Penny Singleton

On her episode of Murder, She Wrote—of course she did an episode of Murder, She Wrote—Penny Singleton played Jessica Fletcher’s aunt. She was only seventeen years older than Angela Lansbury, but still; it’s a believable age gap, at least, and doesn’t make you do mental gymnastics trying to figure out how the family tree works. It wasn’t her last role; her last role was as Jane Jetson in Jetsons: The Movie. Which I saw in the theatre. Her film career was only five years younger than Lansbury was herself, and she lived long enough to make a movie that I saw in the theatre. Then she retired and lived another thirteen years.

Singleton was born in 1908, back in the days when you could drop out of sixth grade and go into vaudeville. Which she did. She performed with Milton Berle and was in Jack Benny’s Broadway show The Great Temptations. Her stage career was so important to her that, even after she started working in film, she was an active member of the American Guild of Variety Artists. Even after she was Jane Jetson, she still did a stint as president of the guild, and in the ‘70s, she even led negotiations between assorted unions and Disney. She fought for the rights of strippers and exotic dancers to truly be represented by their guild.

And, you know, good for her. She may have played the slightly sleazy Polly in After the Thin Man, but she seems to have taken her experiences as a vaudeville performer to heart and really worked for women in Polly’s job. I don’t know if she worked burlesque—my only knowledge about the overlap between burlesque and vaudeville comes from Gypsy—but she may not have cared. She may have only cared that the people for whom she was responsible received the protection their union promised them and that their union did not reliably give them. She led the Rockettes through a month-long strike when it was beyond the realm of plausibility that she could’ve been one.

Her IMDb trivia suggests that she is best-known for her over two dozen films playing Blondie Bumstead, and it’s an interesting thought. Because I’ve never seen any of those, but have my kids ever seen The Jetsons? I don’t think they have. I’m not sure when the last time I watched The Jetsons was. She did each role for a very long time, and both of them are something in the way of lost pop culture. The differing media landscape between then and now is a source of constant fascination to me.

She seems to have been perfectly content playing the same role over and over again. After all, it paid the bills. In her early days, she says she was who they got when they couldn’t get Claire Trevor, and I can see that. She didn’t want to be typecast, but playing Blondie nearly thirty times, or playing Jane Jetson for literally decades, wasn’t quite the same thing. Come to that, while I’ve never seen the films, I’ve read the strip, and Blondie isn’t the same character as Jane Jetson, either.