page_title: Mary Livingstone
section_title: "Chiss Sweeze"
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Livingstone / Performance career / "Chiss Sweeze"
caption_attribution_description: Publicity photo of Mary Livingstone from The Jack Benny Program.
context_page_description: Mary Livingstone was an American radio comedian and actress. She was the wife and radio partner of comedian Jack Benny.
  Enlisted casually to perform on her husband's program, she proved a talented comedian. But she also proved one of the rare performers 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.
context_section_description: Livingstone's "chiss sweeze sandwich" order in a lunch counter sketch was referred to for several years afterwards (episode 333; October 27, 1946). Another flubbed line was "How could you possibly hit a car when it was up on the grease rack?" Instead, she 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 twister, 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 ("...Boy did that grease rack!"  "That's "grass reek!"" "Well make up your mind!"). It was also mentioned in a later show when, while Christmas shopping, Mary notices a toy gas station and says that it "even has a grease rack".  This was a typical example of Benny's and Livingstone's (and the show's writers') ability to improvise comedy from un-scripted errors.
  Mary's trademark gag on the radio show, other than beleaguering Benny, was to read letters from her mother (who lived in Plainfield, New Jersey), usually beginning with "My darling daughter Mary...". The letters often included comical stories about Mary's (fictional) sister Babe — similar to Sadie'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 Benny and was forever advising her daughter to quit his employ.
caption: Mary Livingstone, 1940
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