That Girl! | Iowa life

Ted Bessell and a monkey. The young boy there who played the son, Scott C. Kolden, soon gave up acting and became a bigwig in the recording industry. Probably a lot of them gave up acting after that. No report on the monkey. Rumors were he died in ‘Nam.

13 episodes of bad from the 1972 television season. It is amazing what you can find on YouTube. You can find the fall lineup from about any year you want. I have a special fondness for 1972 so I watched that one. The creator was Garry Marshall (of Odd Couple, Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley fame). Marshall I should have said was co-creator of The Odd Couple along with Jerry Belson. That show was a little too good for just Marshall.

Me and the Chimp had a very successful cast of people who had good shows before and after that, but it wasn’t going to happen with this one. Tom Bosley, Kami Cotler, Bernie Kopell, Noah Beery Jr, Dick Wilson, Ruta Lee. I used to get the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide showing all the shows coming and try to guess which ones would make it. Some you just had a feel for. The network said you ain’t gonna make a monkey out of me.

It must have been tough for the star Ted Bessell. He’d just come off 5 years of smootchy cootchy with one of the most beautiful women on TV with That Girl and Marlo Thomas, and to end up making time with a monkey, it must a been one heck of a blow.

I was thinking there were maybe a dozen women over that 50 year time period on TV as attractive, but not more so. I’d have to say Lynda Carter, Marie Osmond, Shelley Hack, Farrah Fawcett, Heather Thomas, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Lacey Chabert…. and then I run out of ideas. Julie Bowen, that’s it. 8. And the man Marlo chose was Phil Donahue? Go figure.

Marlo Thomas came to television at an interesting time. She was 29 when ‘That Girl!‘ started in 1966. That year was still sort of in what I call ‘old America’. Pre-revolution. TV was nice and simple, non-controversial. That’s the way shows were in 1966. Marlo Thomas, attractive to the max and always wonderfully dressed. She had a personality that was so endearing and this low raspy voice.

From IMDB: “Born in Detroit, Michigan on November 21, 1937, Marlo was christened Margaret Julia Thomas. Raised within the mad Beverly Hills whirl of the entertainment business as the daughter of show business legend Danny Thomas, she was initially dissuaded from an acting career and began a half-hearted adult life as a school teacher. Quickly switching to acting, however, Marlo began with early TV appearances in the late 1950’s on such series as “Dobie Gillis,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “Thriller” and “Zane Grey Theatre”. The [new] pilot was seen by ABC, and they had her tested for another sitcom lead and passed with flying colors. This one stuck did not fail. Audiences adored “That Girl” with the romantic entanglements and struggling ambition of Ann Marie, a single, independent and very trendy young lady in the real world as an actress wannabe. Marlo became an instant household name (as did co-star Ted Bessell) and earned a Golden Globe (“Best TV Star”) and four Emmy nominations during the five-year run of the groundbreaking show.”

[More importantly I just discovered this very moment something vitally important. While Marlo looks ravishing in every picture, she looks even more stupendously scrumptious in the pictures without bangs! Her best pic is the B&W where she’s wearing the white sleeveless top about 7 rows down. I mention this simply as how funny it was as a new student of hers. She took my breath away in the early years of That Girl with bangs, its hard to describe when I saw her in the next stage of her evolution.]

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I just love watching the reruns for the clothes she wore. I swear she had the best fashion of any show back then. I’ll always wonder how much was due to her and how much was due to the designer for the show? Either way, the other thing I noticed later in life was the immense sex appeal she had. Strange how I missed it back then… she was sexy because she didn’t try to be sexy.