Jean Maddern Pitrone - Take It from the Big Mouth: The Life of Martha Raye

Take It from the

Big Mouth

The Life of Martha Raye

Jean Maddern Pitrone

Copyright 1999 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pitrone, Jean Maddern, 1920

Take it from the big mouth : the life of Martha Raye / Jean Maddern Pitrone.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8131-2110-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Raye, Martha. 2. EntertainersUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

PN2287.R248P58 1999

791'.092dc21

98-49383

[B]

A special thank you to Steve Allen, whose generosity provided a more penetrating insight into the complex personality of his friend, Martha Raye.

And my gratitude to all my family for their encouragement and help, especially to Julie, Joyce, Joe, and Chuck.

Illustrations follow

The plaintive wail of bagpipes drifts across the Fort Bragg, North Carolina, military cemetery where a plain wooden coffin, draped with an American flag, rests on supports above an open grave. The date is October 22, 1994. The few family members of the deceasedfamed actress, comedienne, singer, and dancer Martha Rayeare divided now as they have been for a few years. Her fifty-year-old daughter sits with her uncles widow on folding chairs at the side of the grave. The forty-five-year-old husband of the seventy-eight-year-old Raye sits, with his daughter from a former marriage, at the foot of the grave.

As bagpipes drone Amazing Grace, uniformed Special Forces veterans stand in a half-circle near the burgundy canopy sheltering the waiting grave of Honorary Lieutenant Colonel Raye. Colonel Maggie, as she was known to her boys in Vietnam, has the singular honor of being the first civilian ever laid to rest at Fort Bragg.

Raye had served valiantly, bringing entertainment, good cheer, and tender nursing care to soldiers in precariously situated jungle outposts of Vietnam. In 1994, shortly before her death and in recognition of her outstanding service, not only in Vietnam but also in Korea and during World War II, President Clinton presented Raye with the prestigious Medal of Freedom. The nations highest civilian honor had previously been presented to such luminaries as Lech Walesa of Poland and Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom.

Raye often said, in purposeful self-deprecation, that she thought of herself as primarily a clown. Yup, a clown, thats me, she would say, flashing her famous grin. But melancholy lurked behind her raucous laugh. She was one of the worlds four best comediennes, Milton Berle had said, but she lived a life of personal disaster.

On learning of Rayes death, Bob Hope issued a statement to reporters regarding her popularity with the GIs in Vietnam where, he said, she was Florence Nightingale, Dear Abby, and the only singer who could be heard over the artillery fire.

It is likely that neither Berle nor Hope knew that Rayes melancholy and disastrous tendencies were rooted in what she considered a disability: her lack of education. Her own awareness of this deficiency had taken its toll on her psyche and even on her relationship with her daughter, her only child.

Martha Raye was, indeed, a multifaceted personality with an assortment of names to match her temperamental disposition. Her birth name was Margy Reed (sometimes changed, on a whim, to OReed). She also answered to Maggie, Teresa, Martha, Yvonne, and various last names resulting from seven marriages.

She was Mom to her daughter when the two of them were together. But when the young girl was packed off to boarding school or when Raye was away performingwhich was a great deal of the timethe girl felt alienated from her mother and thought of her much less often as Mom, from whom she was unwillingly detached, than as Martha. Martha the singer and comedienne. Martha the star, to whom a glittering career was the focus of her life.

A great number of the stories Raye told about her life were products of her lively imagination and of her eagerness to cover up the facts. Still, the stories she told of her birth in the bleak mining town of Butte, Montana, must have been true because each time she spoke of her parents and the date she was born, August 27, 1916, the details were consistent.

The manager of the Maguire Opera House was not impressed by the vaudeville team of The Girl and the Traveler, who came into his office in August 1916 and pleaded for a job. He stared at the nineteen-year-old girl, who looked ready to give birth any day, and at her older, debonair husband. Just another down-on-their-luck pair, he must have thought, striking out on their own and traveling what seasoned performers called the sudden-death circuit.

The manager shrugged when the fast-talking Pete Reed boasted of how he and his wife recently had packed in audiences that overflowed into the aisles back in Frisco. Here in Butte, the manager told them, they ran four shows a day. It was a tough schedule. Still, the Reeds looked as if they really needed a job. The manager relented. Well, okay. You can start tonight.

By 1900, the population of Butte had zoomed to 30,000, although in other respects the mining town had changed very little from its boom-town beginnings in the 1880s. Butte had become one of the ugliest, wildest towns in the West as Irish immigrants, spurred by reports of silver and copper, came northwest to mine the riches of Butte Hill. These lusty Irish miners were followed by others from the coal and tin mines of Wales and Cornwall, then by a sprinkling of Slavs and Italians.

At the end of their shifts, grimy miners put aside their picks and shovels, trudged away from the pits, and headed for tin-bucket wash-ups and hot meals at their camps or boardinghouses. Afterwards they crowded into Buttes saloons or jammed into the opera house, stamping their boots and applauding whenever their favorite singer of sentimental songs, golden-haired Kathie Putnam, was the attraction. Road company fare varied, though, and the miners also watched tear-jerking productions of East Lynne and Ten Nights in a Barroom.

On that August evening of 1916 when the Reeds bounced out onto the opera-house stage, they were introduced as an Irish immigrant team. But Maybelle Peggy Reed had been born in Montana to Teresa Sanchagrin and Samuel Hooper, who worked as a smelter in Great Falls. Mining towns also were familiar territory to Pete Reed, since his Irish relatives still worked back home in the mines of County Clare. So neither of the Reeds was unaware of the problems that existed between mining companies and their employees in the early 1900s.