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Home Classic Movies Martha Stewart Not Dead Despite Reports to the Contrary – UPDATE: Stewart died in February 2021

Martha Stewart Not Dead Despite Reports to the Contrary – UPDATE: Stewart died in February 2021

Martha Stewart Perry Como
Martha Stewart in Doll Face, with Perry Como.

Martha Stewart: Actress-Singer in Fox movies not dead despite two-year-old reports to the contrary

Ramon Novarro biography Beyond Paradise

February 2021 update: Martha Stewart died at age 98 on Feb. 17.

The article below was originally posted – as an obit – in March 2012.

It was later updated – with more information proving the Stewart was still alive – in November 2014 and February 2016.

According to various online reports, including Variety‘s, pert, pretty actress and singer Martha Stewart, featured in supporting roles in a handful of 20th Century Fox movies of the 1940s, died at age 89 of “natural causes” in Northeast Harbor, Maine – two and a half years ago. Needless to say, that was not the same Martha Stewart hawking “delicious foods” and whatever else on American television.

But the Martha Stewart who died in late February 2012 – if any – was not the Martha Stewart of old Fox movies either. And that’s why I’m republishing this (former) obit, originally posted more than two and a half years ago: March 2012.

Earlier today (Nov. 10, ’14; updated in Feb. 2016), a commenter wrote to Alt Film Guide, claiming that the Martha Stewart featured in Doll Face, I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now, and In a Lonely Place was very much alive and living in California. (See comments section further below.) According to the commenter, the source for that information was Stewart’s own son, Florida-based singer David Shelley of the David Shelley & Bluestone band.

After reading it, I contacted Shelley via his band’s website and did some extra research on Martha Stewart. Unfortunately, there isn’t much available online.

At least I was able to find one mention of her marriage to David Shelley (Sr.) – date unspecified – in Nils Hanson’s book Lillian Lorraine: The Life and Times of a Ziegfeld Diva, and a 1957 newspaper article announcing David Shelley III’s birth in Santa Monica, California, and featuring a photograph of Martha Stewart holding the baby.

In other words, online information about Martha Stewart having been married to a man named Jonathan Crowne from 1952 to his death in 2004 is completely wrong. I could find no information on Crowne, except via early 21st-century tidbits about Stewart, none of which are sourced.

Update: David Shelley replied to my email explaining that his mother, former actress/singer Martha Stewart, was indeed alive and living in California. Shelley died at age 57 in August 2015.

See further below a more recent comment by Stewart’s daughter, Colleen Shelley.

And below is a brief overview of Martha Stewart’s film, stage, and television career.

Martha Stewart and June Haver in ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.’

Martha Stewart movies

If online reports are to be believed, the Kentucky-born (as Martha Haworth, on Oct. 7, 1922, in Bardwell), Brooklyn-raised Martha Stewart was discovered while singing at The Stork Club around Christmastime 1944. At one point, she was a vocalist with Glenn Miller’s band and reportedly, as Martha Wayne, also sang with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, later becoming engaged to jazz singer Buddy Stewart (born Albert James Byrne Jr.), whose surname she adopted professionally.

Stewart’s film debut took place in 1945, when she was featured in a supporting role in 20th Century Fox’s musical Doll Face (1945), an adaptation of Gypsy Rose Lee’s semi-autobiographical play The Naked Genius. Joan Blondell starred onstage for producer Michael Todd, but the show ran for only 36 performances.[1]

Vivian Blaine landed the title role in Fox’s Lewis Seiler-directed film version – notable as Carmen Miranda’s first Hollywood vehicle shot in black and white.[2] In fact, co-starring Dennis O’Keefe and Perry Como, Doll Face – in which Stewart breezily sings and dances with Como (see clip further below) – was a mere programmer (a notch above a B movie).

After the relatively minor Doll Face, Martha Stewart was cast in a trio of supporting roles in Fox productions.

  • She was one of the women in Benjamin Stoloff’s B romantic drama Johnny Comes Flying Home (1946), featuring Richard Crane as one of three World War II veterans attempting to jump-start a business.
  • She replaced a recalcitrant Vivian Blaine in Otto Preminger’s romantic melodrama Daisy Kenyon (1947), starring Joan Crawford, Dana Andrews, and Henry Fonda.
  • Replacing a pregnant Celeste Holm, Stewart was featured in Lloyd Bacon’s Technicolor musical I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now (1947), a highly fictionalized biopic of singer/composer Joseph E. Howard, starring June Haver and, as Howard, Mark Stevens – with singing voice provided by Buddy Clark.[3]

In 1946, Stewart was also to have been cast in another (black-and-white) Fox musical starring Vivian Blaine and Carmen Miranda: If I’m Lucky. However, the film’s screenplay was rewritten and she was dropped from the project.

