June 13 - Mary Wickes

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On this day, in 1910, Mary Isabella Wickenhauser was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Mary’s parents loved the theater and began taking their daughter to see shows as soon as she was old enough to stay awake through an entire one. She was extremely intelligent for her age, ended up skipping not one but two grades and graduated from high school when she was only 16. She graduated from Washington University in 1930 with a double major of English Literature and Political Science with the intent of going into a career in law. But (and there always seems to be a but, doesn’t there), a professor said she should try a little acting, you know, just for fun. So she did. The law career never materialized.

By 1934, Mary was on Broadway having simplified her last name to Wickes. Her first show was The Farmer Takes a Wife with Henry Fonda. She followed Farmer up with runs in Stage Door, Hitch Your Wagon, Father Malachy's Miracle and Stars in Your Eyes. Her breakthrough role came in 1939 when she originated the uptight nurse Miss Preen in Kaufman and Hart’s classic comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner. The show enjoyed an almost two year run and when it came time to make the film version in 1942, Mary and star Monty Woolley were the only two cast members to make the leap to the big screen.

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The next two years were busy ones for Mary. She appeared in eleven films including the Abbott and Costello mystery Who Done It? She slowed down slightly after that, doing eight more movies through the end of the decade, perfecting her persona of the character who appears to be stodgy at first (like a nun or a secretary) but spits out the most sassy one liners by the picture’s end. Through the same time period, Mary also appeared in six more Broadway shows, ending with Town House in 1948. It would be three more decades before she returned to the Great White Way, when she spent nearly a year as Aunt Eller in a 1979 revival of Oklahoma!

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Mary’s career television career practically began with the medium itself. Though NBC had been broadcasting television since 1939 (CBS started a couple of years later), it wasn’t until after World War II that people began buying sets and actual content was needed. Mary’s first appearances came in 1948 on two episodes of Actors Studio on the brand new ABC network. She continued showing up on various anthology shows, including an episode of Studio One in Hollywood in 1949 as Mary Poppins (preceding Julie Andrews by fifteen years!). Her first series as a regular cast member came in 1953 as part of The Danny Thomas Show. She spent the first three seasons playing Liz O’neal. Over the next four decades, Mary would guest star in dozens of episodes of show ranging from whatever Lucille Ball’s latest series was to M*A*S*H to Punky Brewster to a Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation of The Man Who Came to Dinner in which she reprised he role of Miss Preen. She appeared as a regular cast member on eight more series, including Mrs. G. Goes to College (which earned her an Emmy nomination in 1962) and the show she’s probably best known for, Father Dowling Mysteries with Tom Bosley. She also had a few dozen supporting roles in films over the remainder of her career, including a turn as the housekeeper of the inn featured in White Christmas, Mrs. Squires in The Music Man and Aunt March in the 1994 version of Little Women.

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Mary enjoyed a number of positions in the Disney family during her career. She first worked for the company on two of its early television shows. She was Katie, the housekeeper, for the serial Walt Disney Presents: Annette which aired during the third season of The Mickey Mouse Club and she played Dolores Bastinado in three episodes of the first season of Zorro, both in 1958. She then played a pivotal, if entirely unseen, role in 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians as the live action model for the classic villain, Cruella de Vil. Thirty-one years later, Mary delighted audiences as the crusty old Sister Mary Lazarus in Touchstone Pictures’ Sister Act and its sequel, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. Her final role with Disney (her final role with any studio for that matter) was as a wisecracking gargoyle named Laverne in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

As Mary got older, she suffered from the usual list of illnesses that plague us all. Unfortunately for her, she fell during one of her hospitalizations and broke her hip. Complications from the resulting surgery proved to be too much for her and she died on October 22, 1995 at the age of 85. She was one recording session away from finishing her work on Hunchback; if you listen carefully, you might be able to pick out the six lines that Jane Withers had to record in her place. She never married nor did she have any children, so, besides the millions of laughs she left behind, her legacy was to use her estate to establish a $2 million memorial fund in her parent’s names at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, thereby honoring the people who planted the seeds of her remarkable career so many years before.

June 6 - Dr. John

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On this day, in 2019, Dr. John passed away in New Orleans, Louisiana. Born on November 20, 1941 in the same city, his given name was Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr. His father owned a store that sold and fixed appliances and sold records as well. Through the store, the young Malcolm was exposed to various jazz musicians as well as the minstrel type songs his aunts and uncles would sing at family gatherings. When he was thirteen, he met Professor Longhair, a New Orleans blues singer and pianist, and began performing with him soon afterward as a guitarist. Even though he was getting paid, it wasn't until a few years later, when he was able to join the Musicians Union in 1957, that he considered himself a professional musician. At that time he was struggling with his studies at Jesuit High School (the late gigs at nightclubs weren't helping). The school told him he needed to choose between school and his band. It didn't take long for Malcolm to choose his music.

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In 1957, Malcolm was hired as a producer at Ace Records and began working with artists like James Booker and Jimmy Clanton. He continued to play clubs around New Orleans and by the age of seventeen had written his first rock and roll song, Lights Out, that became a regional hit. In 1960, his musical career was temporarily derailed by an incident in Jacksonville, Florida. A band mate was being pistol whipped and Malcolm tried to save him. Malcolm's finger was over the barrel of the gun when it went off, removing part of a finger on his left hand, effectively ending his time as a guitarist. He returned to New Orleans and refashioned himself as a pianist and remained one for the remainder of his career. Unfortunately, he also got involved in the narcotics trade upon his return (both as a user and a dealer). This illegal activity resulted in another career derailment when he was arrested and spent two years in prison.

