Best Known As: The original Peter Pan on Broadway and TV
Name at birth: Mary Virginia Martin
Mary Martin was a Broadway superstar in the 1950s, when she played spunky characters like Peter Pan and Maria von Trapp and won four Tony Awards in 13 years. Martin's stardom as a singer, dancer and actress began in New York City in 1938 with her nightly show-stopping rendition of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in the Cole Porter musical Leave it to Me. She then made 10 films in four years with Paramount Pictures, but her real power remained on the Broadway stage, where she returned in the 1940s. Four Tony Awards for lead roles followed: special recognition in 1948 for the touring production of Annie Get Your Gun and best actress in a musical for South Pacific (1950), Peter Pan (1955) and The Sound of Music (1960). (Both South Pacific and The Sound of Music were written by Broadway titans Rodgers and Hammerstein.) Martin was in her 40's when she started flying around the stage, suspended by cables, as Peter Pan, the magical, elf-like boy who refuses to grow up -- a role she recreated on network television.
Martin was 16 when she married Texas accountant Benjamin Hagman, with whom she had one child; they divorced in 1935. In 1940, she married Paramount editor and producer Richard Halliday, who became her manager. They had a daughter, Heller... Martin reportedly turned down a role in the hit TV series Dallas (1978). Had she accepted, she would have played Miss Ellie, mother of J.R. Ewing, who was played by her son, Larry Hagman.
(born Dec. 1, 1913, Weatherford, Texas, U.S. — died Nov. 3, 1990, Rancho Mirage, Calif.) U.S. singer and actress. She co-owned a dancing school in her native Weatherford, Texas, before moving in 1938 to New York City, where she won a small part in the musical Leave It to Me and became famous for her rendition of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." She appeared in movies before returning to Broadway to star in One Touch of Venus (1943). Martin originated the role of Nellie Forbush in South Pacific (1949 – 53) and later starred in Peter Pan (1954, Tony Award; television version, 1955), The Sound of Music (1959, Tony Award), and I Do, I Do (1966).
Martin, Mary [Virginia] (1913–90), actress and singer. One of the most popular of all contemporary performers, she was born in Weatherford, Texas, and worked as a dance instructor and nightclub entertainer before making her show‐stopping New York debut singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Leave It to Me! (1938). After a brief but successful career in films, she returned to Broadway in One Touch of Venus (1943) and Lute Song (1946). One of her most memorable roles was the spirited Ensign Nellie Forbush in South Pacific (1949), about which Brooks Atkinson recalled, “Miss Martin acted. . .with insight and relish; and as a musical‐stage virtuoso she made the songs express the subtle qualities of a disarming human being.” Turning to comedy, she played the actress Jane Kimball in Kind Sir (1953). Martin then triumphed in a series of hit musicals: Peter Pan (1954), the governess Maria in The Sound of Music (1959), Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! on tour and in London, and the wife Agnes in I Do! I Do! (1966). Her rare Broadway flops were as the actress Jennie (1963) and the elderly Lidya Vasilyevna in Do You Turn Somersaults? (1978). Stanley Green wrote that the attractive, wholesome performer “combined naive charm and buoyant enthusiasm with a warm and rangy soprano.” Autobiography: My Heart Belongs, 1976.
Mary Martin (1913-1990) was a popular stage actress, singer, dancer, television and movie star.
Mary Martin was born in Weatherford, Texas, on December 1, 1913. As a child she was encouraged by her parents, Juanita and Judge Preston Martin, to study violin and voice. Her love of the theater was obvious at an early age. She sang in almost every church choir in town, wrote and performed plays for family and friends, and was an avid movie-goer.
At the age of 15 Martin left school to marry Benjamin Hagman. After the birth of her son, Larry, she opened the Mary Hagman School of Dance in Weatherford. During a trip to Hollywood to further her dancing studies, Martin's childhood desire to perform was rekindled. Subsequently she moved to Hollywood, divorced her husband, and spent two years auditioning for the movies.
Nightclub Performance Launched Broadway Career
It was not in the movies, but rather at the Trocadero nightclub, where Martin's career was finally launched. She sang a swing version of "Il Bacio," and the audience, including Broadway producer Lawrence Schwab, went wild. If "Il Bacio" took Martin to Broadway (by way of Schwab), it was "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" which kept her there. In 1938 she landed the part of Dolly in Leave It to Me at the Imperial Theatre. Her rendition of "Daddy" was a spectacular hit and led to star billing and a contract with Paramount Pictures.
Although Martin's first love was the stage, she accepted the Hollywood contract to star in a series of films including The Great Victor Herbert, Rhythm on the River, Love Thy Neighbor, Kiss the Boys Goodbye, New York Town, The Birth of Blues, Star Spangled Rhythm, and Happy Go Lucky.
It was during this period that Mary Martin met and married the love of her life, producer Richard Halliday. Mary's yearning to work on the stage led them to return to New York, where Halliday assumed his new vocation as her manager. From 1943 through the remainder of her career Martin worked almost exclusively on the stage, for she loved most to work directly with people rather than with a camera. It was her ability to share her exuberance with the people who watched her that made her so loved by musical comedy audiences.
Found Niche on Stage
The roles that she played on film and stage were the standard female images of the time - the sophisticated or exotic woman or the dumb blond. Before she found her true niche she played in Dancing on the Streets (1943), Venus in One Touch of Venus (1945), and Tchao-Ou-Niag in Lute Song (1945-1946). She also made her London debut as Elena Salvador in Noel Coward's Pacific 1860.