Noir classic In a Lonely Place

No longer at Fox by the end of 1947, Martha Stewart supported Donald O’Connor and Olga San Juan in Jack Hively’s comedy Are You with It? (1948) at Universal; Glenn Ford, Broderick Crawford, and Dorothy Malone in Henry Levin’s crime drama Convicted (1950) at Columbia; and Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in Nicholas Ray’s film noir In a Lonely Place (1950), also at Columbia.

In a Lonely Place features what is probably Stewart’s best-remembered performance: The nightclub hat-check girl who is found murdered. Did temperamental (possibly mentally unbalanced) Hollywood screenwriter Bogart do it?

Curiously, In a Lonely Place didn’t lead to bigger and better things. Stewart’s film career came to a halt after another supporting role, in Paramount’s 1952 B musical Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick, directed by Claude Binyon, and starring Alan Young and Dinah Shore.

According to the IMDb, Stewart, who was only 29 when she retired from films, would have one more movie credit: Maury Dexter’s minor youth-oriented comedy musical Surf Party (1964), with Bobby Vinton and Patricia Morrow.

Broadway & TV work

On Broadway in late 1946, Martha Stewart played the young female lead in the unsuccessful musical comedy Park Avenue, written by George S. Kaufman and Nunnally Johnson (from Johnson’s short story “Holy Matrimony”), and with music by Arthur Schwartz and Ira Gershwin.

The story revolved around a young couple (Stewart, Ray McDonald) who, in an environment where divorce is endemic, get second thoughts about their upcoming marriage. The Park Avenue cast also included David Wayne and Mary Wickes, but the musical is chiefly notable for featuring Ira Gershwin’s last compositions for a Broadway show.[4]

In the early ’50s, Martha Stewart and fellow former Fox contract player Vivian Blaine crossed paths once again. Stewart was Blaine’s replacement in another Broadway musical – Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows, and Jo Swerling’s major hit Guys and Dolls – when the original cast moved to London.[5]

And on television, in 1953 Martha Stewart temporarily replaced none other than the London-bound Vivian Blaine in the variety series Those Two. As found on the IMDb, she also guested in a handful of other variety shows of the ’50s (Cavalcade of Stars, The Jackie Gleason Show, The Red Skelton Hour), and landed supporting roles in a couple of TV series in the early ’60s (Our Man Higgins, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour) before retiring from show business.

According to online sources – and this is dubious information – Stewart, a Christian Science convert, then worked as a school librarian for nearly four decades. (Update: This information is inaccurate. Stewart is a Catholic and was never a librarian. See Colleen Shelley’s comment below.)

Martha Stewart marriages

Martha Stewart’s first husband, in the mid-’40s, was alcoholic comedian Joe E. Lewis, portrayed by Frank Sinatra in the highly romanticized Charles Vidor-directed 1957 biopic The Joker Is Wild, co-starring Jeanne Crain. In the film, Mitzi Gaynor played Stewart.

Actor-writer George O’Hanlon was Stewart’s second husband. O’Hanlon appeared in dozens of “So You…” comedy shorts in the ’40s and ’50s, and decades later provided the voice of George Jetson in Joseph Barbera and William Hanna’s 1990 animated feature Jetsons: The Movie, opposite voice actors Mel Blanc, Penny Singleton (formerly of Columbia’s Blondie B movie series), and Tiffany.

Things get tricky when it comes to Martha Stewart’s third husband. As per the IMDb and dozens of online sources, her third marriage was to the aforementioned Jonathan Crowne. Actually, in 1952 – the year her film career ended – Stewart married David Shelley, stepson of songwriter and Capital Records co-founder Buddy G. DeSylva.

Shelley and his mother, Marie Wallace DeSylva, inherited most of DeSylva’s estate after his death in 1950 at age 55, despite the fact that, as found in Lillian Lorraine: The Life and Times of a Ziegfeld Diva, DeSylva had refused to “formally adopt David and treat him as his son.”[6]

Martha Stewart and David Shelley would remain married until his death in 1982.

Death notice a prank?

Once again, actress-singer Martha Stewart is alive and well at age 92, and living in the Los Angeles area. Now, what about the 2012 death notice? Was it a mistake? Or a prank?

