THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 9, 1994 TAG: 9410090048
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
Harriet Nelson is dead.
Again.
The actress who played Ozzie's better half died last week. But all the things her on-screen character stood for faded away years ago.
Anyone who watched the show by their TV's blue light remembers her vacuuming away in her starched apron. And tackling problems like a son's lost homework or unrequited puppy love. And turning in each night to twin beds with husband Ozzie.
The Nelsons' world seemed as uncomplicated as the plots in the weekly episodes. But over time, just the phrase ``Ozzie and Harriet'' conjured up much more meaning than a defunct sitcom:
The two-parent, two-child family tucked safely away in the suburbs. The stay-at-home mother who greets her children with cookies after school. The wife who never argued when Ozzie said men were better than women, but always proved him wrong.
Together with Ozzie, Harriet stood for a world that America continues to yearn for. A world of trimmed hedges, cardigan sweaters and supper-table discussions. A slower, gentler place where all problems could be untangled in 30 minutes.
They are fictional balm to bruised families.
The fact that Harriet Nelson was largely a mythical mother - then and now - should have been painfully obvious.
The real-life Harriet Nelson, after all, was a working mother with problems knottier than those of any sitcom. Her own parents were separated. Her son struggled with drug problems and died in a plane crash. Her grandson was the subject of a bitter custody battle.
She smoked cigarettes.
That's a fact she hid from fans, almost as if she knew we were depending on her to uphold all that was right and good in mothers.
Still, generations looked to the on-screen Harriet as a role model. She made it look so easy: Her children so clean-scrubbed. Her answers so reasonable. Her life as ordered as her kitchen cabinets.
She set an impossible standard.
While few mothers, even in the '50s, lived such ideal lives, they at least had the basic elements. Eighty percent of children during Harriet's heyday had two parents at home. Barely half do today. Too often Mom and Dad don't just sleep in separate twin beds, but separate homes. They don't solve problems at the dinner table but in the courtroom. Supper is cooked with the beep-beep-beep of a microwave for children who don't have time to sit down to eat.
Today's TV moms come closer to hitting reality than Harriet. Roseanne has spoiled milk in the fridge and arguments with her kids. And the newest sitcom mom, in ``Grace Under Fire,'' left an abusive husband to struggle with latchkey kids and late rent.
Today's real mothers may be more likely to say ``I can relate'' to TV moms instead of ``Why can't I be like Harriet?''
But a part of us will always yearn for that ideal family. Maybe we put too much faith in Harriet, who never took herself, or the show, as seriously as sociologists did.
But she seemed to know what counts.
``I know there's one thing that's important,'' she once said. ``And that's your family.''
That much, at least, we know is the real thing. by CNB