Although she had been successful in these parts, her career zoomed when she was finally able to express her true self - a warm, feisty, exciting, down-home girl - on stage. She played Annie Oakley in the touring production of Annie Get Your Gun (1947-1948) and catapulted to stardom. Martin's next big success, and perhaps the role for which she is most well known, was as Ensign Nellie Forbush in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's South Pacific. She created this role and starred in it at the Majestic Theatre from 1949 to 1951 and later performed the same role at Drury Lane in London.
Mary Martin's own favorite part was Peter in Peter Pan, with music by Comden and Green. The production, staged by Jerome Robbins, originated at the San Francisco Civic Light Opera (1954), later went to Broadway (1954-1955), and eventually toured the entire country. Martin's exuberant spirit went into this production - she recalled her youthful dreams and her desire to fly. As a child she had, in fact, even broken her collarbone while attempting to fly off the roof of her garage. The accident didn't deter Mary Martin, and as Peter she finally got her chance to fly, albeit on wires, to the delight of adults and children everywhere. Martin's talents were recorded for future generations to enjoy in the 1955 and 1956 television versions of Peter Pan.
Another role for which Mary Martin will be remembered is that of Maria in The Sound of Music, another successful collaboration between writers Hammerstein and Rodgers and the actress. Martin found the spirit of the determined, energetic, dedicated singer and former nun Maria through her work with the real Maria, Baroness Von Trapp, and her longtime friend Sister Gregory. She received the Theatre Wing's coveted Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Award for this performance in 1959.
Two other roles which Martin played to great acclaim were Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly, which toured to Vietnam, Tokyo, and London (1965), and Agnes in I Do! I Do! with co-star Robert Preston. The latter musical was based on a play, The Fourposter, about the lives of two people from their wedding day until 50 years later. Martin felt that the subject matter of this play - marriage - would represent the essence of her life. In fact, the production (1966-1969) was the last musical that Martin appeared in before her semi-retirement.
Retired to Brazil
In 1969 the Hallidays moved to Anapolis, Brazil, and bought a farm. For several years Martin operated a boutique featuring her fashion designs and her needlepoint, about which she and her husband published a book in 1969. While in Brazil she was also the subject of the television show This Is Your Life. After her husband's death, Martin returned to the United States where she was co-host of the PBS television show Over Easy, which focused on issues of the elderly. Martin enjoyed the successes of her children - Larry Hagman and Heller Halligan DeMeritt - and her six grandchildren.
In 1987 Martin toured with Carol Channing in a non-musical production called Legends! about a pair of bitchy Hollywood battle-axes. To Martin, the world was her theater. Contemplating her own end, she said in, People "It's been a fabulous life and a wonderful career. I'll keep on living until it's time. Then I'll just go on to another stage."
Martin died on November 3, 1990, at the age of 76. Her long-time friend, Carol Channing, had been at her bedside at Martin's Rancho Mirage, California, home less than an hour before she died of liver cancer. "She was heaven," said Channing.
Further Reading
Martin is listed in Who's Who in the Theatre, edited by Freda Gaye (14th ed., 1967); Her autobiography, My Heart Belongs (1984), includes information on her entire theatrical career as well as her personal life; For background information on musical comedy and Martin's role in its development, see Cecil Smith and Glenn Litton, Musical Comedy in America (1981). Also see People, November 19, 1990.
Martin, Mary, 1913-90, American musical comedy star, b. Weatherford, Tex. From Martin's first stage appearance in Leave It to Me (1938), she starred in several enormously successful musicals, including One Touch of Venus (1943), South Pacific (1949); Peter Pan (1954), and The Sound of Music (1959). Her buoyant singing voice and high-spirited temperament won her widespread popularity. Her films included The Great Victor Herbert (1939) and, for television, Peter Pan and Annie Get Your Gun.
Representative Albums: "16 Most Requested Songs", "One Touch of Venus/Lute Song", "Anything Goes/The Bandwagon
Representative Songs: "My Heart Belongs to Daddy", "A Wonderful Guy", "The Sound of Music
Biography
Singer/actress Mary Martin was, along with Ethel Merman, one of the two leading performers in stage musicals during the middle third of the 20th century. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Martin appeared on Broadway, in the West End, and on tour thousands of times in such massively successful shows as South Pacific and The Sound of Music. She also recorded cast albums for these shows that sold in the millions. Unlike Merman, who was known for her brassy, extroverted style, Martin was a warm, ingratiating performer. She was far more subtle than her friend and chief rival, and she was much more versatile. When Martin took over the starring role of Annie Oakley from Merman for the U.S. tour of Annie Get Your Gun, she took a distinctly different approach and enjoyed audience approval. It is hard to imagine Merman doing the same with such Martin roles as Peter Pan or the goddess Venus in One Touch of Venus. But then, Merman never showed much interest in stepping into a part previously created by another actress, while Martin never hesitated to do so. (A rare exception came late in the careers of both actresses, when they each appeared in Hello, Dolly!) Nor did Merman care to leave New York, for the most part, while Martin worked extensively in London and on the road. And Martin's greater flexibility was shown in her enthusiasm for taking on straight plays in which she was asked to sing little or not at all.
