Mary Martin

During the central decades of the twentieth century, Mary Martin shared the spotlight with Ethel Merman as one of the foremost interpreters of leading roles in Broadway musicals. Between the 1930s and the 1960s she performed thousands of times across Broadway, the West End, and touring productions in such blockbusters as South Pacific and The Sound of Music, while the original-cast albums she made for those vehicles moved millions of copies. In contrast to Merman’s bold, larger-than-life delivery, Martin projected warmth and easy charm; she worked with greater nuance than her close friend and principal competitor and displayed far wider range. When she assumed the part of Annie Oakley from Merman on the national tour of Annie Get Your Gun, she brought an unmistakably fresh perspective that won fresh acclaim. It is difficult to picture Merman in Martin vehicles such as Peter Pan or the goddess Venus in One Touch of Venus. Merman rarely expressed interest in inheriting roles created by other actresses, whereas Martin did so without hesitation. The single shared exception occurred late in both careers when each appeared in Hello, Dolly! Merman generally preferred to remain in New York, but Martin worked extensively in London and on the road; that same adaptability appeared in her willingness to accept straight plays requiring little or no singing.

Although the stage remained her natural habitat, Martin also pursued every other medium then available. Her screen career, though relatively short, encompassed more than a dozen features; she became a familiar presence on both radio and television series, performed in nightclubs and concert halls, and made numerous recordings as a solo artist that yielded a pair of chart successes. Even so, her principal legacy rests on the long string of award-winning Broadway starring roles.

Mary Virginia Martin entered the world on December 1, 1913, in Weatherford, Texas, the younger of two daughters born to lawyer Preston Martin and former violin instructor Juanita (Presley) Martin; her sister Geraldine was eleven years older. Her mother nurtured her early interest in the performing arts and started her on violin lessons while she was still quite young. Those lessons failed to hold her attention, yet singing and dancing quickly captured her enthusiasm. At twelve she began studying voice with Helen Fouts Cahoon, chair of the voice department at Texas Christian University. Years later, after moving to New York as an adult, she discovered that Cahoon lived in the same apartment building and resumed lessons with her.

In 1930, at sixteen, Martin was sent by her parents to the distinguished Ward Belmont finishing school in Nashville, Tennessee. She remained there only two and a half months before marrying her boyfriend, twenty-one-year-old accountant Benjamin Jackson Hagman, and returning to Weatherford to live with her parents. Hagman subsequently trained as a lawyer and joined his father-in-law’s practice. On September 21, 1931, seventeen-year-old Martin gave birth to Lawrence Martin Hagman, who, performing as Larry Hagman, would achieve fame on television as astronaut Tony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie (1965–1970) and as the calculating J.R. Ewing in Dallas (1978–1991).

Martin largely entrusted her son’s upbringing to her mother. At eighteen she opened a dance studio in Weatherford. After one successful season she traveled to Hollywood, California, to enroll at the Fanchon and Marco School of Theatre so she could improve her own skills. Over the next several years she alternated periods of teaching in Texas with further study in Hollywood while opening additional branches of her school in Mineral Wells and Cisco. In Mineral Wells she arranged to use space at the local hotel, paying rent by performing weekly with the hotel orchestra in a program also broadcast on radio. During her second stay at Fanchon and Marco she happened upon an audition and secured vaudeville singing engagements in San Francisco and Los Angeles. By 1936 she had resolved to settle in Hollywood and pursue a performing career; she and her husband formally separated and divorced the following year. Although she received custody of her son, she placed him in a succession of private schools and military academies.

From 1936 through 1938 Martin worked steadily to gain recognition as an entertainer in Los Angeles. As early as July 19, 1936, the Los Angeles Times noted her unpaid appearance on a sustaining radio broadcast. She gradually secured nightclub engagements, first at the Cinegrille in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, then at the Casanova club and Gordon’s bar, eventually commanding fees as high as four hundred dollars a week. She continued teaching dance, auditioned unsuccessfully at film studios, and eventually obtained bit parts and opportunities to dub singing voices for other actresses. She supplied the vocal for Louise Havoc (also known as Gypsy Rose Lee) on “The Daughter of Mademoiselle” in Battle of Broadway, which premiered in April 1938, and sang for Margaret Sullavan in The Shopworn Angel the following July. That same month she made her screen debut in an unbilled dance-teacher role in The Rage of Paris. In June 1938 she joined the network radio series Good News as a regular. Her decisive break arrived late in the summer of 1938 when she performed a swing version of Italian composer Luigi Arditi’s waltz “Il Bacio” (“The Kiss”) at a Trocadero nightclub talent showcase and received an ovation. Broadway producer Laurence Schwab, then casting Ring Out the News, signed her to a contract and brought her to New York. By the time she arrived the project had collapsed, yet another musical about to enter production had lost a supporting actress who left to marry; Martin auditioned successfully and joined Leave It to Me!, which featured songs by Cole Porter.

