A Slice of the Life of Janet Waldo

It’s perhaps a little odd that Janet Waldo is celebrating a birthday today because she really is ageless. She sounds no different in the last interview I heard her give than she did when she was enthusiastically squealing to radio audiences as Corliss Archer back in the 1940s.

Janet, as I don’t need to tell you, is the voice of Judy Jetson. But she was a star on the air long before that as Corliss, and appeared in a supporting role on “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.” My favourite story surrounding her gig on that show comes from the Radio and Television Mirror of July 1950:

While Ozzie claims he is the world's worst business man, there are those who will argue the question — among them Bing Crosby.
When Ozzie gave Janet Waldo permission to appear on the Crosby show, he cautioned her about the squeal she has made so popular on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
"I don't know if they want you to squeal," Ozzie said, "but if they do, just be sure that they call you Emmy Lou."
Sure enough, Janet did squeal on the Crosby show. And in the signoff, Bing acknowledged his debt to Ozzie.
"The squeal by Janet Waldo," the groaner announced, "was heard through the courtesy of Ozzie Nelson."

Janet’s connection with Bing went back long before that. Crosby is credited with discovering her as a university co-ed in Seattle and bringing her to Paramount in January 1938. She seems to have done more photo shoots like the one you see to the right (from 1938) than movies, but she worked for a couple of studios before jumping full-time into radio.

Janet appeared on camera when network TV rolled around (though she passed on playing Corliss on the tube) and was given a co-starring shot after her time on “The Jetsons” on the series “Valentine’s Day.” Here’s a syndicated column from July 14, 1964 talking about it. The picture of her with the Laura Petrie hair accompanied the article.

TV KEYNOTES
Janet Waldo, Franciosa Team Up
By HARVEY PACK
NEW YORK — Janet Waldo, who will play Tony Franciosa's secretary on ABC's new Friday night series "Valentine's Day," is a veteran radio actress who, in spite of being the mother of two children, 12 and 8, hardly looks old enough to have owned a radio set.
Born in Grandview, Washington and reared in Seattle, Janet and her mother descended on Hollywood after Janet had scored in local high school shows and wanted a theatrical career. Almost immediately she was signed to play the role of "Corliss Archer," a precocious teen-ager originally created by F. Hugh Herbert for his play "Kiss and Tell". Janet was Corliss until she was in the sixth month of pregnancy at which time little Corliss took a maternity leave.
Janet, who looks like Donna Reed would look if she didn't spend so much time at the hairdressers, was not limited to the part of Corliss and she filled her time and bankbook by appearing on virtually every radio show in Hollywood. In March, 1949 she married writer Robert E. Lee and since then she has been a wife, mother, actress and confidant for the famous writing team of Lawrence and Lee, authors of such hits as "Inherit the Wind" and the stage version of "Auntie Mame".
She and Bob live in the San Fernando Valley (by choice, explained Janet, since her playwright husband can live on either coast) surrounded by many showbusiness neighbors including Shirley MacLaine, Steve Allen, Gale Storm and, most important of all, producer-director Hal Hanter of "Valentine's Day."
Food The Attraction

Since her husband's partner, Jerry Lawrence, is a bachelor with a bungalow overlooking the Pacific, I naturally assume the team worked at Lawrence's house. "Oh, no," said Janet smiling. "They work at our place because I feed them." At the moment, Lawrence and Lee have a play geared for next season on Broadway which may make things a little tricky for Janet and Bob since they have always agreed never to be separated for more than three weeks at a time and Janet will have the series and Bob will be in the east for revisions. "We'll work it out," said Janet. "We always have."
Although fans may not have noticed it, Janet Waldo has grown up on the air with the Nelson family right along with David and Ricky. Years ago, she played teen-ager Emmy Lou on the Nelson's radio show and on TV she has had the running role of Janet. Naturally, she and Bob are quite friendly with the Nelson clan.
Since she's not desperate for the money and her whole life is not wrapped up in her acting career, Janet picks and chooses her spots always with an eye for how much time it will mean away from Bob and the children. She does a lot of voices for cartoons and commercials and one of her favorites was Judy Jetson on ABC's "The Jetsons". Recently she did a sexy voice on a commercial and her words were joined up with a luscious former Playmate on the final film. "I had to see what the girl looked like," said Janet. "So I went out and bought the magazine where she was in the centerfold. Wow! And to think she needed my voice."
For Tony Franciosa, who used to be married to Shelley Winters, working with a girl like Janet Waldo should be a nice change of pace.

