A Conversation With; Mary Ann Mobley

A production of the Mississippi Center for Educational Television, number 105, series a conversation with Programme Ram Mobile, LAMP 2830, date 9, 24, 75, Director Seymour. A conversation with Mary Ann Mobley, talking today with Mary Ann Mobley, actress, entertainer, and Mississippi's first Miss America is Jean Bungie of the Cleary and Ledger Jackson of the Mississippi. Mary Ann Mobley is probably the epitome of every girl's dream. She's the girl from small town Mississippi who's gone to Hollywood and who has found success.

Mary Ann, have you also found happiness? Yes, yes I have, but I have found happiness because I found the man that I think that's right for me. I didn't marry until I was 30 years old and my father had always been very strict with me. I didn't date until I was 16 years old and I couldn't go steady. And I know when I went off to the University of Mississippi as a freshman, all the girls were complaining because they had to be in at 10, 30 at night and I thought it was wonderful because we, I got to stay out later. And it took me a long time to find that, that special person. And I think it was very fortunate that either God or fate took care of me and somehow I didn't settle among the way.

I met my husband and I, I knew I think the moment I saw him that he was the one I'd been waiting for. I know that sounds like a Hollywood script, but it truly happened that way. And he's very down to earth, very honest, and a wonderful father. I know it probably sounds all very boring, but, oh, it sounds wonderful, it sounds like you have found happiness. Now, his name is Gary Collins, and he's an actor, and you have a daughter. Yes, Mary Clancy Collins, who will be seven years old next month, she's named for her great grandfather, William Clancy Farage, and she's a true Clancy. She loves horses, and she loves the out of doors. But she also loves ballet, so it is. Well, it sounds as though you have found happiness in California. Do you find that the Mississippi has, has values that are different from some other parts of the nation.

It seems to me. Do you find that they're different in California, and you consider yourself a California now? Well, I consider myself a Mississippi, and who now lives in California because of my occupation. If you are a Robert Redford or a Steve McQueen, you can live anywhere in the world, because you know what pictures you're going to be doing for the next three years. But my husband and I both do episodic television by that, I mean, we'll guest on a canon or a street of San Francisco, and he was doing a series, so you have to live in Los Angeles to do that. Of course. But hopefully we would one day like to have a farm or ranch or just acreage here in Mississippi and spend half of our time, if not the summers here in Mississippi. My husband had never been to Mississippi until we got married, and he really loves it. His favorite dish now is turn it bring.

But you were asking about the difference. I grew up in a very protected environment. We had Sunday school, church, Methodist youth fellowship, and then Sunday night service. And then we had Wednesday night prayer meeting, and then after prayer meeting we had choir practice. I grew up in a very, what I now look back on as a very lovely environment. It was full of love from all the neighbors, and I grew up feeling that I had a responsibility not just to my parents, but to the people of Brandon, Mississippi. It's like we were all growing up together. And I think that's a nice feeling. When I moved to New York and then later to California, there is not that closeness. And at first I wanted to blame it on a different style of living. And then I realized there are those people who live in California in Los Angeles and in

my business who really don't live any differently than I lived in Brandon, Mississippi. It's just that you have to look harder to find those people. And I think that you have to keep searching as an individual until you find those people who feel the same way that you feel about things. I'm talking about the important things. I'm talking about love and marriage and fidelity and marriage and how you're going to raise your child and what values your child will have. My daughter is still being taught to say, yes ma'am and no ma'am and please and thank you and I've run into people who say you should not ask your child to say yes ma'am. And I said well to me it's important that's the way I was brought up. And I want her to say yes ma'am and no ma'am. I think it's a respect that children should have for their elders.

So I do run into that occasionally, people who disagree with the way I was brought up and that I in turn am bringing up my daughter. But I don't think I have to please everybody else. I think I have to find what works for us as a family. Are you and Gary able to spend very much time together or how do you work your schedule so that you can? Well, when we got married, I'd been single for a long time so I knew I wasn't giving up anything. And I decided that he has had to be the main career and I have never taken a job that took me away from from Clancy or Gary for longer than a week. I have come here to Mississippi to do different appearances and I may be gone for five days. But generally we all go together. When Clancy was ten months old, my husband did a movie in Hong Kong and I was really crushed.

