Mary and Me
/Jon Shorr
A week before my wedding, a package arrived at my Oxford, Ohio apartment from a New York jewelry store. In it, a sterling silver frame that held an 8x10 black & white photo of Broadway star Mary Martin and her husband Richard Halliday on their wedding day. Engraved across the top of the frame, my wedding date “May 5, 1968;” across the bottom “May 5, 1940.” Written across the bottom of the picture: “To Jon and Susan Shorr, May 5, 1968, with our affectionate best wishes for your happiness always. Mary Martin and Richard Halliday, May 5, 1940.”
My relationship with Mary (I call her Mary) started long before 1968, with Peter Pan, the 1954 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical that NBC televised live in 1955 from the Winter Garden Theatre. Mary played the part of Peter, the boy that never grew up. She sang; she fought pirates; she flew by means of wires attached to a harness she wore under her costume. The show was so popular that NBC televised another live performance of it the following year. They televised yet another, slightly shorter live production in 1960 and rebroadcast the color videotape of that production in 1963. I watched the telecasts and reruns; I knew the songs; I knew the lines; I had the album to sing along with.
I didn’t think much about her as a person, though, until 1966 when I got the job of head of publicity for South Pacific, Miami University’s 1966 All Campus Musical. I was a sophomore, and the only reason I got the job was that the three seniors on the publicity committee had quit, and I was the only person left. I knew the minute I got the job that I had to invite Mary Martin, not as a publicity stunt, but as a courtesy: it just seemed to me that you couldn’t do South Pacific without at least inviting the person for whom Rodgers and Hammerstein had written the starring role. I’d seen the movie, of course, with Mitzi Gaynor as Nellie Forbush, but I knew that the real Nellie Forbush was Mary Martin, just as the real Maria Von Trapp wasn’t Julie Andrews, but Mary Martin who originated the role on Broadway and for whom Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein had created the part. My reference point for South Pacific was the Broadway soundtrack album, the one with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza on the cover, the one that my mom listened to and sang along with regularly when I was growing up.
There was no internet in 1966 when I wanted to invite Mary Martin to Miami’s production of South Pacific, so unable to find her address, I sent it to the 46th Street Theater in New York where she had recently opened in the new musical I Do! I Do! opposite The Music Man’s Robert Preston. I got no reply. Nor did I expect one.
The following November, I Do! I Do! came to Cincinnati’s Shubert Theater for a week—still with Mary Martin and Robert Preston; that’s where my girlfriend Susan and I saw it. Afterward, we wrote Mary a fan letter, telling her how much we admired her, from the first time I saw Peter Pan to listening to her in South Pacific, and finally to our seeing her in I Do! I Do!. I don’t remember where I sent the letter, probably to the theater where the show played after it left Cincinnati. I got no reply. Nor did I expect one. But then, a month or so later, an envelope showed up in my off-campus apartment’s mailbox:
Z O O M… I certainly am flying since reading your letter! My spirits soared to new heights with your gracious and kind compliments. I’m thrilled that you enjoyed the show so much because I really have had the time of my life since I said, “I do, I do.” Do know that my thoughts shall include two darling people from Miami U, to whom I send my every best wish for happiness and success. Always, [signed in red] Mary Martin
A couple years later, when Susan and I decided to get married, we both knew that between my relationship (albeit one-sided) with Mary and that letter we’d gotten, we’d invite her to our wedding. We knew she wouldn’t come; we didn’t expect a reply. But we sent her an invitation with a note attached, anyway. A few weeks later, this handwritten letter came in the mail:
Very dear Jon Shorr, I read your letter and know why I love to tour. How very dear and kind and heartwarming of you to share the happy news about you and Susan. You can’t possibly know how much both Mr. Halliday and I would love to be there with the two of you on May 5, 1968—you see we were married on May 5, 1940! It would be such fun for us to celebrate our 28th year by being with you two at the chapel in Oxford, Ohio! But we will be in Los Angeles, California. We have to be there. We opened our 14 month tour of I Do I Do Monday here in Rochester and open in L.A. the 29th, where we’ll play for eight weeks. We are going up and down the U.S. until June, 1969—and oh! how good it would be if our paths would cross. Mr. and Mrs. Halliday would always welcome the opportunity of seeing Mr. & Mrs. Shorr!! Many thanks—much happiness—the best of health—our affectionate best—Always, Mary Martin.
