Dutch postcard by HEMO.
Monogram star
Gale Storm was born Josephine Owaissa in 1922 in Bloomington, Texas. Her middle name, Owaissa, means 'Bluebird' in the native American language. The youngest of five children, she had two brothers and two sisters. Her father, William Walter Cottle, died after a year-long illness when she was only 17 months old. The family moved from Bloomington to McDade between Austin and Houston, where her mother, Minnie Corina Cottle, struggled to make ends meet as a seamstress and milliner.
The family eventually settled in Houston, where Gale took dance and ice skating lessons. Storm attended Holy Rosary School in what is now Midtown, Houston. She performed in the drama club at both Albert Sidney Johnston Junior High School and San Jacinto High School. When Storm was 17, two of her teachers urged her to enter a local radio talent contest called Jesse L. Lasky's 'Gateway to Hollywood' in 1939. This took her and her mother to Hollywood, where she captured the national contest title.
She was immediately given the stage name Gale Storm and was soon put under contract to RKO Pictures. Her performing partner and future husband, Lee Bonnell from South Bend, Indiana, became known as Terry Belmont. Storm had a role in the radio version of 'Big Town'. Her first film was Tom Brown's School Days (Robert Stevenson, 1940), playing opposite Jimmy Lydon and Freddie Bartholomew. Although she was dropped by RKO after only six months, she had established herself enough to find work elsewhere, including at Monogram and Universal.
In 1941, she sang in several soundies, three-minute musicals produced for movie jukeboxes. She acted and sang in Monogram Pictures' Frankie Darro series, and played ingénue roles in other Monogram features with the East Side Kids, Edgar Kennedy, and the Three Stooges, most notably in the film Swing Parade of 1946 (Phil Karlson, 1946). Monogram had always relied on established actors with reputations, but in Gale Storm, the studio finally had a star of its own. She played the lead in the studio's most elaborate productions, both musical and dramatic. She shared top billing in Monogram's Cosmo Jones in the Crime Smasher (James Tinling, 1943), opposite Edgar Kennedy, Richard Cromwell, and Frank Graham in the role of Jones, a character derived from network radio.
Gale Storm starred in several films, including the romantic comedies G.I. Honeymoon (Phil Karlson, 1945) and It Happened on Fifth Avenue (Roy Del Ruth, 1947), the Western Stampede (Lesley Selander, 1949), and the Film Noirs The Underworld Story (Cy Endfield, 195) starring Dan Duryea and Between Midnight and Dawn (Gordon Douglas, 1950) starring Mark Stevens. U.S. audiences warmed to Storm, and her fan mail increased. She performed in more than three dozen motion pictures for Monogram, an experience which made her successful in other media.
Dutch postcard by 't Sticht, no. 3096.
Dutch postcard by Foto archief Film en Toneel, no. AX 193. Photo: Universal International.
The women who made television funny
In 1950, Gale Storm made her television debut in Hollywood Premiere Theatre on ABC. She also made singing appearances on such television variety programs as The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom. Gary Brumburgh at IMDb: "Her very first TV series, My Little Margie (1952), which was only supposed to be a summer replacement series for I Love Lucy (1951), became one of the most-watched sitcoms in the early 1950s while showing up in syndicated reruns for decades. Co-starring the popular film star Charles Farrell as her amiable dad, Gale's warmth and ingratiating style suited TV to a tee, making her one of the most popular light comediennes of the time."
Her popularity was capitalised on when she served as hostess of the NBC Comedy Hour in the winter of 1956. In 1956, Storm starred in a situation comedy, The Gale Storm Show (Oh! Susanna), featuring another silent movie star, ZaSu Pitts. The show ran for 143 episodes on CBS and ABC between 1956 and 1960. Storm appeared regularly on other television programs in the 1950s and 1960s. In Gallatin, Tennessee, in 1954, a 10-year-old girl, Linda Wood, was watching Storm on a Sunday night television variety show, singing one of the popular songs of the day. Linda's father asked her who was singing, and she told him it was Gale Storm from My Little Margie. Linda's father, Randy Wood, was president of Dot Records, and he called Storm to sign her before the end of the television show.
Her first record, 'I Hear You Knockin'', a cover of a rhythm and blues hit by Smiley Lewis, sold over a million copies. The follow-up was a two-sided hit, with Storm covering Dean Martin's 'Memories Are Made of This' backed with her cover of Gloria Mann's 'Teen Age Prayer'. That was followed by a hit cover of Frankie Lymon's 'Why Do Fools Fall in Love'. Storm's subsequent record sales began to slide, but soon rebounded with a cover of fellow Dot Records recording artist Bonnie Guitar's haunting ballad 'Dark Moon' (1957), which went to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1957, she was both a panellist and a 'mystery guest' on CBS's What's My Line? Storm and Billy Vaughn wrote 'You're My Baby Doll' and performed it on Storm's television show in 1958. Storm had several other hits, headlined in Las Vegas and appeared in numerous stage plays. Storm recorded for five years with Dot Records, then gave up recording because her husband was concerned with the time she had to devote to that career.
Gale Storm's film career took a sharp decline following the demise of her second series in 1960. Most of her focus was placed modestly on the summer stock or dinner theatre circuit, doing a revolving door of tailor-made comedies and musicals. On television, she appeared on two episodes of Burke's Law, 1964 and 1965. In 1978, Storm performed as a guest artist in the stage production of 'Cactus Flower' at Glendale Community College, outside Phoenix, Arizona. As reported in the campus newspaper El Tiempo Pasando, Storm surprised the cast of students by unexpectedly showing up for three days of rehearsal before it was scheduled. Storm made occasional television appearances from 1979 to 1989, such as The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote.
In 1981, she published her autobiography, 'I Ain't Down Yet', which described her battle with alcoholism. She was also interviewed by author David C. Tucker for 'The Women Who Made Television Funny: Ten Stars of 1950s Sitcoms', published in 2007 by McFarland and Company. Storm was married and widowed twice. In 1941, while still a teenager, she married Lee Bonnell (1918–1986), then an actor and later a businessman. They had four children: Peter, Phillip, Paul, and Susanna. In 1988, two years after she was widowed, she married Paul Masterson, who also predeceased her. After the death of her second husband in 1996, Storm lived alone in Monarch Beach, California, near two of her sons and their families, until failing health forced her into a convalescent home in Danville, California. She died there in 2009, at the age of 87.
French postcard by Editions P.I., no. 226.
Sources: Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia (English and Dutch) and IMDb.