I didn't know what to do because I didn't want to leave my ten month old daughter. I didn't want my husband to go away for two and a half months without me and I thought what are we going to do? So we voted and we decided we're all going together and I said to my pediatrician, well, is it going to hurt Clancy? I mean, she's going to have to have cholera and yellow fever and all of this and he says, believe me, it's going to hurt you more than it's going to hurt Clancy and he was right. And she had her first birthday in Hong Kong and then in Japan. Then her second birthday, I believe, was in Hawaii at third and fourth, were in California. Fifth was in London and her sixth was in Africa and I don't know where our seventh is going to be. But we generally all try to go together because I've decided that that's the lesser of maybe three evils for my daughter. One I could leave her at home with grandparents and she could stay in school. The second I could stay at home and let my husband go off. Thirdly, we all go together.

We take a tutor or we arrange to have a tutor wherever we are. And we all stay together and that's what we've opted for. Because I think it's very hard on a marriage especially in our business to be separated. I just don't think you can be blasé about it and if you want your marriage to work and if you want to keep close to your child and know what's happening and know what thought she's thinking, I think you have to stay together. Obviously your marriage does work. I think so. You know, I don't think I'm superstitious. And I say that I'm not superstitious and I'll walk on the ladders. But when I say something like that, I look at pieces of blue and hard, hard, hard time to find what I'm missing. And I think it works a lot because of my husband. Well, I think very special, very special man. And I must say it gets better every year and that I don't say because you and I are talking and we're on television. I can say that quite honestly and I don't think I deserve any credit. I think I've been very lucky.

I think all of my life I've been very lucky. Do you still go to church? Yes. It's a little different. We go to, I'm a Methodist, but we found a Presbyterian Church that we like very much because the minister is very young. His name is Don Muammal. He was an Olympic athlete at UCLA and he's this tall, very young man who gets in and he says he's sermons with a smile and we have more young people in that church. And I think that's the way you can judge the success of a church and of a minister because in these troubled times for young people, if you can have a large number of young people in the congregation, that means that you're meeting their needs. And I think with all the temptation, with all the other things pulling on young people right now, it's quite a compliment to the minister and the church.

When you see so many of them involved in church life. Obviously your husband and your daughter are important. Your family in Mississippi is still important. Your mother's here in the studio with us, so I assume that that's the case. Yes, I don't want to embarrass her, but my mother is probably the person who has influenced my life the most. I've not always agreed with her and I don't know any daughter that's ever agreed whole heartedly with her mother. But she has been the guiding force. She's been the one responsible for I think any success that I have achieved. I can remember one time I was asked to enter a speech contest in Rankin County and I was lazy, I guess, I didn't want to work on a three minute speech that you had to memorize and then get up and say in front of a panel of judges.

And my mother said, yeah, I think you would, I think you'd be very pleased that you've done this once it's all over. So I ended up doing it for my mother, mainly. But I ended up being so pleased with the results and I was lucky enough to win. I don't think there were that many contestants really. But it started me thinking about a career in show business. It started me thinking about a career in speaking and it just did wonders for me and I probably would never have done it if my mother had encouraged me in it. And I try to remember these things when I'm dealing with my daughter, because I think you tend to do the things you approved of, I mean the things that you approved that your mother did and then going the opposite way and things that you didn't approve of. But I don't want to embarrass her because she's sitting here in the audience.

But my mother has been the guiding force in my life. She's a very special lady. Can I tell one story on her? Please do. I don't know whether she's going to approve of this. Once we were building a house in Brandon in the meantime, we were living with some very dear friends who had a big Annabellum house about two miles outside of Brandon called Music Wells. And the music were very dear friends of ours and they had this huge Annabellum home with two stories, you know, like 15 rooms downstairs and 15 rooms upstairs and they said, well, you're building your home, why don't you take the upstairs and live there? And we said fine. And my stepfather was out of town. He was checking land titles, working for Gulf Hall at that time, a lawyer for Gulf War. And he was out of town and I was having a big dance recital.

Now, in a small town, most of your activities revolve around the church and the school and there was to be a big ballet recital at the high school auditorium and I must have been what? Nine years old. And I had a little solo. Now at nine years of age, nothing in your life that's going to happen in the future is going to be as important as that night. And so he'd rained all that day and my mother and I went to get in the car to drive to the high school auditorium for my ballet recital and we got stuck. And no daddy. And no daddy there. And I am in tears. And my mother said to me, don't you worry, I'll get you to that dancing recital. And she went to the stables and she settled a horse and she put me up behind her. And we got to the dancing recital. How marvelous. She's a resourceful lady. Yes.

