Edie Adams earned the Tony Award and was nominated for an Emmy Award.
31 Facts About Edie Adams
2.
Edie Adams was the frequent television partner of Ernie Kovacs, her husband.
3.
Edie Adams was born in Kingston, Pennsylvania, the only daughter of Sheldon Alonzo Enke and his wife, Ada Dorothy.
4.
Edie Adams made her own clothing beginning in the sixth grade and Adams would later have her own designer line of clothing, called Bonham, Inc.
5.
Edie Adams earned a vocal degree from Juilliard and then graduated from Columbia School of Drama.
6.
Edie Adams studied at the Actors Studio in New York and at the Traphagen School of Fashion.
7.
Edie Adams was seen by the producer of the Ernie Kovacs show Three to Get Ready, who invited her to audition.
8.
Edie Adams had very little experience with popular music and could perform only three songs.
9.
Edie Adams had never seen the program she was hired for.
10.
When he saw his daughter on the show, Edie Adams's father was upset to find her role involved trying to avoid pies in the face.
11.
Edie Adams began working regularly on television with Kovacs and talk show pioneer Jack Paar.
12.
Edie Adams went on a six-week European cruise, hoping to come to a decision.
13.
Edie Adams starred on Broadway in Wonderful Town opposite Rosalind Russell, and as Daisy Mae in Li'l Abner, winning the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.
14.
Edie Adams played the Fairy Godmother in Rodgers and Hammerstein's original Cinderella broadcast in 1957.
15.
Edie Adams was to play Daisy Mae in the film version of Li'l Abner but was unable due to the late arrival of her daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs.
16.
Kovacs was a noted cigar smoker, and Edie Adams did a long-running series of TV commercials for Muriel Cigars.
17.
Edie Adams played supporting roles in several films in the 1960s, including the embittered secretary of two-timing Fred MacMurray in the Oscar-winning film The Apartment.
18.
Edie Adams was the wife of a presidential candidate in The Best Man and was reunited with Robertson for the comedy The Honey Pot.
19.
Shortly after her husband's death, Adams won a "nasty custody battle" with Kovacs's ex-wife over Edie's stepdaughters.
20.
Edie Adams's ex-wife had previously kidnapped the girls during a visit years before; because Kovacs was their legal guardian, he and Edie had worked tirelessly to locate his daughters and bring them home.
21.
The dispute lasted for years, with Edie Adams remaining the administrator of her husband's estate and guardian of the three girls.
22.
Edie Adams worked for years to pay her late husband's tax debt to the IRS.
23.
Edie Adams once owned a 160-acre California almond farm and was the spokeswoman for Sun Giant nuts.
24.
Edie Adams was a Republican and campaigned for Dwight Eisenhower's re-election during the 1956 presidential election.
25.
Edie Adams was an early advocate of civil rights, frequently lending her support to the movement at celebrity events and on her own television show during the early sixties.
26.
Edie Adams insisted that her duet with Sammy Davis Jr.
27.
Edie Adams died in Los Angeles, California, on October 15,2008, at age 81, from cancer and pneumonia.
28.
Edie Adams was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills, alongside her first husband Ernie and between her daughter, Mia, and her stepdaughter, Kippie.
29.
Edie Adams archived her husband's television work, which she described during a 1999 videotaped interview with the Archive of American Television.
30.
Edie Adams later testified on the status of the archive of the short-lived DuMont Television Network, where both she and husband Kovacs worked during the early 1950s.
31.
Edie Adams said that so little value was given to the film archive that the entire collection was loaded into three trucks and dumped into Upper New York Bay.