Mary Livingstone

Mary Livingstone born Sadie Marks on June the 23rd, 1905, was an radio comedienne and the wife and radio partner of Jack Benny. But she also proved one of the rare performers to experience severe stage fright

years after her career was established — so much that she retired from show business completely.

She was born in Seattle, Washington, but raised in Britain, Vancouver. Sadie Marks herself came from a respected show business family: relatives included her cousins the Marx Brothers and Al Shean. She met her future husband at a Passover seder at her family home when she was 14; Benny was invited by his friend and her cousin,Zeppo Marx while Benny and the Marx Brothers were in town together to perform. Sadye developed a near-instant crush on the funny, somewhat shy man. But when he insulted her by excusing himself for the night in the middle of her violin performance, she got her revenge the next night. She took three friends to the theater where Benny performed, sitting in the front row and making sure not to laugh. Benny said later it drove him nuts that he couldn't get the four girls to laugh at anything.

Three years later, when she was 17, Sadie visited California with her family while Jack Benny was in the same town for a show. Still nursing a small crush on the comedian, Sadie went to the theater to re-introduce herself to him. As he approached her in a hallway, she smiled and said, "Hello, Mr. Benny, I'm..." But he interrupted her with a "Hello," and continued on his way down the hall without pausing; she learned much later that when Benny was deep in thought about his work, it was nearly impossible to get his attention otherwise.

They met again a few years later — while she was said to be working as a salesgirl at a May Departments Store in down-town Los Angeles  and the couple finally began dating. Invited on a double-date by a friend who had married Sadie's sister, Babe, Benny brought Sadie along to keep him company. This time, the couple clicked: Jack was finally smitten with Sadie and asked her on another date. She turned him down at first — she was seeing another young man — but Benny persisted. He visited her at The May Company almost daily and was reputed to buy so much ladies' hosiery from her he helped her set a sales record; he also called her several times a day when on the road.

At the same time, Benny seemed fearful of a committed relationship and Sadie Marks continued dating other men, even becoming engaged, which panicked the comedian enough to beg her to come to Chicago, where he tried to convince her she was too young to marry. When the argument didn't convince her, Benny confessed he was in love with her and wanted to marry her himself. In a scene that could have been a later Jack Benny Program routine, she needled him about her being too young to marry. "You're not too young to marry me!" he retorted, his way of proposing. Sadie Marks broke her existing engagement and married Jack Benny in 1927; the marriage ended only when Benny died in 1974. In her biography of her husband, she revealed she didn't tell him she was the little girl he'd once needled until after they'd dated a little while.

Sadie took part in some of Jack's vaudeville performances but never thought of herself as a full-time performer, seeming glad to be done with it when he moved to radio in 1932. Then came the day he called her at home and asked her to come to the studio quickly. An actress hired to play a part on the evening's show didn't show up and instead of risking a hunt for a substitute, Benny thought his wife could handle the part: a character named "Mary Livingstone" scripted as Benny's biggest fan.

At first, it seemed like a brief role — she played the part on that night's and the following week's show before being written out of the scenario. But NBC received so much fan mail that the character was revived into a regular feature on the Benny show, and the reluctant Sadie Marks became a radio star in her own right. Mary Livingstone underwent a change, too: from fan to tart secretary-foil; the character occasionally went on dates with Benny's character but they were rarely implied to be truly romantically involved otherwise. (The lone known exceptions: a fantasy sequence on both the radio and television versions of the show, as well as when NBC did a musical tribute to Jack, in which Mary admitted to being "Mrs. Benny.")

Mary Benny soon enough displayed her own sharp wit and pinpoint comic timing, often used to puncture Benny's on-air ego, and she became a major part of the show, enough so that, giving in when she was addressed as "Mary Livingstone" often enough when out in public, she ended up changing her name legally to Mary Livingstone. Years later, her husband admitted how strange it felt to call her Sadie even in private.

Livingstone's honest, wisecracking style proved a perfect lancing of Benny's on-air persona as a vain skinflint. (By contrast, Portland Hoffa— the real-life wife of Benny's friend, fellow comedian, and longtime "feuding" rival Fred Allen — played a squeaky friend who usually hied Allen off to 'Allen's Alley' after a brief comic exchange.) But she was still prone to occasional flubbed lines on the show, and many became as legendary as the deliberately crafted "illogical logic" of Gracie Allen or the cleverly scripted malapropisms of Jane Ace and (as Molly in The Goldbergs) Gertrude Berg.

Perhaps the best-remembered such flub was Livingstone's "chiss sweeze sandwich" order in a lunch counter sketch (the flub was referred to for several years afterwards). But nearly as well-remarked was the show on which she was to ask Jack, "How could you possibly hit a car when it was up on the grease rack?" Instead, Livingstone 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 twists, 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 wreak!"" "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 and Livingstone, and the show's writers' ability to mine classic comedy out of, apparently, nothing much.

Mary's trademark bit on the radio show (other than haranguing Benny) was to read letters from her mother, usually beginning with, My darling daughter Mary... and often including comical stories about Mary's (fictional) sister Babe (similar to Sadye'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 Jack Benny and was forever advising her daughter to quit his employ.