Although the stage was her home, Martin also worked in the other media available to her. She had a relatively brief film career that still added up to more than a dozen features; she was a regular on radio and television series; she appeared in nightclubs and concert halls; and she recorded extensively, not just on cast albums, but also as a solo artist, and even scored a couple of chart hits. Nevertheless, her chief career accomplishment was her lengthy succession of award-winning starring roles in Broadway musicals.
Mary Virginia Martin was born on December 1, 1913, in Weatherford, TX, the second daughter of Preston Martin, a lawyer, and Juanita (Presley) Martin, a former violin teacher; her older sister Geraldine was 11 years her senior. Her mother encouraged her interest in performing and began teaching her the violin at a young age. Those lessons did not take, but she showed more enthusiasm for singing and dancing. At the age of 12, she began taking voice lessons from Helen Fouts Cahoon, head of the voice department at Texas Christian University. (Amazingly, when she later moved to New York as an adult, she happened to move into an apartment building where Cahoon was living and resumed her lessons.)
In 1930, when Martin was 16, her parents sent her to the prestigious Ward Belmont finishing school in Nashville, TN. She ended up staying at the school only two and a half months before marrying her boyfriend, 21-year-old Benjamin Jackson Hagman, an accountant, and returning to Weatherford where they lived with her parents. (Hagman then studied to become a lawyer and later worked in his father-in-law's office.) On September 21, 1931, the 17-year-old Martin gave birth to Lawrence Martin Hagman, who, under the name Larry Hagman, would become a well-known television actor, starring as astronaut Tony Nelson in the situation comedy I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970) and as the ruthless J.R. Ewing on the primetime soap opera Dallas (1978-1991).
Martin largely left the raising of her son to her mother. At the age of 18, she opened a dancing school in Weatherford. It became such a success that, after a season, she went to Hollywood, CA, to enroll at the Fanchon and Marco School of Theatre in order to learn more herself. Over the next few years, she alternated sessions of teaching in Texas and learning in Hollywood, meanwhile opening branches of her school in Mineral Wells and Cisco. In Mineral Wells, she set up the school at the local hotel and paid for the space by singing with the hotel orchestra once a week, a performance also broadcast on the radio. During her second stint at Fanchon and Marco, she wandered into an audition and ended up getting offstage singing engagements at vaudeville theaters in San Francisco and Los Angeles. By 1936, she had decided to settle in Hollywood and try to make a living as a performer; she and her husband formally separated, and they divorced in 1937. (Although she was given custody of her son, she placed him in a series of private schools and military academies.)
From 1936 to 1938, Martin struggled to achieve recognition as an entertainer in Los Angeles. As early as July 19, 1936, the Los Angeles Times carried a notice about her singing on the radio, although this was a "sustaining" (i.e., unsponsored) show for which she was not paid. She gradually found nightclub work, first at the Cinegrille of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, then at the Casanova club, and at Gordon's bar, eventually earning as much as $400 a week. She taught dancing. She auditioned unsuccessfully at the movie studios, but she eventually began to get work in bit parts and dubbing the singing voices of others. For example, she sang "The Daughter of Mademoiselle" for Louise Havoc (aka Gypsy Rose Lee) in Battle of Broadway, which opened in April 1938, and she was the singing voice of Margaret Sullavan in The Shopworn Angel in July. The same month, she made her onscreen debut in the unbilled bit part of a dance teacher in The Rage of Paris. Meanwhile, she spent June 1938 as a regular on the network radio series Good News. But it was not until the late summer of 1938 that she got an important break, when she appeared at a talent show at the Trocadero nightclub and brought down the house singing a swing arrangement of Italian composer Luigi Arditi's waltz "Il Bacio" ("The Kiss"). In the audience was Broadway producer Laurence Schwab, who was casting an upcoming musical, Ring Out the News. Schwab signed Martin to a contract and brought her to New York. By the time she got there, the show had fallen through, but another musical about to go into production had just suffered a defection when a secondary actress dropped out to get married, and Martin successfully auditioned for what became Leave It to Me!, with songs by Cole Porter.
In Leave It to Me!, Martin sang a typically risqué Porter number, "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," and did a partial striptease to boot. When the show opened on November 9, 1938, for the first of 307 Broadway performances, that number was a sensation, and it made Martin a star. On November 30, backed by Eddy Duchin & His Orchestra, she recorded the song for Brunswick Records, and although record charts did not exist at the time, chart researcher Joel Whitburn (in the book Pop Memories, 1986) estimates it was a Top Ten hit. On December 19, Martin appeared on the cover of Life magazine. On December 22, she was back in the recording studio, this time for Decca Records, with which she would remain associated for the next decade, cutting songs for a series of single releases, backed by Woody Herman & His Orchestra. On January 11, 1939, she opened an eight-week nightclub engagement at the Rainbow Room at the top of Rockefeller Center, appearing each night after finishing her work in Leave It to Me!
All this exposure succeeded where Martin's two years of knocking on movie studio doors had failed; she was signed to a contract by Paramount Pictures and returned to Hollywood to make her first featured appearance in the movie The Great Victor Herbert, which opened in December 1939. But she did not close other doors. In September 1939, she joined the cast of the radio series The Tuesday Night Party, and she returned to the East Coast to star in a new musical, Nice Goin', produced by Laurence Schwab, who also wrote the libretto. It opened out-of-town tryouts in New Haven, CT, on October 21, 1939, but closed in Boston on November 4, never reaching Broadway. Still, Martin remained in New York for the winter. On January 25 and February 5, 1940, she recorded the eight tracks for her first Decca album, Mary Martin in an Album of Cole Porter Songs, including another rendition of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." In March, she returned to Good News, appearing on the show regularly through the end of the year. But she was back in Los Angeles by April 16, when she recorded "You're Lonely and I'm Lonely" for Decca backed by an orchestra conducted by Ray Sinatra.
