I’ve told this story before, but one of my happiest childhood memories is waking up one Christmas and looking out into the living room. Our living room and dining room were mostly connected, and Mom was sitting at the dining room table, wrapping presents and watching Operation Petticoat. I had a strong sense in that moment that everything was right in the world. I was safe and protected. I happily went back to sleep.

It’s easy, when you’re talking Operation Petticoat, to focus on Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. Among the women, the focus is on Joan O’Brien (in a role that feels written for Marilyn Monroe and was turned down by Tina Louise) and Dina Merrill. But even as a child, I liked Virginia Gregg as Major Edna Heywood. It honestly feels to me as though she became a nurse because it was a field that required competence and technical ability that was open to a woman in the 1920s, when her character would have been a young woman. She says her father was an engineer, and it seems apparent that she has the aptitude for it but never could have gotten into a good engineering school, much less been hired.

I kind of feel as though there’s no place for actresses like Gregg much these days; the closest we have is maybe Kathy Bates and Frances McDormand. Women who can play intelligent, competent older women who, okay, are the support mechanism for younger ones. Still. Yes, there’s a joke to the romance between Major Heywood and Chief Machinist’s Mate Sam Tostin, but she’s not the butt of that joke. It feels to me that, in a modern movie, she would be. Here, she’s resigned to a single life and pleased that it no longer seems certain.

Oh, she played a shrew or two in her day, I admit. She gave Dixie McCall a hard time on at least one episode of Emergency!, as I recall. I think she did the same to Perry Mason. But middle-aged women were still able to play more than shrews or drudges. Or mothers. I now feel we missed out by never seeing her in a comedy with Thelma Ritter and Joan Blondell where they were just sarcastic at everybody while being fiercely loyal to one another.

In the end, yes, it doesn’t totally matter what else she did, so far as I’m concerned. She’s Major Heywood, taking care of her younger charges while being less concerned than Cary Grant’s Sherman about interactions between the women and the men. She’s able to fix a bit of submarine despite never having been on a submarine before. And you’d better believe she knows what the head is called and is just aware that explaining it makes young Ensign Stovall nervous, and that’s always fun.

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