Besides being a very loving lady and she always put her children first. And we always knew that we were first in her life over bridge games and parties. And that's a very special feeling growing up as a child. I'm sure it is. Now, I know that you didn't just come to Mississippi to visit your family because I know you've been very busy for the last several days with all sorts of activities that you're doing purely are the goodness of your heart. And I know that some of them have to do with the bicentennial and I don't know what all else except that I do know you're interested in prevention of blindness and psych conservation. And I'm wondering why? Well, I'm involved a little bit selfishly in the Mississippi prevention of blindness society. Let me digress just a little bit. The Mississippi prevention of blindness society is something that is operated solely on voluntary funds.

They only have three paid employees over the entire state. And they have three main goals. One is to educate employers to be more conscious of eye safety and to promote eye safety on the job. Also we have lecturers and film clips, all sorts of people who are available to go out and speak to women's groups, men's groups, school groups, any organization that would like to have information on eye safety. We have that available free of charge. It's only a telephone call away. The third thing that we do and I'm using the editorial way, if I may, is they have a program to go out and screen preschool children for eye problems. The thing that's so important about that is that so many eye problems, if they're caught at an early age, can be so easily corrected and they can prevent permanent eye damage

and blindness. Also, so many children that we might think have a learning disability, Johnny isn't learning very easily. He's not comprehending what he reads, Johnny might have a site problem. And that's the reason why he is not understanding, why he's not making good grades. And I had that come home to me and my own family, not making good grades because thank goodness my daughter and I don't know where she gets. It is a straight-day student. But my husband said to me one day, Maryann, look at Clancy's left eye. I don't think it's tracking in correlation with the right eye. I said, I don't see a thing. So when I took her in for her check up with a pediatrician, I said, when you please look at the left eye, Gary says it seems to be a lazy muscle. The pediatrician said, no, I don't see anything.

And I said, we'll just to ease Gary's mind. Let's make an appointment. So it made an appointment with a specialist. He says she has a 2020 vision, but she does have a slight problem with the muscle in the left eye. I believe it's called amleopia. And hers was terribly slight. It just took six weeks of eye exercises and she was perfect again. But you can have amleopia in different stages of severity, some requiring operations. But if it is not called in time, it weakens the other eye because the other eye is having to compensate for the lazy muscle in the other eye. And after a certain age, it cannot be corrected. And so many problems that later results on blindness can be corrected at an early age. And the Mississippi Society for the Prevention of Blindness does this free of charge.

We have a lot of ladies here in the junior league who are trained to go out and do these pre-school screening tests. They give of their time and we provide all of the equipment and the training necessary. And I think if we could just dress to parents and to schools, to superintendents, to kindergarten teachers, please take advantage of this facility and that's available at no cost whatsoever. Because a lot of heartache could be prevented at a very early age and with a little and no heartache. Because I think it must be so difficult to adjust from being a sighted person to an unsighted person. And I have great admiration for those millions who have done it and done it so beautifully. I know a young man in Los Angeles who is a fantastic singer.

He's married to a lovely young lady and they have a darling little girl. He's unsighted but he's done more with his life than a lot of sighted people. In fact, he saved his daughter from drowning. Oh, my heart. He heard the splash of her entering the pool and followed the sand waves of the ripples to her in the pool and saved her life. So you say that you have a selfish interest, it's not really selfish, it's personal. Well, that's a nice way for you to say yes, it's a personal reason. And I think that the society is doing so much and with so little, when I say so little, we're so little in the way of funds. And the only way that we can keep this program going is by people volunteering. But I don't think we even need to talk about the money. I think if the society only educates mothers and teachers that these facilities are available, because I realize right now, with the economy, times are difficult.

And if a child's eyes look okay to the parent and the child doesn't say, mother, I have blurred vision. Because also to a child, he looks at you and he sees two of you. But he does not know that you don't see two of him. He does, he has no way of knowing that his side is different because it's always been like that. Exactly. So it's easy for a parent to say, listen, I know I should have the eyes checked, but they look perfect and he needs a new pair of shoes and it's going to cost me money to take him and have him tested. But it won't. Yes, this is free of charge. So I hope that the parents will not become apathetic to it. I mean, it's available only a phone call away and it's free of charge. Well, I think Mr. Cipi ought to know that Mary Ann Moby is just super nice, as nice as she's ever been, and that success has not spoiled Mary Ann Moby, far from it. How do you feel about beauty contest and retrospect?

