A Star With a Place in the Sun : Gale Storm Is Looking Ahead to a Marriage and New Film Roles

Flashback: The aspiring young actors and actresses from across the country--finalists in the nationwide “Gateway to Hollywood” talent search--arrived in Hollywood in the fall of 1939 with high hopes and stars in their eyes.

A lot was riding on the talent contest. The winning actor and actress would receive contracts with RKO Studios and a guaranteed role in a major motion picture. But the two winners also would receive something extra.

In the best Hollywood tradition, they would be given new names: Movie star names. Memorable names. Names that would look good up on a theater marquee.

And so, for 13 consecutive Sundays, as the finalists acted in scenes broadcast live over CBS Radio, the listening audience was lured back each week to find out the answer to:

“Who will be Terry Belmont?

“Who will be Gale Storm?”

When it was over, Lee Bonnell, a handsome 21-year-old Indiana University drama student from South Bend, Ind., nabbed the Terry Belmont moniker. And Josephine Cottle, a pretty 17-year-old high school senior from Houston, Tex., was re-christened Gale Storm.

Flash forward: Seated in the family room of her home in the Laguna Shores area of Laguna Niguel, her legs stretched out and her black boots propped up on the coffee table, Gale Storm flashed her mega-watt smile.

“At the time I was so impressed, I didn’t even see the humor in the name Gale Storm,” she recalled, her stunningly blue eyes sparkling merrily beneath great winged eyebrows. “It was so exciting and so thrilling. It’s like a Cinderella story.”

Indeed, Storm not only walked away with a new name and a movie studio contract, she walked away with her co-winner, Bonnell. Storm and Bonnell, who dropped the name Terry Belmont after one picture, were married in 1941.

Theirs was a long, happy marriage, one that produced three sons and a daughter. It ended after 44 years when Bonnell, retired from the insurance business he entered after World War II, died of a heart attack in 1986.

Last September, Storm sold her house in Monarch Bay and moved into the smaller house in Laguna Shores a few blocks from her son, Phillip, and his family. But while she is happy with her new house, she is already preparing to move out.

On April 23, Josephine Cottle Gale Storm Bonnell will make yet another name change when she marries Paul Masterson, a former ABC television executive and current president of the Permanent Charities Committee, the entertainment industry’s charity organization. The marriage also will be the second for Masterson, whose wife died five years ago.

Storm said she met “this wonderful man” last July through a mutual friend, Linda Leighton, who played matchmaker by inviting them both to a dinner party at Leighton’s Monarch Bay house. It worked.

“We just hit it off real keen,” said Storm, laughing: “We’re moving right along, as they say. I had been going out some, dating men. Then, when I met him I didn’t talk about others much. . . . He’s intelligent and has a marvelous sense of humor. I love him, but I just like him, too. He’s something special.”

The wedding will be held in South Shores Baptist Church in Laguna Niguel, where Storm has sung in the choir the past three years. Said Storm with a grin: “It’s going to be a small wedding--covered by the (National) Enquirer. They called and wanted exclusive coverage.”

Unlike many other celebrities, Storm said she has had only positive experiences with the supermarket tabloid. When it has come to stories about her, “they’ve always been in impeccable taste, and I really respected that,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re welcome to cover the whole thing.”

Although they will continue to spend time in Masterson’s house in Laguna Beach on weekends, the newlyweds will move into a new condominium in Los Angeles after they return from their honeymoon to London and Paris. Storm is looking forward to moving back up to Los Angeles, which will allow her to be more readily available for movie and TV work.

“I want to get more active,” she said. “I feel like it’s a waste when I’ve had as much experience as I’ve had, and I love it.”

Evidence of her vast experience as a B movie queen in the ‘40s and as one of television’s biggest stars in the ‘50s is visible throughout her family room.

One wall is filled with framed magazine covers featuring her (Look, Ladies’ Home Companion, TV Guide) and photographs: There’s Gale with Laurel and Hardy, Gale with Walt Disney, Gale with Charles Farrell (her “My Little Margie” co-star) and Gale with ZaSu Pitts (her “Oh! Susanna” co-star). There’s even a gold record (for her 1956 million seller, “I Hear You Knockin”).

Chatty, personable and good-humored, Storm, at 66, is still as perky as when she was the popular Josephine Cottle from Houston. Today, Storm’s upbeat personality is seasoned by a well-publicized battle with alcoholism in the ‘70s and the emotional aftermath of losing her husband of 44 years.

In a wide-ranging interview, Storm candidly discussed those subjects and more.

As it turns out, young Josephine Cottle never aspired to be an actress. In fact, although she had always acted in school plays, she didn’t even want to try out for the “Gateway to Hollywood” contest. But both her Latin and English teachers insisted. (Later, when she was featured on “This Is Your Life,” Ralph Edwards flew the two women out for a reunion with their star pupil. “They were so dear,” Storm says.)

After winning the “Gateway to Hollywood” contest, Storm made her first picture for RKO. It was “Tom Brown’s School Days” with Freddie Bartholomew. Storm was cast as a 10-year-old: “That was a rip-roaring start!”

