ET’s Mary Hart will get lifetime Emmy award
Competing in the 1970 Miss America pageant inspired her to get into TV
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.— In the early 1980s, Mary Hart became the face — and the famously insured legs — of a new breed of TV show, the entertainment news magazine.
She quickly rose from correspondent to anchor on Entertainment Tonight, powered by a dazzling smile, unflagging charm and an engagingly deft touch with the celebrities who are the syndicated show’s currency.
Many such TV magazines followed to satisfy the public’s growing taste for Hollywood buzz, but what became a nearly 30-year run at ET made Hart the genre’s queen bee.
Her legacy will be recognized Sunday with a lifetime achievement award at the Daytime Emmys ceremony, and Hart pronounces herself thrilled by the honour. She learned of it on a trip to Chicago last fall with husband Burt Sugarman and son AJ to catch a Dodgers-Cubs playoff game.
“My jaw dropped,” she said, when the TV academy called with the news. “I know Burt and AJ were looking at me concerned that something awful had happened, because I immediately got emotional.”
Bob Mauro, president of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, said Hart is a worthy recipient. Betty White, Alex Trebek and Bob Barker are past honorees.
“As a trusted anchor in the genre of entertainment news, Mary’s ability to be embraced by both the stars she interviewed and the audience is the reason that ET has been welcomed into homes across the country for so long,” Mauro said. Hart, born Mary Johanna Harum in Sioux Falls, S.D., said that competing in the1970 Miss America pageant (she was a top 10 finisher) gave her the poise and confidence to aim high — and led to an epiphany.
“I think it literally was the first time I was interviewed on television, I went, ‘That’s what I want to be doing. I would love to be talking to various people about everything,’ ” Hart recalled.
She detoured as a high school teacher for three years in her hometown, but then TV beckoned, and she followed the path through TV news and hosting stints in the Midwest before heading to Los Angeles.
After dabbling in acting, she cohosted a syndicated TV magazine and, with Regis Philbin, a short-lived national talk show in 1982. An interview with fledgling ET about the cancellation brought a job offer.
“We broke ground in television,” Hart said of the show. “We created the genre. And we all knew we were doing something new and fun, and it was hard but it was exciting.”
She held the anchor job opposite a succession of partners, including John Tesh and Mark Steines, before shifting to ETspecial correspondent.
Asked to recount some of her career highs and lows, the unfailingly gracious Hart was game.
She interviewed Richard Pryor when she worked on an Oklahoma City talk show in 1977 and found him gruff and unco-operative: “It was kind of an expletive-filled interview that was barely usable,” she said.
He was a far different man when she talked him in the late 1980s, in failing health and apologetic for his transgressions.
An interview with Oscar-winning actress Jane Wyman, then starring on TV’s Falcon Crest, was going well until Hart asked her about ex-husband Ronald Reagan, unaware that Wyman consistently declined to discuss him.
“Things immediately went straight into the toilet,” she said, and worsened when Hart brought up the couple’s children. When Hart’s impressive legs caught viewers’ attention, her then-agent suggested insuring them with Lloyd’s of London, reminiscent of a publicity stunt involving Second World War pin-up Betty Grable.
“I never dreamed it would have legs of its own, so to speak,” Hart said.