Catt although Posted:

Up until some time in the 70s, there was only one “phone company” (in the U.S.) and you could only get phones from them, which you had to pay monthly for. We had a broken one lying in our basement for years that a repairman left behind that we weren’t sure what to do with (you had to call a repairman if your phone stopped working) . It said “Property of Bell Telephone” or something like that on the bottom.

And, the humor in the movie, Pillow Talk, is really lost on anyone who doesn’t know that you used to not even have your own phone line. It was a shared “party line” with your neighbors, so nothing you said over the phone was likely to be private when anyone could listen in.