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While he was incarcerated, New Orleans decided to clean up its image by closing many of the clubs Malcolm used to perform in. When he was released in 1965, he couldn't find work locally and moved to Los Angeles, California where he became a studio musician. While playing with the likes of Sonny and Cher and Frank Zappa, Malcolm began developing a persona he named Dr. John, fashioned after a Haitian voodoo healer popular in New Orleans. Initially, Dr. John was supposed to be for one of Malcolm's friends, Ronnie Barron, but when Ronnie dropped out of the project, Malcolm took the persona on and released an album, Gris-Gris, in 1968.

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Over the next few years, Malcolm gained a cult following as Dr. John. He toured around the country, releasing several albums. While Dr. John performed for the growing crowds, the name Malcolm Rebennack continued to get the writing and producing credits. With the release of Dr. John's Gumbo, a 1972 album that mostly consisted of covers of New Orleans R&B songs, Dr. John became a mainstay of Louisiana music. It also marked the end of the overtly voodoo portions of his act. Going forward, he modeled his stage presence as a Mardi Gras revue, only occasionally bringing in voodoo influences. In 1973, he released the funk album In the Right Place, which contained the single Right Place Wrong Time, his only song to break into the Billboard Top Ten.

Over the next 46 years, while he would only break into the Top 100 list once more, Dr. John enjoyed immense success as a studio performer and much beloved collaborator. He recorded with The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond, Van Morrison, Aaron Neville, Harry Connick, Jr., Ringo Starr, Lou Reed, Greg Allman, LeAnn Rimes, Bonnie Raitt and Aretha Franklin, just to name a few of his over 2,000 credits. He was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live in 1977, sang the jingle for Popeye's Chicken, performed the theme songs for the television series Blossom and Curious George, was king of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2010 Mardi Gras season and kicked off the 2017 NBA All-Star Game. Oh, yeah, he also released over forty more albums of his own. During his career he won six Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.

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Dr. John made several contributions to Disneyana over the years. His version of the song Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive was used in 1992's The Mighty Ducks. He sang Cruella de Vil for the live action version of 101 Dalmatians. He joined Steve Tyrell for a duet of You've Got a Friend In Me for Steve's Disney Standards album. In 2009, he sang the opening song of The Princess and the Frog called Down in New Orleans. The Randy Newman written song was nominated for an Academy Award. And, in 2016, he sang a version of Bare Necessities for the live action Jungle Book.

While Dr. John stopped trafficking in narcotics after his stint in prison, he did not stop using them, especially heroin. After battling his addiction for a good chunk of his life, he was finally able to get sober after spending time in rehabilitation in 1989. His decades of drug use took their toll, however. He suffered a fatal heart attack on this day, shortly after recording a farewell album. He was 77.

April 20 - Betty Lou Gerson

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On this day, in 1914, Betty Lou Gerson was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Betty’s family spent most of her formative years in Birmingham, Alabama, where her father was a steel company executive. When she was sixteen, the Gerson clan moved to Chicago, Illinois and she got her first taste of performing on a radio show called The First Nighter Program. What made First Nighter different from other serials of the day is that it technically wasn’t a serial. It was the first anthology program meaning a new, complete story was presented each week. If you missed last week’s episode because your cousin was in town and wanted to see the sights, you won’t be confused as to what is happening in this week’s episode, a concept we’re used to but was novel in 1930. Romantic comedies were the usual fare on First Nighter and for the two years she spent with the show, Betty was frequently paired with a young Don Ameche.

Betty’s career didn’t really take off until she was 21 and living in New York City. For the latter half of the Thirties, she became a staple in several radio soap operas. She played the title role in Arthur Grimm’s Daughter, lead the cast as Julia in Midstream, was one of the main Lonely Women and appeared on the radio version of Guiding Light. It wasn’t all melodrama for Betty though, as she continued being the resident romantically comic lead (although some weeks she was comically romantic for a change of pace) on anthologies like Curtain Time and Grand Hotel.

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In the mid Forties, Betty changed locations by moving to Los Angeles but continued working in the medium of radio. She reestablished herself on the airwaves in dramas like The Whistler, Crime Classics, Mr. President and Johnny Modero, Pier 23. She also had several roles on Lux Radio Theater including a turn as Glinda the Good Witch in a 1950 production of The Wizard of Oz.

1950 was also the year Betty first became part of the Disney family, when she was cast as the narrator of Cinderella. Her most enduring contribution didn’t come until eleven years later when her voice burst into our eardrums as the deliciously over-the-top Cruella de Vil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. She also played Mrs. Birdwell, a contestant on the show-within-a-movie, What’s My Crime, that Horace and Jasper watch while the Dalmatians escape from de Vil Manor. Her final Disney role was a rare live action one when she did a cameo in Mary Poppins as an old Crone.

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Betty was seen on the big screen only a handful of times in her career. For instance, she played Nurse Anderson in the 1958 version of The Fly, Yvonne Kraus in the 1949 anti-communist propaganda film The Red Menace, Kate Peacock in 1959’s The Miracle on the Hills and a half dozen small, mostly uncredited roles in mostly B-Movie film noirs. She did about the same number of live action roles for television, appearing on Perry Mason three times and once each on The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Hazel, Wanted Dead or Alive and The Rifleman. In 1966, she retired from acting but not from working. When she married her second husband (her first husband had died the year before), she supported him at his telephone answering service.

In 1996, Betty was made an official Disney Legend not only for trying to skin puppies in the name of fashion but for making us love her as she did it. She came out of retirement just once, in 1997, to provide the voice of Frances the Fish in Cat’s Don’t Dance, the only animated feature ever produced by Turner Feature Animation. Just over a year later, Betty suffered a fatal stroke on January 12, 1999 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 84.