Janis Paige

Janis Paige (born Donna Mae Tjaden; September 16, 1922 – June 2, 2024) was an American actress and singer.

With a career spanning nearly 60 years, she was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Paige began singing in local amateur shows at the age of five. After high school, she moved to Los Angeles, where she became a singer at the Hollywood Canteen during World War II, as well as posing as a pin-up model.

This led to a film contract with Warner Bros., although she later left the studio to pursue live theatre work, appearing in a number of Broadway shows. She continued to alternate between film and theatre work for much of her career. Beginning in the mid-1950s, she also made numerous television appearances, as well as starring in her own sitcom It's Always Jan.

Spouses

• Frank Martinelli Jr., (m. 1947; div. 1951)​
• Arthur Stander, (m. 1956; div. 1957)​
• Ray Gilbert, (m. 1962; died 1976)

Early life

Paige was born Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma, Washington, the first child of Hazel Leah (nee Simmons) and George S. Tjaden on September 16, 1922, primarily of Norwegian, German, English, and Cornish descent. She had a younger sister named Betty Jane.

Paige began singing in public at age five in local amateur shows. She moved to Los Angeles after graduating from high school, and she was hired as a singer at the Hollywood Canteen during World War II. Courtesy of MGM, Paige helped entertain the troops in February 1944 at Camp Roberts, California, starring in Rio Rita along with Ann Ayars. During the war, United States Army Air Forces pilots flying the P-61 Black Widow chose her as their "Black Widow Girl". In appreciation, she posed as a pin-up model, dressed in an appropriate costume.

Film roles

The Hollywood Canteen was a studio-sponsored club for members of the military. A Warner Bros. agent saw her there, saw her potential and signed her to a contract. She began co-starring in low-budget musicals, often paired with Dennis Morgan or Jack Carson. She co-starred in Romance on the High Seas (1948), the film in which Doris Day made her movie debut. Paige later co-starred in adventures and dramas, in which she felt out of place. Following her role in Two Gals and a Guy (1951), she decided to leave Hollywood.

Broadway

Paige appeared on Broadway, and she was a huge hit in a 1951 comedy-mystery play Remains to Be Seen. She also toured successfully as a cabaret singer. In April 1947, she was crowned "Miss Damsite" and participated at the ground-breaking ceremony for the McNary Dam, on the Columbia River, alongside Cornelia Morton McNary, Senator Charles McNary's widow, and Oregon Governor Earl Snell.

Stardom came in 1954 with her role as Babe in the Broadway musical The Pajama Game. She was on the December 1954 cover of Esquire, where she was featured in a seductive pose taken by American photographer Maxwell Frederic Coplan. For the screen version, the studio wanted one major movie star to guarantee the film's success, so John Raitt's role of Sid was offered to Frank Sinatra, who would have been paired with Paige. When Sinatra declined, the producers offered Paige's role of Babe to Doris Day, who accepted and was paired with Raitt.

Return to film

After six years away, Paige returned to Hollywood in Silk Stockings (1957), which starred Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, the Doris Day/David Niven comedy Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960), and as a love-starved married neighbor in Bachelor in Paradise (1961) with Bob Hope. A rare dramatic role was as Marion, an institutionalized prostitute, in The Caretakers (1963).

Musical theater

Paige returned to Broadway in 1963 in the short-lived Here's Love. In 1968, when after nearly two years Angela Lansbury left the Broadway production of the musical Mame to take the show on a limited U.S. tour, Paige was the star chosen to be the first Broadway replacement, and she admired the character, saying, "She's a free soul. She can be down, but never out. She's unbigoted. She says what she thinks with a kind of marvelous honesty, which is the only way to say anything."

Paige appeared in touring productions of musicals such as Annie Get Your Gun, Applause, Sweet Charity, Ballroom, Gypsy: A Musical Fable, and Guys and Dolls. In 1984, she was back on Broadway with Kevin McCarthy in a nonmusical play, Alone Together. The tryout tour gave Paige her first experience of the eastern summer-stock circuit, where she said audiences "laughed so hard you just had to wait", and she enjoyed the role so much, she played it again in 1988 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, this time with Robert Reed.

Television host and roles

During the 1955–1956 television season, Paige starred in her own sitcom It's Always Jan as Janis Stewart, a widowed mother.

Paige made her live dramatic TV debut June 27, 1957, in "The Latch Key" on Lux Video Theatre. She appeared as troubadour Hallie Martin in The Fugitive episode "Ballad for a Ghost" (1964). She also had a recurring role as Auntie V, Tom Bradford's sister, in Eight Is Enough.

Paige appeared as a waitress named Denise in both the seventh and ninth seasons of All in the Family. In her first appearance, she has a flirtation with Archie Bunker that threatens to become serious.

Paige appeared on episodes of 87th Precinct; Trapper John, M.D.; Columbo; Night Court; Caroline in the City; and in the 1975 television movie John O'Hara's Gibbsville (also known as The Turning Point of Jim Malloy). In 1982, she appeared on St. Elsewhere as a female flasher who stalked the hallways of the hospital to "cheer up" the male patients. She also appeared on a season 11 episode of Happy Days, as a roadside diner waitress named Angela who may or may not be Fonzie's long lost mother; Fonzie has a heartfelt talk with Angela, and it is left up to the viewer to determine if she is his mother or not – though the emotions exhibited by her character throughout the scene indicate that she is, but does not want to be found out. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was seen on several soap operas, including Capitol (1987, as Sam Clegg's first wife, Laureen), General Hospital (1989–1990, as Katharine Delafield's flashy Aunt Iona, a lady counterfeiter), and Santa Barbara (1990–1993, replacing Dame Judith Anderson as matriarch Minx Lockridge).

Honors

Paige was given a star in the Motion Picture section of the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6624 Hollywood Boulevard on February 9, 1960.

Personal life and death

Paige was married three times. She married Frank Louis Martinelli Jr., a restaurateur, in 1947; they divorced in 1951. She married Arthur Stander, a television writer and creator of It's Always Jan, in 1956 and divorced him the next year. Paige married composer and music publisher Ray Gilbert in 1962. They remained married until his death on March 3, 1976. All of Paige's marriages were childless.

Paige was a Republican who supported the campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower during the 1952 presidential election.

In 2001, Paige found that her voice was cracking with nearly irreparable vocal-cord damage. She went to a singing teacher a friend recommended. Paige's voice ended up worse with her not being able to talk at all. "He literally took my voice away," she said. "I lost all my top voice. I couldn't hold a pitch for a second. Finally, I couldn't make a sound. He said that this will all come back. It didn't." Another singing teacher told her to go to the voice clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. "There were bits of skin hanging off my vocal cords", she said. "They told me to go home and not talk for three months." She finally was introduced by a doctor to another voice teacher, Bruce Eckstut, who helped her regain her speaking voice and singing voice.

In 2017, Paige wrote a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter in which she stated that Alfred Bloomingdale had attempted to rape her when she was 22 years old. She alleges that she was sexually assaulted after being lured into Bloomingdale's apartment under false pretenses.

Paige turned 100 on September 16, 2022, and died at her Los Angeles home on June 2, 2024, at the age of 101.