Actually, she looked so young the studio dropped her after her second picture, and Ben Piazza, head of talent, advised her to go back to Houston. Piazza later told her that it was the biggest mistake he ever made, she said.

After leaving RKO, Storm free-lanced as an actress. She appeared in a string of movies, including three Roy Rogers westerns in a row. Then she signed with Monogram, a studio known for cranking out low-budget pictures in six days. “That was terrific experience for television,” she said. “Boy, you learn fast.” When Monogram began producing musicals, Storm was asked if she could sing. She said she would try. “They hired a choreographer to teach me the routines, and I just loved it,” she said.

In all, she appeared in about 50 pictures.

But by the early ‘50s, Storm’s movie career was in a slump. So when producer Hal Roach Jr. asked her to read the script for a new television comedy about a mischievous young woman living with her widowed father in a Manhattan apartment, she was ready to make the move to television.

When it debuted in 1952, “My Little Margie” was roundly panned by the critics. “Nobody liked it but the people, and that was sufficient at that time,” Storm said. The show lasted 4 1/2 years. “When we started ‘Margie’ it was a six-day (work) week and I carried the lead in every one. Fortunately, I loved hard work--and I got it.”

Still, she felt so overworked on the show that she swore she would never do another TV series. But after “My Little Margie” ended in 1955, a writer approached her with an idea for a new comedy series. The writer had neither a script nor a story. All he showed her was the back cover of a Time magazine. It was an ad for a luxury ocean liner with the ship’s female social director beckoning readers to “Sail with us.”

The idea of doing a comedy set on a glamorous ocean liner appealed to Storm. But the clincher came when Storm, who already had begun her recording career, was told that every third episode would be a musical.

After “Oh! Susanna” was canceled in 1960, Storm continued to appear in summer stock and in dinner theaters around the country. Although she never retired, she was no longer in the limelight--until 1979 when she began doing commercials for Raleigh Hill Hospitals where she had received treatment for her seven-year bout with alcoholism.

Alcoholism, Storm said, “is a disease of denial. I had been the kind of alcoholic--as so many women are--that I was so careful. You talk about a secret drinker.”

Professionally, she said, she never took a drink before a performance and even socially, if everyone had only a drink or two, so would she. She could do that, she said, because “I’d fortify myself before I went out . . . and I’d compensate afterward, as well.

“With me, once it (alcohol) got hold of me, I could go just so many hours without my body craving and demanding.”

She would wake up in the middle of the night, ostensibly to go to the bathroom. Instead, she would find herself “having a good stiff drink.” She felt helpless to do otherwise. Alcoholism, she said, “is as compulsive as anything and that’s very scary, especially if you don’t know anyone can help.”

In Storm’s case, she went to three different hospitals to try to overcome her drinking problem. She was in one hospital for three months, but it was no better than a country club, she said.

Then she heard about Raleigh Hills. After undergoing detoxification, she went through aversion therapy. For Storm, the two-week treatment worked, and she has never craved alcohol again. “It was just like God turned it off. That was it! And it was heaven.”

Before checking into Raleigh Hills, Storm said, “I was dying of humiliation and self-disgust and all the other emotions.” But as soon as she was told that alcoholism was a disease and not a character flaw, she felt a tremendous sense of freedom “and I wanted to share it.”

She begged to do commercials for the now-defunct alcohol treatment chain and, with missionary zeal, she told her story in numerous interviews.

Storm credits her faith in God for helping her overcome her alcoholism. “The spiritual part of my life is the most important,” she said. “That’s the source of my strength.” But through it all, her husband, Lee, offered his support.

“It was absolutely a great marriage,” she said, adding that she felt funny talking about her first husband now that she is to marry again. But, she said, “there’s nothing wrong with having a good marriage. I didn’t necessarily expect to marry again. It was a terrific marriage, and it got better and better, not because we were lucky but because we worked at it . . . which makes it pretty devastating when you lose it, by durn.”

After her husband’s funeral, she said, her minister took her aside and asked her if she had any regrets--any feelings of unfinished business, or of things left unsaid.

“And I thought about it, and I said, ‘No,’ because we had verbalized and never held back, and I think that’s the greatest piece of advice to a married couple.”

Storm worked hard at adjusting to life alone. “My kids were a tremendous help to me,” she said. “They were just marvelous to see me through it. So loneliness wasn’t so bad.”

Her first inclination was to turn down social invitations but, following the advice of one woman who had lost her husband, she said yes to everything. “I felt that was good advice,” Storm said. “It kept me going.”

Of course, by following that advice she met Masterson. Storm smiles broadly at the thought of their impending nuptials.

“My daughter, Susie, is going to be matron of honor, and Phil, my oldest boy, is going to be giving me away,” she said. “He said he’s been practicing walking down the aisle.”

Looking back over her life, Storm feels fortunate in having had a career she has enjoyed and a loving husband and family to share it with.

“God is good,” she said. “I just feel so blessed.”

And her upcoming marriage to Masterson, she feels, is a continuation of that blessing.

“You bet it is.”