You have to chuckle at the reference to Janet doing the voice for a Playboy centrefold? Look at the photo to your right. It’s a publicity shot of Janet from 1943. Need I say more?

Needless to say, “Valentine’s Day” flopped. But Janet Waldo is no worse for it. When you think of her on camera, you likely think of her guest appearance on the top TV show of its day (and can likely quote the instructional line from Ricky Ricardo to Peggy about jiggling). She’ll always be eep-orping Judy Jetson to a few generations. And, best of all, she comes across in interviews as a genuine and happy person, unaffected by the problems that show biz fame can bring. She deserves a happy birthday today. I suspect she’ll have many more. She’s ageless, you know.

At Home With Janet Waldo

If you want an indication of how celebrity gossip has changed over the years, I present as Exhibit ‘A’ this slice of life with Janet Waldo from the Radio-TV Mirror of June 1952.

This, of course, was before her role as the typical teenager of the future on The Jetsons. She was still known for her role on radio as the typical teenager of the present on Corliss Archer.

Today, show biz gossip consists of “news” items about celebrity train wrecks and pictures of stars wearing next to nothing. The 1950s were a gentler era. In between ads for shampoo, lipstick and home permanents, fans could read happy, fluffy stories about radio stars (Garry Moore, Jan Miner, Marie Wilson and so on) and, oddly, fiction “written” by characters on radio soap operas as if they were real people. You got to know what the Second Mrs. Burton really thought, not just what you heard on the air. It was all so innocent. Confidential and its ilk changed all that.

In honour of Janet’s birthday today, I’m posting the full article. Click on each page to enlarge it. Don’t expect dirt, viciousness or earth-shattering revelations. Unlike some fan magazine stories, there’s no reason to question the veracity of anything in this one. Janet and Bob Lee had a happy relationship that ended with his death in 1994. She comes across—on and off the air—as a kind, friendly and outgoing person. And she sounds the same as when Del Sharbutt was introducing her on radio more than 65 years ago. May she enjoy good health and be with us for many more years.



