My First TV Love

She was lovely, she was golden and, as every prepubescent boy tuning in to “Super Circus” could attest, she was spectacular, from the gleaming overbite to the flowing platinum blondness that tumbled past her shoulders as she swung her baton and curves to the band music, wearing white boots and a drum majorette’s dress that presented her memorable thighs for inspection.

Mary Hartline, where are you now?

That’s what I was wondering recently when thinking of those days, 50 years ago, when television was just getting to be television. My first hazy recollection of its presence is the black-and-white test pattern that my parents and I studied on our 9-inch screen now and then as if it were a program about to happen. Any TV picture, even a static one, was exciting in those days.

Barry Levinson got it right in his film “Avalon,” when he showed family members in the swaddling days of TV assembled worshipfully before the just-unboxed Philco or whatever, so eerily transfixed by the test pattern that they were rendered speechless. The scene foreshadowed the TV colossus that would seduce Americans and usurp much of their lives, to some degree transforming them into an audience of passive observers.

What was TV then? Let’s go to the kinescope.

ABC, CBS, NBC and DuMont were the only major national networks, and a look at their prime-time schedule from 1948 shows that a now highly endangered species, the musical-variety show, was early TV’s hottest ticket. Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle, TV’s first superstar, had shows of that stripe on the air. I also counted nine others, ranging from “Captain Billy’s Mississippi Music Hall,” which was set on a 19th century riverboat, to “The Village Barn,” a square-dancing hour from Greenwich Village, of all places, featuring the likes of Harry Ranch and His Kernels of Korn.

Also prevalent in prime time were public-affairs shows, including what would become network TV’s most enduring series, NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Among the half-dozen other such shows, ABC opened its Sunday nights with a 15-minute interview program featuring Pauline Frederick, who would become NBC’s United Nations correspondent. Meanwhile, “America’s Town Meeting” presented debates on ABC between guest speakers and studio audiences. “Child’s World” was a 15-minute discussion show on which kids hashed over their problems and their feelings. On another program, critics discussed the performing arts. Books were the focus of a separate series titled “The Author Meets the Critics,” and NBC began its Wednesday nights with 15 minutes on teaching viewers how to draw.

There was also a smattering of game shows, a cooking show, a science show hosted by an astronomer, two nights of boxing, one of wrestling, a 15-minute sitcom (“Mary Kay and Johnny”) starring a married couple as themselves, and several dramatic anthologies, a form that would dominate prime time in the coming decade that was to become grandiosely titled the Golden Age of Television.

Golden, shmolden. It’s Mary Hartline I remember.

“Super Circus” was a half-hour kids show from Chicago that aired Sunday afternoons on ABC from 1949 to 1955, then a final season from New York with an entirely new cast. During its Chicago run, circus acts performed live in front of an audience of screaming kids inside what was then the city’s Civic Opera Building. Lanky Claude Kirchner was the costumed ringmaster and Mary his assistant who led the band and participated in intros and various other bits with kids, including the commercials that were woven through the show as if they were the show. There were also three clowns: Cliffy, Scampy and Nicky.

As if I cared about them or Claude or any of the performing acts, or even could recall much of them years later. Until watching a video of the series that I obtained recently from Moviecraft Inc., a TV nostalgia house in Orland Park, Ill., I had little memory of “Super Circus” beyond Mary. Nor can I recall exactly when my infatuation with her began, although given my age and hormonal progression at the time, it had to have been in the early ‘50s.

Although her entire package was noteworthy, I especially wanted to smell Mary’s hair and her skin, for even in rudimentary black-and-white, the message that “Super Circus” sent me was erotic and unconnected to trapeze acts or terriers walking on their hind legs.

Ringmaster Claude: “Turn your attention now to our ‘Super Circus’ bandstand. The fellas look mighty natty today in their ‘Super Circus’ caps. And ready to give the downbeat is our lovely queen, Miss Mary Hartline!”

And off she’d go, swinging her little baton and those hips, which co-starred on her 5-foot-6 body with other arresting endowments. Not to denigrate Mary’s bandleading skills, but what’s striking is that she faced the camera, not the band--a bunch of nerdy-looking guys who, by staring at their sheet music instead of at their “leader,” indicated that her contributions to “Super Circus” were likely nonmusical. In fact, I was probably joined in my ogling by many of America’s fathers. Call it early family viewing.

Mary Hartline was arguably the small screen’s first sex symbol, and half a century after she first carried on for the camera, I was determined to locate her, if she were still alive. And if she were, I wondered, was she living in the shadows somewhere like a creepy Norma Desmond caricature, a faded bombshell still awaiting her close-up in her sassy mini-dress, white boots and sheet of blond hair?

Finding her turned out to be surprisingly easy.

It turned out that Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communications had an evening for her in 1997, and it had her number.

At the zenith of her fame, “our fabulous princess from fairyland,” as “Super Circus” anointed her, drove a white Cadillac convertible, owned a boat and marketed her own slew of products, including Mary Hartline records, Mary Hartline comic books, Mary Hartline boots, a Mary Hartline baton and Mary Hartline dolls in four sizes.

Her husbands also came in four sizes. She married four men of great wealth, the last of whom, dime-store heir Woolworth Donahue, died in 1972 in Palm Beach, Fla., where they owned a large estate on the ocean and were part of high society.

The money ultimately dwindled, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune, eventually sending Mary back to her hometown of Hillsboro, Ill., to live with her mother, who died recently at 94, in the same house where she grew up. Her sister lives next door.

Mary says she was born Oct. 29, 1927, making her 70 now. Thus, she would have been about 22 when she surfaced on “Super Circus” a few years after earning a free trip to Chicago for winning the title of “Queen of Love and Beauty” in Hillsboro.

“It’s so many years ago,” she said on the phone.

I could hardly believe I was hearing someone who had tapped my testosterone nearly half a century earlier.

“A sex symbol?” She seemed genuinely surprised when I asked her if she’d been cognizant of her power over precociously evolved twerps. “I never thought about it at all,” she said. “I really loved what I was doing. I really loved the children. That’s what the show was about. And my job was to lead the orchestra, even though I did move around.” It was the moving around that I recalled most vividly.

The Norma Desmond question: I asked if she still wore her hair as she did then. “When you get older, you can’t wear your hair down like that,” she said.

The baton, the white boots, the fame. Why had she given them all up? “When they wanted to take the show to New York after all those years, they wanted me, but they didn’t want anybody else,” she said. “So I didn’t go. And I had been working seven days a week, and I had my own Mary Hartline enterprises, so after a while, I felt I needed a vacation.”

I wondered if there were close-ups in her future. “I’ve had a lot of calls about the dolls and things,” she said. Yet isn’t it a bit sad, her ending up as she has, obscure and back home in central Illinois, after once flying so high? “Absolutely not,” she said. “I’ve got lots of things pending. I’m not sitting around here eating bonbons.”

So long, Mary Hartline, and keep striking up the band.