Her IMDb bio refers to her as a second banana, and it isn’t wrong. It implies that it’s hard out there for a second banana, which is certainly true, but it doesn’t talk about how frankly it’s harder out there for a female second banana. There are a few women in comedy history who made a living at it, but mostly, they end up having to do filler roles just to keep roofs over their heads. And that is why Nancy Walker, late of a couple of very successful sitcoms, ended up shilling for a paper towel company for years of my childhood.

Nancy Walker was born Anna Myrtle Swoyer into a showbiz family. Her father was a vaudevillian, with his own Wikipedia page, and her mother was a dancer. She and her sister both got into the business. Young Nancy—she was fifteen at the time—got started as “Nan Barto,” using her father’s stage name, on the radio. Four years after that, she was on Broadway; two years after that, she was in the movies. She didn’t do a lot of movies—though she’s one of the many people in my perpetual object of fascination, Won Ton Ton The Dog Who Saved Hollywood—but she definitely had a Standard ‘70s Television Career.

Sure, her TV career went back to 1950. But she did three episodes of Love, American Style. Three of The Love Boat. One of Fantasy Island. One each of Happy Days and The Partridge Family. She didn’t do many of the cop shows of the era, though she did one of Police Story, not to mention a whopping 32 of McMillan and Wife. She was the eponymous Blansky of Blansky’s Beauties, a semi-forgotten Happy Days spin-off, involving her one and only appearance on the show.

Oh, and of course there was her four Mary Tyler Moore Show appearances as Ida Morgenstern. Obviously, since she was Rhoda’s mother, she was also on Rhoda. She was the guilt-inducing mother of Valerie Harper’s long-suffering Rhoda, the one who kept pressuring Rhoda to get married and settle down and give her grandchildren. It made her a flat-out icon of ‘70s TV, and it’s flatly disappointing that she ended up hawking paper towels after that because there were no roles for her.

It’s hard out there for a second banana. What’s more, she took a lot of blame for the failure of Can’t Stop the Music, her one and only directorial effort. (She did direct some TV, but only one theatrical release.) It’s hardly her fault that a 1980 movie about the Village People didn’t do well in the theatre, especially one that so determinedly rejected the concept that not all of the boys in the band might be fond of girls and also starred Steve Gutenberg. You’d think the Stonecutters would’ve done more for her, at the very least.

I’ve never hawked paper towels myself, but I’ll continue to shill my Patreon and Ko-fi!