On May 5, 1940, Martin married Richard Halliday, a story editor at Paramount. The same month, she began filming her second Paramount feature, co-starring with the studio's biggest star, Bing Crosby, in Rhythm on the River. The picture was finished by July and in release by the end of August. Martin immediately went into Love Thy Neighbor, which put her between radio stars Jack Benny and Fred Allen; it opened in December. Her film career picking up steam, she quickly went on to Kiss the Boys Goodbye with Don Ameche and Oscar Levant, which appeared in August 1941, and New York Town with Fred MacMurray and Robert Preston, which opened in November. Between April and June, she worked on another Crosby vehicle, Birth of the Blues, a December release. The speedy completion of this series of projects was necessitated by her delicate condition; on November 4, 1941, she gave birth to her second child, Mary Heller Halliday.
Joel Whitburn registered a number 23 showing that same week for the Decca recording of Johnny Mercer's "The Waiter and the Porter and the Upstairs Maid," sung by Crosby, Martin, and Jack Teagarden, and featured in Birth of the Blues. In January 1942, Martin took over as the regular female vocalist on Crosby's radio series, the Kraft Music Hall, continuing throughout the year. She also recorded again with Crosby, and on April 8 served as the featured vocalist on Horace Heidt & His Musical Knights' recording of "Pound Your Table Polka" on Columbia Records, a disc that hit number 22. Meanwhile, however, her movie career languished. Her only screen appearance in 1942 came at the end of the year, when she was one of many performers making small appearances in Star Spangled Rhythm. At the same time, the recording ban that began August 1, 1942, and ran into the next year temporarily derailed her recording career. She did make one more film, Happy Go Lucky, with Dick Powell, but by the time it appeared in March 1943, she had decided to try her own luck once again on-stage. Two different shows were in preparation in the winter of 1943, and she had her pick of them. One was the work of the newly formed team of veteran composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist/librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, an adaptation of the play Green Grow the Lilacs. The other was Dancing in the Streets, with songs by Vernon Duke and Howard Dietz. Unable to choose between them, Martin flipped a coin and went into Dancing in the Streets, which opened in Boston on March 19, 1943, and closed there forever on April 10. The Rodgers and Hammerstein show continued to gestate before emerging on March 31, 1943, as Oklahoma!, a landmark hit.
Martin returned to Hollywood and shot her ninth film, True to Life, with Franchot Tone and Dick Powell, which opened in October. But she had actually decided to give up on a film career after four years of trying to achieve stardom. She sought a leave of absence from Paramount and went back east to look for another musical. She found it in One Touch of Venus, the story of a Greek statue that comes to life in current-day Manhattan, which had a book by S.J. Perelman and Ogden Nash, lyrics by Nash, and music by Kurt Weill. It opened at the 46th Street Theatre on October 7, 1943, for a run of 567 performances, through February 10, 1945. For her performance, Martin won a Donaldson Award, the precursor to the Tony Award. Among the innovations of Oklahoma! had been Decca's decision to record a cast album, and the label followed up on November 7, 1943, by putting stars Martin and John Boles in a recording studio for an "original Broadway cast" recording of the songs from One Touch of Venus, released February 10, 1944. Martin did other recording sessions for Decca during this period, resulting in a Top Ten rendition of the wartime standard "I'll Walk Alone." Toward the end of the New York run of One Touch of Venus, she also joined members of the original cast of On the Town for a belated recording of that show's score, even though she had not appeared in it on-stage.
The day after the Broadway closing of One Touch of Venus, Martin and her husband embarked on a national tour of the musical. While on the road, they decided that Halliday would give up his work as a story editor to devote himself to being her manager. He fulfilled this function for the rest of his life. After completing the tour, Martin immediately turned to a new musical, Lute Song, a love story based on a 14th century Chinese play, with songs by Raymond Scott and Bernard Hanighen including "Mountain High, Valley Low." Critically acclaimed, but only a modest financial success, Lute Song ran 142 performances, until June 8, 1946. Only Martin appeared on the cast album recorded March 4, 1946, and released May 6 by Decca. In July, Martin made a rare film appearance, reprising her performance of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in Night and Day, a movie biography of Cole Porter. During the summer, she sailed to England, where Noël Coward had asked her to star in his next musical in London. The show, Pacific 1860, did not open until December 19, 1946, because the theater in which it was housed, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, had to be repaired after having been bombed in World War II. It was not well received and ran only 129 performances, closing on April 12, 1947, but a cast album was recorded by the U.K. branch of Decca.
Martin returned to the U.S., where Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, acting as producers of the hit Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun, were planning a national tour of the show. Its star, Ethel Merman, was not interested in going on the road, and Martin, who, as a Texas native, felt an affinity with its Western sharpshooting heroine, was happy to step in. She opened the tour of Annie Get Your Gun in Dallas, TX, on October 3, 1947, and traveled around the U.S. with it for the next 11 months. This earned her a special Tony Award, her first, in the second year that the awards were given out, 1948.
