Sympathetic Susie

"I've been in show business for 20 years," says breezy Ann (Maisie) Sothern, hard-working star of her own CBS-TV show, Private Secretary, "and this is the toughest thing I've ever done." After Actress Sothern had made seven Maisie movies and broadcast 78 Maisie radio programs, she was so tired of the dumb-blonde character that "the very name made me frantic." .Several months ago someone handed her a TV script for Private Secretary, and Ann decided it was just right.

As Susie McNamara every Sunday night (7:30 p.m., E.S.T.), Ann is the "private right arm" of a show-business impresario, a glib, high-spirited girl in her thirties, who gets in & out of scrapes with sexy relish. Unlike Maisie, Susie dresses well, and "we try not to make her stupid. There are 5,000,000 secretaries in this country, and we want some sort of sympathetic association." After only a couple of months on the air, Private Secretary--a sort of junior-size I Love Lucy--has built up an audience of a good portion of those 5,000,000 secretaries, plus a few hundred thousand others.

As the boss of the filmed program (cost: $27,500 a week), Ann Sothern has to be practical about her art: "It's a business of compromise. Time is of the essence. Cost is paramount. If you're trying

I to honestly do a show of quality, then you are constantly frustrated. In three days we have to shoot an entire 26-minute show. And we do it just like the movies, with closeups, the whole works. But you know that isn't enough time. We start shooting promptly at 9 a.m. and never finish until 6. And still we don't have enough time. Some scenes that you see on the screen have never been rehearsed. I just read the script and they shoot it."

Ann also has to approve and edit scripts and help in casting and production planning: "If anyone tells you TV is easy, you can hit them for me. I live on Knox Gelatine and orange juice, just to keep going. In television you must give of yourself at such a pitch that it takes everything out of you."

Although Private Secretary is going great guns, Ann likes to say she would just as soon be out of it all. She says she never asked to be in show business anyway; it was all her mother's idea. Fortyish and divorced, she lives in Beverly Hills with her eight-year-old daughter Patricia, and "I hope Tish will never want to be an actress. I want her to grow up and have a lot of children so I can be a grandmother." What Ann really wants, she says, is "a man who is 40, rich and Catholic. Then I'll quit this business in a second." Until then, "I'll have to spend my time hermetically sealed on Stage 8."

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