There are two kinds of actresses that appeal to me most, and there are a lot of women who start as one and shift with time into the other. While I first knew Una Merkel as Verbena, the more acerbic mother figure in The Parent Trap, she was also capable of being the snappy, sassy best friend type. Joan Blondell could manage those two, even when she was mothering Katharine Hepburn. Thelma Ritter made her career on it. And Una Merkel played them both, even if I didn’t know it until I was an adult.
Of course, when Una Merkel got started, she wasn’t really doing either, because both of those roles are kind of dependent on language, and she’s old enough to have started in silent film. But she was eventually given the right roles, including playing off previous honoree Ginger Rogers in 42nd Street. She did a ton of movies until she turned forty, then her career ebbed. In fact, she’d been retired for twenty years at the time she died in 1986, without even the obligatory Love Boat or Murder, She Wrote appearance. But she made the two movies for Disney that introduced her to me, The Parent Trap in 1961 and Summer Magic in 1963.
Really, though, Verbena is who you’d get if a lot of sassy best friend characters grew up and got jobs as housekeepers for wealthy ranchers with children. She’s definitely a loving person. We know that she cares for Susan as though Susan were her own—and that Susan looks on Verbena as a mostly adequate replacement for the mother she doesn’t remember. And Verbena definitely sees herself as part of the family; I adore the “it’s none of my never mind; I don’t say a word” litany and have used it on occasion myself many times over the years.
For whatever reason, Una Merkel has never gotten the attention of many of her contemporaries. It’s sad, really. She never quite stood out the way Lucille Ball or Maureen O’Hara, among others, came to, and that’s kind of sad to me. She was a lot more talented than you’d expect given how seldom you hear about her. It’s true that her IMDb biography talks about her appearance before her talent, but that’s true of a depressingly large number of IMDb biographies, no matter how talented the woman is.
I’ll level with you; I don’t remember seeing Summer and Smoke, her Oscar-nominated film based on a Tennessee Williams play. Apparently, I did and didn’t like it. I think it’s one where the scion of a good family can seen to be going wrong because he falls for a tempestuous ethnic woman? Who was, if I’m right, played by Rita Moreno, who in fact won Best Supporting Actress that year for another tempestuous ethnic woman—Anita from West Side Story. Which was a hard role to beat, I suspect.