Sweet Talker

“I l-o-o-o-ved Betty Anderson.”

Elinor Donahue’s face is beaming as she talks about her beloved character, the eldest child on “Father Knows Best,” the iconic 1950s television series that defined the picture-perfect family.

Talking to a virtual stranger over breakfast to promote her autobiography-cum-cookbook, “In the Kitchen With Elinor Donahue,” she’s warm, cordial, sometimes animated, but mostly tentative, wanting to be nice.

And it comes easily. She is nice.

But the subject of Betty, especially, brings her to life. Betty Anderson was a bit of a brat--haughty, determined, a typical teenager who knew all the answers and looked down on her uncouth younger brother, Bud (played by Billy Gray), and kid sister, “Kitten.”

Now, the ponytail she used to swing imperiously is gone. The rface, however, is uncannily unchanged. But the woman sitting at the booth at Louise’s, close to Donahue’s Studio City home, is nothing like Betty Anderson--and it’s not just age, which is 61. Her eyes are warm and soft, she’s sincere and nervous, and self-effacing, occasionally even self-deprecating.

“She was my alter-ego, that’s why I loved her,” Donahue confides.

“She was so different from me. She was positive, she knew where she was headed--she might have been wrong, but she sure knew where she was headed--she was social, she could do a lot of things. I was this shy, insecure wimp.” Donahue sips her coffee but doesn’t touch a bite of food, hesitant to even attempt the perils of chewing and talking.

“Father Knows Best,” a prime-time staple for nearly a decade beginning in 1954, appeared on all three networks, almost always in the top 10 ratings. More, it has become entrenched as a cultural marker singularly symbolizing the Eisenhower era, and a lightning rod for the virtues--and evils--of the decade.

That the show has become a target for all that was wrong with the decade--for essentially sugar-coating reality--provokes Donahue, whose roots are definitely in the era when if you couldn’t say anything nice you weren’t to say anything at all.

“It makes me a little angry that it’s used as a negative instead of as a positive,” she says.

“We weren’t caricatures, we were real characters. We weren’t meant to be a treatise on how people should live their lives. And people come up to me and develop tears in their eyes as they tell me we were the family that they didn’t have. We gave them something to aspire to.”

She says it’s a long-standing debate between her and screen kid brother Gray, now an inventor who lives in the hills of Topanga. “To some people this idyllic family unit was painful, and made them feel worse about their own lives,” says Gray by phone. “I don’t know how much positive can come out of something that’s a sham.”

But “Father Knows Best,” for Donahue, was the defining moment of a career that amazingly began in vaudeville and has continued into the era of the renegade Fox network.

“I have pockets of fans who know nothing about the rest of my work,” she says, touting a resume that continued into the 1960s with “The Andy Griffith Show”; the 1970s with “The Odd Couple” and “Star Trek”; “The New Adventures of Beans Baxter” in the ‘80s; and “Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman” in the ‘90s.

Remembering the Early Days of TV

Donahue was a child actress in the pre-television 1940s whose co-stars ranged from such veterans as Loretta Young and Jeanette MacDonald to fellow newcomers such as Ann Blyth, Doris Day, Jane Powell, Donald O’Connor and Margaret O’Brien. In the early-early days of television, she danced with Ray Bolger. (“I was a good dancer,” she admits in a rare moment of self-confidence.)

“She’s very modest,” Jane Wyatt says by phone from her Southern California home. “She’s actually a very fine actress.”

Tony Randall, who worked with Donahue on “The Odd Couple,” once berated her for putting herself down. Donahue remembers, “Jack [Klugman] and Tony were talking about an actress, and one of them said, ‘Oh, she’s wonderful, a great actress, I really like her.’ And I was just standing off to the side, and I said, ‘Oh, like me?’ making fun of myself. And Tony turned to me and snapped, ‘You’re a lot better than you let yourself be.’ I’ve always remembered that.”

Donahue’s inspiration to tell her memoir, cookbook style, was pragmatic: so she could dip her toes into an autobiography without going way into the deep end. “I had to get it out, break the logjam somehow, with a memoir, and this way I was able to not get too heavy about things, keep it lighthearted.” Her co-writers are Ken Beck and Jim Clark.

Also, the format had proven successful in the “Aunt Bee” series of cookbooks, emanating from the “Andy Griffith Show.” “The publisher said if I could do that with someone else’s book, what could I do with my own book?”