Martin's 1947 recording of "Almost Like Being in Love" from the musical Brigadoon, accompanied by Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians, brought her another singles chart entry on Decca. But by the start of 1949, she had switched allegiance after a decade, signing to Columbia Records. In early February, she recorded a selection of show tunes for her debut Columbia album, Mary Martin Sings for You. Columbia also contracted for her next cast album, for the musical South Pacific. This adaptation of World War II stories by James Michener with songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein opened on Broadway on April 7, 1949, and became Martin's biggest career triumph. She starred in it for more than two years in New York, receiving her second Tony Award and singing such songs as "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair" and "(I'm in Love With) A Wonderful Guy," and the Columbia album, the first cast recording issued in the new LP format, topped the charts for a record 69 weeks, eventually selling several million copies. During this lengthy stay in New York, Martin found plenty of time to make other recordings for Columbia. Her duet with Arthur Godfrey on the novelty tune "Go to Sleep, Go to Sleep, Go to Sleep" peaked in the Top Ten in April 1950, and she recorded a duet single with her son Larry Hagman of "You're Just in Love" from Ethel Merman's current show, Call Me Madam. Most ambitious, she was engaged by Columbia president Goddard Lieberson to record a series of studio-cast versions of music from musicals that had run prior to the era of the original Broadway cast album. These included Cole Porter's Anything Goes, Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz's The Band Wagon, Rodgers and Hart's Babes in Arms, and George and Ira Gershwin's Girl Crazy, all recorded in 1950 and 1951. Also, she made her debut television appearance as a guest on the NBC special Richard Rodgers' Jubilee Show on March 4, 1951.
Martin left South Pacific on Broadway in June 1951, only to travel back to London and open the West End production on November 1, 1951, and devote another year to the show. (She also made a second cast recording of it for the English Columbia label.) After returning to the U.S., she did not immediately go into a new show. On June 15, 1953, she appeared on a television special marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Ford Motor Company, singing an extended duet with Ethel Merman. Decca Records pressed up a 10" disc of the duet for commercial release. Martin made her final appearance in a feature film by turning up as herself in Main Street to Broadway, a movie made primarily to promote Broadway. Instead of going into a new musical, she next toured the country in a straight play, co-starring with Charles Boyer in Kind Sir, which finally reached Broadway on November 4, 1953, where it played 166 performances before closing on March 27, 1954. The property later enjoyed greater success as the 1958 film Indiscreet, starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.
By now, Martin and her husband were interested in assembling their own projects. With Halliday serving as producer, the couple turned to a new musical adaptation of J.M. Barrie's children's play Peter Pan, hiring the songwriting team of Mark (Moose) Charlap and Carolyn Leigh for a production that began with the Los Angeles and San Francisco Light Opera Association. Songs by composer Jule Styne and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green were added before the show opened on Broadway on October 20, 1954. RCA Victor recorded a cast album, including such songs as "I've Got to Crow," "I Won't Grow Up," and "Neverland," and it became a Top Five hit in the Billboard chart, while hitting number one in Cash Box. The show, which found Martin, in her early forties, flying around the stage suspended by piano wire, ran 152 performances in New York and would have gone much longer if it had not been so physically taxing for the star and if the production had not been contracted to close so as not to compete with a live television broadcast. She won her third Tony Award for it. After a final stage performance on February 26, 1955, she flew before a reported television audience of 65 million on the evening of March 7, winning an Emmy Award in the process.
Martin and Halliday vacationed in South America after Peter Pan, and they decided to buy a farm in Anápolis, Brazil, where they lived over the next two decades when Martin was not working. She next returned to non-musical stage work, opening in a revival of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth in Paris in June 1955. The show then moved to Washington, D.C., and Chicago before a New York run of 22 performances that began on August 17 and was followed by a live television broadcast on September 11. Only six weeks later, on October 22, Martin was back on network TV, appearing in the 90-minute special Together with Music alongside Noël Coward. A recording of the show was issued privately at the time, and later DRG Records released a commercial version. Martin, meanwhile, signed a three-year contract with NBC for $100,000 to appear in further TV specials, the first of which was another live broadcast of Peter Pan on January 9, 1956. On October 28, 1956, she was in a television version of the play Born Yesterday.
Martin's association with Peter Pan made her an attractive performer for the child-oriented Walt Disney Company, which signed her for a series of children's recordings beginning in 1956 with The Little Lame Lamb, followed in 1958 by the albums Hi Ho! Mary Martin Sings and Swings Walt Disney Favorites, Mary Martin Sings a Musical Love Story, and The Story of Sleeping Beauty, and in 1959 by Snow White. Martin also recorded Adventures for Readers for book publisher Harcourt, released in 1958. In April 1957, she recorded the LP Mary Martin Sings, Richard Rodgers Plays for RCA Victor, performing Rodgers songs to piano accompaniment by the composer and an orchestra; the album was released in 1958. She returned to the stage in June 1957, spending the summer performing South Pacific and Annie Get Your Gun in repertory for the Los Angeles and San Francisco Light Opera Association, and on November 27, 1957, she and co-star John Raitt did Annie Get Your Gun on television, with an accompanying album released by Capitol Records that reached number 12.
Martin and Halliday had settled on their next Broadway project, a musical adaptation of Maria von Trapp's memoirs, The Trapp Family Singers, eventually called The Sound of Music, but while they obtained rights and assembled the creative team, Martin embarked on her first national concert tour in September 1958. On this ambitious trek through 87 cities, lasting into March 1959, she performed two shows at each stop, a matinee, dubbed Magic with Mary Martin and intended for children, featuring the mini-musical Three to Make Music and songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein's recent TV musical Cinderella, and an evening show called Music with Mary Martin for adults. She repeated both performances for television on Easter Sunday, March 29, 1959, and released an album, Three to Make Music/Cinderella, on RCA Victor, that earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Recording for Children.
