The face of many Chicago TV programs and commercials
Carmelita Pope was a mainstay on locally produced Chicago TV commercials and programs like quiz shows and soap operas from the 1950s through the 1970s.
With a quick wit and broad base of knowledge, Pope thrived on live TV during television’s early years. She also was widely known as the face of Pam cooking spray.
“It was the early days of television, and it was just starting up, and a lot of commercials were being done in Chicago,” said her son Howard “Buzz” Ballenger. “She came back to Chicago (from New York) and started working in TV.”
Pope, 94, died of congestive heart failure on April 3 at her home, her son said. She had been a Boise, Idaho, resident for more than 20 years and before that had lived in Stuart, Fla., Los Angeles and Highland Park.
Born Carmelita Sylvia Pope in Chicago, Pope was the daughter of an attorney, Nicholas Pope, who had been a vaudeville star. Pope grew up in several Chicago neighborhoods, including West Garfield Park and Little Italy. She also spent summers at her family’s home on a large property in the unincorporated Prairie View community in southern Lake County.
From the age of 5, Pope took drama, dance and singing lessons. During her teen years, Pope was part of the Lake Zurich Playhouse summer theater, where she also spent her time “making scenery, scraping gum off seats and playing a role once in awhile,” she told the Tribune’s Mary Daniels in 1976. It was there that she met Jocelyn Brando, an older actress, whose brother, “Bud” Brando, would one day become better known as legendary actor Marlon Brando.
Pope and “Bud” Brando, whose family lived on a farm in Libertyville, started dating as teenagers.
“Because the Brandos lived in what was country then, whenever he and I would have a date, he’d stay with us in Wheeling, sometimes for days,” she recalled.
Pope graduated from Providence High School in Chicago and then briefly studied on a drama scholarship at the now-shuttered Marycrest College in Davenport, Iowa, where she appeared on a local network affiliate, WOC-TV, in a college dramatic series. Pope later studied for a semester at the Goodman School of Drama.
Pope left the Goodman when she won a part in a comedic traveling production, “Maid in the Ozarks.” Soon after, she won the role of the upbeat and earnest Corliss Archer in the U.S.O.’s performance of the George Abbott-produced play “Kiss and Tell,” touring the Mediterranean during World War II for a year. She returned to the U.S. in 1945 and settled in New York, where she worked in commercial, industrial and newsreel production.
Pope’s first big break was playing the lead role of Mother Cabrini in the 1947 RKO film “Citizen Saint,” under the stage name Carla Dare. The director and producer Elia Kazan saw Pope in that role and hired her to serve as the understudy for Kim Hunter, who played the role of the sister, Stella, in the Broadway production of the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
During Pope’s 18-month run in “Streetcar,” she was pressed into service when Hunter was ill one evening, and Pope later won the role permanently, when Hunter departed.
“Hunter was going to leave, so she told my mother that she would pretend to be sick so that Mom could go on and the producers could see her,” Ballenger said. “That’s what happened, and the producers loved her, and signed her for the rest of the run.”
Pope herself confirmed the story to the Tribune in 1976, reflecting that “the public thinks theater people are very selfish, and it’s not true.”
Pope also acted alongside Brando in “Streetcar.”
In 1949, Pope married her first husband, H. Charles Ballenger, who had been a Tribune reporter from 1942 until 1946 and later worked as a publicist and antique store owner. The marriage brought Pope back to Chicago, and she and her husband settled in Highland Park, where they began raising a family.
“I wanted a family. I was tired. I had been working since I was 5. I thought, it’s time to be a normal human being,” she told the Tribune in 1976.
However, even while raising two young boys, performing still beckoned to Pope, and she began doing radio work on WGN-AM’s “Chicago Theater of the Air” and had TV roles on WGN-Ch. 9’s “They Stand Accused” and on WNBQ’s “Magic Slate.” She also appeared in educational films made by Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“I’m a better wife and mother for having television jobs,” Pope told the Tribune’s Joan Beck in 1951. “I had always been completely absorbed in the theater. But I know I would feel like an incomplete person if I had to cut it out completely. But I wouldn’t give up my home life for anything. You can give the greatest performance in the world on Broadway and come home to a lonesome one-room apartment all alone, and it just isn’t any good.”
Pope also interviewed celebrities on WBBM-Ch. 2’s “Guest Star” interview show, hosted WGN-Ch. 9’s “Baby of the Week” program and did commercials for a locally produced, weekday soap opera titled “Hawkins Falls.”
One of her signature roles in the early and mid-1950s was as one of four panelists on WGN-Ch. 9’s early interactive TV program “Down You Go,” when panelists would try to decipher words or phrases sent in by viewers. In that role, Pope won raves as an erudite, quickwitted panelist.
Later work included as a Chicago-based correspondent on NBC’s “Today on the Farm” show, serving as a fashion-show commentator and appearing in a raft of commercials. Pope also returned to the stage in 1971 in “The Secretary Bird,” at the Pheasant Run theater in St. Charles.
Pope once estimated that she did more than 2,000 TV commercials, and she probably is most remembered for being the TV pitchwoman in the 1960s and 1970s for Pam cooking spray. Her tagline was, “When you pick up a pan, spray it with Pam.”
Pope and her first husband divorced in the early 1970s, and he died in 1975. Pope moved in 1977 to Los Angeles, where she continued acting in commercials, as well as in a made-for-TV “Spiderman” pilot film on CBS in 1978. A pushover for animals, Pope eventually shifted her career toward working with animals, and she became a traveling ambassador for the Pet Food Institute and then took a job overseeing American Humane’s Hollywood office, monitoring the treatment of animals on TV and movie sets.
In the mid-1980s, Pope retired with her second husband, Bill Wood, to Stuart, Fla. After he died, she moved to Boise to be closer to her family.
A sister, actress Clarissa Pope Mancuso, died in 2002. In addition to son Howard, Pope is survived by another son, Bruce; and four grandchildren.
Services were held.