Detroit's Lady of Charm Brings Home the Bacon

Edythe Fern Melrose, Detroit radio station WXYZ's Lady of Charm, and her business executive husband, Forest U. Webster, formed their own radio and print advertisement production company called House O'Charm Studios in 1941. This shrewd move put Edythe on a firm business footing which was rare for a woman of her time. Together, she and her husband produced her popular women's radio program and also made commercials for many of the products she used and recommended on her show. The Lady of Charm's seal of approval was money in the bank for advertisers, and sponsors were lining up to get her endorsement. It is difficult to overestimate her influence over women consumers in the Detroit area in the 1940s through the 1950s.

The Lady of Charm had long dreamed of the perfect kitchen, and she asked her viewers for their ideas. Once Edythe worked out what she wanted, she hired Ann Arbor consulting architect Walter T. Anicka to draw up the blueprints of her vision. Because Edythe was a savvy business woman, she took advantage of the tax benefits of dedicating a sizeable portion of the home to create America's first test kitchen home with a media production studio. She was masterful at product placement and literally set the stage for all cooking and fashion shows to follow.

The state of the art kitchen appliances and gadgets used in the home were donated by some of America's top manufacturers simply for promotional consideration. Everything used in the home inside and out was the most modern and finest available. The Lady of Charm was known for mentioning the brand names of the products she used whenever she used them. Her list of advertisers was impressive:

• General Electric
• Frigidaire
• Hotpoint
• Wrigley's Grocery Stores
• Robinson's Furniture Company
• Fisher Wall Paper and Paint Company
• Palombit Tile
• Restrick Lumber 
• Hollywood Glass and Shower Door Company
• Harold C. Southard--Designer and Builder
• Grinnell Brothers (China and silver settings)
• and many more
  

Their ads ran prevalently in the Real Estate and Property section of the local Detroit newspapers linking their products to the House O'Charm. This form of advertising was an early example of effective cross-marketing.

The House O'Charm was built on Lake St. Clair lakefront property in St. Clair Shores and doubled as the residence of the Websters--Edythe and Forest. The street view of the home appeared to be on one level, but the house had seven levels. The exterior of the home was light-faced brick. The entrance was a raised flagstone patio leading to a reception hall and gallery which the rest of the house radiated from. Straight ahead and a few steps down was a sunken living room with a black marble fireplace. Wide 6' by 9' expanses of thermopane glass windows flanking both sides of French doors, providing an impressive view of Lake St. Clair and leading outside to a flagstone terrace and sun deck facing the lake.

A fully-equipped kitchen to the right of the gallery was four steps above the living room level which included a dining room terrace and a breakfast nook . A stairway led down to a laundry and utility room. Another winding stairway led up to the maid's private apartment. A wide stairwell off the service entrance led down to the basement where the radio studio was located which included three production offices and a 13' storage wall. On the opposite end of the basement was a family recreation room.

Back on the ground floor, two spacious bedrooms, each with its own private his-and-hers bathrooms, were off the left end of the gallery. The master bedroom had a commanding view of the lake. The gallery was so long that each end had it's own fully-equipped, cleaning closet. This dream house also included an attached, two car garage facing the street and a boathouse on ground level facing the lake.

On November 28, 1948, the building was dedicated during a live radio broadcast when the Lady of Charm set the cornerstone. The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press each featured full, front page articles in the Real Estate and Property sections of their newspapers about the House O'Charm, with artist renderings of the home and targeted advertising.

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Edythe and Forest were frequent vacationers to the United States Territory of Hawaii and admired the way tropical homes opened to the outdoors for inside-out living. Edythe was inspired to create a tropical-style home adapted to the often harsh Michigan weather.

Using modern construction materials and imaginative design, their new, innovative concept house would also double as a test home for products Edythe would later recommend for promotional consideration--not only kitchen products but also building materials and services used in the home's construction. Shrewdly, she and her husband deducted a percentage of the home's footprint from their federal taxes while taking full advantage of donated materials and product endorsements as they had done with the original House O'Charm--now for sale.

The new house was built in Grosse Point Woods and christened the Tropical House of Charm on May 28th, 1955. Unlike its predecessor, which was occasionally used for WXYZ tours and entertaining purposes, this home was not open to the public and more of a private residence. Harold C. Southard of Charm Builders once again was chosen to construct the tropical home. Edythe and Harold Southard were to build two more homes together in Grayling, Michigan. Closer examination reveals that Harold was Edythe's son from her first marriage, and in the interest of full disclosure, Edythe's television kitchen helper was her daughter-in-law Gretchen both seen in the above photo.

Tropical House of Charm facing Lake St. Clair.

The living room of the tropical house had 14' ceilings and a huge, sliding glass, thermopane wall that opened on pleasant days onto a 56' wide flagstone terrace leading towards Lake St. Clair. Waterproof marine-grade mahogany was used for exterior paneling. Inside the home, there were 30' of built-in planters filled with tropical plants and pygmi palm trees lit by a series of skylights. Edythe even had a flowering banana tree flown in from the Islands. A specialized wrought-iron stairway led to three bedrooms on the second level. The master bedroom had a lanai balcony overlooking the lake. Cork floors were used throughout the living and sleeping areas. The home was wired for television, telephone, and an intercom system. 

The dream kitchen had a built-in refrigerator, a double oven, and a dishwasher. The double sink was equipped with a garbage disposal. A convenient cooking island containing counter-top surface burners with plenty of storage was conveniently located. House O'Charm Studios filmed segments in her spacious test kitchen for her weekly television program and produced syndicated shows for other television stations in Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. She and her husband also produced television and print commercials for the products she tested and gave her seal of approval to. 

