Johnny Carson’s favorite singer was Marilyn Maye. The Kansas City mob loved her, too.
Now 87, Maye is one of the last of the club singers who crisscrossed the country in the ’50s and ’60s, singing jazz standards. A fixture at New York’s cabarets, she’s performing Friday night at Joe’s Pub.
Carson sidekick Ed McMahon first heard her in the ’60s at the Living Room in New York. He got her on “The Tonight Show,” where she appeared an unprecedented 76 times.
“I think [Carson] liked me because we were both Midwestern kids,” says Maye. “He was from Nebraska, I’m from Topeka [, Kan.].”
Even so, they were never close. “He’d pop into the dressing room and say, ‘Great to have you back,’ and that was pretty much it. They gave you the choice of doing two songs or one song and then sitting with him on the couch. I’m about the music, so I always opted for two songs.”
Maye had a long-running gig at the Colony in Kansas City, where she lives. A tough guy named Turk owned it, and he and his buddies never missed her performances.
One night, Maye’s car was broken into outside the club. She’d been on a shopping spree, so the car was loaded with new outfits and gifts for her family. Everything was gone.
“I went to Turk and started crying,” she says. “He said, ‘Park your car in the same place tonight.’ I did, and when I returned, everything was back, completely untouched.”
Wherever Maye sang, Turk would make sure his friends looked after her. “There was a man in Chicago who took me out for lunch and gave me a car and a driver,�� she recalls. Later, she found out he was one of Chicago’s leading mobsters. “But it was a lovely lunch!”
Maye started singing professionally at 12, onstage and on the radio. Her mother, a piano player who had divorced her husband when Maye was very young, raised her. “Mother and I had to perform to make a living,” Maye says.
Was her mother a Momma Rose, driving her daughter to succeed in showbiz? “Oh, no,” she says. “If she had been, I’d be a bigger star today!”
Even so, her many fans include Barry Manilow, who saw her perform in Palm Springs, Calif., and invited her to lunch at his vast estate in the mountains. “This is what 45 years on the road will get you,” he said.
Maye laughed and replied: “Honey, I’ve been on the road 70 years and, well, no — I don’t have this.”