Corliss Archer—Wonderful Whack
By Elizabeth Downs
The telephone rang with its long, impatient-sounding buzz and Janet Waldo, with her usual bounding energy, rushed to answer it before it could ring again.
A man's voice sounded over the telephone. He identified himself as the representative of a Hollywood motion picture film company. "May I speak to your mother, please," he said, soothingly. "My mother!" exclaimed Janet. "Why, my mother doesn't live with me."
"What," came the surprised voice, the horrified voice. "You're only sixteen years old and you live alone?"
Janet mumbled something that sounded like "I'm really old enough to take care of myself," and hung up the telephone.
The pretty, pert star of ABC's "Corliss Archer" tilted her head to one side and said softly, "It was ever thus. For eight years I've been playing a sixteen-year-old girl and people just won't believe I'll ever grow up—that I am grown up—that, as a matter of fact, I'm grown up enough to be married and about to be a mother. But most people are like the film executive. They just won't believe me and I haven't the heart to tell them, very often.
"I had a terrible time on the radio show because I didn't want to disappoint the many fans of my Corliss Archer counterpart. Corliss is a part of me, somebody I love and understand, and I want people to still think of me as Corliss despite the fact that in real life I wanted to be my husband's wife and now a mother! I couldn't let the fans know until the last minute that I was going to have a baby. I just couldn't."
Odds are that Janet will still be acceptable as Corliss long after she becomes a mother because she still looks like Corliss, talks like Corliss, is Corliss in real-life. Her petite figure is just perfect for skirts and sweaters. Her long bob looks adorable in a teenager's dream of sophistication—the horse's tail coiffure. She has a peaches and cream complexion, twinkling brown eyes and a pert face that looks as naive as a high school sophomore's. If her looks are deceiving, the bubbling Waldo personality clinches the illusion. Janet is as effervescent, fresh and unspoiled as the teenagers she portrays so well. And it was this very freshness and charm which attracted Robert E. Lee, brilliant young writer of the Railroad Hour, four years ago when he asked Janet to be his wife.
"Oh, and he is," sighs Janet, "so wonderful! He's so beautifully patiently impatient with me."
Translated, that means Bob takes cute Janet and her many "household incidents" in his stride. Reserved, quiet, easy-going, Bob is a good balance for his bouncy, carefree wife.
Bob, as most husbands would, likes their attractive Sherman Oaks, California, house to appear shiny and spotless. He encourages Janet to see that it is in good order at all times. But Janet, who is as personally immaculate as they come, admits she'd rather visit her many friends than stay home and straighten out a room.
Janet's attempts at cooking are always good for a laugh to her friends. "I have people I've been trying to coax to dinner for years and they won't come. The cowards! They've been frightened by the propaganda they've heard." It's propaganda, however, which has been jointly spread by Mr. and Mrs. Lee over the four years of trial and error Janet has had in the kitchen.
Cooking, it seems, is not an art Janet has mastered, although she claims she's improved since that first terrible evening when Bob had invited some very important persons to dinner. Janet had insisted, as any good conscientious bride should, on cooking it herself. "It will flatter them," she explained to her dubious husband.
Came the eventful day, and for once Janet was detained until 5:30 P.M. at the studio rehearsing. The guests were expected at 6:30.
Undaunted, Janet popped her roast into the oven, along with the potatoes. "I learned later that the roast wasn't too good a cut of meat." Then, hurriedly, Janet began to put a tomato aspic together.
"You know," Janet says with just a trace of the mystified expression she wore that evening, "the aspic didn't freeze and in desperation I tried to serve it covered with hard-boiled eggs and chopped walnuts. It looked all right in the mold but when people started dishing it up, it looked like tomato soup. But that wasn't all. I had only purchased six rolls since there were just four of us and they caught on fire in the oven. Periodically, as I worked desperately over the hot stove, Bob would stomp into the kitchen. 'Isn't it done yet,' he'd whisper. 'I smell something that smells done!'
"At last, at 9:30, I served dinner. The guests were terribly polite—and so hungry that I guess they couldn't speak. The roast was positively rare—and tough. And the potatoes—well, you'd put your fork into them and they'd just scoot off the plate. It was a miserable dinner and, to this day, Bob doesn't speak of it but turns slightly pale whenever I bring up the subject."
So Janet and Bob don't take chances on important people any more. "We have my mother help or Bob has the dinner catered. We had important guests right after Bob hit upon this catering even though I told Bob I'd do much better. But he wouldn't listen to me. He just had the dinner brought in, before the guests arrived, and everything seemed perfect.
"Excepting," giggled Janet, "it was composed of the most wonderfully delicious little sauces over equally exotic solid food. We hadn't the vaguest idea what any of it was. Our guests were completely amazed at my having cooked this gourmet's delight. Bob had promised to kill me if I told them our dinner was catered so I graciously accepted their compliments. When the women began asking for the recipes, I was more embarrassed than I'd been when dinner didn't turn out at all. Then I had an idea.
