Mary Livingstone
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- Mary is also the name of David Livingstone's wife
Mary Livingstone (b. Sadye Marks, June 23, 1905, Seattle, Washington; d. June 30, 1983, Holmby Hills, California), was an American radio comedienne and the wife and radio partner of comedy great Jack Benny (nee Benjamin Kubelsky). Enlisted almost entirely by accident to perform on her husband's popular program, she proved a talented comedienne. But she also proved one of the rare performers (Barbra Streisand would prove another) to experience severe stage fright years after her career was established---so much so that she retired from show business completely, after two decades in the public eye, almost three decades before her death, and at the height of her husband and partner's fame.
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[edit] Early Life
Seattle-born but Vancouver, British Columbia raised, Sadye Marks herself came from a respected show business family: relatives included her cousins the Marx Brothers and Al Shean of Gallagher and Shean; her family name Marrix was Anglicised to Marks when the family arrived in the United States. She met her future husband at a Passover seder at her family home when she was 14; Benny was invited by his friend and her cousin, Zeppo (b. Herbert) Marx while Benny and the Marx Brothers were in town together to perform. Sadye developed a near-instant crush on the funny, somewhat shy man thirteen years her senior. But when he inadvertently insulted her by excusing himself for the night in the midst of her violin performance, she got her revenge the next night. She took three girlfriends to the theater where Benny performed, sitting in the front row and making sure not to laugh. Benny said later it drove him nuts that he couldn't get the four girls to laugh at anything.
[edit] Courting Jack Benny
Three years later, at age seventeen, the Marks family visited California while Benny was in the same town for a show. Still nursing a small crush on the comedian, Sadye went to the theater to re-introduce herself to him. As he approached her in a hallway, she smiled and said, "Hello, Mr. Benny, I'm..." But he curtly cut her off with a "Hello," and continued on his way down the hall without pausing; she learned much later that when Benny was deep in thought about his work, it was nearly impossible to get his attention otherwise.
They met again a few years later---while she was said to be working as a lingerie salesgirl at a May Department Stores branch store in downtown Los Angeles---and the couple finally began dating. Invited on a double-date by a friend who had married Sayde's sister, Babe, Benny found Sayde along to keep him company. This time, the couple clicked: Jack was finally smitten with Sayde and asked her on another date. She turned him down at first---she was seeing another young man---but Benny persisted. He visited her at May's almost daily and was reputed to buy so much ladies' hosiery from her he helped her set a sales record; he also called her several times a day when on the road.
At the same time, Benny seemed fearful of a committed relationship and Sayde Marks continued dating other men, even becoming engaged---which panicked the comedian enough to beg her to Chicago---where he tried to convince her she was too young to marry. When the argument didn't convince her, Benny confessed he was in love with her and wanted to marry her himself. In a scene that could have been a later Jack Benny Program routine, she needled him about her being too young to marry. "You're not too young to marry me!" he retorted---his way of proposing. Sayde Marks broke her existing engagement and married Jack Benny in 1927; the marriage ended only when Benny died in 1974. In her biography of her husband, she revealed she never told him she was the little girl he'd once needled until after they'd dated awhile.
[edit] Goodbye Sayde, Hello Mary
Sadye took part in some of Jack's vaudeville performances but never thought of herself as a full-time performer, seeming glad to be done with it when he moved to radio in 1932. Then came the day he called her at home and asked her to come to the studio quickly---an actress hired to play a part on the evening's show didn't show up and, instead of risking a hunt for a substitute, Benny thought his wife could handle the part . . . a character named Mary Livingstone scripted as Benny's biggest fan.
At first, it seemed like a brief role---she played the part on that night's and the following week's show before being written out of the scenario. But NBC received so much fan mail that the character was revived into a regular feature on the Benny show, and the reluctant Sayde Marks became a radio star in her own right. Mary Livingstone underwent a change, too: from fan to tart secretary-foil; the character occasionally went on dates with Benny's character but they were never implied to be truly romantically involved otherwise. (The lone known exception: a fantasy sequence on the television version of the show.)
Mrs. Benny soon enough displayed her own sharp wit and pinpoint comic timing, often used to puncture Benny's on-air ego, and she became a major part of the show---enough so that, giving in when she was addressed as "Mary Livingstone" often enough when out in public, she ended up changing her name legally to Mary Livingstone. Years later, her husband admitted how strange it felt to call her Sayde even in private.