Wow, we thought, life doesn’t get much better than this. A few weeks later, it did: we received the sterling silver frame engraved with our respective wedding dates.
The following year, I Do! I Do was back on tour, this time with a stop in Dayton, Ohio, less than an hour up the interstate from Cincinnati where Susan and I lived and were both teaching. After seeing an ad for the show in the Cincinnati Enquirer, we wrote to Mary c/o the Dayton theater, reintroducing ourselves, and on a lark (as usual), said that if by any chance she was going to be in Cincinnati to do any TV talk shows, etc., we’d love to have her over for dinner or meet her for a drink. Of course, I expected that she would never even get the letter; I didn’t expect a reply; I have no idea why we even wrote it.
Susan and I were in our first year of teaching junior and senior high school English, came home every day totally exhausted, graded a few papers, ate dinner, planned the next day’s classes, and fell into bed, usually before 10:00. So when the phone rang one night at 11:00, I jumped up, certain that such a middle-of-the-night call could only mean a death in the family.
“Is this Jon Shorr?” the male voice asked.
“Yes,” I said, bracing myself for the worst.
“This is Richard Halliday,” the voice said. “Mary asked me to call you.” Who’s Richard Halliday, I’m thinking to myself. Who’s Mary? And then it hit me. That Richard Halliday!
“She’s so sorry that she won’t be able to meet you in Cincinnati,” he continued without stopping, “but she was wondering if there was any chance you could come to Dayton to see the show and visit with us afterwards.” When I allowed as how we would love to do that, he told us that there would be tickets for us at the box office and that she was “so excited” to finally meet us. The next morning, I said to Susan, “Did I dream that Richard Halliday called us, or did that really happen?”
There were, in fact, tickets for us at the box office, fifth row center, which gave us a much better view of the show than our usual back-of-balcony seats.
After the show, we found the backstage door, crowded with fans and guarded by a stern-looking usher whose job it was, apparently, to let no one through. We moved slowly through the crowd until we got close enough to catch his attention.
“We, um, are supposed to go backstage,” I mumbled, barely making eye contact.
“Sorry,” he said, “no one’s allowed backstage.”
“But Mr. Halliday said—”
“—Oh,” the usher’s demeanor immediately changed. “Are you the Shorrs from Cincinnati?” Susan and I looked at each other. “Come right through; Miss Martin’s expecting you.”
We walked down the hall, where another guard spotted us and said, “Are you the Shorrs from Cincinnati? Come right in,” leading us to a dressing room door. “Miss Martin will be right in.”
We went in and sat down. In less than a minute, she swept in, her hair wrapped in a striped towel, the rest of her wrapped in an orange velour robe,.
“Are you the Shorrs? Oh Jon, Susan, it is so nice to meet you, finally, I can’t believe you drove all the way from Cincinnati just to see us! Mr. Halliday is so sorry to have missed you, but he had to go back to New York.”
I don’t remember the details of the conversation, but it went pretty much like that, Mary the epitome of graciousness, me feeling like Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Cramden when he meets a beautiful woman and all he can say is “Ahma-humma, bumma-hamma,” etc.
Several years later, in the summer of 1977, my parents, who then lived in Knoxville, TN, asked if they were remembering correctly that Susan and I had had a correspondence some years back with Mary Martin and then told us that Mary was in town putting together a new show, Do You Turn Somersaults?, with Anthony Quayle at the University of Tennessee. My kids, then seven and five, who’d grown up watching and listening to the music from Peter Pan, excitedly put together and rehearsed their version of the show, including most of the songs, confident that they’d get to perform for Mary. We loaded the car with costumes and props, as well as our regular summer-vacation-in-Knoxville paraphernalia, and headed south.
When we got to Knoxville, we learned that she’d just injured her leg during a rehearsal and was at least temporarily laid up (in fact, it was a ligament in her knee, and although she was 64 at that point, didn’t miss a performance, appearing on stage in an ankle-to-thigh cast).
We felt like since we knew about her injury and were only a couple miles away, we should do something (isn’t that what friends are for?). My mom had several little beanbag frogs that her cousin had made, so we wrapped one, thinking maybe she’d like to snuggle with it, maybe holding it would make her feel better, enclosed a note reminding her of our history, and delivered it to the box office of the Clarence Brown Theater on UT’s campus. We didn’t expect a reply. Nor did we get one.