The Sound of Music, with songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein, finally opened on Broadway on November 16, 1959, and was second only to South Pacific as the high point of Martin's career. She won her fourth Tony Award, introducing such songs as "My Favorite Things," "Do-Re-Mi," and the title song, and she appeared in the show for two years of its three-and-a-half-year run. She also recorded the cast album, which topped the charts and sold in the millions, winning a Grammy Award. In the middle of her run in the show, she gave her third television performance in Peter Pan on December 8, 1960, the first to be taped for future viewing.
In 1962, Martin made an inspirational recording, Guideposts for Living, with popular minister Norman Vincent Peale while planning her next musical, Jennie, based on the life of actress Laurette Taylor. Featuring songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, it opened on Broadway on October 17, 1963, but lasted only 82 performances, closing December 28. RCA Victor recorded a cast album that made the Top 100. Although Martin had eschewed film work, she was considered for the Disney feature Mary Poppins before the part went to Julie Andrews, who also went on to star in the movie version of The Sound of Music. But Martin did record an album of the music from Mary Poppins for Disney that was licensed to Kapp Records, and when Songs from Mary Poppins and Other Favorites, credited to the Do-Re-Mi Children's Chorus with Mary Martin appeared in 1964, a single of "A Spoonful of Sugar" drawn from the LP earned Martin another Grammy Award nomination for Best Recording for Children.
In the run-up to the production of Jennie, Martin had been forced to turn down another musical, Hello, Dolly!, which instead starred Carol Channing when it opened on January 16, 1964. She was, however, able to accept the national tour, which began in April 1965 in Minneapolis, MN, and crisscrossed the U.S. for the next five months. That turned out to be only the beginning. In the fall, the production moved to the Pacific, playing in Hawaii, then in Japan, before touring U.S. military installations in Okinawa and Japan, and then, starting on October 10, the war zone in South Vietnam for ten days. Martin then flew to London and opened the West End production of the show on December 2. She also recorded the original London cast album for RCA Victor. On February 7, 1966, her adventures were recounted in the TV special Mary Martin: Hello Dolly 'Round the World. Two months later, on April 3, she had another TV special, Mary Martin at Eastertime, broadcast from Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The same month, Disneyland Records released the LP Mary Martin Songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein's the Sound of Music, a re-recording of the music that was even more popular in the wake of the 1965 movie.
Martin made her final appearance in a Broadway musical in I Do! I Do!, a show depicting 50 years in the life of a married couple. The two-person cast also featured Robert Preston, and the show, with songs by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, among them the hit "My Cup Runneth Over," opened on Broadway on December 5, 1966, for a run of 561 performances through June 15, 1968. (The RCA Victor cast album reached the Top 100 in Billboard and the Top 40 in Cash Box.) It then embarked on a 30-city road tour that ran into 1969, at the end of which Martin returned to Brazil with no immediate plans to perform again. She remained active, however, opening her own boutique in Anápolis and publishing a book, Mary Martin's Needlepoint, later in the year. But she did not return to the stage until March 26, 1972, when she appeared at a benefit performance, A Celebration of Richard Rodgers, in New York. Nearly a year later, on March 3, 1973, her husband, Richard Halliday, died at the age of 67. Soon after, she sold the farm in Brazil and moved back to the U.S., living on Martha's Vineyard and in Rancho Mirage, CA. In 1976, she published her autobiography, My Heart Belongs. She went back to work in August 1977, when she toured in a play, Do You Turn Somersaults?, with Anthony Quayle. It opened on Broadway on January 9, 1978, but lasted only two weeks. On December 7, 1979, she appeared in a television movie, Valentine. In 1981, she began co-hosting a daily half-hour television series for seniors, Over Easy, on PBS. Her tenure on the show was interrupted in September 1982 when she was seriously injured in a car accident while riding in a taxi, but she recovered and continued to appear on the program into 1983. She also made guest appearances on the network TV series Love Boat and Hardcastle and McCormick. From January 1986 to January 1987, she and Carol Channing toured in the play Legends!, her last stage work. She continued to make occasional appearances in the late '80s. In December 1989, she was the recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. By then, she was suffering from cancer, and she died at age 76 on November 3, 1990, in Rancho Mirage, CA.
