Peter Lind Hayes (and Mary Healy)

Today is the birthday of actor/singer/performer Peter Lind Hayes (1915-1998). Hayes started out performing in the vaudeville act of his mother Grace Hayes (including the Palace in an act he wrote when he was but 16 years old) In the 30s he performed in the floor show of his mother’s night club the Grace Hayes Lodge, also appearing in radio, and in films, starting with Myrt and Marge (1933), and including Million Dollar Legs (1939), et al. In 1940 he married fellow performer Mary Healy, with whom he almost invariably appeared for the remainder of his career. Among other films, the couple co-starred alongside Grace Hayes in Zis Boom Bah (1941), and the modern cult favorite, Dr. Seuss’sThe 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953).

Hayes and Healy performed in night clubs, made records, and were in several Broadway shows, notably Norma Krasna’s Who Was That Lady I Saw You With? (1958-1959). They were also a frequent presence on television including The Peter Lind Hayes Show (1950-1951) and Peter Loves Mary (1960-1961). For a time in the 1960s they did a daily local radio Broadcast out of the basement of their home on Columbia Island, on Long Island Sound.

Oddly, in his lifetime, this is one of the things he was best known for in his lifetime, the 1948 record Life Gets Tedious, Don’t It?

, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

For more on silent and slapstick comedy don’t my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc