If not exactly the bedside manner of Marcus Welby—the ideal doctor Young played on TV for seven years—the spontaneous ovation made a fitting tribute to a life well lived. In a career spanning six decades, Robert Young's ail-American face was everywhere—in about 100 films (opposite such stars as Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn), in much-satirized Sanka coffee commercials and, of course, as beloved dad Jim Anderson in Father Knows Best and as the wise healer Marcus Welby, M.D. Young won two Emmy Awards for Father, which started on radio in 1949 and first ran on TV from 1954 to 1960, and another for Welby, which made its debut in 1969 and became the next season's highest-rated show.
"The world has lost one of its last leading men, and I have lost my father," said Young's daughter Betty Lou Gleason at his July 27 Glendale, Calif., funeral. It was attended by, among others, Young's Father wife Jane Wyatt and Billy Gray, who played son Bud. (Elinor Donahue, who played older daughter Betty, was visiting London and could not attend; a tearful Lauren Chapin, a hotel concierge who played daughter Kathy, said she could not afford the expensive airfare from her Orlando home.) Like the characters he played, Young "was a very kind, quiet, good-tempered professional," says Shirley Temple, his costar in the films Stowaway (1936) and Adventure in Baltimore (1949).
To millions of Americans, including his own TV daughters, Young was much more. "He was the father I never had," recalls Chapin, 53. "He took care of me." And says Donahue, 61: "I loved him very much."
At home, too, Father often seemed to know best. "He was very much like he was on TV," says Gleason, 54, one of four daughters Young had with Betty, his wife of 61 years. (She died in 1994 at age 84.) "He was a great friend and a wonderful dad." In a scene so wholesome it could have aired on Young's sitcom, the family's poodle came skidding across the sleek floor of their Los Angeles house every night when Young whistled to announce he was home.
But there was a side of Young that whistled no happy tunes. Since his early 40s, he had battled alcoholism and chronic depression. His problem stemmed from a lack of confidence so profound that he felt as if each salary increase would be snatched away, each contract option reneged on and each year his last. "I was full of terror and fright. I drank to escape reality," he told PEOPLE in 1987. "I was close to suicide." Four years later, drinking again, Young did try to kill himself, by breathing car-exhaust fumes.
On-and off-screen, he played the loving father so well that only his wife knew the depths of his despair. Chapin, for one, was shocked. "I had an alcoholic mother, and he saved me from her," she says. "I never would have dreamed that he had that problem himself." At home, Betty insulated the girls from his dark moods. "Mother would say, 'Today's not a very good time to see your dad,' " Gleason says.
Thanks to treatment and medication for depression, Young's final years were "quite splendid," says Gleason. Although he longed for Betty, he was bolstered by the love and support of his daughters—Carol Proffitt, 64, Barbara Beebe, 60, Kathy Young, 51, and Betty Lou—and his six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Born in Chicago on Feb. 22, 1907, to Margaret and Thomas, an Irish-born building contractor, Young was the fourth of five children. His family moved to L.A. in 1915. At Lincoln High School, he fell in love with acting—and with Betty, who sang light opera. They married in 1933. "Bob was pretty lost without her when she died," recalls Marsha Hunt, who played Young's wife in 1942's Joe Smith, American. "It was very rough on him."
With no money for college, Young tried clerking in a bank, bookkeeping and bill collecting while acting nights at the Pasadena Playhouse. A 1931 screen test won him a contract at MGM, where he remained 15 years. He played a series of amiable, romantic leads before portraying a " greenhorn ranger in 1940's Northwest Passage and a disfigured war vet in 1945's The Enchanted Cottage. When he played a bad guy in 1947's They Won't Believe Me, audiences didn't—believe him, that is. "He was such a sweet man, and when he played a heavy they didn't like it at all," says costar Jane Greer.
But he was certainly believable as a caring doctor. In fact, Young sometimes forgot he was acting; he once gave Welby costar James Brolin a shot with a real needle, recalls Elena Verdugo, who played nurse Consuelo Lopez. "Oh, Bob would really get into it," she says. Even real doctors loved Welby. "The whole idea he portrayed of what medicine should be certainly influenced me," says Dr. J. Edward Hill, an American Medical Association trustee.
Young's air of authority was intrinsic. "Even when I was young," he once confided to Verdugo, "it would be 'Hi, Clark' and 'Hi, Jimmy,' " as Gable and Stewart passed the MGM gatekeepers. "But it was always, 'Good morning, Mr. Young.' What is it about me?" he wondered.
Well, Mr. Young, you just looked paternal. Chapin recalls going onstage to accept the 1958 Best Actress Emmy for TV mom Wyatt, only to realize she had left her shoes at her seat. "With the greatest dignity, Bob picked up my high heels, walked onto the stage and, in front of God and everybody, handed me my shoes," she says. "Here was Daddy to the rescue again."
Beth Karlin
Champ Clark in Los Angeles and Giovanna Breu in Chicago
- Contributors:
- Champ Clark,
- Giovanna Breu.
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