Rose Marie Guy (née Mazzetta; August 15, 1923 – December 28, 2017), known professionally as Rose Marie, was an American actress, singer, comedienne, and vaudeville performer with a career spanning nine decades, which included film, radio, records, theater, night clubs, and television. As a child performer from the late 1920s onward, she had a successful singing career under the stage name Baby Rose Marie.
Rose Marie was widely known for her role on the CBS situation comedy The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) as television comedy writer Sally Rogers, "who went toe-to-toe in a man's world". Later, she portrayed Myrna Gibbons on The Doris Day Show and was a featured celebrity on Hollywood Squares for 14 years.
She is the subject of a 2017 documentary film, Wait for Your Laugh, which includes interviews with her and her co-stars, including Carl Reiner, Dick Van Dyke, Peter Marshall, and Tim Conway.
Early life and childhood career
Rose Marie was born Rose Marie Mazzetta in Manhattan, New York, on August 15, 1923, to Polish-American Stella Gluszcak and Italian-American vaudeville actor Frank Mazzetta, who went by the name of Frank Curley. Her mother took her to see local vaudeville shows regularly and afterwards Rose Marie would sing what she had heard for neighbors, who eventually entered her in a talent contest. At the age of three, Marie started performing under the name "Baby Rose Marie". At five, she was offered a seven-year contract and became a radio star on the NBC Radio Network and made a series of films.
"I had a deep voice, not like Shirley Temple but more like Sophie Tucker. I never sounded like a child, so there were some people who thought I was really a 30-year-old midget."
To counteract these rumors, NBC arranged for her to undertake a national stage tour, and she appeared in a few short films, including Baby Rose Marie the Child Wonder (1929), a Vitaphone sound short. Between 1930 and 1938, she made 17 recordings, three of which were not issued. Her first issued one, recorded on March 10, 1932, featured accompaniment by Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, one of the leading African-American jazz orchestras of the day. Henderson and the band were said to be in the RCA Victor studios recording the four songs they were intending to produce that day and were asked to accompany Baby Rose Marie, reading from a stock arrangement.
She continued to appear in films through the mid-1930s, making shorts and one feature picture, International House (1933), with W. C. Fields for Paramount.
As she entered adulthood, Rose Marie turned to nightclub and lounge performances. According to her autobiography Hold the Roses, she was assisted in her career by many members of organized crime, including Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. In 1946, Siegel invited her to be the opening act at his newly built Flamingo Hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Because of the Flamingo's organized-crime ties, she had to seek permission to perform in other casinos and remained loyal to "the boys" at the Flamingo for the rest of her life.
Concurrently with her nightclub work, Rose Marie continued to work in radio, earning the nickname "Darling of the Airwaves".. She appeared as a guest on The Jimmy Durante Show on 31 March 1948.
In the 1960–1961 season, Marie co-starred with Shirley Bonne, Elaine Stritch, Jack Weston, Raymond Bailey, and Stubby Kaye in My Sister Eileen.
After five seasons (1961–1966) as Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rose Marie co-starred in two seasons (1969–1971) of The Doris Day Show as Doris Martin's friend and co-worker Myrna Gibbons. She also appeared in two episodes of The Monkees in the mid-1960s. She later had a semiregular seat in the upper center square on the original version of The Hollywood Squares. Because contestants tended to pick corner squares first, the phrase "Rose Marie to block" was uttered so often, she frequently joked that she should legally change her name to that. In addition, Rose appeared for a special “Game Show Week (II)” on the Tom Bergeron-hosted version of Squares in 2003.
Rose Marie performed on three 1966 and 1967 episodes of The Dean Martin Show on NBC and also twice (1964 and 1968) on The Hollywood Palace on ABC.
In the mid-1970s, Rose Marie appeared in the recurring role of Hilda on the police drama S.W.A.T. Hilda brought fresh doughnuts, made coffee for the team, and provided some comic relief.
On the March 8, 1986, episode of Remington Steele, Rose Marie played a key role in "Steele in the Spotlight".
In the early 1990s, Rose Marie had a recurring role as Frank Fontana's mother on Murphy Brown.
She appeared as Roy Biggins' domineering mother Eleanor "Bluto" Biggins in an episode of Wings.
Rose Marie and The Dick Van Dyke Show co-star Morey Amsterdam appeared together in an October 1993 episode of Herman's Head and guest-starred in a February 1996 episode of Caroline in the City, shortly before Amsterdam's death in October of that same year.