Cummings Is Everybody’s Hero at Birthday Fete

Curiously, the most prestigious acting award Bob Cummings ever won was for a dramatic role. He received an Emmy for his 1954 “Studio One” performance in “The Twelve Angry Men.”

Cummings--surprised by friends Friday night with a birthday party at Horace Heidt Estates in Sherman Oaks, where he and scores of others in the entertainment industry have retired--is remembered more for his TV sitcoms of the 1950s and ‘60s: “The Bob Cummings Show,” “My Living Doll” and “My Hero.”

Seemingly everybody’s hero Friday night, Cummings was led into the Aloha Room by the party chairman and emcee, comedian Jimmy Caesar. More than 100 friends, many he hadn’t seen in years, greeted him by singing “Happy Birthday.”

“It’s my 40th birthday,” he joked. He was 80 Saturday.

At his side was his fifth wife, Janie. A former supermarket cashier in Nashville, Tenn., she had written a fan letter about Cummings to an editor, later met Cummings and ended up marrying him last August.

“I’m trying to catch up with Mickey Rooney,” he said, with the same boyish grin that endeared him to so many fans during his acting heyday.

Art Linkletter, an old friend, commented, “We have laughed our way around the world together a couple of times.”

Asked when he last saw Cummings, comedian Red Buttons replied, “About 3 million pills ago.”

It was a night for laughs, old stories and nostalgia. Among others on hand: Jane Withers, Patty Andrews, Don Defore, Rosemary DeCamp, Pat Buttram, Helen Forrest, Jane Wyatt, Rose Marie, Gloria Jean, Terry Moore, Margaret O’Brien, Buddy Rogers, Virginia O’Brien, Dick Van Patten and veteran writer Paul Henning, who created “The Bob Cummings Show,” among many others.

President George Bush couldn’t join the party, but he did send a congratulatory acknowledgement, as did former President Ronald Reagan.