Austin360 blogs > TV Blog > Archives > 2009 > November > 13 > Entry
Retired Georgetown TV director lived her own great story line
It sounds as if Linda and Steve Varnum lived a lifetime in just short of eight years.
The couple, high school sweethearts in California over 50 years ago, reconnected in 2002 and settled in Georgetown two years later. Linda, born Linda Gail Day in Los Angeles on Aug. 12, 1938, died on Oct. 23 after bouts with leukemia and breast cancer.
You might not recognize the name, but chances are you’ve seen Day’s work — her page at IMDB.com (the Internet Movie Database) is ridiculous. Her resume reads like a bound collection of TV Guides from the 1980s and early ’90s: Day directed more than 350 episodes of more than 50 different television series, including “Married with Children,” “Archie Bunker’s Place,” “Dallas,” “Kate & Allie,” “Mad About You,” “Who’s the Boss?” and “Clueless.” She was an Emmy Award nominee and she received Paul Newman’s Humanitas Award. The Director’s Guild of America honored her as a trailblazing female director.
And she was Steve Varnum’s soul mate.
Day and Varnum attended separate high schools in the Los Angeles area and were introduced by mutual friends in 1954. They went steady for nine or 10 months, and then went their separate ways. Varnum eventually graduated from college and went to work for the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) from which he retired at age 60, while Day continued her education in archaeology and art. Living in Illinois, Day divorced in the early 1960s, returned to Los Angeles and took an office job at CBS. Her father had directed movie trailers and her uncle, Gordon Douglas, was a feature film director (he directed, among other films, “Stagecoach” and “They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!”) but they did not help Day get into show business.
“They hired her as a secretary,” Varnum says. “She couldn’t type, but they loved her; she was such a wonderful personality. You never saw a picture of her where her mouth wasn’t wide open, smiling.” Day kept getting promoted until she landed in script supervising. She found herself on set, responsible for continuity — “making sure that the glass on the table had the same amount of cola or less than it had in the previous scene,” Varnum explains.
At some point, she made the leap to directing, although Varnum didn’t know that when they reconnected. They had talked on the phone two or three times over the years, and the last he’d heard Day was an associate producer. In December 2002, Varnum decided to locate his high school sweetheart again. A Google search turned up thousands of hits but no contact information. He began searching television trade magazines and found an article Day had written, so he e-mailed the magazine explaining that he and Day were high school friends and that she would want to hear from him.
“Coincidentally, the woman who got the e-mail said that she was going to be meeting with Linda the next day,” Varnum recalls. She delivered Varnum’s message early on a Wednesday morning. The next day, Varnum got an e-mail from Day with the subject line “Friends??” After she kidding him, asking him what he was doing reading Caucus magazine, the pair exchanged phone numbers.
“We then talked a couple of hours a day until, well, until forever,” Varnum says. That February, Varnum, then living in Cincinnati, went out to visit Day in Los Angeles. She came out to see him in early April. The pair lived together until they were married in May 2005.
“With two separate lives coming together at such an age, either you’re going to have a lot of problems or you’re going to have to learn how to compromise,” Varnum says. “And we learned to compromise. Both of us moved a lot toward the center, you might say — not politically, but philosophically we moved to the center. Honest to God, it was such a wonderful relationship.
“My wife Linda didn’t know how to nag,” he laughs. “She was such a sweet person, so easy to live with. It was one of those relationships that were just made in heaven or so to speak.”
The pair happened to be going to New Orleans for Christmas in 2003. Texas had not made their short list of places to settle down, but they stopped in Georgetown because they’d heard wonderful things about Austin and were aware of the Sun City retirement community. They fell in love with the area and relocated in 2004. Day became a member of the Sun City Theater group and directed several plays there. Some of the members were naturally wary of a professional outsider coming into their group, Varnum explains, but Day won them over quickly. She had a gift, Varnum says, for “telling somebody how to do something without them feeling like they had been told.”
“She directed Brian Dennehy one time, and he was not happy having a woman director,” Varnum recalls. “But it didn’t take long before she had him wrapped around her finger. People took to her immediately.”
The couple was fond of the Austin Playhouse and visited Esther’s Follies often. They loved Sixth Street and Austin’s restaurants and went to the movies every Thursday. “That’s when they came to clean the house, so we just got out,’ Varnum laughs.
And they watched television, often happening upon episodes Day had directed or stars she had worked with. “If we ever came close to fussing, that was the time,” Varnum joked. He explained that he enjoyed pausing the DVR at exciting points in programs and asking questions about things like what an actor had just said.
“Linda would say, ‘Are we going to watch the movie?’ and I would sit there like an old sullen hen. She did the same thing, but it was OK when she did it. She would say, ‘I directed him,’ or ‘Let me tell you about this one or that one.’ And, so, she did the same thing but I didn’t mind. It didn’t bother me a bit,” he laughs.
Day had worked with so many stars in her career that she had no shortage of anecdotes to recount. Varnum tells me about her “ego wall,” on which she kept clusters of photos. He describes a photo of her and Jerry Lewis upon which Lewis had penned, ‘Linda, my darling, I will never forget last night. Love, Jerry. January ’93.’
“Of course, there was no last night,” Varnum laughs.
There’s the picture of Day with Robert Redford as he gave her the Humanitas Award. The photo shows Day at a microphone while Redford, standing next to her, suspiciously looks at her backside. Day’s slip had gotten caught and was exposed. “She thought that story was so funny, she would tell it to everyone,” Varnum laughed.
And there’s a photo of Day with Carroll O’Connor sitting in Archie Bunker’s chair, now located in the Smithsonian Institute. “She used to take naps in that chair,” Varnum says.
The couple remained active until weeks before Day’s passing, traveling on cruises to destinations including Australia and New Zealand, Tahiti, Alaska and Europe. At the ages of 70 and 71, the couple went ziplining in Hawaii.
A private memorial service will be held on Nov. 20. Varnum isn’t sure many people would want to attend a service for somebody they didn’t know, even if they had been touched by her work.
“Everybody knows the stars,” he says, “but nobody really knows the people behind the scenes.”
This 2008 photo was taken in Hawaii after Steve and Linda had ziplined on two stations (four “zips”) and were preparing to do another one.
Linda Day relaxes on the set of “Archie Bunker’s Place.” “She had the greatest admiration for Carroll O’Connor,” Steve explains. “He was very nice to work with.”
Linda directed Jerry Lewis in an episode of “Mad About You.” Linda told the ad-libbing comic that he might want to “do his best stuff” because she would have to put some of it on the cutting room floor.
Linda (back row, center) poses with the cast and crew of “Married With Children.”
Robert Redford presents Linda with the Paul Newman Humanitas Award.
This photo of Linda and Steve was taken just a little over two months before Linda passed away. “Her smile was our constant companion,” Steve says.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Entertainment, Local people on TV, TV Profile
Comments
Austinites love to be heard, and we're giving you a bullhorn. We just ask that you keep things civil. Leave out the personal attacks. Do not use profanity, ethnic or racial slurs, or take shots at anyone's sexual orientation or religion. If you can't be nice, we reserve the right to remove your material and ban users who violate our Visitor's agreement. Click here to report comment abuse.