NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Mary Hartline, the high-energy platinum-blond entertainer who became one of network television’s earliest stars on the children’s show “Super Circus,” died Aug. 12 at her home in Hillsboro, Illinois. She was 92.
The death was confirmed by Hough & Sons Funeral Home in Hillsboro.
“Super Circus,” a live Sunday afternoon series on ABC, began in early 1949, when the television industry was still laying its coaxial cables. Hartline was a striking presence with her long, wavy hair, her majorette-style costumes — including her signature uniform, with musical notes on the thigh-high hemline — and white tasseled boots.
Between the show’s death-defying circus acts, she conducted the band’s lively musical numbers, performed comedy sketches with the clowns, guided young audience members through contest segments and delivered live commercials. (Everybody did it. Future newsman Mike Wallace, also a cast member, pushed peanut butter.)
Hartline, often called television’s first sex symbol (a lot of fathers, it seems, were watching, alongside their offspring), was a master of promotion. In addition to having her face on Kellogg’s cereal boxes, representing Canada Dry beverages and demonstrating the joys of the newest Dixie Cup dispenser, she had her own merchandise line.
Those three dozen products included the Mary Hartline doll (“all hard plastic with socket head, jointed arms and legs, sleep eyes, blond wig,” according to a recent auction-lot description), which can still bring hundreds of dollars at auction.
“Put that in the vault,” Hartline advised a man holding up his vintage doll at a 1997 appearance. Even Hartline’s sister had learned the dolls’ value the hard way, she said: Hers “was stolen right out of her own living room.”
Mary Pauline Hartline was born on Oct. 29, 1927, in Hillsboro, a small town south of Springfield. She was the younger of two daughters of Paul Hartline, a salesman who later became the town postmaster, and Dorothy (Crowder) Hartline.
Mary was a brunette beauty queen at Hillsboro High School, class of 1945, when Harold Stokes, a noted bandleader, entered her life. While living in temporary retirement in his nearby hometown, Stokes had been asked to organize an amateur-show fundraiser. He hired a cast of musical locals, including, as a dancer, Mary.
When Stokes took a job in Chicago, he suggested she move there to pursue a modeling career. By 1946 she was on “Junior Junction” (later “Teen Town”), a radio series produced by Stokes about a community where all the citizens were teenagers. During the first season, Hartline received a diagnosis of polio but made a rapid recovery. She and Stokes married the next year.
Hartline was on “Super Circus,” broadcast from the Civic Theater in Chicago, every week from January 1949 to December 1955. From 1950 to 1952 she also did “The Mary Hartline Show,” a 15-minute cartoon and music series. (It was a far more innocent time; 11-year-olds brought onto the stage introduced themselves by giving out their street addresses.)
After “Super Circus,” Hartline starred in “Princess Mary’s Castle” (1957-58), a local children’s show with singing puppets, a talking crow and a magic mirror. It was her last job in show business.
Hartline, who never had children, married four times. In 1951, the year of her divorce from Stokes, she married George Barnard, a Chicago lawyer. Months after their divorce in 1960, she married George Carlson, a Chicago contractor, who died in 1963. In 1964 she married Woolworth Donahue, an heir to the Woolworth five-and-dime-store fortune; they were together until his death in 1972. They lived mostly in Palm Beach, Florida, and Southampton, New York, entertaining guests including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Hartline’s sister, Dorothy Jane Coderko, died in 2017.
In 1997, Hartline was honored by the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago. She was still good-natured about the dangerous unpredictability of doing live television. “You don’t have a chance,” she said with a laugh.
Remembering a costume-change mishap that put her on camera with no back to her dress, she recalled the reactions of the male orchestra members behind her — and of her scene partner, Cliffy the clown — who couldn’t understand why she was walking sideways.
“Like they say, ‘What you sees is what you gets,’” Hartline told the audience of early-television fans at the museum. “And if it doesn’t go right, you get it anyway.”
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