Kathryn Murray; Widow of Dance King Arthur Murray

Kathryn Murray, the widow of dance teacher and entrepreneur Arthur Murray who played a pivotal role in the couple’s television success in the 1950s, has died.

Family members said Murray, who had been in failing health in recent years, died Friday at her penthouse apartment just off Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. She was 92.

At mid-century, the Murrays were the first couple of dance in America. Arthur Murray, Kathryn’s urbane husband, started selling dance lessons by mail order, and by the end of his career had created a chain of lucrative dance studios from coast to coast.

He encouraged Americans to “Put a little fun in your life, try dancing,” and for years when Americans learned to dance they generally learned the Arthur Murray way. But the Arthur Murray way included text manuals written by Kathryn and tips to instructors, also from Kathryn, on how to keep the students coming back for more.

She was born Kathryn Kohnfelder in Jersey City, N.J. At the age of 17, she was a member of the studio audience at an Arthur Murray radio program broadcast from Newark. In those days Murray gave dance instruction over the air, summoning people from the audience to help demonstrate the dance steps. He called Kathryn onto the stage and later asked her for a date.

“I had visions of going to some swanky New York nightspot,” she recalled later. “Instead, he took me to a theater--on passes--and then we went home, where he made sandwiches in my mother’s kitchen.”

But four months later they were married in New York, and they remained married until Arthur’s death in 1991 at the age of 95.

His radio program, which ran for 20 years, and his mail order business, with its unique step-by-step diagrams, flourished throughout much of their lives and made the couple rich. The television program just heightened their already enormous popularity.

In an interview some years ago, Kathryn Murray recalled being unenthusiastic about the idea of being a television star.

“I asked Arthur, ‘Are you going to teach dancing?’ and he said. ‘No, you are.’ ”

“I said, ‘A woman has to be beautiful to be on TV,’ and Arthur said, ‘People have such small sets and such poor reception that they won’t know the difference.’ ”

The show began on the DuMont Network in July 1950. It moved on to ABC, CBS and NBC over the next 10 years and still had excellent ratings as late as 1958.

As the hostess, Kathryn was the show’s focal point. She danced with Arthur, sang, introduced comedy sketches and hosted dance contests. “I’ve ridden trick horses, wrestled with bears and even roller-skated with experts as part of the show,” she once recalled.

Guests included Milton Berle and Helen Hayes. But as a Chicago Tribune story pointed out some years ago, there was the occasional odd booking, like Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

Kathryn introduced the band as “rock ‘n’ roll specialists” and asked her audience not to prejudge the act, saying: “You have to keep a nice, open mind about what the young people go for. Otherwise the youngsters won’t feel that you understand them.”

Holly and the Crickets launched into “Peggy Sue,” but the show’s cast and dancers, all in formal attire, stood still in the background, seemingly nonplused that rock ‘n’ roll had invaded their arena.

By the 1960s, Arthur Murray felt that the dance scene with “The Twist” and “The Monkey” was moving in a direction that he didn’t want to follow. The couple left television and, a few years later, Arthur Murray retired as president of the dance studios that carried his name. When he left the business in 1964, the 300 franchise studios were grossing $25 million a year.

The couple retired to Hawaii in 1965, where they lived comfortably on their stock portfolio, but surfaced again in the 1980s as judges on Merv Griffin’s disco-era television show, “Dance Fever.”

Kathryn Murray is survived by twin daughters Jane Heimlich of Cincinnati, whose husband Dr. Henry Heimlich is the innovator of the anti-choking maneuver that bears his name; and Phyllis McDowell of New Haven, Conn., eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.