‘My heart belongs to Daddy’ by Cole Porter set Mary Martin's good reputation in many hearts in 1938. Her sudden success led to her performing late-night serenades at the popular Rainbow Room, the capstone of the Rockefeller Center complex. During her stint at the Rainbow Room, Mary Martin dated Winthrop Rockefeller in early 1939. After dancing at El Morocco club they were voted ‘The Handsomest Couple’. Mary Martin was a woman who seemed to live life to the full. Did these relationships with Rockefeller and others fail because Martin could presage the libidinal demands of a full-on heterosexual relationship? Or did she just put her career first? Were Jean Arthur and Mary Martin lovers? It was a hot topic of Hollywood speculation for years. All the persistent rumors probably had bearing on Martin eschewing Hollywood for Broadway. She was emotionally more suited to success in the theater and that is where she found it. As Martin put it herself: “I was not thinking of the past or the future. I was very much living in the present.” And that is exactly how she lived.
In 1942, Dick Powell signed a contract with Paramount Pictures on condition that he vary his roles and would occasionally do some dramatic films which Warner Brothers had refused to cast him in. But his first film for them was Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and his bit part in that wartime musical was with Mary Martin doing probably the best number in the film, Hit the Road to Dreamland. They certainly seemed well suited for each other onscreen. With that in mind, Powell got to do his first color film Happy Go Lucky (1943) with Mary Martin the following year. But for some reason Mary Martin never quite clicked with film audiences, which was quite strange because she certainly had a sparkling personality. Powell did this film reteaming with Martin with the hope that more interesting parts would eventually come his way and Happy Go Lucky is certainly a very amusing Paramount comedy. Martin plays a cigarette girl pretending to be a débutante and hoping to land a rich husband. Her sights are set on Rudy Vallee, reprising his role from Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story. Along for the ride is Betty Hutton who is a fellow cigarette girl traveling with Martin and an old flame of Eddie Bracken's character.
Mary Martin flashes a great pair of legs in the film's show stopper, "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay". Miss Martin has set out for Trinidad for the sole purpose of catching herself a millionaire, Rudy Vallee, who is a forerunner of Mister Howell of Gilligan's Island fame. Marjory (Mary Martin) decides to sail off for New York with her new beau, Alfred, who generously offers $2,000 to Pete (Dick Powell) for introducing him to his bride-to-be. A despondent Pete later is delighted to find Marjory waiting for him at his home. Powell and Martin have a very realistic chemistry. After Marjory accepts Alfred's proposal, we can see Pete feeling a pang of jealousy. Broadway producer James Kirkwood learned about Mary Martin having been smitten with Dick Powell (her co-star in Happy Go Lucky and True to Life). Martin recalled how devastated Powell was when Joan Blondell left him for Mike Todd.
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"Dick was going to marry Mary Brian, but Joan played her cards well. Mike Todd gifted her a mink coat and she went to New York. Dick and I were good friends for years. One night Dick invited me to his apartment. He was great in bed and all, but I couldn't leave Richard [Halliday]." Mary Brian (1906-2002) was married twice. Her first husband was a magazine illustrator named Jon Whitcomb who she married in 1941... for six weeks. Her second marriage was much happier and lasted much longer. In 1947, she married the film editor George Tomasini and they remained married until his death in 1964. Neither marriage produced children. Mary had some pretty famous boyfriends in Hollywood: Jack Pickford, Gene Raymond; she was engaged to Dick Powell in the early 1930s and engaged also to Cary Grant in 1936. When Blondell asked Powell if he loved Brian, he didn't know what to say. When Powell, who was thinking of marrying Brian, asked Blondell for advice, the blonde bombshell made him doubt of his true feelings. Powell broke up with Brian in 1933 and dated Margaret Lindsay, while he initiated a romance with Blondell in late 1934.
According to Hedda Hopper: Mary Martin was "the most gullible of all them, who sees, hears, and speaks no evil." In the New York Post, Clive Barnes claimed that “Mary Martin's special charm was an innocence that was never sugary, a voice that never cloyed and a personality that happily combined the indomitable with the vulnerable on a spectrum that made it possible for us all to identify with.” Hedda Hopper noted in The Whole Truth and Nothing But (1962): "Michael Todd taught Elizabeth Taylor an awful lot about sex. Todd was one of the most ruthless men in show business. Todd had gone through the jungle of Broadway and taught Taylor everything he knew about sex, good and bad. He proposed to Liz Taylor in the office MGM gave him at the studio when he was shooting Around the World in Eighty Days. He said: “Elizabeth, I love you, and I’m going to marry you, and from now on you’ll know nobody but me.” Only he didn’t say “know.” They were married and they started one of the craziest, fightingest, most passionate love matches recorded in modern times, repeating Todd's pattern with previous wife Joan Blondell. Unlike Blondell, Todd bought Taylor the world, or as much of it as he could lay hands on: a dozen of jewels every Saturday; a plane; a villa in France; dresses by the hundred. Whatever she wanted, she got. Todd knew he was spoiling her rotten, but he loved to see her face light up when she saw his presents."
"For the Academy Award show where he expected her to collect an Oscar for Raintree County, he bought her a diamond tiara. “Hasn’t every girl got one?” he asked blandly. He gave her a Rolls-Royce and a $92,000 diamond ring. In return she gave him a daughter, Liza. Todd used to say: “If you want to be a millionaire, live like one.” For the London opening of his picture, Elizabeth was draped in a ruby-and-diamond necklace, with bracelet and earrings to match. It was straight out of Arabian Nights. Todd was frantically busy with two spectacular shows to put on, on the screen for his premiere and at Battersea Festival Gardens, where he threw a shindig for two thousand people to celebrate, scoring a triumph that gave him every front page in London, except The Times. What some of the London newspapers said the next morning about that bit of ham-handed showmanship would have driven a more sensitive man into a knothole. Then came the day when the plane, Lucky Liz, dived into the desert in New Mexico, and Mike Todd was dead. Everybody clustered around Taylor as though she were a queen. I am sure
she believed she was. Mike Todd had been dead not quite six months and Taylor started a romance with Eddie Fisher (married to Debbie Reynolds). This is what Elizabeth Taylor said on the phone that set me alight: “Well,” she said calmly, “Mike’s dead and I’m alive. What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?” —Sources: "Some Enchanted Evenings: The Glittering Life and Times of Mary Martin" (2016) by David Kaufman and "The Whole Truth and Nothing But" (1962) by Hedda Hopper
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