No, wait; that’s only partly true. Of course I expected a reply after all we’d been through together, Mary and me! I expected a letter or a phone call, an invitation to come and visit her during her convalescence, tickets to the show when she recovered. Part of me expected her to come to my parents’ house for a comforting dinner of matzo ball soup and brisket that would take her mind off her troubles.
In fact, we weren’t friends except in my imagination, at least not the kind of friends I told myself we were. We didn’t have a real friendship or a real relationship. My cynical brain, forty years later, says that It was only as real as she wanted it to be. That was very different from its being as real as I wanted it to be. Maybe my series of letters arrived at exactly the time that she was feeling isolated as a celebrity and craved contact with “ordinary people.” And the coincidence of our wedding anniversaries was just too irresistible not to respond to. Maybe I needed the ego validation that came from knowing that I had a correspondence with a famous person. Maybe by 1977, she’d outgrown her need to connect with us.
My cynical brain says that it really was no different from my friend who had the Farrah Fawcett bathing suit poster on his wall and was convinced that if he and Farrah were ever in the same room, she would have seen what a great guy he was, and they would have run off together for a life of bright teeth, flipping hair out of their faces, and who knows what else. It was no different from my friend who had seen The Beatles perform at Crosley Field in Cincinnati and when Paul made eye contact with her knew that if only he’d had her address or phone number, her life would be entirely different today.
In fact, Susan and I didn’t pursue the relationship, either. What if it felt to Mary that we’d abandoned her in 1973 when her husband died and we didn’t send her a sympathy note? Or a few months later when that play they’d been rehearsing in Knoxville closed on Broadway after only three weeks of terrible reviews and I didn’t send her a “there-there” note? Should I have sent her a congratulatory note in 1986 when she got back up on the metaphorical horse after being seriously injured in an automobile accident a few years before and co-starred with Carol Channing in the two-woman show “Legends?” When she died in 1990, should I have sent sympathy cards to her children? Were we the phony friends that weren’t there for her and her family when they needed us?
Years later, I read Mary’s autobiography, My Heart Belongs. She never said a bad word in the book about anyone. She thought everyone was wonderful, from the British royal family to the royal footmen; from the children who’d come to the Winter Garden Theater to see Peter Pan and wouldn’t leave until she came out after the show and taught them to crow; to the horse she rode (on a treadmill, no less) and “fell madly in love with” in Annie Oakley. She wrote about the time “a tiny little three year old girl got away from her parents and crawled onto stage,” looking terrified. The show stopped, she said. “When she got close enough… I picked her up and took her back to her parents… She was a deaf-mute [her parents told me], and crawling onto the stage to see Peter Pan. It was the first thing she’d ever done on her own with no direction… I still hear from her and her family.” She wrote about the Catholic nun, Sister Gregory, who wrote to her after seeing South Pacific and praised its message of tolerance. Mary wrote back and later consulted with her when she was rehearsing The Sound of Music. “To this day,” Mary said, writing about it decades later, “she is one of my dearest friends.”
Mary Martin said that of all the characters she played, from Nellie Forbush to Maria Von Trapp, from Dolly Levi to Annie Oakley, Peter Pan was her favorite character because, "Neverland is the way I would like real life to be: timeless, free, mischievous, filled with gaiety, tenderness and magic." Maybe in some small way, we helped each other hold onto the belief in that version of life. Maybe that’s what attracted us to each other, Mary and me.
Mary Martin was the Julie Andrews of her day, the Julia Roberts, the Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, the J-Lo, the Jennifer Hudson. She appears to have been a genuinely nice person who loved connecting with her audiences, especially those people who reached out to her in some way. I was one of them. And that was much more than I should have expected.
Author’s Note: When the pop music star made eye contact with you at that concert, was it random or did you really make a connection? Was that response you got back from the celebrity after you’d sent a fan letter real or form? Did she actually sign it, or was the signature computer-generated? Ever since I got my first response from mid-Century Broadway star Mary Martin to a letter I wrote her, I’ve wondered about the nature of our relationship. “Mary and Me” documents that relationship and explores those questions.
Jon Shorr's fiction and essays have been published in Cagibi, The Jewish Literary Journal, The Write Launch, The Inquisitive Eater, Pangyrus, Tricycle, and elsewhere, and have won awards from the Writers Alliance of Gainesville, Stories That Need to be Told, and The Baltimore Sun. A retired University of Baltimore professor, he currently produces a weekly podcast for Passager Books.