I can only talk about the Miss America pageant because that's the only one I have any intimate knowledge of. To me, it was wonderful. La Nora Slaughter, who first took over the pageant in what, 1945, I believe, somewhere in that area. She was responsible for the Miss America pageant and she has now since retired and I'm very sorry about that because she's the one who went in and she said, Miss America will not be crowned in a swimsuit. It's undignified. We won't ladies. And I love that word, ladies. She said they'll be crowned in evening gowns and the press walked out and without the press. I mean, there was no pageant because this was before the time of television, but she would not be swayed and five minutes after the pageant began, they all came back. And from then on, she had her way.

The thing that was nice about the Miss America pageant was I never had to defend it. Do you know what I mean? Miss America never went anywhere on Shapiroon. She never appeared at a cocktail party. So no gentleman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or Oshkosh could say, oh, I went out with Miss America last night. I mean, there was no way. And she tried to maintain a lovely image for her girls that she called us. Also, it gave me a $10,000 scholarship, which I used to study, acting, and speech, ballet, singing in New York. Also I got to meet people in every walk of life. I got to meet presidents. I got to meet all sorts of people that, as a little girl from Matt Branden, Mississippi, right out of my junior year in college, that I would never have had an opportunity to meet.

So for me, it was a great advantage. I don't know what's going to happen to the pageant in the future. I don't know how I will feel about it in the future. But for me, I thought it happened at the right time, and it was good. Would your career have taken the same general direction, do you think, if you had meant for the Miss America pageant, would you have had the same opportunity? No, I don't think so. I have to be honest. I would like to say, yes, first of all, I don't think had it been for the Miss America pageant that I would probably have had the courage to move to New York. My father was very much against show business, because unfortunately, at that time, we're talking about 1958, the most we ever saw about anything pertaining to show business in this area, where we would read about the 16th divorce of some wireless-capade, and it was not something that a family, I think, would readily say, I want my daughter to be an actress.

Not really. So I think it would have been very difficult for me. And yet, many Miss Americas served their year and disappeared, and you didn't. So there must be something different about you. Well, I don't know. I don't think a lot of them wanted to do anything with it. I see. Now, the one disadvantage that I had was that I was not able to start at the bottom and work up. Well, that was a disadvantage. That's a disadvantage, because I'd always had singing lessons and dancing lessons and piano lessons, but I had never sung with an orchestra until I went to Atlantic City. I was petrified. I was sure he would. Oh, and I think, as it has been Miss America, you can't start in the chorus of a Broadway show and work up. I mean, they expect more from you. So when you got out there, you had to be as good as if you had gone through that apprentice period of learning step by step. And I was realistic enough to know that I got a lot of jobs because they could use the

name, you know, or the title, former Miss America. But they didn't keep you up there. Well, I had hoped that once I got the job that I could deliver on my own, that they never wanted them to be disappointed and say, well, she's just a former Miss America. And that's something that you constantly have to fight, and that's a problem to this day. I'm sure it is, except that, you know, you've made an aim for yourself, you're not Miss America anymore. Well, that's nice of me to say. I would like that to be true, and that's not saying anything detrimental against the page. No, I know for me, and I appreciate every moment and everything they did for me. Well, I don't think they intended to be the, you know, the end all for your life. But that was what? 1958. 1958. So that was 17 years ago, and there are many people that would be watching you tonight that would never have even known it.

There were either babies or, you know, this is the generation of young people, they don't even know that. They know you as Mary Ann Moby the actress. Well, I hope so. I would like to talk about, I don't know how we're doing time wise, but talking about 17 years ago, my years in Miss America, I was in Thomasville, North Carolina for a festival, and they were very lovely to me, and I stayed in a private home, and this lovely young lady came in, she must have been years old, and she sat on my lap, and I had my picture taken with her. Well, you know what I'm going to say, don't you? I went back to Thomasville about two years ago, and a young lady came over to me, a young woman, holding a little toddler in her hand, saying to me, do you remember this picture? And she had grown up, and she had her own baby now. Isn't that wonderful? And I thought, oh, time really flies by. The woman's movement, I think, has, you know, they're sort of inclined to downgrade beauty contest, and feel it, perhaps beauty isn't the most important quality that a woman

can have. Do you think that this has had any effect on pageants in general in Miss America in particular? I don't think it's had much effect on the Miss America pageant, because, again, L'Honneur Slotta was very adamant in saying, I don't want this to be known as a beauty contest. I want this to be the world's largest scholarship program for women. We're looking for the average American girl. This has been a conversation with Mary Ann Mobley.