In Leave It to Me! Martin delivered the typically risqué Porter number “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and performed a partial striptease. When the show opened on November 9, 1938, for the first of 307 Broadway performances, the number created a sensation and established Martin as a star. On November 30, accompanied by Eddy Duchin & His Orchestra, she recorded the song for Brunswick Records; although charts did not yet exist, researcher Joel Whitburn later estimated it reached the Top Ten in Pop Memories (1986). On December 19 she appeared on the cover of Life magazine. On December 22 she returned to the studio for Decca Records, beginning a decade-long association that produced a series of singles backed by Woody Herman & His Orchestra. On January 11, 1939, she began an eight-week nightclub engagement at the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, performing each evening after completing her work in Leave It to Me!

All this visibility accomplished what two years of studio auditions had not: Paramount Pictures offered her a contract, and she returned to Hollywood for her first featured role in The Great Victor Herbert, which opened in December 1939. She did not abandon other outlets. In September 1939 she joined the cast of the radio series The Tuesday Night Party and traveled east to star in the new musical Nice Goin’, produced by Laurence Schwab, who also wrote the book. The show opened tryouts in New Haven, Connecticut, on October 21, 1939, but closed in Boston on November 4 without reaching Broadway. Martin nevertheless remained in New York for the winter. On January 25 and February 5, 1940, she recorded eight tracks for her debut Decca album, Mary Martin in an Album of Cole Porter Songs, which included a fresh version of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” In March she rejoined Good News, appearing regularly through year’s end. By April 16 she was back in Los Angeles to record “You’re Lonely and I’m Lonely” for Decca with an orchestra led by Ray Sinatra.

On May 5, 1940, Martin married Paramount story editor Richard Halliday. That month she began filming her second Paramount feature, co-starring with the studio’s top attraction, Bing Crosby, in Rhythm on the River. The picture finished shooting by July and reached theaters by late August. She moved immediately into Love Thy Neighbor, which placed her between radio comedians Jack Benny and Fred Allen; it opened in December. Her film momentum continued with Kiss the Boys Goodbye opposite Don Ameche and Oscar Levant, released 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 rapid pace of these projects was dictated by her pregnancy; on November 4, 1941, she gave birth to her second child, Mary Heller Halliday.

Joel Whitburn recorded a number-23 peak that same week for the Decca single of Johnny Mercer’s “The Waiter and the Porter and the Upstairs Maid,” performed by Crosby, Martin, and Jack Teagarden and featured in Birth of the Blues. In January 1942 Martin became the regular female vocalist on Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall radio series, continuing through the year. She recorded again with Crosby, and on April 8 served as featured vocalist on Horace Heidt & His Musical Knights’ Columbia recording of “Pound Your Table Polka,” which reached number 22. Her film career nevertheless stalled; her sole 1942 screen appearance came at year’s end in a brief role in Star Spangled Rhythm. The recording ban that began August 1, 1942, and extended into the following year temporarily halted her recording activity. She completed one further film, Happy Go Lucky with Dick Powell, but by the time it opened in March 1943 she had chosen to return to the stage. Two musicals were in preparation during the winter of 1943, and she was offered her choice. One was the first collaboration of 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 decide, Martin flipped a coin and joined Dancing in the Streets, which opened in Boston on March 19, 1943, and closed there permanently on April 10. The Rodgers and Hammerstein project matured into Oklahoma!, which premiered on March 31, 1943, and became a landmark success.

Martin returned to Hollywood and completed her ninth film, True to Life with Franchot Tone and Dick Powell, released in October. She had already decided to abandon motion pictures after four years of striving for stardom. She requested a leave from Paramount and headed east in search of another musical. She found it in One Touch of Venus, the tale of a Greek statue that comes to life in contemporary Manhattan, with a book by S.J. Perelman and Ogden Nash, lyrics by Nash, and music by Kurt Weill. The production opened at the 46th Street Theatre on October 7, 1943, for 567 performances through February 10, 1945. For her performance Martin received a Donaldson Award, the predecessor to the Tony. Following Decca’s precedent with Oklahoma!, the label recorded Martin and co-star John Boles on November 7, 1943, for an original-cast album of One Touch of Venus, issued February 10, 1944. Additional Decca sessions during this period produced a Top Ten version of the wartime standard “I’ll Walk Alone.” Near the close of the New York run Martin joined members of the original On the Town cast for a belated recording of that score, although she had not appeared in the stage production.

The day after One Touch of Venus closed on Broadway, Martin and her husband began a national tour of the musical. While traveling they decided that Halliday would resign his position as story editor to serve full-time as her manager, a role he performed for the remainder of his life. Upon completing the tour Martin turned at once to a new musical, Lute Song, a love story drawn from a fourteenth-century Chinese play, with songs by Raymond Scott and Bernard Hanighen that included “Mountain High, Valley Low.” Though critically praised, it achieved only modest commercial success, running 142 performances until June 8, 1946. Only Martin appeared on the Decca cast album recorded March 4, 1946, and released May 6. In July she made a rare film appearance, reprising “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Night and Day, a biographical picture about Cole Porter. During the summer she sailed to England, where Noël Coward had invited her to star in his next London musical. Pacific 1860 finally opened on December 19, 1946, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, after wartime bomb damage was repaired; the production received poor notices and closed after 129 performances on April 12, 1947, though a cast album was made by the British branch of Decca.

