Ravinia 2019, Issue 6, Week 12

AUGUST 12 – AUGUST 25, 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 33 Right: The real-life–turned– sitcom family of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson could have tuned in to a live broadcast of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti during the first season that they were on the air and seen a depiction of suburban, married life very much at odds with their own. Such culturally ingrained ideals and portrayals of married life likely influenced Bernstein’s decision to marry Felicia Montealegre, despite growing up in a family dynamic similar to that in Trouble in Tahiti . Below: Felicia wholeheartedly supported Tahiti in a 1954 telegram to Leonard, even though its story of a strained marriage was written in part during their honeymoon. TV series to this day; only one month before the world premiere of Trouble in Tahiti , Lucille Ball, as a tipsy Lucy Riccardo, delivered her classic commercial for Vitameatavegamin. Other TV comedians who kept Americans laughing that year included Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Milton Berle, Amos ’n’ Andy, Jackie Gleason, and Sid Caesar. Roy Rogers and the Cisco Kid rode the Western ranges, Jack Webb fought crime on Dragnet , Ed Sullivan introduced an amazing spectrum of performers, and celebrity panels played such games as What’s My Line? and, new in 1952, I’ve Got a Secret . Children watched Howdy Doody; Kukla, Fran, and Ollie; and the very first show aimed at preschoolers, Ding Dong School , which premiered that year and originated from Chicago. Other classic shows first telecast in 1952 include Our Miss Brooks , The Adventures of Superman , My Little Margie , and Life with Eliz- abeth , which marked the television series debut of the still-beloved Betty White. Of special significance in the context of Trouble in Tahiti was the premiere of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet , a sitcom that depicted the fictitious antics of the real-life family of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and their sons David and Ricky. Thus began television’s mythologizing of the perfect American family, an unrealistic and saccharine ideal that would be cement- ed with such subsequent series as Father Knows Best (1954), Leave It to Beaver (1957), and The Donna Reed Show (1958)—all of them set in the suburbs. Of course most American families couldn’t meet those unattainable standards. Millions of housewives were painfully aware that their own lives fell pathetically short of such perfection, and after the company Hoffmann-La Roche patented the drug diazepam in 1959, it was widely prescribed under the name Valium to sedate those discontented and frustrated women; most assuredly Bernstein’s Dinah would have been among them. Much later, the sitcoms Married With Children (1987) and Roseanne (1988) would mercilessly rip the mask of perfec- tion off the image of the mythical American family. What is astounding is that 35 years earlier, Leonard Bernstein accom- plished the same revelation. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, MUSIC DIVISION (TELEGRAM)