[edit] "Chiss Sweeze"
Livingstone's honest, wisecracking style proved a perfect lancing of Benny's on-air persona as a vain skinflint. (By contrast, Portland Hoffa---the real-life wife of Benny's friend, fellow comedian, and longtime "feuding" rival Fred Allen---played a squeaky friend who usually hied Allen off to 'Allen's Alley' after a brief comic exchange.) But she was still prone to occasional flubbed lines on the show, and many became as legendary as the deliberately crafted "illogical logic" of Gracie Allen or the cleverly scripted malaprops of Jane Ace and (as Molly in The Goldbergs) Gertrude Berg.
Perhaps the best-remembered such flub was Livingstone's "chiss sweeze sandwich" order in a lunch counter sketch. But nearly as well-remarked was the show on which she was to ask Jack, "How could you possibly hit a car when it was up on the grease rack?" Instead, Livingstone asked, "How could you possibly hit a car when it was up on the grass reek?" The following week, Benny devoted much of the show to poking fun at the tongue twists, chastising her for using the made up phrase "grass reek." But Jack got his comeuppance later in the show, when the show's guest, the real-life Beverly Hills police chief, was talking about the strange call the department got the night before: two skunks fighting on someone's lawn. "And let me tell you," he said, "when they were done, did that grass reek!" Mary then took great satisfaction out of making Jack admit to the millions of listeners that "grass reek" did exist. This was a typical example of Benny, Livingstone, and the show's writers mining classic comedy out of, apparently, nothing much.
Livingstone's brother, Hilliard Marks, also factored big in the show on radio and, later, television: he produced both. Her trademark bit on the radio show (other than haranguing Benny) was to read letters from her mother, usually beginning with, My darling daughter Mary... and often including comical stories about Mary's (fictional) sister Babe (similar to Sadye's real sister Babe in name only), who was so masculine she played as a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers and worked in steel mills and coal mines; or, their ne'er do well father, who always seemed to be a half-step ahead of the law. Mother Livingstone, naturally enough, detested Jack Benny and was forever advising her daughter to quit his employ.
[edit] Stage Fright
Never all that comfortable as a performer despite her success, Livingstone's stage fright became so acute by the time the Benny show was moving toward television that she rarely appeared on the radio show in its final season, 1955. When she did appear, the Bennys' adopted daughter, Joan, acted as a stand-in for her mother while Livingstone's pre-recorded lines were played during live broadcasts. Livingstone made few appearances on the television version and finally retired from show business in 1958.
[edit] Personal Life
Many fans would be surprised when George Burns revealed in his 1988 memoir Gracie, A Love Story that George and his wife/comic partner Gracie Allen loved Jack Benny but merely tolerated Mary, whom they found vain, envious and not much on talent. Indeed, Mary in real life seemed quite different from the friendly, spunky role she played on the radio, just as her husband truly was about as far removed from the cowardly, self-centered miser he played on the show as humanly possible. According to Burns, she wanted all the things her friends had, but more and bigger, and had a tendency to demand immediate service when going into a busy salon or department store. At times, wrote Burns, when she acted too entitled, her friends would humble her by pretending she was selling them panty hose — reminding her that for all her airs, she had been a lowly lingerie salesgirl before she met Jack Benny.
Jack and Mary adored each other, but their relationship was sometimes troubled by her vanity and his philandering. (Mary would later claim that Jack's famous gesture of putting his hand to his cheek began when she answered a phone call from one of his girlfriends and scratched his face shortly before a photo shoot.[1]) Her relationship with their adopted daughter, Joan, was often strained. In Sunday Nights at Seven, her father's unfinished memoir that she completed with her own recollections, Joan Benny revealed she rarely felt close to her mother, and the two often argued, often at the instigation of Mary, whom her daughter has described as a deeply insecure woman.
She had so many good qualities---her sense of humour, her generosity, her loyalty to her friends. She had a famous, successful, and adoring husband; she had famous, interesting, and amusing friends; she lived in luxury; she was a celebrity in her own right. In short, she had everything a woman could possibly want. When I think of her it's with sadness because I wish she could have enjoyed it all more.---Joan Benny, from Sunday Nights at Seven.
Benny was so devoted to his wife that, prior to his death, he arranged to have a single red rose delivered to her every day for the rest of her life. After writing a biography of her husband, Mary Livingstone---whose surname is often spelt without the 'e,' as occurred with her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to radio---died from cardiovascular disease at her home in Holmby Hills, California on June 30, 1983---hours after receiving a visit from then-First Lady Nancy Reagan, as daughter Joan noted, where the two women enjoyed a private manicure appointment, and seven days after her 78th birthday. "The doctor said it was a heart attack," Joan wrote, "but I have always felt she just gradually faded out of life."
Mary Livingstone was interred beside her husband in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.
[edit] Listen
[edit] External links
- [2] - Mary Livingstone Benny's Gravesite
