Mary Healy has died

[HarryCarter]

Mary Healy, who was probably Lucy's earliest TV costar still living, died on Tuesday at the age of 96. Mary Healy appeared with Lucy on TV in 1949 in Inside USA with Chevrolet and in 1950 in The Peter And Mary Show. Both programs co-starred Healy's husband Peter Lind Hayes, who had appeared in Seven Days Leave with Lucy.

 

Mary Healy, an actress and singer who with Peter Lind Hayes formed a husband-and-wife comedy team on television variety shows and sitcoms in the 1950s and ’60s and portrayed their suburban life on radio broadcasts from New Rochelle, N.Y., died on Tuesday in Calabasas, Calif. She was 96.

 

Her daughter, Cathy Lind Hayes, confirmed the death.

 

Ms. Healy and Mr. Hayes, a movie actor and Broadway, nightclub and television comedian whom she married in 1940, appeared together in the early ’50s on two variety shows, “The Peter Lind Hayes Show” on NBC and “Star of the Family” on CBS.

 

In 1958, the couple starred in the Broadway farce “Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?,” which ran for 26 weeks. In 1960, they starred in “Peter Loves Mary,” a sitcom about married show-business celebrities struggling to adjust to life in the suburbs. They were also frequent guest panelists on the CBS game show “What’s My Line?” and vacation hosts on Arthur Godfrey’s television programs.

 

For several years in the early ’60s, they starred on a WOR radio show, broadcast on weekday mornings from their home in New Rochelle. Many metropolitan-area listeners identified with their witty observations and unrehearsed chatter about children, meals, commuting, friends and life’s little exasperations — the things ordinary people talked about over the breakfast table.

 

“They love it when we argue on the air,” Ms. Healy told The New York Times in 1964. “We’re even had letters saying, ‘Please argue more.’ ”

 

Mary Healy was born in New Orleans on April 14, 1918. After winning the Miss New Orleans beauty pageant as a teenager, she began singing with dance bands at hotels in the city. She was signed to a 20th Century Fox film contact and had her first major role in the 1939 movie “Second Fiddle,” starring Tyrone Power and Sonja Henie.

 

Sent on a national tour in 1940, she met and married Mr. Hayes and joined his cabaret act. Except for roles in unmemorable films over the next two years, and a starring part in “Around the World,” Orson Welles’s 1946 Broadway production of “Around the World in 80 Days,” she worked almost exclusively with her husband thereafter.

 

In the early 1950s, Ms. Healy and Mr. Hayes were the first to sing the Chevrolet commercial jingle “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet.” Dinah Shore sang the song after 1952, and it became her signature on the long-running “Dinah Shore Show.”

 

Ms. Healy and Mr. Hayes wrote a memoir, “Twenty-Five Minutes From Broadway” (1961), its title inspired by George M. Cohan’s musical about New Rochelle, “Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway.”

 

Peter Lind Hayes died in 1998. Besides her daughter Cathy, she is survived by a son, Peter, and a grandchild.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/05/arts/television/mary-healy-actress-and-singer-dies-at-96.html?_r=0&referrer=

[HarryCarter]

You can watch Lucy and Mary on Inside USA with Chevrolet here: http://www.lucylounge.com/index.php?/topic/3215-lucy-on-inside-usa-with-chevrolet-1949/&do=findComment&comment=93513