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that TV personality Martha Stewart does have a large estate in Sea Harbor, in Maine’s Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island area, where Northeast Harbor is also located.

Premature obits

I should add that, apart from the usual hoaxes announcing the weekly deaths of Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy, and Betty White, erroneous reports of celebrity deaths – besides those of Mark Twain and Martha Stewart – include premature obituaries for Jaclyn Smith, Lena Horne, Dwayne Johnson, Gabriel García Márquez, Ernest Hemingway, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Downfall actress Corinna Harfouch, and one of this year’s Honorary Oscar recipients, Maureen O’Hara.

Additionally, Gloria Stuart was killed off by a small newspaper in the ’80s, about a decade before she – unlike Leonardo DiCaprio – survived James Cameron’s sinking of the Titanic; while minor late 1920s actress Eva von Berne (featured in John Gilbert’s Masks of the Devil) had her death reportedly taking place in 1930 – an error propagated by early 21st-century online sources – even though she went on to live another seven decades, dying at age 100 in November 2010.

A particularly egregious case was CNN’s 2003 snafu, which featured premature obits for the likes of Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, Bob Hope, Gerald Ford, and Pope John Paul II.

‘Martha Stewart: Actress / singer not dead’ notes

[1] At various times, Michael Todd was Joan Blondell’s, Evelyn Keyes’, and Elizabeth Taylor’s husband. He also produced the 1956 Best Picture Academy Award winner Around the World in 80 Days.

[2] Not including the black-and-white release Four Jills and a Jeep, in which Carmen Miranda has a cameo as herself.

Both Miranda and Vivian Blaine were gone from Fox the year after Doll Face was released.

‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’ lawsuit

[3] Curiously, although the female lead role in I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now was written expressly for June Haver, the part was initially offered to Linda Darnell, who turned it down.

Just as curiously, after I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now was released, composer Harold Orlob sued both Fox and Joseph E. Howard, claiming that he (Orlob) had actually written the song “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” for the 1909 Broadway musical The Prince of To-Night. The suit would later be settled, with Orlob receiving credit for the song.

‘Park Avenue’ vs. Holy Matrimony’

[4] Despite having Nunnally Johnson in common, Park Avenue and John M. Stahl’s 1943 movie Holy Matrimony, starring Monty Woolley and Gracie Fields, came from different sources.

Written and produced by Johnson, Stahl’s film is based on Arnold Bennett’s novel Buried Alive, previously filmed as His Double Life, with Roland Young and Lillian Gish.

For his efforts as a screenwriter, Nunnally Johnson was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award.

‘Guys and Dolls’

[5] In the highly successful 1955 MGM film version directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Vivian Blaine was the only original Broadway cast member to reprise her role.

Robert Alda, Isabel Bigley, and Sam Levene were replaced by, respectively, Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, and Frank Sinatra.

Buddy G. DeSylva

[6] Buddy G. DeSylva frequently worked with lyricist Lew Brown and composer Ray Henderson. Their partnership was depicted in Michael Curtiz’s 1956 make-believe biopic The Best Things in Life Are Free, starring Gordon MacRae as DeSylva, Dan Dailey as Henderson, and Ernest Borgnine as Brown. Their songs included “Follow Thru,” “Good News,” “Sonny Boy,” and “Birth of the Blues.”

DeSylva was nominated for an Academy Award for the song “Wishing,” from Leo McCarey’s 1939 romantic comedy-melodrama Love Affair, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. He lost to Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg for “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz.

At Fox in various producing capacities in the mid-’30s (the Shirley Temple movies Poor Little Rich Girl, Stowaway, etc.), DeSylva later moved on to RKO (the Ginger Rogers comedy Bachelor Mother), and then to Paramount, where he became involved in the production of several dozen movies, among them the following:

DeSylva, Johnny Mercer, and Glenn Wallichs co-founded Capital Records in 1942.

‘Martha Stewart: Actress / singer not dead’: Other sources

The information about Martha Stewart being dropped from If I’m Lucky is found in Colin Briggs’ Vivian Blaine article “The Cherry Blonde” in Classic Images. In his piece, Briggs writes that in I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now, Stewart succeeds in “getting away from the nasty side of the woman by giving the character [of Lulu Madison]* a Mae West comedic slant.”

Another key source for this Martha Stewart article was tcm.com, which features film information found in the AFI catalog.

Variety‘s Martha Stewart obit, dated March 5, ’12, can be found here (via web.archive.org, as some time in 2015 Variety removed the article from its website).