" 'Oh, you must ask Bob,' I said in my most casual manner, not looking at him. 'They're his favorite recipes!' Poor Bob. He knows less about cooking than I do. He hemmed and hawed over each dish. Any resemblance to the ingredients he finally concocted and the beautiful dishes on the table was more than accidental—it was amazing!"
Janet and Bob used to eat many meals out. But this was before Bob gave Janet a deep freeze for a birthday present, thinking that perhaps this would help her learn to cook. The freezer came stocked with food—steaks, hamburger, ice cream. Janet learned how to defrost and broil steaks in no time and they lived like royalty on steaks and ice cream. But now Janet is worried—"The only thing that's left is hamburger, and how do you fix forty pounds of hamburger so that's it's edible for forty meals?"
'T'heir favorite meal is Sunday dinner—which Janet's mother always cooks. "We never miss that. Although Bob loves to fly his own plane on Sunday, his only free time, he always makes it back to Mom's house for dinner. Once we'd had a quarrel and the only way I could think to punish Bob was by depriving him of my mother's dinner for a month. He was really heartbroken and made up immediately."
Bob and Janet have such fun together that there's little' time left for quarreling. "Just like any newlyweds, we used to squabble, but we've mellowed. Bob has such a wonderful sense of humor he has me laughing—at myself—in no time. But, then, we never got really mad. For example, I never thought of going home to Mother. Now, I wouldn't dare because Bob would be there, waiting for dinner."
Life today has never seemed fuller or richer to the Lees, who are eagerly awaiting their baby's arrival, due early in June, Janet thinks. They don't really care what their first-born is, boy or girl—"just so it's a little baby," sighs Janet. Janet is busy turning her spare bedroom into a nursery with a dream of a baby bed and oodles of baby clothes which she loves to show off.
The Lees' friends used to kid them about the baby by insisting "it" would play second fiddle to their dog, Lady Ophelia. As a lady, "Ophie," a pedigreed Welsh terrier, gets the run of the house.
"We love Ophie as much as people," defended Janet, "and when she had two little puppies we named the first one People. The second we call Perkimore, after its vitamins. You bet Ophie, Pepe and Perky have a very special place in our hearts. But really nothing will compare to the love we'll have for our baby. We think we'll try for a family of two or three, just like Ophie."
Having been in the entertainment business for many years, Janet is wisely aware of the pitfalls it offers a woman combining career with marriage. "And I don't intend it's happening to me," she said.
"I've turned down many opportunities, and even the chance of playing Corliss on TV, just to keep my life uncluttered and my time free for my husband. He's tried to keep free time for me by beginning his writing hours at 5 A.M. This doesn't affect me, as I usually don't arise until 9. He doesn't even take time from his work to come in and wake me, instead he calls on his phone from the next room."
That isn't as confusing as it sounds. The Lees have their own telephones, and for good reason, too. Janet has telephonitis.
"Bob used to die because I tied up the line for hours just chattering—a habit I love and wouldn't break. As he worked at home he couldn't get important calls, so he made a bargain with me. If I'd answer the phone, 'Lawrence and Lee Productions' —which is his and business partner Jerry Lawrence's title—like a secretary in his office, then he said I could have a line of my own. We tried it and it works just beautifully. Now he doesn't dare use my phone without asking."
While this solved one problem, it didn't solve another. Even though Janet can't tie up his line, Bob finds she is still oblivious to everything while chattering on her own phone. Therefore, he has to write her notes concerning pertinent business, such as the eggs she's left cooking on the stove, or the fact they've guests coming in twenty minutes.
"And he can be so stuffy," she wailed, "when he says in his most authorish tone, 'We'll be finished in five minutes, won't we?' We, meaning me. That's the way he talks to me when he's annoyed about something. 'My, we're burning a lot of things, aren't we?' But I love him, he's so wonderful!"
Janet's idea of sheer heaven would be to work with her husband on a radio or TV show. "Then we'd be together every minute!"
As it is, the Lees share more hours together than the average couple. They bought their attractive redwood bungalow, on a charming street in Sherman Oaks, fifteen minutes after they'd first seen it! They noticed the compact valley house and fell in love with it. The real estate agent was right there and in no time at all they were home owners. Janet claims the house still isn't furnished properly.
But the only real complaint she has, if she has any, is her lack of offers to portray dramatic roles. Roles as adult and sophisticated as she'd actually like to be—and sometimes imagines that she is.
"Oh, well," smiled Janet with her most grown-up look, "I'll have you know a talent scout asked me recently if I thought I could play a young lady. Isn't that peachy? I've really never been so flattered!"

