It's not a shock to hear that the great performer Rose Marie has died at the age of 94. She'd been in and out of hospitals constantly the last few years and friends kept telling me, "She may not last the week." I started writing an obit for her three or four years ago and never finished it. I'm writing this one from scratch because I decided what I wanted to say about her and it wasn't what I set out to write back then.
But before I get to it, two points…one being that I don't think she was 94. I think she was 96. A number of her friends think that, too. Rose started out as a child star — a very big, stellar child star with a singing voice that was amazing for her age. A lot of us think that age was fudged by a year or two back then to make her seem younger and therefore more remarkable. We had a little birthday dinner for her four years ago and during it, she said some things that led me to conclude she was two years older than the public record showed.
Secondly: As all the obits are saying or will say, she probably had the longest performing career in the history of show business…and you know what her last paying job was? I hired her to voice a witch on The Garfield Show in 2012.
Like a lot of you, I first became aware of Rose from her appearances on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She was great on that program…and while no one thought this way at the time, that was an important role in the history of on-screen females. She wasn't there to play somebody's wife or somebody's mother or somebody's girl friend. She was a full-fledged working woman with a career and an income and a job that was equivalent to a man's. I mean, you just know Sally Rogers got the same money as Buddy Sorrell. Name me another character on TV before her who got equal pay as a guy…or as many good lines. She scored with every one of them.
I could fill this blog listing all the jobs this woman had…playing Vegas for Bugsy Siegel, playing Broadway with Phil Silvers, Hollywood Squares, The Doris Day Show and so many more. For a few decades there, if a show needed a comedienne who could hold her own on stage against a Milton Berle or Danny Thomas, she was at the top of a very short list.
The last decade or two though, she didn't work much. As she once said, "I think I outlived my career." Some of that was health-related. She'd put on weight and was confined to a wheel chair, plus there were all those hospital stays. Another person might have retired but all Rose did her whole life was work. I don't think she knew how not to work and it drove her crazy that she wasn't able to perform.
A few years ago, Rose told us (her friends) that a filmmaker named Jason Wise was making a documentary about her life. That was good news if only because of how it energized her and gave her hope that the ol' career still had some applause left in it. In the months that followed though, it started to feel like it might turn into bad news. The film seemed to be taking a long time and some of us had a very real, understandable fear that she would not live to see it completed.
Well, she did.
Last August, Amber and I went to the big premiere of it out in Santa Monica. I had two strong reactions that night. One was how good it was. All the time they spent to make it was evident on the screen with every second presented in loving precision. The other reaction was how happy Rose was. I'll bet it was one of the three best nights of her life…and how amazing to have one of those when you're her age.
Rose always had great timing and I think this proves it. The film is out now. It's called Wait For Your Laugh and I highly recommend that you seek it out and watch it. It will tell you more about this woman than I or anyone could tell you and you'll certainly understand why it was an honor to know her.
A week or so ago, the Motion Picture Academy announced which documentaries will be considered for Academy Awards for 2017. They do this each year, whittling down all the submissions to a list of fifteen finalists from which the winner will be selected. Wait For Your Laugh did not make the cut. If it had, I suspect Rose would have stuck around until the ceremony next year on March 4th and then left us. In a very long, successful life, she never missed a chance to be where she was born to be: On stage.