Mary Kay Stearns
Television's first sitcom star dies at 93
In the late 1940s, as television was just beginning to become a mass medium, Stearns and her husband Johnny, both Broadway actors, were hired by the Du-Mont Television Network for a new comedy for their fledgling network. They secured the sponsorship of Anacin, who was skeptical of the medium, expecting the series debut to be seen by only about 200 people. Through a free giveaway promotion, they soon realized that the viewership was instead in the tens of thousands.
Mary Kay and Johnny proved to be one of Du-Mont's first and biggest hit series. The show was a roughly fictionalized version of their own lives, with their son and friends playing themselves and the couple writing all of their own scripts. The show would eventually get some episodes aired on the bigger networks NBC and CBS.
Unfortunately for posterity purposes, Mary Kay and Johnny was largely forgotten by the 1970s, and its program archive was mostly discarded; other than a few clips and a single full episode, none of which have made it to the Internet yet, the remainder of the series was last known to be sitting at the bottom of the East River or Upper New York Bay since the tapes were dumped there in 1975. Thus, bigger names with longer reputations on film and radio, such as Lucille Ball, Gracie Allen and Betty White would overshadow Mary Kay. The couple largely stopped performing after the 1950, further contributing to the rarity.
Johnny died in 2001. Mary Kay died November 17, but her death was not reported until January 2019.
Obituary from Deadline/MSN
Wikipedia
@jmyrlefuller What happened to the DuMont network archive was a crime---a successor network, likely Metromedia (which evolved in due course into Fox), dumped just about
all the DuMont kinescopes into New York's East River. It's believed that only 350 of DuMont's 20,000+ television episodes survive, mostly involving Jackie Gleason's
Honeymooners sketches from his original
Cavalcade of Stars show (from which CBS ultimately hired him for the original
Jackie Gleason Show), but also involving items from the personal archives of Gleason and other DuMont stars such as Dennis James and possibly the family of Ernie Kovacs. (The same thing, unfortunately, was done with several thousand transcription discs of vintage network radio programs, especially Procter & Gamble's destruction of over three thousand transcription discs of radio legend
Vic & Sade after World War II. Two hundred
Vic & Sade episodes survived that destruction and can be heard today, but you wonder what Procter & Gamble wasn't thinking as opposed to what Johnson Wax and Carnation were thinking when they allowed just about
everything from a quarter century of
Fibber McGee & Molly [the show's latter-year 15-minute semi-serial-style episodes survived, I believe, by way of "Fibber McGee" actor Jim Jordan himself] to survive.)
Until CBS and Time Warner closed down the WB and UPN networks to create the CW in their stead, the DuMont network was the only American television network ever to shutter.
RIP Ms. Stearns. Your place in broadcast history is secure. But it might have been nice to see your show.
