rockwell and turned into leering double entendres by Actress Arden (e.g., "Miss Brooks, haven't you got something for me?" Miss B.: "Of course, you just haven't noticed").

The shows try to maintain vague ties to reality. Two of the girls have glasses and sometimes wear them; none of them lives in the marble-bath mansions that Hollywood ordinarily assigns to its movie working girls, and Eve Arden's rooming house is pictured as a place where the plumbing seldom works and the phone bill is often unpaid. All the girls are surrounded by hordes of admiring friends, most of them of such astonishing eccentricity as to make televised life in the U.S. resemble visiting day at London's 17th century Bedlam. Outstanding are Meet Millie's Marvin Kaplin as a frustrated poet-author-composer, Private Secretary's Marcel Dalio as a continental singer with a compulsive giveaway urge. Irma's Donald MacBride as a terrible-tempered Mr. Bang, and Our Miss Brooks's complete gallery of juvenile and adult delinquents.

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