* Lulu Madison was a fictional character loosely inspired on Joseph E. Howard’s wife and fellow composer/vaudeville entertainer Ida Emerson.

Perry Como and Martha Stewart Doll Face publicity shot: 20th Century Fox.

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14 comments

Randall P. -

I got a chuckle when I saw the caption under the YouTube film clip for “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now “. It reads, “Martha Stewart and June Haver in ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissinger Her Now.'” Does that portend a life changing event for 93 year old Henry Kissinger?

Reply
altfilmguide -

Oops… Text amended.

Back to “Martha Stewart and June Haver in ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.’ “

Reply
Colleen Shelley -

My mother Martha Stewart is alive and well and will be 93 on October 7, 2015. She was never married to a Jonathon Crowne and says she has never been to Maine. She lives with me and has for the last 12 years. I barely remember her ever going to a library let alone a librarian. She is a lifetime lapsed Catholic and never a Christian Scientist. She thinks the new pope is swell. My brother David Shelley’s death on August 10, 2015 was very hard on her. Her only son was her joy.
At her age most of her friends are dead and she enjoys watching them on Turner Movie Classics. She is still very sharp but quite deaf, she still puts on a turban to go out in. She enjoys visits with her grandchildren and is a homebody at heart. She is a fountain of movie and Broadway trivia and will fill you in on lots of backstage drama during the films of her era. She takes care of all the critters that dwell with us in our home “The Casa de Fruitcake” in the San Fernando Valley.

Reply
Ivy -

I hope this comment finds you well and not too late, I love Martha Stewart’s work in are you with it. Donald O’Connor is one of my all time favorites and I have watched that movie a hundred times! The part Stewart played was so humorous and wonderful, she is really very talented.

Reply
Janet Cannady -

Please respond ASAP. There is a lady very anxious to reach Martha. I happened to see an e-mail from her when I was looking at Martha’s page of films and general biography on IMDB. I had just re-watched In a Lonely Place , a very great film noir With the very talented Martha Stewart. Thank you! Janet I can be reached at MCannady1 at Verizon.net

Reply
Timothy Noonan -

Martha Shelley (Stewart) is alive and well. She was never a librarian. Spending many years in Ft. Lauderdale, FL she currently resides in California. I was with her last week, and she is as bright and together as ever.

Reply
Clair Mail -

I am happy to hear that! My family moved to Woodland Hills, CA in 1961 and the Shelleys were our next door neighbors until they moved to Brentwood a few years later. I remember her well… so pretty and glamorous. My sister, brother and I were about the same ages as her children and often played at their home.

Reply
TONY -

Your research is extensive and interesting. In Jazz Singing by Will Friedwald as well as several articles I have read it is claimed she was once married to Buddy Stewart whom she sang with in the Claude Thornhill band. Since she took the name Stewart as her acting moniker I suppose started this misinformation. Can you shed any light on any relationship she had with Buddy Stewart? Thank you.

Reply
Anonymous -

Is it definite that this David Shelley is the son of the Martha Stewart in question? IMDB has three Martha Stewarts in their database – the one we all know, the one about whom this article is written, and a third one who had a single movie role during the 70s.

Is it not possible, for example, that this David Shelley is actually the son of the 70s actress, and many years of erroneous information has led people to name the 40s actress as his mother instead?

Reply
John Kerr -

I’ve seen her in a number of the films mentioned in the article, but only now (vaguely) remember her, especially “In a Lonely Place.” I think she was the hatcheck girl Bogart took home…. what a very weird story, and I do hope she’s still alive & well, god bless her!

Reply
Gale Kappes -

Martha Steward is ALIVE & WELL in California. Her son, David Shelley of Dave Shelley & Bluestone Band in so. Florida is a dear friend of mine, & I told him after viewing his mom on U-Tube, when the status said, that she had passed away in 2012. NOT TRUE!! She is 92yrs. YOUNG!!! Please update your INFO Sincerely Gale Kappes

Reply
Josh -

She actually married Crowne in 1952 after her divorce from O’Hanlon; she wasn’t married to the two in 1951. That change is still slowly taking place on her IMDb page.

Reply
Gene C -

The first (and best) Martha Stewart was great with Bogie in the movie “In a Lonely Place”. An A+ character actress, she was very good in her roles.

Reply
Mark -

Damn! Thought was Mitzi Gaynor that died. Only knew of Ms Stewart from Mitzi’s part in The Joker Is Wild. RIP

Reply

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