Mary Hart Looks Back on Her Legendary Career, Including Interview with ‘Tough Cookie’ Lucille Ball

TV sweetheart Mary Hart may have fame and fortune, but that’s not what makes her wealthy — her riches are her friendships.

“I still have friends that I have known for decades,” reveals the 74-year-old former Entertainment Tonight host. “Those friendships are invaluable. When you have relationships that go back 30 and 40 years, you can’t beat it. It makes your life rich.”

Born Mary Johanna Harum in Madison, S.D., the star’s career goal was established at an early age.

“I have two dear friends who remember when we were about seven years old, swinging back and forth, talking about what we wanted to do in the future,” Mary confides. “I don’t remember this, but they both do. They said, ‘We remember that you said you wanted to be in show business!’ So, I must have known it very early on.”

Her first step came when she entered beauty pageants and competed as Miss South Dakota in the Miss America Pageant, which she lost to businesswoman, sportscaster, and First Lady of Kentucky Phyllis George.

Instead of using pageants as a gateway to Hollywood, she decided to go into entertainment journalism.

“I loved being interviewed, but I realized I wanted to be on the other side of the microphone because I wanted to be able to tell stories,” Mary explains. “I find everybody has a different story.”

She started small on a local talk show called Danny’s Day, and eventually interviewed for the Entertainment Tonight spot.

After teaching high school English for three years, Mary remembers, “I still sounded like that schoolteacher, and I looked like it! I just was very prim and very proper in the way I spoke. It was almost like I was talking to 12th grade Shakespeare students.”

But she got the job and spent the next 29 years traveling the world and interviewing actors, celebrities and famous dignitaries.

“I also loved interviewing the older actors, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball — she was a tough cookie and not easy to interview,” Mary remembers. “I just love those people!”

She says a Native American who was in Killers of the Flower Moon once “shyly grabbed me. He said, ‘Mary, I just have to tell you, I remember watching you as a kid, when you were on ‘Danny’s Day.’ It just gave me goosebumps, because I did ‘Danny’s Day’ in the late ’70s in Oklahoma City! For him to remember, I was very touched.”

Mary also has special words to live by: “Believe in yourself and thank God every day — not necessarily in that order.”