The year before her death, Martin saw her 1960 performance in Peter Pan sell four million videocassettes. This was, however, a rare instance in which a performer whose primary medium was the stage had one of her most memorable portrayals captured in permanent form for the appreciation of later generations. In addition to those 1940s films, there are grainy kinescopes of some of Martin's TV appearances, on The Ed Sullivan Show re-creating scenes from her shows, for example, and the Ford 50th Anniversary Show duet with Ethel Merman. Those who did not see Martin on-stage, however, may best appreciate her warmth and vivacity on the cast recordings of her shows and compilations of her solo recordings such as 16 Most Requested Songs (Columbia/Legacy, 1993) and The Decca Years: 1938-1946 (Koch/MCA, 1995). As the 50-year copyright limit on recordings continues in Europe, unlicensed albums of Martin recordings appear, notably the Flapper and Living Era collections both called My Heart Belongs to Daddy (1999 and 2004, respectively), and Jasmine's 2006 album Broadway to Hollywood -- and Back, which also contains soundtrack and aircheck recordings. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
Career Highlights: Peter Pan, True to Life, Love Thy Neighbor
First Major Screen Credit: The Great Victor Herbert (1939)
Biography
Mary Martin was a wife, mother, and stage performer before she'd reached her 18th birthday. She became an overnight sensation in the 1938 Cole Porter Broadway musical Leave It to Me, stopping the show with her sly striptease number "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" (she would revise this piece in two Hollywood films, 1941's Love Thy Neighbor and the 1946 Cole Porter biopic Night and Day). From 1939 through 1943, Martin appeared in such Paramount films as New York Town (1941), Birth of the Blues (1941) and Happy Go Lucky (1942). She gave up Hollywood to return to the stage, where she became one of the biggest musical comedy attractions in Broadway history, starring in the original productions of One Touch of Venus, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, I Do I Do, and many others. Her 1953 Broadway hit Peter Pan was re-created on television several times, the 1960 telecast happily videotaped for posterity. She also had a successful run in both the Broadway and touring companies of Hello Dolly. In 1983, Martin and actress Janet Gaynor were seriously injured in a car accident; Gaynor eventually died from her injuries, but Martin recovered to the extent that she was able to continue playing guest roles on television. Mary Martin was the mother of actors Larry Hagman and Heller Halliday. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Ben Hagman (m. 1930–1936)
Richard Halliday (m. 1940–1973)
Mary Virginia Martin (December 1, 1913 – November 3, 1990) was an American actress. She originated many roles over her career including Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and Maria in The Sound of Music. She was named a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1989.
Mary Martin's life as a child, as Martin describes it in her autobiographyMy Heart Belongs, was secure and happy. She had close relationships with both her mother and father, as well as her siblings. Her autobiography details how the young actress had an instinctive ear for recreating musical sounds.
Martin's father, Preston Martin, was a lawyer and her mother, Juanita Presley, was a violin teacher. Although the doctors told Juanita that she would risk her life if she attempted to have another baby, she was determined to have a boy. Instead, she had Mary, who became quite a tomboy. Her birth was an event as all of the neighbors gathered around Juanita's bedroom window, waiting for the raising of a curtain to signal the baby’s arrival.
Her family had a barn and orchard that kept her entertained. She played with her older sister Geraldine (whom she calls “Sister”), climbing trees and riding ponies. Martin adored her father. “He was a tall, good-looking, silver-haired, with the kindest brown eyes. Mother was the disciplinarian, but it was Daddy who could turn me into an angel with just one look” (p. 19). Martin, who said “I’d never understand the law” (p. 19), began singing outside the courtroom where her father worked every Saturday night at a bandstand where the town band played. She sang in a trio of little girls dressed in bellhop uniforms. “Even in those days without microphones, my high piping voice carried all over the square. I have always thought that I inherited my carrying voice from my father” (p. 19).
She remembered having a photographic memory as a child, making it easy to memorize songs, as well as get her through school tests. She got her first taste of singing solo at a fire hall, where she soaked up the crowd’s appreciation. “Sometimes I think that I cheated my own family and my closest friends by giving to audiences so much of the love I might have kept for them. But that’s the way I was made; I truly don't think I could help it” (p. 20). Martin’s craft was developed by seeing movies and becoming a mimic. She’d win prizes for looking, acting and dancing like Ruby Keeler and singing exactly like Bing Crosby. “Never, never, never can I say I had a frustrating childhood. It was all joy. Mother used to say she never had seen such a happy child—that I awakened each morning with a smile. I don’t remember that, but I do remember that I never wanted to go to bed, to go to sleep, for fear I’d miss something” (p. 20).
Marriage
As she grew older, Martin dated Benjamin Jackson Hagman while in high school, before being sent to the Ward-Belmont finishing school in Nashville, Tennessee. Besides imitating Fanny Brice at singing gigs, she thought school was dull and felt confined by the strict rules. She was homesick for Weatherford, her family and Hagman. During a visit, Mary and Benjamin convinced Mary's mother to allow them to marry.[1] They did, and by the age of 17, Martin was legally married, pregnant with her first child (Larry Hagman) and forced to leave finishing school. However she was happy to begin her new life. She soon learned that this life was nothing but “role playing” (p. 39).
Their honeymoon was at her parent’s house, and Martin's dream of life with a family and a white-picket fence faded. “I was 17, a married woman without real responsibilities, miserable about my mixed-up emotions, afraid there was something awfully wrong with me because I didn’t enjoy being a wife. Worst of all, I didn't have enough to do” (p. 39). It was “Sister” who came to her rescue, suggesting that she should teach dance. “Sister” taught Martin her first real dance—the waltz clog. Martin perfectly imitated her first dance move, and she opened a dance studio. Here, she created her own moves, imitated the famous dancers she watched in the movies, and taught “Sister’s” waltz clog. “I was doing something I wanted to do—creating” (p. 44).
Early career
Wanting to learn more moves, Martin went to California to attend the dance school at the Franchon and Marco School of the Theatre, and opened her own dance studio in Mineral Wells, Texas. She was given a ballroom studio under a certain deal—she had to sing in the lobby every Saturday. Here, she learned how to sing into a microphone and how to phrase blues songs. One day at work, she accidentally walked into the wrong room where auditions were being held. They asked her what key she’d like to sing “So Red Rose”. Having absolutely no idea what her key was, she sang regardless and got the job. She was hired to sing “So Red Rose” at the Fox Theater in San Francisco, followed by the Paramount Theater in Los Angeles. There would be one catch — she had to sing in the wings. She scored her first professional gig, unaware that she would soon be center stage.