Happy Birthday, Judy

Some time ago, the title of “America’s Oldest Teenager” was bestowed upon Dick Clark. Whoever did it was wrong. Everyone knows America’s Oldest Teenager is really Janet Waldo.

Janet was a real teenager when she went into the movies. She starred as a teenager—“15 going on 16,” as the announcer put it—on the radio show Meet Corliss Archer. She appeared on camera as a teenager in a memorable episode of I Love Lucy. She, of course, is teenaged Judy Jetson. And, if you listen to any recent interviews with Janet, she still has that teenaged-girl quality in her voice. She’s like that cartoon senior citizen who defied the aging process, Precious Pupp’s owner Granny Sweet, who, not coincidentally perhaps, is voiced by one Janet Waldo.

I’m probably like many of you. Janet’s voice has been a part of my life for so long, she seems like an old friend, even more so considering she lived down Highway 99 maybe 100 miles or so from where I grew up in a place I’ve been through countless times.

Internet sources don’t agree about Janet’s year of birth—personally, I’ll take the word of the U.S. Government Census—but they do agree that she was born on this particular day in the pippin paradise of Grandview, Washington, near Yakima. Her dad was Benjamin Franklin Waldo, a native Vermonter who was the agent for the Northern Pacific Railway at Granger. She was the fourth child and had an older brother Franklin Allen and older sisters Virginia and Elizabeth. Janet is a distant relative of the fabled Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Soon, the family moved to Everett, north of Seattle. She attended the University of Washington and appeared in its Little Theatre presentations. She was on the radio, too; her first job was reading two lines in a commercial while still in high school. At that time, Bing Crosby and his studio, Paramount, were on a talent quest in his native State and Janet was induced to enter. She and a Spokane girl named Ruth Rogers were winners, and off they went to Hollywood.

The Los Angeles Times of February 3, 1938 has this Hollywood squib:

The initiation of Janet Waldo, 18 years of age, of Seattle into the film world was nothing short of ostentatious yesterday. She was kissed fifteen times by Richard Denning, a stock player for Paramount, during the shooting of scenes for a trailer for “Romance in the Dark.” Retakes accounted for all of the activity, and Miss Waldo admitted she was a trifle embarrassed at first. She is one of the girls signed to a contract in the Bing Crosby beauty hunt conducted recently in the Northwest.”

Paramount shoved her in a bunch of pictures in the late ‘30s and played her up in publicity material as an ingénue. Complete with glamour shots. Check this NEA wire service picture from April 6, 1939 from a story about young stars who added fitness to glamour. Perhaps that was her cinematic undoing. The Oakland Tribune’s Sunday magazine of January 29, 1939 featured a picture of Janet in a feature story entitled ‘Does It Pay to Be Beautiful in Hollywood?’ Part of the text reads:

When Hollywood's directors and producers were polled to name the 10 most beautiful girls to gain screen recognition during 1938 the winners were:
Janet Waldo, Mary (Punkins) Parker, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ellen Drew, Rosella Towne, Judith Barrett, Nancy Kelly, Sheila Darcy, Pauline Moore and Ruth Hussey....
[Here’s] what happened when Paramount’s eastern business chiefs started reorganizing the west coast studio. ... lopped off the contract list included Dorothy Howe, Joan Bennett, Franciska Gaal, Ann Todd and Frances Dee and next in line were Nora Gale, Harriet Haddon and Janet Waldo.
So two—Janet Waldo and “Punkins” Parker — of Paramount’s five winners in the Hollywood “10 best” beauty contest (conducted by Paramount) couldn’t be saved by their beauty.

Ah, but poor “Punkins” didn’t have the Old Groaner watching out for them. Janet did. She kept getting parts in Bing Crosby movies.

The original home of many cartoon actors, network radio, became Janet’s best-known residence. She doubled on Lux Radio Theatre, starting around early 1941, and then, as the Milwaukee Journal reported on July 16, 1944:

Starring in the role of Kathy [on the serial Those We Love] is Janet Waldo, who stepped into the part when Nan Grey retired temporarily [in May 1943] to give birth to her second daughter. (Coincidence: Kathy also has just become a mother in the script.) Janet entered radio as the winner of a talent contest at the University of Washington, and she considers “Those We Love” her lucky program since it was through that show that she got her first real radio break. That was several years ago, after Janet had made several auditions along Hollywood’s radio row but had received very little encouragement. Then, when Nan Grey was detained in San Francisco and was unable to get to rehearsal, a hurryup check of audition files revealed that Janet Waldo was available. She read the star’s part at rehearsal, and although Nan returned in time for the actual broadcast, Janet’s ability so impressed the producer that he called her for another show and before long she had her foothold in radio.

Her most famous role was, once again, one she took over. In mid-July, 1943, she replaced former Little Rascal Priscilla Lyon as the title character on Meet Corliss Archer. You’d never know anyone else had played Corliss the way the papers talked. Here’s a syndicated column; this is the version that appeared in the Milwaukee Journal on September 5, 1943:

