Gail Patrick

At 69 years old, Gail Patrick has this physical status:

After graduating from Howard College, she remained as acting dean of women. She completed two years of law school at the University of Alabama and aspired to be the state's governor. In 1932, "for a lark", she entered a Paramount Pictures beauty and talent contest, and won train fare to Hollywood for herself and her brother. Although she did not win the contest (for "Miss Panther Woman" in Island of Lost Souls starring Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi, 1932), Patrick was offered a standard contract. She visited the studio officials by herself and asked to negotiate. She said that she must have $75 a week instead of the customary $50, and that she would not accept the standard 12-week-layoff provision. "I also read the fine print and blacked out the clause saying I had to do cheesecake stills," Patrick recalled in a 1979 interview. "In the back of my mind I had this idea I could never go home to practice law if such stills were floating around.": 286

Her patrician bearing and luminous beauty helped her win top billing occasionally, as in King of Alcatraz (1938) and Disbarred (1939), both directed by Robert Florey—but she most often played the cool, aloof, usually unsympathetic "other woman". She appeared in more than 60 movies between 1932 and 1948, usually as the leading lady's extremely formidable rival. Some of these roles include Carole Lombard's spoiled sister in My Man Godfrey (1936), Ginger Rogers's rival in Stage Door (1937), and Anna May Wong's sophisticated competitor in Dangerous to Know (1938). Patrick played Cary Grant's second wife in My Favorite Wife (1940), with Irene Dunne, and helped Leo McCarey write the judge's lines in the second courtroom scene.

Praising her perfect combination of haughtiness and malice, as well as her comic gifts and refusal to play for sympathy, film scholar Maria DiBattista called her "the underrated Gail Patrick, who excelled in feckless or selfish or simply second-best brunettes."

Patrick attributed her screen success to an accident of timing. When she arrived in Hollywood, the movie studios then wanted hussies, and they felt she looked like one. "I never thought I had much to do with it," Patrick recalled. "Somebody made me up, somebody did my hair, somebody told me what to say and do, and somebody took the picture."

Patrick was so afraid of the camera that she made it a point to never see her films. In 1979, she screened a print of My Man Godfrey given to her by a friend, and she watched herself on screen for the first time. "My fright emerged as haughtiness and I can see where I got my image as a snob, a meanie," Patrick said.: 291  "And it's the movie that typed me and the one I'm still asked about." She said director Gregory La Cava told her she should suck on lemons and beat up little children to prepare for the role of Cornelia Bullock. La Cava borrowed Patrick from Paramount again for his next film, Stage Door—"where I was never nastier".: 287

Patrick stopped acting in 1948. "I never formally retired", she told journalist James Bawden in 1979. "I just quit, and it was a good time as TV started taking over." During the summer of 1951, Patrick hosted Home Plate, a postgame interview show at Gilmore Field that immediately followed television broadcasts of the Hollywood Stars home games on KTTV. She and Jackson adopted a daughter in 1952, and a son in 1954.: 290 : 75

Cornwell Jackson was literary agent for attorney-author Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the fictional criminal defense attorney Perry Mason. After a series of disappointing Warner Bros. films and a radio series he despised, Gardner had refused to license the character for anymore adaptations, but Patrick won the author's trust. She had maintained her network in show business, and shared Gardner's love for the law. Patrick, Jackson, and Gardner formed a production company, Paisano Productions, of which she was president. Patrick developed the television series Perry Mason and sold it to CBS, where it ran for nine seasons (1957–66) and earned the first Silver Gavel Award presented for television drama by the American Bar Association. Gail Patrick Jackson was its executive producer. She was one of the first women producers.

Longtime CBS executive Anne Nelson, who handled contract negotiation and other business affairs for CBS, called Patrick "my adversary in business, but my friend in life." In a 2008 interview, Nelson reported that Patrick was the only female executive producer in prime time during the years Perry Mason was on the air. "Women today won't believe that things were that tough," Nelson said, "but Gail was alone in her bailiwick, and I was the only female executive not in personnel at CBS at the time." Nelson said that years later, Patrick told her she had written up the contract herself, and that it was so wild and favorable to Paisano Productions that she had no idea CBS would accept it. "But we bought it," Nelson said. "And it has been a very big financial success, not only for CBS, but [also] for the Paisano partners over this many years."

Patrick also developed a half-hour Paisano Productions series based on Gardner's Cool and Lam stories.: 19  A pilot directed by Jacques Tourneur aired on CBS in 1958, but a series did not materialize.

Patrick served two terms (1960–62) as vice president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and as president of its Hollywood chapter. She was the first woman to serve in a leadership capacity in the academy, and its only female leader until 1983.

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