From her WXYZ salary, extensive product endorsements, and speaking fees, it is estimated the Lady of Charm made close to $100,000 yearly. In the 1950s, that was an impressive amount. She was active in Detroit and national business organizations and chosen Advertising Woman of the Year four times by the Women's Advertising Club of Detroit. In 1963, the Lady of Charm won the Zenith Television Award "for excellence in local programming and distinctive service to the community and its welfare." 

Edythe Fern Melrose was a television trailblazer and a woman ahead of her time. Miss Melrose left such an impression on comedian Lily Tomlin, who grew up in Detroit, that she based her Tasteful Lady character on Melrose.

Lady of Charm biography 

Edythe Fern Melrose--The Lady of Charm

The Lady of Charm

Edythe Fern (Culp) Melrose was born in rural Illinois in 1897, but she was raised on a farm in West Mansfield, Ohio. She grew up a farmer's daughter doing chores like milking cows and gathering eggs. "My parents had four daughters and we all did boy's work and household chores." Edythe went to a little country school until her father moved the family to Chicago, so his daughters could get a better education.

At first, Edythe was insecure about being a "country hick" or a "hayseed" at the Bush Conservatory of Music and Performing Arts. To avoid being labeled a "dunce," she became an overachiever and pushed herself to get the highest grades in her class. She learned about charm, personality, diction, poise, and proper speech habits--the standard expectations for young, educated women of that era. Unbeknowst to Edythe, these traits became the focus of her future career.

She graduated with honors from the Bush Conservatory and entered Columbia College in Chicago--a private, nonprofit college specializing in visual and performing arts, liberal arts, and business degrees. There, she graduated from the "School of Media Arts" where she learned about radio broadcasting and business management.

In 1929, Edythe became one of the first women in America to manage a radio station--WJAY in Cleveland. From 1933 until 1941, she emceed her own women's program which was popular locally. Edythe moved her program in 1941 to WXYZ-Radio in Detroit and renamed it "The Lady of Charm." By 1943, she created House of Charm Radio Productions and syndicated her program throughout Michigan, building her Lady of Charm brand. She had a pleasant radio voice, an infectious chuckle, and a wealth of common sense for women that she would sprinkle throughout her program. Her tag line was "A women's charm depends on the way she looks and the way she cooks."

Early television pioneers

Edythe's public image was motherhood and apple pie, but behind the scenes, she was a consummate business woman active in Detroit's professional business organizations. As the Lady of Charm, Edythe Fern Melrose was a much sought-after speaker in the Detroit area. Seven years later, she made the leap to television and became a television pioneer. Her program on WXYZ-TV Channel 7 ran from 1948 until 1960. She was always fashionably dressed and looked like she just left the beauty parlor.

Edythe was one of the first television personalities to utilize product placement, and she doubled-down by shrewdly mentioning the brand names of the appliances used on her studio set which endeared her to sponsors like Frigidaire, Hotpoint, and General Electric. 

Her recommendations were much sought-after by advertisers. She had a fully-functional replica of her home kitchen constructed in the studio at the Maccabees Building and later at WXYZ's Broadcast House in Southfield. Every year, kitchen appliance styles would change, and the Lady of Charm got whatever she asked for free of charge. Her studio kitchen always had the latest appliances and was an advertisement in itself. 

 

When Edythe did a cooking segment, everything was premeasured for her to save precious air-time. Every dish was prepared in two stages: one with ingredients for preparation on-air to be shoved in the oven and another already baked to take out of the oven. She would choose an invited guest or someone from the station to sit down at the end of her show and share the dish while seated at a tablecloth-covered, fully decked-out table with silverware and crystal service. After taping her show, Edythe's assistant finished cooking or baking the extra dish for Edyth's camera crew. Soupy Sales remembered, "We were the best-fed station in town."

WXYZ did not renew Edythe's contract in 1960 after twelve years on Detroit television. She revived her production company producing commercials and syndicated segments titled "The Charm Kitchen" and "House of Fashion" for other Detroit stations including CKLW in Windsor, Ontario. In addition to producing and appearing in ads, she wrote advertising copy for her high-dollar, corporate clientele. To produce her segments, she rented studio time and production facilities from WXYZ Broadcast House in Southfield.

During a studio taping for the Pontiac Motor Car Company on February 27, 1968, one of the station's directors asked Edythe to go backstage and attach a microphone to her bra. It was dark behind the curtain where she tripped over a cable and severely twisted her leg dislocating her knee. She was rushed to the hospital for surgery where her knee cap was removed confining her to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

She and her husband (Forest U. Webster) filed a lawsuit charging WXYZ with neglect for not providing a proper passageway backstage for her. The station dragged the lawsuit through two appeals taking eight years to work through the Macomb County Court and the Michigan Court of Appeals.

Just fifteen days after she and her husband were awarded a settlement of $952,000 for damages including back interest, Edythe Fern (Melrose) Webster died at the age of seventy-seven at her home on May 19, 1976. Services were held in Grosse Point Woods at A.H. Peters Funeral Home, and she was buried in Grayling, Michigan.

Edythe was a product of her times as much as a trendsetter for women of her day. Her friends and colleagues remembered Edythe as active in public affairs and concerned about her television viewers. Longtime friend Diane Edgecomb told The Detroit Free Press that "Edythe was a classic, a real television pioneer. She was a genteel women's libber all her life." Business associate and friend Marion Ryan said, "Edythe had a very charming personality and a nice way of putting people at ease. She will be missed." 

Lady of Charm Brings Home the Bacon