Mitzi Gaynor, Showbiz Dynamo and Star of ‘South Pacific,’ Dies at 93
Mitzi Gaynor, the leggy entertainer whose saucy vitality and blond beauty graced the big screen in South Pacific and on Las Vegas stages and in spectacular TV specials, died Thursday. She was 93.
Gaynor died in Los Angeles of natural causes, her team announced.
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“As we celebrate her legacy, we offer our thanks to her friends and fans and the countless audiences she entertained throughout her long life,” Rene Reyes and Shane Rosamonda of Gaynor’s MGMT team said in a statement.
“Your love, support and appreciation meant so very much to her and was a sustaining gift in her life. She often noted that her audiences were ‘the sunshine of my life.’ You truly were. We take great comfort in the fact that her creative legacy will endure through her many magical performances captured on film and video, through her recordings and especially through the love and support audiences around the world have shared so generously with her throughout her life and career. Please keep Mitzi in your thoughts and prayers.”
Gaynor also received top billing over The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 16, 1964, and was famed costume designer Bob Mackie’s first celebrity client.
With her hazel eyes, tight curls and exuberant singing and dancing, the feisty Gaynor stood out in such movies as My Blue Heaven (1950) with Betty Grable and Dan Dailey; in Irving Berlin’s There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), opposite Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe, her eventual successor at 20th Century Fox; and in the Cole Porter MGM musical Les Girls (1957) with Gene Kelly.
Gaynor also starred in Anything Goes (1956) with Bing Crosby and Donald O’Connor, The Joker Is Wild (1957) with Frank Sinatra and Happy Anniversary (1959) with David Niven and Patty Duke.
In 1957, Gaynor was involved in a fierce competition to win the role of Navy nurse Nellie Forbush in Joshua Logan’s South Pacific, the long-awaited adaptation of the sensational Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway musical.
“I was filming The Joker Is Wild with Frank Sinatra and got the call that I’d be auditioning for Oscar Hammerstein at the Beverly Hills Hotel ballroom for South Pacific,” she told Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune in 2013. “I did ‘Honey Bun,’ I did ‘A Cockeyed Optimist.’ I did everything but strip.
“Oscar’s way, way at the other side of the ballroom. Why? I don’t know. But he walked over afterward. … You know when you do good? You feel like, ‘Well, at least I didn’t make a fool of myself.’ Oscar took my hand and said: ‘Thank you very much, Miss Gaynor. You’ve been a wonderful sport.”
She went on to famously sing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” and “Some Enchanted Evening” in the 1958 film, and the exotic World War II-set musical became the third highest-grossing movie ($17.5 million, or $196 million today) of the year. She also was nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress (comedy or musical).
Gaynor made her last noteworthy film appearance in Stanley Donen‘s Surprise Package (1960), a musical comedy that also starred Yul Brenner. With the Hollywood musical fading into obscurity, she retired from the movies after just one more film, the Kirk Douglas-starring For Love or Money (1963). She was in her early 30s.
“I quit films because they quit me,” she said in a 2012 interview for the TV Academy Foundation. “Marilyn Monroe was now the new Alice Faye/Betty Grable, she was doing the musicals at Fox. I wasn’t going to do My Fair Lady, and I wasn’t going to [sing] ‘The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Screaming’ — there was nothing for me to do.”
Partnered with husband/manager Jack Bean, she smartly trained her sights on Las Vegas. Dressed in glittery Mackie costumes and accompanied by a team of handsome male dancers, she began singing, dancing and telling jokes in Vegas in 1961 and eventually acquired a stake in the Flamingo Hotel.
After what the Catholic Church called a “lascivious” 13-minute performance of her act on the Sullivan show — she was introduced as “Hollywood’s Mitzi Gaynor!!!” — the Beatles requested her autograph. (During rehearsals, they also asked to borrow her hair dryer.) They were all on the show broadcast from a Miami hotel, seen by 70 million viewers; a week earlier, Sullivan had introduced the Fab Four to America for the first time.
In 1968, Gaynor reportedly was earning $45,000 a week in Vegas. Also that year, she starred on her first TV special, Mitzi, for NBC.
Five years later, she headlined the first of her six annual specials for CBS, including Mitzi and a Hundred Guys; Mitzi … A Tribute to the American Housewife; Mitzi … Zings Into Spring; and Mitzi … What’s Hot, What’s Not.
Gaynor said she regularly was approached to star in a weekly network variety show but refused. “Gene Kelly once told me, ‘Only do event television,'” she said.
After all her years working on TV, she finally won an Emmy in 2008, for her PBS special Mitzi Gaynor: Razzle Dazzle! The Special Years.
She was born Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber in Chicago on Sept. 4, 1931. Her mother was a dancer and her father a cellist, and she took her first dance class at age 8. An only child, she and her parents moved to Elgin, Illinois, then to Detroit and finally to L.A. when she was 11, to follow her dance teacher.
At age 13, then known as Mitzi Gerber, she convinced Edwin Lester, the impresario of the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, that she was 16 and landed a role in the musical Song Without Words.
She then danced during a comedy bit in a West Coast production of Jerome Kerns’ Roberta, starring Tom Ewell. That led to gigs in touring productions of The Fortune Teller (Gypsy Lady on Broadway), Song of Norway (as Miss Anders, her first speaking part), Naughty Marietta opposite Susanna Foster and as Katie in 1949’s The Great Waltz.
While in The Great Waltz, she was spotted by a Fox producer, signed to a contract by studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck and had her last name changed to Gaynor. In My Blue Heaven, she stood out in several send-ups of TV commercials in the film.
Fox was grooming her to be the next Grable, and in quick succession, she starred in the Jeanne Crain sorority story Take Care of My Little Girl (1951); Golden Girl (1951), set amid the California Gold Rush; the comedy We’re Not Married! (1952) with Monroe; Bloodhounds of Broadway (1952); Down Among the Sheltering Palms (1953); The I Don’t Care Girl (1953); Three Young Texans (1954); and The Birds and the Bees (1956)? an RKO remake of The Lady Eve.
On a Danny Thomas TV special in 1966, Gaynor met costume designer Ray Aghayan, who showed her a series of sketches for outfits he had designed, and she was impressed. She wanted him for her next show, but he was busy working with Judy Garland, so Aghayan suggested his partner, Mackie, instead. That marked the start of a long, fruitful collaboration.
Gaynor often was called upon to perform at the Academy Awards, and she brought down the house with performances of “The Moon Is Blue” (with host O’Connor) in 1954, “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (singing it over and over again when the show was running short) in 1959 and “Georgy Girl” in 1967.
Gaynor said she dated Howard Hughes for about eight months and broke up with him when she was 19. She said he begged her to marry him but “found out that he’d asked 400 other girls to marry him, too,” she said. (He advised her to buy “some dirt” in Las Vegas; she did for $25 an acre and sold it for “two million bucks,” she told Mo Rocca in October 2019 on CBS Sunday Morning.)
In September 2022, she received a Legacy Award from the Cinecon Classic Film Festival in Hollywood.
She was married to Bean, who started out as a public relations executive at MCA, from 1954 until his death in 2006.
In her memory, donations can be made to the Entertainment Community Fund and The Great American Songbook Foundation.
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