Martin returned to the United States, where Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, now producing the hit Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun, were organizing a national tour. Its star, Ethel Merman, declined to travel, and Martin, who felt a personal connection to the Western sharpshooter heroine as a native Texan, agreed to take the role. She opened the tour in Dallas, Texas, on October 3, 1947, and remained with the production for the next eleven months. This engagement earned her a special Tony Award in 1948, the second year the awards were presented.

Martin’s 1947 Decca recording of “Almost Like Being in Love” from Brigadoon, backed by Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians, produced another chart entry. At the beginning of 1949 she ended her decade-long association with Decca and signed with Columbia Records. In early February she recorded a selection of show tunes for her first Columbia album, Mary Martin Sings for You. Columbia also secured rights to her next cast album, for South Pacific. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s adaptation of James Michener’s World War II stories opened on Broadway on April 7, 1949, and became the pinnacle of Martin’s career. She starred in the production for more than two years, received her second Tony Award, and introduced such songs as “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” and “(I’m in Love With) A Wonderful Guy.” The Columbia cast album, the first original-cast recording issued in the new LP format, held the top chart position for a record sixty-nine weeks and eventually sold several million copies. During her extended New York run Martin found time for additional Columbia sessions. Her duet with Arthur Godfrey on the novelty “Go to Sleep, Go to Sleep, Go to Sleep” reached 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 ambitiously, Columbia president Goddard Lieberson engaged her to record studio-cast versions of earlier musicals that predated the original-cast-album era. 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 cut in 1950 and 1951. She also made her television debut as a guest on the NBC special Richard Rodgers’ Jubilee Show on March 4, 1951.

Martin left the Broadway company of South Pacific in June 1951, then traveled to London to open the West End production on November 1 and remained with it for another year. She also made a second cast recording for the English Columbia label. After returning to the United States she did not immediately enter a new show. On June 15, 1953, she appeared on a television special celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Ford Motor Company, performing an extended duet with Ethel Merman; Decca released a ten-inch commercial recording of the number. She made her final feature-film appearance playing herself in Main Street to Broadway, a picture created chiefly to promote Broadway. Rather than begin a new musical she next toured in a straight play, co-starring with Charles Boyer in Kind Sir, which reached Broadway on November 4, 1953, and played 166 performances before closing March 27, 1954. The property later succeeded as the 1958 film Indiscreet starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.

By this point Martin and her husband were eager to develop their own projects. With Halliday serving as producer, they turned to a new musical version of J.M. Barrie’s children’s play Peter Pan, engaging songwriters Mark (Moose) Charlap and Carolyn Leigh for a production that originated with the Los Angeles and San Francisco Light Opera Association. Additional songs by composer Jule Styne and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green were incorporated before the show opened on Broadway on October 20, 1954. RCA Victor recorded a cast album containing such numbers as “I’ve Got to Crow,” “I Won’t Grow Up,” and “Neverland”; it reached the Top Five on Billboard and number one on Cash Box. The production, in which Martin, then in her early forties, flew about the stage on piano wire, ran 152 performances in New York and would have continued longer had it not been physically exhausting for the star and had the contract not required closure to avoid competing with a live television broadcast. Martin received her third Tony Award. After her final stage performance on February 26, 1955, she flew in a live telecast viewed by an estimated sixty-five million people on the evening of March 7, earning an Emmy Award in the process.

Martin and Halliday vacationed in South America after Peter Pan and decided to purchase a farm in Anápolis, Brazil, where they would live for the next two decades whenever Martin was not working. She next returned to non-musical stage work, opening a revival of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth in Paris in June 1955. The production moved to Washington, D.C., and Chicago before a brief New York run of twenty-two performances beginning August 17, followed by a live television broadcast on September 11. Only six weeks later, on October 22, Martin appeared on network television in the ninety-minute special Together with Music alongside Noël Coward; a recording was issued privately at the time and later released commercially by DRG Records. Meanwhile she signed a three-year NBC contract worth one hundred thousand dollars for additional television specials, the first of which was another live Peter Pan broadcast on January 9, 1956. On October 28, 1956, she appeared in a television version of the play Born Yesterday.

Martin’s association with Peter Pan made her appealing to the 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 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. She also recorded Adventures for Readers for 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 orchestra; the album appeared 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. On November 27, 1957, she and co-star John Raitt performed Annie Get Your Gun on television, with a Capitol Records album 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, ultimately titled The Sound of Music, but while they secured rights and assembled the creative team Martin launched her first national concert tour in September 1958. The ambitious itinerary through eighty-seven cities extended into March