Jeanne Bates

JEANNE BATES

What can you say about a lady who lived almost up to the age of 90,
and who was married for almost 40?

The lucky man was radio writer and director Lew X. Lansworth.
What remains of his radio work are thirteen episodes of Family Theater.

Bates played Diana Palmer in the 1943 serial version of The Phantom.

Catch Jeanne Bates as a femme fatale
in the Screen Director's Playhouse radio version of 'D.O.A.'
Bates is deadly at delivering these lines
to walking fatality Edmond O'Brien:
"And don't get any ideas, because I'm not afraid to use this... "
"You lie and I'll blow your head off!"
"If I were a man, I'd punch your dirty face in."

Well-worn homesteader wife in Gunsmoke.

Jeanne Bates' first experience with gunsmoke
was not in Gunsmoke. It was an episode of Wild Bill Hickok
which aired on February 20, 1952, titled 'Gunsmoke and Violet.'

Bates appeared in all four of CBS's best radio westerns.
Besides Fort Laramie and Frontier Gentleman,
she did twenty-six episodes of Gunsmoke
and fourteen of Have Gun-Will Travel.

There's hoofers, and then there's hoofers.
Away from Gunsmoke, in an episode of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
called 'The Kay Bellamy Matter,'
Jeanne Bates does a good turn as a mysterious entertainer
who walks away from a bright career
and goes back to doing burlesque.

'The Story of the 10:08' is not really
one of the better episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar,
but the last scene puts Jeannes Bates through her paces as an actress.
First, as one of a pack of thieves, she has to be indignant
when she discovers she is not being given her fair share of the loot;
then, after being slapped and dismissed, she must explode
into a fierce pistol-packin' mama,
blasting down one of her duplicitous partners;
last, she is made to soften and agonize
over spending the rest of her life outside the law,
or cooperating with the forgiving insurance investigator
and returning to the straight and narrow.

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