page_title: Mary Healy (entertainer)
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Healy (entertainer) / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Photo of w:Peter Lind Hayes, w:Mary Healy, and w:Sherman Billingsley at Billingsley's restaurant, The w:Stork Club. In 1950, CBS began a live program from the building with husband and wife Hayes and Healy and Billingsley as regulars. Hayes and Healy served as a type of "anchor" team while Billingsley hopped tables and chatted. The viewing public believed the show was being done live from the restaurant's private dining room, The Cub Room. However, it was not. CBS built a replica of the famed room on the sixth floor of the building to serve as the television studio the program was actually broadcast from. After 5 years, CBS dropped the show and ABC picked it up, using the CBS built studio. In May of that year, Billingsley made some remarks about fellow restaurateur w:Toots Shor's honesty and financial solvency on a live broadcast. ABC ended the program after the remarks in 1955. Billingsley was never truly at ease on camera and it seems to show in this promotional photo.
context_page_description: Mary Sarah Healy was an American actress, singer, and variety entertainer. She performed often with her husband, Peter Lind Hayes, for over 50 years, in a succession of films, television and radio shows and on the stage. Healy appeared in four Broadway shows between 1942 and 1958, and her film appearances include Second Fiddle, Star Dust and Theodore Geisel's musical fantasy, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. In 2006 she was inducted into the Nevada Entertainment/Artist Hall of Fame at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
context_section_description: Healy was born on April 14, 1918, in New Orleans. Crowned Miss New Orleans in 1935, Healy performed as a singer in the New Orleans area. She made her first screen appearance in the 1938 musical comedy Josette. In 1939 she had major film roles in Second Fiddle and Star Dust, in which she sang the title song.
  That year she also met entertainer Peter Lind Hayes who, along with his mother, vaudevillian Grace Hayes, was performing in North Hollywood. Healy and Hayes were married from 1940 until his death in 1998. With few exceptions, she and her husband worked together exclusively.
  Healy made her stage debut in Count Me In (1942), opposite Charles Butterworth and Jean Arthur. She starred as Mrs. Aouda in Orson Welles's 1946 Broadway production of Around the World in 80 Days, a role that she later reprised for The Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air radio adaptation of the musical play.
  Healy was a member of the regular cast of Hayes's CBS-TV series, Inside U.S.A. with Chevrolet (1949–50), a revue-style series that producer Arthur Schwartz based on his successful Broadway show, Inside U.S.A. Healy and Hayes were the first to sing the commercial jingle, "See the USA in Your Chevrolet", which later became a signature song for Dinah Shore.
  Among the couple's other joint ventures on television were The Stork Club (1950), a CBS interview program; NBC's The Peter Lind Hayes Show (1950–51), a live situation comedy in which they played themselves on a set matching their actual New Rochelle home; the second season of the CBS variety show, Star of the Family (1951–1952); and the NBC sitcom Peter Loves Mary (1960–61), in which they played a show business couple with two children who are adjusting to suburban life.  Healy and Hayes were among the substitute hosts of The Tonight Show in 1962, between Jack Paar's departure and Johnny Carson's arrival, and they were regular substitute hosts on Arthur Godfrey's TV programs. They were frequent guest panelists and once were the mystery guests on the long-running quiz show What's My Line?  The couple were also celebrity contestants on the TV game show Password.
  Healy and Hayes appeared in the cult fantasy film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953) and the Broadway comedy Who Was That Lady I Saw You With? (1958), written by Norman Krasna.
  During the 1960s, they starred in a breakfast conversation show on New York radio station 710 WOR.  WOR set up equipment in their house in suburban New Rochelle, New York so that they could broadcast on weekday mornings from their home.
  Over the years Healy and Hayes headlined on 14 occasions at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. The couple published a memoir, Twenty-Five Minutes from Broadway, in 1961. Healy self-published a second book, Moments to Remember with Peter and Mary — Our Life in Show Business from Vaudeville to Video, in 2004. In 2006 she was inducted into the Nevada Entertainment/Artist Hall of Fame at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
caption: Hayes and Healy with nightclub owner Sherman Billingsley, promoting the 1950 debut of the CBS-TV talk show, The Stork Club
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