Soon after, Martin learned that her studio had been burnt down by a man who thought dancing was a sin.[2] She began to express her unhappiness — she needed to let go and be free. Her father gave her advice, saying that she was too young to be married. Martin left everything behind, including her young son, Larry, and went to Hollywood while her father handled the divorce for her. In Hollywood, Martin plunged herself into auditions—so many that she became known as “Audition Mary”. Her first professional audition and job was on a national radio network. She sang on a program called “Gateway to Hollywood” and was told that her job was “sustaining”. Little did she know that “sustaining” meant unpaid.[3] Among one of Martin's first auditions in Hollywood, she was “determined to give them everything I could do”, before announcing her intention to sing "in my soprano voice, a song you probably don’t know, 'Indian Love Call'". After singing the song, “a tall, craggly man who looked like a mountain” told Martin that he thought she had something special. He added, “Oh, and by the way, I know that song. I wrote it.” It was Oscar Hammerstein II (pp. 58-59). This marked the start of her career.
Later career
Mary Martin struggled for nearly two years to break into show business. As a struggling young actress, Martin endured humorous and sometimes frightful luck trying to make it in the world, from car crashes leading to vocal instruction, unknowingly singing in front of Oscar Hammerstein II, to her final break on Broadway granted by the very prominent producer, Lawrence Schwab.
Using her maiden name, Mary Martin began pursuing a performing career singing on radio in Dallas and in nightclubs in Los Angeles. Her performance at one club impressed a theatrical producer, and he cast her in a play in New York. That production did not open, but she got a role in Cole Porter's Leave It to Me!. In that production, she became popular on Broadway and received attention in the national media singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy". "Mary stopped the show with "My Heart Belongs to Daddy". With that one song in the second act, she became a star 'overnight'."[4] Martin reprised the song in Night and Day, (the Hollywood "biographical" movie about Porter) during the film in an audition as herself for Porter (Cary Grant).
"My Heart Belongs to Daddy" catapulted her career and became very special to Mary — she even sang it to her ailing father in his hospital bed while he was in a coma. Martin did not learn immediately that her father had died. Headlines read "Daddy Girl Sings About Daddy as Daddy Dies." Because of the show’s demanding schedule, Martin couldn’t even attend her father’s funeral.[5]
She received the Donaldson Award and the New York Film Critics Circle Award in 1943 for One Touch of Venus. A special Tony came her way in 1948 for "spreading theatre to the rest of the country while the originals perform in New York." In 1955 and 1956, she received, first, a Tony Award for Peter Pan, and then an Emmy for appearing in the same role on television. She also received Tony Awards for South Pacific, and, in 1959, for The Sound of Music.
Martin as Peter Pan, a role which effected a plausibly boyish look for her with minor costuming, equating the character with the actress in many viewers' minds[6]
Although she appeared in nine films in her career, all between 1938 and 1943,[7] she was generally passed over for the filmed version of the musical plays in which she starred. She herself once explained that she did not enjoy making films, because she did not have the "connection" with an audience that she had in live performances. The closest she ever came to preserving her stage performances were her famous television appearances as Peter Pan (she had starred in a musical version on Broadway in 1954, and this production was subsequently performed on NBC television in RCA's compatible color in 1955, 1956 and 1960). While Martin did not enjoy making theatrical films, she did apparently enjoy appearing on television, as she did frequently.
Martin made an appearance in 1980 in a Royal Variety Performance in London, performing "Honeybun" from South Pacific. In 1982 she was involved in a traffic accident that left her with two fractured ribs, a fractured pelvis, and a punctured lung and was hospitalized at San Francisco General Hospital. Also in the accident was Janet Gaynor, who died two years later from complications from her injuries. Her press agent, Ben Washer, died in the accident.[8][9]
She appeared in the play Legends with Carol Channing in a one-year US national tour, opening in Dallas on January 9, 1986.[10]
She received the Kennedy Center Honors, an annual honor for career achievements, in 1989.
Death
Mary Martin died at age 76 from colorectal cancer at her home in Rancho Mirage, California on November 3, 1990.[11] She is buried in East Greenwood Cemetery in Weatherford, Texas.
^"Hospitalized". Time (magazine). September 20, 1982. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,950804,00.html. Retrieved 2008-06-25. "Janet Gaynor, 73, winner of the first Oscar for Best Actress (1929), in serious condition with eleven broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, pelvic fractures, an injured bladder and a damaged kidney; and Mary Martin, 68, star of Broadway's original South Pacific and TV's first Peter Pan, in good condition with two fractured ribs, a fractured pelvis and a punctured lung; after a vehicular accident; in San Francisco. Gaynor and her husband Paul Gregory, 61, and Martin and her press agent, Ben Washer, 76, were riding in a taxi when they were struck broadside by a van. Washer was killed. Gregory is in good condition."
Martin, Mary (1976). My Heart Belongs. New York: Morrow. ISBN0688030092.
Kirkwood, James, Jr. (1989). Diary of a Mad Playwright: Perilous Adventures on the Road with Mary Martin and Carol Channing, about production of the play "Legends" (Dutton)
