LIVING LEGEND OF THE MONTH

Jill Corey, The Ultimate Diva

Photo:  Jill Corey enjoyed a very successful career in musical theater starting in the late 1950’s and extending to as recently as 2003, when she appeared in a production of Anne of Green Gables. In this photo, Jill is shown on stage during the 1980’s in the role of Irma La Douce.  

 Jill scored three hit records during 1957.  Three of her Columbia recordings were actually introduced on television anthology series.  She appeared in two of the dramatic presentations, but previous commitments prevented her from acting in the Studio One Summer Theatre episode which introduced her biggest hit record, Love Me to Pieces.  Jill became increasingly in demand for personal appearances.  She became one of the youngest performers ever to headline at the Copacabana and her twenty-eight weeks at the Blue Angel established a record for that venue.  Countless guest appearances on television, including six on the Ed Sullivan Show alone, testified to her popularity.  The year 1957 was capped by Jill’s being named one of the new complement of singers on the perennial favorite, Your Hit Parade, and by a television interview by famed journalist Edward R. Murrow on Person to Person. As a reward for her success in the recording studio during 1957, Columbia gave Jill the opportunity to produce an LP of her own choosing.  What the 22-year-old diva created stands even today as a truly unique achievement.  Entitled Sometime I’m Happy, Sometime I’m Blue, Jill selected six 1920’s era happy tunes sung to the able backing of Glenn Osser in her most charming “pixie twinkle voice”, as it was once described.

 

In stark contrast the reverse of the album consisted of six torch songs delivered with such remarkable pathos and depth of understanding that comparisons to Piaf were immediate and inevitable.  Understatement was her hallmark, and never once did Jill resort to needless histrionics to convey the songwriter’s poignant lyrics. The album was released in March of 1958, shortly after Miss Corey scored yet another coup, as lead in Columbia Pictures Senior Prom and with it another hit song Big Daddy, which she subsequently reprised twice on the Ed Sullivan Show. As 1961 drew to a close, Jill was marking her eighth year in the limelight and now was increasingly in demand for public appearances, including more work in regional theater, where both her singing and acting talents were in demand.  It is not surprising then that Jill began thinking about a break from the frenetic pace she had lived since a teenager.  No doubt that thought had something to do with handsome Pittsburgh Pirates third baseman Don Hoak, whom she had met a year earlier, and who had launched a well orchestrated campaign to win Jill’s affections.  His efforts ultimately proved successful.  On December 27, 1961, the two were united in marriage in Pittsburgh. While honoring existing contractual commitments, the following year Jill began a systematic withdrawal from the public stage, first to follow her husband’s baseball career and then to begin her own family with the birth of daughter Clare in 1965. The Hoaks’ union was an unusually strong and happy one, particularly for a couple both in the public eye.  It was, however, a tragically short marriage.  On October 9, 1969, after a particularly stressful day culminating in an attempt to thwart the theft of a family vehicle, Don died of cardiac arrest.  He was 41.CONTINUES NEXT