Maybe Mother Knew Best: Celebrating ‘Father Knows Best’ Supermom Jane Wyatt
Before June Cleaver appeared on TV screens in her collared house dresses, pearl choker, neatly-coiffed bob and occasional disdain for domestic duties, Father Knows Best‘s Margaret Anderson was America’s maternal ideal. Played by Barnard-educated, Manhattan-bred actress Jane Wyatt — whose upper crust, “transatlantic” accent made its way to Mrs. Anderson, despite the family’s Midwestern roots — Margaret still lands among the top TV moms more than six decades after Father Knows Best went off the air.
A respected stage and screen actress who happily divided her time between Hollywood and Broadway, Wyatt’s path to her most famous role came after she had already suffered a career downturn. One among the legion of stars who protested the House Un-American Activities Committee in the ’40s and ’50s, the cherubic-faced beauty saw her film roles dry up in the aftermath.
But when plans were made to move the radio hit Father Knows Best to TV, Wyatt received a script. She found the script “enchanting,” though the worldly actress admitted she struggled to adjust to the happy housewife role, as she suspected she might.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
“I got frustrated at times,” Wyatt told The Washington Post. “I was never shown reading a book. On the other hand, what kind of a show would we have had if Mom was off having a career? I think for the time, it was okay.”
Plus, Wyatt staunchly believed that Margaret was an equal intellectual partner to her spouse. “She was the power behind the throne,” Wyatt told the Los Angeles Times. “She helped her husband out. Mother always knew best, too.”
That didn’t mean she completely accepted Margaret’s stay-at-home mom world, onscreen or off. Margaret attended ladies club meetings and even became a crack fly fisherman. And in a 90-minute Father Knows Best reunion special that hit the NBC airwaves in 1977, we learn that, after kids Bud, Kathy and Betty grew up and flew the coop, Margaret suffers a speck of empty nest syndrome, but is ultimately pleased about that empty nest.
Everett Collection
And Wyatt, with three Emmys on the shelf and her career revived, was perfectly happy to move on.
To celebrate elegant Everymom Margaret Anderson and the refined New Yorker who played her, here are five fun facts about Jane Wyatt.
1 Her mom was a drama critic who frowned on Jane’s career
Wyatt’s dad, Christopher Billopp Wyatt, was a successful investment banker, and her mom, the loftily named Euphemia Van Rensselaer Waddington, a playwright and theater critic. But when their daughter decided to bail on Barnard and a high-brow career to become an actress, her disappointed parents believed she was capable of more.
2 She briefly lost her social status
Gereghty/TV Guide/courtesy Everett Collection
Possibly contributing to her parents’ displeasure, Wyatt’s Broadway aspirations caused her name to be pulled from New York’s Social Register. She was reinstated only after she married wealthy stockbroker Edgar Bethune Ward in 1935. The union did more than restore Wyatt’s social status; Ward and Wyatt, who met when both were Franklin Roosevelt’s houseguests, were happily married for more than 60 years and had two sons, Christopher and Michael Ward (pictured above along with her husband at the family’s home in 1955).
3 Her first Broadway play was written by Winnie the Pooh’s creator
Though he’s best known for creating the beloved “bear of very little brain” and his Hundred Acre Woods companions, A. A. Milne was also a prolific playwright. Wyatt appeared in his Give Me Yesterday, which debuted on Broadway March 4, 1931.
4 She felt typecast by Father Knows Best
Peter Samerjan/TV Guide/courtesy Everett Collection
Wyatt’s wholesome beauty often overshadowed her fierce intellect and adventurous spirits So it was little surprise that Wyatt told the New York Times that she felt typecast as a good wife to good men, and would have preferred to play a murderer.
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5 She got the most fan mail for playing a mom … but not Margaret
Paramount/Courtesy: Everett Collection
Wyatt cheerfully noted that the most fan mail she ever received was not for playing Bud, Princess and Kitten’s mom. Instead, she got it for playing Spock’s mom, Amanda, on an episode of the original Star Trek series and again in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
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