Also, she loves to cook, which she enjoyed during 30 years of domesticity with husband Harry Ackerman, with whom she had three children--Peter, 36, James, 33, Christopher, 30. Her eldest, Brian, 41, is from a brief previous marriage. Ackerman, a television executive, died in 1991. She later married former dancer Lou Genevrino.

Donahue sifted through and winnowed favorite recipes and photos, both her own and her mother’s, as visual cues for a lifetime of personal and career moments. She includes recipes from celebrities she’s worked with over the years, along with anecdotes about working with them.

“I was so delighted to go all the way back to 1942,” she says, “to two of the stars of the first movie I was in, ‘Mr. Big’ [starring Donald O’Connor]. I just thought that was such fun. Not too many people can go back that far and still have a live person to contact. And Peggy Ryan and Gloria Jean were so forthcoming and happy to take part in it and send their photographs.”

The book is a nostalgic treasure trove, covering Donahue’s early years performing on the vaudeville circuit as a 5-year-old in Tacoma, Wash., her years in the 1940s studio films, and her seven-odd television series. It has a disarming warmth and charm, offering up some 260 photos and 185 recipes.

She was happy with the format, though its upbeat tone, by necessity, was a challenge. “It was hard sometimes,” she admits. Like the segment talking about Ackerman’s death. “I mean, how do you talk about someone dying and then segue into a recipe?” She knows the dark edges have been lightly dusted. “Another kind of book might have been darker. But this kind of book does not lend itself to that.”

And there are plenty of anecdotes left for the more thorough book she’s contemplating. Like arriving on Jeanette MacDonald’s set with a cold. The older actress had a Howard Hughes-like fear of germs. “We were shooting this scene, which was supposed to be warm and cuddly. I’m on her lap, but her hand is on my head and she’s pushing me down, away from her, out of the camera. There I am, sliding below frame. Finally, they had to have a crewman crouching below me, pushing up on my feet while Miss MacDonald’s hand is pushing my face away from her.”

Or Tony Randall’s risque prank to (literally) goose her performance.

“I loved Tony. He could be so naughty and pixie-ish. I was playing Miriam, who is supposed to be all perk and bubble--just laugh and giggle and smile and be cute. That was my whole function. Right before we’d make an entrance, he’d do something outrageous, like pinch me, and I’d go [squeal] and immediately we’d go through the door.”

Or the dark side of television production in the ‘50s. “We went to work when it was dark, and we finished work after it was dark. The first two years we worked six days a week.” Her prime-time series pay is mind-boggling in this era of “Seinfeld” paychecks: “I started at $125 a week, and eventually was raised to $275 or $285, a week,” she says.

Book Reveals Some Juicy Tidbits

And there were more juicy tidbits of behind-the-scenes shenanigans, like running away to get married to the sound man (father of her oldest son), leaving her a pregnant “senior in high school,” which the show successfully hid. Or the time when she was so fed up with her ponytail she just chopped it off. “They had to pin a fake ponytail on my head for the final two seasons,” she reports.

A full-length autobiography would also give ample space to a memorable moment between Donahue and Young--with whom she had never had much intimacy--at his deathbed this summer. She says she has always, always, referred to him as Mr. Young.

“I don’t think I ever said to him, ‘I love you.’ He was very elegant, and wasn’t a huggy kind of guy. I loved and respected him, but always kept my distance. His housekeepers had called and suggested I go and visit him. He wasn’t well. But he was alert, and he was listening to me. I told him about the book, was just kind of chitter-chattering along so that he didn’t have to expend much energy talking. And then I said, ‘Mr. Young, is it OK if I give you a kiss?’ ”

Donahue pauses to compose herself, and continues. “He smiled and kind of half-closed his eyes, nodding yes. So I kissed him a little bitty kiss on the forehead. We were holding hands at the time, and he squeezed my hand.

“I said, ‘Mr Young, I love you,’ and he said, ‘I love you too, baby.’ ” Tears start streaming down Donahue’s face. “I don’t think he had ever told me he loved me. And he was just beaming. He said, ‘Bye-bye dear,’ softly.”

That was the last time she saw him.

And for a generation of fans, naysayers aside, she will forever be Princess, and he will forever be the dream dad.