Scatterbrain is Anything But That
Janet Waldo offers proof that it takes brains to play the part of a charming young scatterbrain. Witness her title role portrayal in Columbia network’s “Corliss Archer” program. Janet does it so well some listeners must think she is in private life as effervescent, moonstruck and unpredictable as the character she creates.
On the contrary, Janet is a serious young artist whose day, beginning at 5 a.m., is a planned schedule of piano lessons, French lessons, rehearsals, study of radio dramatic technique and “boning up” on the vagaries of a girl’s mind.
Janet has been a serious minded young lady since the day she played a lead role in a student production of “Showboat” at Washington university, St. Louis [sic]. Inspired by the applause, she decided then and there to devote her life to a Thespian career, and engaged a dramatic coach.
Three years ago she went to Hollywood and got her first big break on Cecil B. De Mille’s “[Lux] Radio Theater,” playing with George Brent and Merle Oberon. She later landed parts in movies, but renounced motion pictures to concentrate solely on radio. She has had parts on “Big Town” with Edward G. Robinson, who also coached her; on “Dr. Christian” with Jean Hersholt, “Mayor of the Town” with Lionel Barrymore, and “Silver Theater,” opposite Bing Crosby and Kay Kyser.
Janet believes there is but one formula for success in her chosen profession, and that’s hard work and appreciation of intelligence. In the mornings she doesn’t pause for a breakfast cigarette, because she doesn’t smoke. In the afternoon she’s not found in fashionable cocktail bars, because she doesn’t drink. And in the evening she flits very little in café society—this despite the fact that she is young and beautiful. She has dates, of course, but not many. Dates, cigarets and cocktails take up too much time, she feels.
“I’ve made up my mind to be a really good actress,” she explains.
When Janet find time she rides horseback, swims, plays tennis or writes light verse. But work or play, she always finds some way of doing things to please her mother, who is a concert singer, and her father, a retired railroad man.
Janet would rather talk about her sister, Elizabeth Waldo, than herself. Elizabeth, a concert violinist, was a member of Leopold Stokowski’s All-American Youth orchestra which toured South America, and is now a violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra.
“We’re just two girls who know our own minds,” says Janet. “Elizabeth will never leave her music and I’ll never leave radio.”
And that’s the kind of gal who stars as a madcap.

Yes, Janet was starring in two shows. She was in a third, actually, appearing in 1944 as Irene, Cliff’s wife, in the venerable One Man’s Family. Okay, a fourth, as the same year, she was signed for a lead role in Lady of the Press, airing out of KNX Los Angeles. Multiple shows for radio actors, even ones with starring roles, weren’t unheard of.

More roles followed. She was Emmy Lou on Ozzie and Harriet; Ozzie Nelson called her character “a composite of about four or five teenagers who frequented the Los Angeles Tennis Club’s swimming pool during vacation time.” She regularly played one of Eddie Bracken’s girl-friends on his show. She even got another starring role in 1949 with Jimmy Lydon on the comedy Young Love. But Corliss carried on through network changes, sponsor troubles and the decline of the Golden Age of Radio, finally going off the air in 1956. Oh, and it provided Janet with a husband. She married radio writer/producer Bob Lee in March 1948; he had written for Archer and penned her show with Lydon before heading to bigger things (Janet once joked she kept working to put her husband through Broadway). The only thing Corliss didn’t do was put her on television—Lugene Sanders was hired to go before the camera at the time Janet was pregnant with Jonathan.

So how did Janet end up becoming Judy Jetson? She had been voicing commercials at the time, and her agent Jack Wormser called. On The Jetsons DVD, she explains:

I was working in an on-camera series called ‘Valentine’s Day’ and they sent me to do this audition for The Jetsons, and I had never done a cartoon before....
When I came to the first session, Joe Barbera directed it and he had the whole storyboard there and would go through the entire script, playing all of the parts. That was great because we didn’t have to wonder what he wanted us to do.
But Penny [Singleton] and I loved each other. I don’t believe we had ever met before The Jetsons. Most of the other people in the series I had worked with in radio. George O’Hanlon. Wonderful actor. Wonderful guy. I loved working with these people because they were all so good. They were totally professional. Some of them had come from the theatre and they were just wonderful actors. They weren’t just voice people.
You know, Penny and I had voices that were in the same register, and I was always trying to get her to go lower. But she’d say “Well, no, because we’re mother and daughter it’s okay we sound alike.” But then I went higher and the higher I went, the higher she went. But Joe Barbera never questioned us about that, he never picked on us about that, our voices being too close.
Daws Butler...He was a dear, dear man. And helped me so much at this first audition because, as you can imagine, I was very nervous.
George O’Hanlon didn’t like to be called a voice person. He said “I do one voice, and it’s me.” And Penny just did one voice always in the sessions. I noticed with this first session that Jean Vander Pyl and Daws and Don Messick did lots and lots of voices so I became totally enamoured of doing more than one voice. So later on, I coaxed Joe Barbera to let me try some other voices and I did lots of them in The Jetsons.
[The first show] was a little more straight-laced than some of the other shows. I mean, nobody went really, really far out except maybe Howie Morris...but as the show progressed, you can not believe some of the wild voices that everybody did.
Joe Barbera, in looking at the storyboard, it was such fun to hear him do all of the different voices. Joe was a very good actor, actually, and, in fact, one time I was working with Paul Lynde on a series called The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and he said to Paul Lynde “You don’t sound like Paul Lynde, Paul,” so Joe Barbera did a Paul Lynde for Paul Lynde. You couldn’t fool Joe. His ear is absolutely perfect. He knows when he gets it and he knows when it’s wrong.

