AN APPRECIATION : Recalling an Everywoman of Stage, Film

Shirley Booth, who died this week at the age of 94, will be most widely remembered for her television work, a lot of which I missed because I was out of the country or otherwise distracted.

But no one who saw and heard her on stage or in the film, pathetically calling in the gathering darkness for her little dog in “Come Back, Little Sheba,” will have any doubt that she was one of the great and versatile character actresses of her time. She was Everywoman to whoever was playing Everyman.

In “The Time of the Cuckoo” (which became the film “Summertime” with Katharine Hepburn), Booth, as a middle-aged American woman rediscovering love in Italy, spoke a line by the playwright Arthur Laurents that has stayed with me ever since. “As my mother used to say,” Booth remarked in her crackly voice: “Enjoy yourself; it’s already too late.”

She was also very kind to a young reporter on an embarrassing mission. At the start of the 1950s she was appearing at a summer theater in Denver, even as Time magazine was preparing a cover story on her tied to her triumph in “Come Back, Little Sheba.”

One afternoon a researcher from the magazine in New York called in great excitement to say she had just heard a terrific anecdote from Cornelia Otis Skinner and would I, as a Denver correspondent, please check it out with Booth.

The story was that in the years of her marriage to Ed Gardner of the radio show “Duffy’s Tavern,” she and Gardner were on a cruise ship en route to Puerto Rico, where Gardner had a tax-haven arrangement. On board the ship was a voluptuous blonde, traveling alone.

One afternoon the Gardners were invited to the captain’s tea, but her husband begged off, on the grounds that he needed to work on a script. Booth went alone. Returning to their stateroom she had to pass the cabin everyone now knew belonged to the dishy blonde. Just as she reached it, the door opened and out sidled Gardner.

“Well, now you know,” Gardner said. “I’m a jewel thief.”

The idea of confronting a woman with a joke about her husband’s infidelity (even an ex-husband’s) seemed just short of mortifying.

But I reached Booth and blurted out the story. She laughed a lovely laugh and said, “Ah, but it’s not true. Ed made it up and thought it was so funny I understand he’s telling it about his present wife.”

What remains from our brief encounter these 40-some years ago is the impression of a kind of merry serenity that had seen and accommodated a few hard knocks along the trail--that and an affection for Gardner that had survived an unsuccessful marriage.

There was a happier marriage to William H. Baker that lasted until he died eight years later. I was glad to read of that marriage, short-lived as it was, because a woman with the great talent and the compassionate humanity of Shirley Booth deserved whatever success and happiness the world could give her in return.