As Sally Rogers, from Wait For Your Laugh, via YouTube
August 15, 1923: Rose Marie:
“I love everything I have done. If that’s being conceited, I guess I am! I wouldn’t be in it this long if I didn’t love it. It was a beautiful life. In fact, I always say, if I had known how beautiful it was, I would have paid more attention to it. “
The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961 – 1966) wasn’t an immediate hit, although it won 15 Emmy Awards. It only became one of the best loved sitcoms after it went into syndication.
The pilot, Head Of The Family (1960), was the jumping off place for The Dick Van Dyke Show. It essentially had the same characters, but with a different cast: Carl Reiner played Rob Petrie, Barbara Britton played Laura Petrie, and Sylvia Miles played Sally Rogers. CBS decided that the main character was too intellectual, too Jewish and too New York, so Reiner, the creator of the series, was replaced with Dick Van Dyke.
The series was inspired by Reiner’s experiences as a writer for Your Show Of Shows. He based Rob Petrie on himself and Petrie’s egocentric boss Alan Brady on Sid Caesar, with a dash of Milton Berle with a pinch of Jackie Gleason.
Van Dyke, Amsterdam, Richard Deacon, Marie and Moore, CBS via YouTube
The Dick Van Dyke Show was the last show filmed entirely in beautiful black and white. It is still loved for its sophisticated writing, inspired casting and insightful view of the inner workings of the then-new medium of television.
Even as a kid, I loved television shows and films set in the milieu of showbiz. The two main settings of the show were the work and home life of Petrie, the head writer of the “Alan Brady Show”, a comedy/variety show. Many scenes deal with Petrie and his co-writers, Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) and Sally Rogers, played by blond, raspy-voiced, Rose Marie. The trio had a built-in forum for them to constantly make jokes.
Marie did have conflicts with Reiner, and she resented that Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie, her first big role, was given more story lines on the show. Reiner:
“I used real strong language. I said, ‘You both have beautiful legs. But, they wanna look at her legs.'”
Nominated three times for an Emmy Award, Marie was not quite 40 years old when she was cast on The Dick Van Dyke Show, yet she had already been an entertainer for more than 30 years.
In her memoir Hold The Roses (2004), Marie writes about being proud of playing a woman defined by her work, a rare sitcom character at the time who wasn’t a wife, mother, or housekeeper. Marie felt she had struck a blow for gender equality on American television because Rogers was a writer equal to Petrie and Buddy Sorrell. Witty and self-deprecating, desperately seeking a husband, Sally acted as a balance against Sorrell, the joke machine, and the physicality of Petrie. Her verbal sparring offered a woman’s point of view. Always wearing a distinctive hair bow, she was in every episode of the show for five seasons.
The show cemented my lifelong dream to be a comedy writer, stuck in a room with fellow writers, coming up with funny stuff for the temperamental star. I wanted to be the wisecracking Sally Rogers, not Rob Petrie.
From Wikimedia Commons, public domain
She may have been the very first celebrity to lop off her last name. Marie had one of the longest careers in showbiz history, nearly 90 years. She was born Rose Marie Mazetta of Italian-Polish parents in New York City. When she was 3 years old, her mother entered her in an amateur talent contest in Atlantic City as “Baby Rose Marie”:
“My mother was terrified. But I went out and sang What Can I Say, Dear, After I Say I’m Sorry? and won the contest.”
She began singing on radio and NBC gave her a seven-year contract and her own show, 15 minutes every Sunday afternoon. Her powerful voice gave rise to rumors. Marie:
“Stories went around that I was really a 45-year-old midget. So, they sent me on a year-round personal appearance tour of theaters across the country to prove that I was a child.”
Marie sang in a series of film shorts and appeared on the Vaudeville circuit. Among her childhood friends was one of the country’s most notorious gangsters. Marie:
“My father worked as an arsonist for Al Capone. He used to burn down your warehouse if things weren’t going the right way, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was a child star and to me Al was my ‘Uncle Al,’ my mother used to cook for all these guys.”
In 1946 she married Bobby Guy, the trumpet player in Kay Kyser‘s band and on top NBC radio shows. Guy was just 48 when he died suddenly of a blood infection. It was 1964, and the loss so devastated Marie that wore black for a year and refused work except for The Dick Van Dyke Show. She never remarried.
Her quick, rat-tat-tat timing made her ideal as a supporting player. She appeared on The Doris Day Show (1968 -1973) as the irreverent secretary to the star, and on Murphy Brown (1988 – 1998). She was a regular on the original Hollywood Squares for 14 years.
CBS via YouTube
The Dick Van Dyke Show was not only a perfect vehicle for Marie’s comic gifts, but also a showcase for her singing, with Rogers belting out jazz standards during nightclub and party scenes.
In the 1940s and 1950s, she played clubs in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Marie:
”I was singing at Slapsy Maxie’s in Hollywood, and a man came over and asked me to play Las Vegas. And I said, ‘What is Vegas?’ I opened The Flamingo in a show for Jimmy Durante. It was the greatest show. Every star in Hollywood was there on opening night. It was absolutely fabulous. Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Robert Taylor. The Flamingo was a fabulous thing.”
In 1951, Marie was cast opposite Phil Silvers in the Broadway musical Top Banana with tunes by Johnny Mercer, in which she had a show-stopping number, I Fought Every Step Of The Way. When United Artists made the film version of the show in 1954, Marie was cast in the role she originated on Broadway. Marie:
”We were on the soundstage, and I did my number. I wore boxing gloves, and I made a few boxing positions, you know, rubbing my nose like a fighter does and making believe I was punching. And when I got through, a man came over to me and said: ‘That was very good, and this can be your movie. I’m a producer on the picture’. And I looked at him and said: ‘That’s very nice, thank you’. And then he said: ‘If you are really interested in a few positions, I really could show you a few’. I laughed and told him that was very funny. But he was serious. He said: ‘I could make you a star out of this picture, I’ll show you a few positions I know’. And so, in front of everyone, I said: ”You son of a bitch, you couldn’t get it up if the flag went by!”’
All of Marie’s musical numbers and some of her scenes were cut from the film. Marie:
”You know, I think women have slowly but surely gained a lot of power. I think little by little, they are getting to where they are supposed to be, equals, and we are talking uprightly. Before, I think they were afraid. I don’t want to take all the credit. But, I was one of the first. I never even thought about it, I just did it! And I always spoke up, and everyone was wonderful to me, except that one producer.”
Marie never stopped working. She was a regular guest on television. From 1977 to 1985, she toured in the musical revue 4 Girls 4 with Rosemary Clooney, Helen O’Connell and Margaret Whiting, which I saw and was thoroughly charmed by. She did voices for The Garfield Show from 2008 to 2013. In a reunion special, The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited (2004), the Petries have long since moved to Manhattan, where Laura runs a dance studio. Their son Ritchie has bought their old New Rochelle home. Alan Brady asks Petrie to write his eulogy, with the help of the now happily-married Sally Rogers.
2016, from Wait For Your Laugh via YouTube
Rose Marie Mazzetta Guy left this world at the end of 2017. She was 92 years old when she took that final bow. A few weeks earlier, the documentary Wait For Your Laugh about her life premiered. Her signature black bow is at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. In the last decade, she was active on Twitter, offering support for women who, like her, had suffered from sexual harassment.
