Golden Couples: William and Lia Schallert

The Pacific Palisades Couple Married in 1949

William and Lia Schallert’s ‘celebrity’ marriage of 58 years is a testament to the fact that Hollywood relationships can last if there is love, respect and commitment. ‘We’re lucky,’ says Lia during a recent interview. ‘We were in it for the long haul.’ This meant having a philosophy of ‘live and let live,’ Bill says. ‘She has been very tolerant of me.’ Their early years together were not easy, because Bill’s acting career did not take off financially until he was in his early 30s, and the couple struggled. ‘But Lia never gave up on me,’ Bill says. Lia grew up in Virginia and worked in an army hospital during World War II (an experience she later chronicled in her 2005 novel, ‘Mary Lou’s War’). After the war, she moved to Hollywood to study acting, which is where she met Bill. A native of Los Angeles, he attended a Catholic seminary and was contemplating the priesthood–‘There was something appealing about the theatrical aspect of being in front of a congregation’–but he abandoned that career path to pursue acting classes at UCLA, before entering the army in 1943. After the war, he joined a group of actors who founded the Circle Theater, the first professional theater-in-the-round in the U.S. Lia and Bill met at that theater in June 1948 during a production of ‘Rain,’ directed by Charlie Chaplin. One Monday, when Bill was in the box office, Lia came in to work on reservations. ‘She had on a blue top and blue plaid pants,’ he recalls, ‘and she crawled on the files and laid there.’ ‘There was no place to sit,’ Lia says. That night they went to a silent movie on Fairfax with two other friends, and their relationship blossomed from there. Although Bill didn’t own a car, his parents were both writers and had three cars, so he borrowed one. (Edwin Schallert was the Los Angeles Times drama editor and his wife Elsa wrote for magazines like ‘Photoplay’ and ‘Modern Screen.’) Bill and Lia were married at the Santa Barbara Mission on February 26, 1949. Bill was in a play, but he took Saturday night off and the theater was dark on Sunday and Monday, enabling them to drive up the coast past Santa Maria for a three-day honeymoon. They moved into their first apartment on Fountain Avenue with a table, a hotplate, two chairs and a $25 bed. Their neighbors wondered when they would move in the rest of their stuff, ‘but we didn’t have anything else,’ Bill remembers. ‘We ate a lot with my parents that first year.’ Lia soon became pregnant with Joe, the first of their four boys. ‘Oona O’Neil Chaplin (Charlie’s wife) gave me all my maternity clothes,’ she says. Another friend, Marjorie Steele, who was married to Huntington Hartford, heir to the A & P grocery chain fortune, sent the Schallerts 10 cardboard trunks filled with baby clothes and paid for their doctor for a year. Lia was soon pregnant again, but acting didn’t start paying the bills until 1951, when Schallert began his long film and TV career with a role in ‘The Man From Planet X,’ followed by other science-fiction classics such as ‘Gog’ (1954), ‘Them!’ (1954), ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ (1957) and ‘The Monolith Monsters’ (1959). In 1952, Bill received a Fulbright Fellowship to study British repertory theater in Great Britain, and Lia and the two boys joined him. They were in London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. When they returned to the U.S., they stayed with Lia’s parents until they could cobble together enough money for a house’way out in Pacific Palisades. In 1955, the Schallerts moved into a drafty home off Bienveneda, before finding a place they wanted in the Huntington. There were two problems: (l) the $3,000 down payment and (2) another couple had already said they wanted it and would be back in 15 minutes with the money. Even though Bill didn’t have steady employment, Lia asked, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ They told the owner, ‘We’ll take it.’ Bill’s next question was, ‘When will the check clear?’ Lia’s parents sold their home to help the Schallerts buy their new one, and both families lived together the first couple of years. At one point, in that era before credit cards, the Schallerts took out a loan to buy a toy poodle. A week later he died. They both laugh now about how they had to continue to pay for a dead dog. ‘We weren’t too practical about money,’ Lia says. In 1963, the Schallerts rented their home to actor Cliff Robertson and moved to New York, where Bill played Patty Lane’s ever-patient father in ‘The Patty Duke Show’ for three seasons. ‘For the first time in our lives, we lived like tourists,’ Lia says. ‘We had a full-time housekeeper and we ate at all the best restaurants and went to all the best shows.’ Bill worked steadily after that as a regular on such series as ‘Dobie Gillis’ (playing literature teacher Mr. Pomfrit), ‘Get Smart,’ ‘The Nancy Drew Mysteries,’ ‘The New Gidget’ and even the soap opera ‘Santa Barbara.’ At age 85, he still goes out for auditions, and he recently played Vanna White’s father in a commercial. ‘If you believe you’re going to work–and Lia believed in me–it all works out,’ Bill says. ‘You have to have the right attitude and get lucky.’ The Schallerts have four boys. Joe, who received his master’s degree from Yale in the classics and a Ph.D. in Slavic languages at Berkeley, is a professor at Toronto University. Edwin, who graduated from Stanford and Harvard Law School and was a clerk for Thurgood Marshall, is currently in private practice. Mark graduated from Stanford, earned his law degree from Hastings, practiced, retired and is now a freelance writer. Brendon, who received his master’s degree from NYU, teaches English at Roosevelt High and is working on a book.