Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,399
By This is the grave of Mary Martin.
Born in 1913 in Weatherford, Texas, Martin grew up in a pretty well off family. Her father was a local doctor and her mother taught violin on the side. From the time she was a child, she had a really powerful singing voice. Her and her sisters started a little local trio and her voice caught attention. She also had incredible mimicry skills. She was a good student too. But her first attempt to leave home was something of a failure to launch. In 1930, her parents sent her to Nashville to attend a finishing school/college called Ward-Belmont. But while he had some fun in Nashville and did some performing, she was deeply homesick. So she returned home, married her high school sweetheart, a man named Benjamin Hagman, and had a son named Larry. Yes, that’s right, Larry Hagman, future star of Dallas.
But Martin was young and confused and probably a bit depressed for the first time in her life. The marriage really didn’t help. She was bored. Her sister suggested she teach dance. She went to California for a bit to learn more about it. Then she came home and opened a dance studio in the town of Mineral Wells. Alas, this being Texas, some asshole Christian burned it down because dancing was a sin. Sounds like Mineral Wells to me. To be clear as well, this was ballroom dancing. Not like she was teaching the Charleston or something. Anyway, she started to want to spend more time in California and her father just sat her down and said to get a divorce. Not too often you’d probably see a father encourage that in the late 30s. So she did–including leaving her son behind with his father. Whatever you want to say about a parent leaving behind a child like this, and you could say plenty, it’s also safe to say that no woman was going to have a career performing at this time with as a single mom with a couple of kids in tow.
Well, Martin did very well. Oscar Hammerstein discovered her at a performance one night and was quite impressed. She started getting radio show gigs by 1940, but became more prominent working on Broadway, where she became one of the stage’s big stars. She worked on Cole Porter’s Leave It To Me! and later played herself in the 1946 biopic of Porter, Night and Day, starring Cary Grant. This play had a famous song called “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and part of the reason she became famous is that she was in the play that included this song when her father actually died. She couldn’t attend the funeral because she couldn’t get time off. Of course the media ate this up. She would star in a lot of top end Hollywood musicals over the next few years–Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus, Lute Song, South Pacific. She won the Tony for the latter.
Martin would remain mostly a Broadway actress for the rest of her life. She had plenty of chances to work in Hollywood, and did on occasion, but she didn’t like it. I assume it’s that the production was so slow compared to Broadway where you get up and do the thing in one take every night. She also said that she just wasn’t as good in Hollywood because she needed the energy of live audiences to be at her best. Makes sense. Plus it’s not like she needed the work. She won the Tony in 1954 for her work in Peter Pan. That play was performed on television several times in the late 50s and she did all those performances. She also did the TV version of her work in Annie Oakley. This is important in part because being on Broadway in these years, there’s not a ton of recorded work of her art otherwise. She also won the Tony for The Sound of Music, which she debuted in 1959 and played into 1961. She was also nominated for a Tony in 1966 for I Do! I Do!
Martin remarried in 1940, to a theater critic named Richard Halliday. There was lots of speculation that they were both gay and married each other as a cover up for both. Friends much later basically confirmed this. But they stayed together forever, until his death in 1973. He loved her enough to be buried all the way out in Weatherford in her family cemetery, so there’s that. They also had a child together in 1941. As for Larry, there’s no question that when he became interested in acting, she helped him, but he didn’t spend too much time with his mom when he was a kid. He was in New York on occasion, but she was usually too busy to be an active mother. It wasn’t really until after Halliday died that he developed a good relationship with her. She was nearly killed by a drunk driver in 1982, when she was in a car with Janet Gaynor and other theater people. In fact, this would kill Gaynor in 1984, who never really recovered from her injuries. But Martin was fairly lucky here. It was cancer that would get her, in 1990. She was 76 years old.
Let’s watch some Mary Martin.
Mary Martin is buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Weatherford, Texas.
If you would like this series to visit other Tony winners for Best Actress in a Musical, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Nanette Fabray, who won in 1949 for Love Life, is in Culver City, California. Ethel Merman, who won in 1951 for Call Me Madam, is in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.