I hate to correct Janet’s first statement, but Valentine’s Day didn’t debut until fall 1964. As you know, The Jetsons first aired September 23, 1962.

More from Janet about the recording sessions:

The animators... use to come to the rehearsal and they would sit in a little separate booth and they would watch us performing, or doing our recording, I’m sure you all know that the recording was made first and then the animation. And they would take mannerisms that we used and put them into our characters...
If you can believe this, the early recording sessions, there were only 24 that were made, and they lasted for six hours. That’s because Joe Barbera was so particular and he wanted to get exactly the right sound and the right quality. And, then, later on when we made new Jetsons, which was years later, we did them in an hour or an hour and a half. But I loved those six-hour sessions. They were great fun.

Janet has much more to say; listen to the DVD bonus tracks for yourself. She didn’t say how much she was paid for each episode but Jean Vander Pyl told a reporter in 1995 she (Jean) got $250 per show for The Flintstones.

I suppose I have to make mention of The Tiffany Affair. For those of you who don’t recall, Hanna-Barbera brought back all of The Jetsons voice actors—including a couple who were in failing health—to record a voice track in 1989 for a movie version. Someone at Universal had the idea to pander to young people by replacing Janet’s voice track with pop singer Tiffany. I was outraged. Tiffany was not Judy Jetson. Janet Waldo was. End of discussion. In fact, Tiffany pretty well epitomised what was wrong with the music industry in that era; the every-hook-is-calculated, homogenised, soulless material polluting the song charts. Even more, I couldn’t picture why anyone would go to see a movie just because Tiffany was singing in it; the whole concept was such an obvious marketing ploy involving someone who was maybe a B-lister at best. I was pleased to see the pander was panned by fans, the media—the L.A. Times declared “The Judy I heard was an imposter”—and Janet, who was classy in interviews at the time. Janet didn’t buy a ticket to the movie. Neither did I.

Into the 21st Century, there were few places on the radio, besides commercials, for long-time voice artists, but Janet found one of them—the Christian radio play series Adventures in Odyssey. If you listen to this podcast and skip past the contrived opening to the 1:25 mark, you can hear her talk about her career and her work on that show with Hanna-Barbera’s Hal Smith where she finally stopped playing a teenager.

If you haven’t read enough, Mark Evanier’s blog has this great tale of Janet and Howie Morris.

Finally, some little known Janet Waldo facts:

• She almost appeared on television—in 1945! Plans for a fashion show on Don Lee’s W6XAO fell through. Scheduled to appear with Janet on the catwalk were radio actresses and noted H-B cartoon voices Bea Benaderet and Cathy Lewis (Billboard, Jan. 27, 1945).
• Servicemen overseas during the war requested pin-up pictures of her—specifying they wanted shots with all her clothes on (Milwaukee Journal, May 13, 1945).
• Janet is afraid to fly though her husband Bob was a licensed pilot (Chicago Tribune, May 27, 1951).
• She won a free trip for two to Paris in Dodge’s monthly ‘Buyer is King’ letter-writing contest but turned it down because of radio commitments (L.A. Times, Sept. 20, Oct. 23, 1951).
• A fortune teller told her that her marriage wouldn’t last three years. She and Bob finally parted upon his death in 1994, 46 years later (Pittsburgh Press, May 13, 1951).
• The Lees won a tax refund case in 1967 that apparently set a legal precedent.

This post went a lot longer than I expected and I’ve cut out a lot of stuff. There’s enough for a whole book. Suffice it to say, Janet Waldo’s had a fine career and has made audiences smile and laugh since she was a teenager. A real one. It’s her birthday today, but we all know it can’t be. Janet Waldo is still 15 going on 16. And she always will be.