Johnny Stearns, 85; Paired With Wife in Trailblazing TV Sitcom of Late ‘40s

Before Lucy and Desi, George and Gracie, and Ozzie and Harriet, there was Mary Kay and Johnny.

In the fall of 1947, Johnny and Mary Kay Stearns made TV history playing “themselves” as young New York newlyweds in a pioneering television situation comedy, “Mary Kay and Johnny.”

The weekly 15-minute show was broadcast live from New York, beginning on the old DuMont Network and later moving to NBC and CBS. The character of Johnny, the more serious of the pair, was a banker; and Mary Kay was his homemaker wife, who was prone to getting into odd predicaments.

Johnny Stearns, who wrote the scripts for the popular show during its 2 1/2-year run and went on to a career as a television producer, director and host, died Wednesday at a Newport Beach hospital of complications from a fall. He was 85.

Stearns, a Corona del Mar resident, produced Steve Allen’s precursor to “The Tonight Show” on WNBC-TV in New York and produced and directed “The Arthur Murray Dance Party” on NBC.

In 1961, after moving to Los Angeles, he began a long-running career in public affairs television as producer and host of “Agriculture U.S.A.” on NBC. Later known as “AG-USA,” it ran on NBC stations until 1990 and continues in syndication.

After 40 years and 1,100 episodes, Stearns recorded a voice-over for the final episode of the show only days before he died.

Born in Billerica, Mass., in 1916, Stearns began acting at age 14 at the Mary Arden Theater in Peterborough, N.H. He also performed at the Peterborough Players Summer Theatre, which his family founded in 1933.

He made his Broadway debut in “Night Music” with the Group Theater and performed in “One Touch of Venus” with Mary Martin, “On the Town” and “Are You With It.”

It was during this period that he met Mary Kay Jones, a young actress from Glendale, whom he married in 1946.

In 1947, Mary Kay landed a job modeling dresses on a live weekly 15-minute television show in New York. When Stearns watched her on camera, he told the stage manager that he thought she did fine but that the show was awful. He thought he could come up with something better.

“I said there are a lot of very successful domestic comedies on radio, but nothing had ever been done like that on TV,” he told the Associated Press in 1997. “We got the go-ahead to try one episode. So I went back to our apartment in the [Greenwich] Village, and I wrote a little script about a young married couple--and played it for comedy.”

The show, which predated “I Love Lucy” by four years, was an instant hit.

“It was tremendously popular actually at the time, because there was very little else on TV,” Mary Kay Stearns said Friday.

For the most part, she said, the episodes were dramatizations of incidents that happened to them. “However, obviously, they were made much funnier than when it actually happened.

“We got a tremendous amount of mail,” she said, “because people had never seen a husband and wife in real life doing skits that were based on what really happened in our marriage. So people became tremendously identified with us as people, and they did all sorts of wonderful things, like knitting Christmas stockings for our children.”

Son Made TV History on Parents’ Show Too

The couple had three children, but their firstborn, Christopher, made TV history himself.

More than four years before the much-publicized birth of Desi Arnaz Jr.--and the coinciding birth of “Little Ricky” on “I Love Lucy”--Mary Kay gave birth to her son Dec. 19, 1948, the morning of one of their broadcasts.

On the show that night, viewers watched the anxious Johnny pacing the set of a hospital waiting room as he awaited the birth of his TV son, who would also be named Christopher.

When Mary Kay returned to the show, she was shown walking over to a bassinet in one scene. And although the show was live, NBC inserted a film clip of the Stearns’ 13-day-old son in his bassinet.

“It was in ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ that he was the youngest performer that had been on TV,” she said.

“Mary Kay and Johnny,” which had expanded to 30 minutes after moving to NBC in 1948, was canceled in the spring of 1950.

In the early ‘50s, the couple spent several years doing live commercials for the “U.S. Steel Hour” and served as U.S. Steel spokesmen around the country.

In addition to his wife, Stearns is survived by sons Christopher of Corona del Mar and Jonathan of Laguna Beach; daughter Melinda of Seattle; and one grandson.