Star of the West Wing
SHOW-business legend June Lockhart, famed for playing Timmy’s mother on “Lassie” and Mrs. Robinson on the kitschy sci-fi show “Lost in Space,” has a lesser-known life as the all-time greatest White House and media groupie.
“It’s life’s blood to me,” the 91year-old Broadway and Hollywood star told The Post of her fascination with presidents and the reporters who cover them.
It began in 1948, just after she wrapped her Tony-winning Broadway run in “For Love or Money.” She and a friend took the train to Washington. At the White House, they were led into the Oval Office. Behind the desk sat the president, Harry Truman.
“What is it like being in here?” she asked Truman.
“He looked at me, and said, ‘It’s just like being in jail.’ ”
Lockhart liked Truman instantly. “He was very cordial, very charming and great fun,” she recalled. She asked for an autograph. “The president was so flustered by her looks that he not only gave her the autograph but also told her to keep his fountain pen,” wrote Post columnist Leonard Lyons, who set up the visit.
Lockhart’s fascination with current events started in childhood.
Her parents, actors Gene and Kathleen Lockhart, often had “movers and shakers” at their Los Angeles home — “writers, newsmen, correspondents, novelists.” When she was 9 or 10, Lockhart
started a neighborhood newspaper. As a student at LA's elite Westlake School for Girls, she got hooked on Time magazine. As Lockhart’s fame grew, TV producers put her fascination with the news on display on the prime-time quiz shows of the 1950s. She was a regular on “Who Said That?” which ran on NBC, then ABC from 1952 to 1955.
It had a simple format: The host read a quote from a newsmaker. The panel — two journalists and two celebrities — had to tell the audience who said the quote. Lockhart became a regular because, as she put it, the producers felt the show needed a “girl.”
She studied up by collecting 300 quotes a week from the newspapers. “I would put them all together and memorize them,” she said. “I could acquit myself nicely with this panel of experts.”
After the show, everyone went to Toots Shor’s, a Midtown celebrity hangout. “I would sit there agog while this group of men and our producer, Ann Gillis, would talk about what was going to be news the following week,” Lockhart said.
Merriman Smith, the White House reporter for the United Press and later United Press International, was a “Who Said That?” regular. Lockhart’s friendship with him came in handy in 1956, when she decided to travel with reporters covering the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson presidential campaigns. Smith helped set up both trips.
“It was just such a heady experience,” she said.
Smith and other reporters picked her brain. “It’s Eisenhower all the way from what I’ve seen,” she told them. “They sat there benumbed with that information, but I was right,” she recalled. “There was nothing, nothing to equal the absolute enchantment of people in the street with Eisenhower.”
In the summer of 1957, Lockhart and Hugh Downs filled in for a month as hosts of NBC’s “The Tex and Jinx Show.” Regular hosts Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg had been trying for years to book Eisenhower’s press secretary, Jim Hagerty, as a guest. Lockhart pulled it off with one phone call to the White House. “It was such a hoot,” she recalled.
She went to Washington and interviewed Hagerty. Later that day, July 31, 1957, she attended her first presidential press conference.
Hagerty gave her a lifetime White House press pass. For the next 47 years, Lockhart attended briefings whenever she was in Washington, or whenever presidents traveled to California.
She traveled in 1960 with the Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy campaigns. She thought all along Kennedy would win. “Nixon was very stiff,” she said.
The high point of Lockhart’s fascination came Nov. 19, 1961, when she, her husband and her two daughters got a private meeting with President Kennedy in LA. Her second husband, architect John Lindsay, wanted to show JFK his plans for senior-citizen housing in Santa Monica, Calif. Smith set up the meeting.
Lockhart attended a number of White House briefings during George H.W. Bush’s presidency in 1989, when she appeared in the play “Steel Magnolias” at the Kennedy Center.
Every morning, Lockhart took a car from the Mayflower Hotel to the White House. “I would get out, go into the press room,” she said.
White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, who took a liking to Lockhart, provided her her only opportunity to ask a question. She asked for the name of the vet who was treating Millie, the Bushes’ dog, who had just given birth to six puppies. As she recalls, Fitzwater said the vet’s name was restricted information.
Lockhart says she last attended a press briefing in 2004, during George W. Bush’s presidency.
She misses them. “They were always so cordial about inviting me,” she recalled. “They knew that I was serious about it.”
Lockhart is out of the Washington loop these days, but she still keeps up. Three newspapers arrive at her California doorstep every morning — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.
“You absolutely must be aware of what is going on with the press and with the news,” she says.
Bill Sanderson’s book about Merriman Smith and Smith’s coverage of the JFK assassination, “Bulletins From Dallas,” will be released Nov. 1 by Skyhorse Publishing.