Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Meet Millie: Florence Halop, Marvin Kaplan , and Elena Verdugo

Meet Millie ran on CBS from October 1952 until March 1956.

[Announcer] "A gay new comedy about the life and loves of a secretary in Manhattan. It's time to MEET MILLIE."

Opening of Meet Millie

Millie Bronson ( Elena Verdugo) was a young, attractive, middle-class secretary working in Manhattan. She lived in a brownstone apartment with her mother ( Florence Halop), who was always promoting Millie to eligible men as a potential spouse. Millie's boyfriend through most of the series was Johnny Boone Jr( Ross Ford), the son of her boss(Earl Ross and later Roland Winters). A close friend of the Bronson's, who managed to get involved in most everything was Alfred Prinzmetal (Marvin Kaplan, years before he was known as Henry on Alice). Alfred was an aspiring author-poet-composer. Meet Millie had originated on CBS radio in July 1951 with Audrey Totter in the starring role. When her movie studio refused to let her do the tv version, Elena Verdugo took it over and eventually replaced Miss Totter in the radio edition before it expired in 1954. Earl Ross, as her boss, made the transition from radio to tv but he left the series in June 1953.Though Meet Millie was set in New York, it was one of the first series broadcast from CBS Television City Facility In Hollywood.

An Article From Time Magazine on TV's Working Girls

The Working Girls
Monday, Feb. 08, 1954 Article

Of all the TV networks, CBS is unquestionably the outstanding friend of the working girl. CBS has four shows devoted exclusively to the trials and tribulations of three secretaries and a schoolteacher. But, in refreshing contrast to real life, the girls are seldom asked to do much work. On Private Secretary, blonde Cinemactress Ann Sothern occasionally pecks at a typewriter, but mostly she is shown trading wisecracks with her boss (Don Porter), getting mink and sable coats from the firm's clients or having her superior business acumen vindicated (dumb as the girls are, they are all far brighter than the men who employ them).

Meet Millie's Elena Verdugo once in a great while carries a piece of paper from her desk to a filing cabinet, but, with that chore over, she takes it easy by necking with the boss's son (Ross Ford). My Friend Irma's Marie Wilson is portrayed as a bosomy sub-cretin who spends her office hours listening ecstatically while the recorded voice of a telephone operator recites the time of day.

As the schoolteacher in Our Miss Brooks, Eve Arden is the intellectual superior of her rivals, as evidenced by the fact that she always gets a pained expression when one of her students says "ain't," which they do with dismaying regularity. But not even Eve is often seen in the classroom. Usually she cruises the high-school corridors on the heels of Bob Rockwell, a biology instructor who is impervious to the most blatant advances from Teacher Brooks. In fact, much of Miss Brooks's humor derives from remarks made innocently by Rockwell and turned into leering double entendres by Actress Arden (e.g., "Miss Brooks, haven't you got something for me?" Miss B.: "Of course, you just haven't noticed").

The shows try to maintain vague ties to reality. Two of the girls have glasses and sometimes wear them; none of them lives in the marble-bath mansions that Hollywood ordinarily assigns to its movie working girls, and Eve Arden's rooming house is pictured as a place where the plumbing seldom works and the phone bill is often unpaid. All the girls are surrounded by hordes of admiring friends, most of them of such astonishing eccentricity as to make televised life in the U.S. resemble visiting day at London's 17th century Bedlam. Outstanding are Meet Millie's Marvin Kaplin as a frustrated poet-author-composer, Private Secretary's Marcel Dalio as a continental singer with a compulsive giveaway urge. Irma's Donald MacBride as a terrible-tempered Mr. Bang, and Our Miss Brooks's complete gallery of juvenile and adult delinquents.

For an episode guide go to http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Stage/2950/US/Comedy/MeetMillie.htm

For more on Elena Verdugo go to http://universalqueens.com/verdago.aspx

What a character Elena Verdugo at http://www.what-a-character.com/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=982803560

For more on Meet Millie go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_Millie