The Monica Lewis Centennial

I’ve long known the work of Monica Lewis (1922-2015) without knowing I did. She was in no fewer than four major disaster movies of the 1970s, most notably as Lorne Greene’s secretary and Genevieve Bujold’s best friend in Earthquake (1974), but she’s also in Rollercoaster (1977), Airport ’77, and The Concorde…Airport 1979. These were co-produced by her second husband Jennings Lang.

Here she is being lowered to safety on a make-shift elevator made of a firehouse and office chair in Earthquake:

It’s been a delight to learn about Lewis’s earlier stardom. In the mid ’70s older folks likely would have recognized her almost as much as they did Lorne Greene,Ava Gardner, and Lloyd Nolan.

First, her background, for it is relevant. Her father was a musician, symphonic composer and later a musical director at CBS; her mother was an opera singer; her sister, a concert pianist; and her brother, co-creator and co-producer of Toast of the Town, a.k.a. The Ed Sullivan Show, as well as other tv variety shows. Monica was trained as a singer, and was already singing professionally by her teenage years. She performed on local NYC radio, at The Stork Club, in the 1942 Broadway show Johnny 2 x 4, and then was hired to front Benny Goodman’s band in 1943. She sang on network radio shows like Beat the Band and The Chesterfield Show and had several hit records, In 1948, hers became the voice of the animated Miss Chiquita Banana mascot. She sang on the very first broadcast of The Ed Sullivan Show in 1948. She also appeared on the variety shows of Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, George Jessel, and others. In 1951 she sang in the movies Inside Straight and The Strip.

Lewis’s first proper acting role was inExcuse My Dust (1951) with Red Skelton, followed by Everything I Have is Yours (1952), Affair with a Stranger (1953), and The D.I. (1957), and appearances on tv shows like The Danny Thomas Show,Tales of Wells Fargo, Johnny Staccato,Wagon Train,The Virginian ,and Emergency!Later films included The Sting II (1983) and Dead Heat (1988).

In 2011 Lewis’s autobiography Hollywood Through My Eyes, was published. Her excellent official website is here.

To learn more about show biz history please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. And stay tuned for my next book Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.