Edie Adams, an actress, comedian and singer who both embodied and winked at
the stereotypes of fetching chanteuse and sexpot blonde, especially in a
long-running series of TV commercials for Muriel cigars, in which she poutily
encouraged men to “pick one up and smoke it sometime,” died Wednesday in the
West Hills section of Los Angeles. She was 81 and lived in Los Angeles.
The cause was pneumonia and cancer, said her son, Josh Mills.
Ms. Adams had a remarkably varied career in show business, performing on
stage, in nightclubs and on the large and small screens. A classically trained
singer who graduated from Juilliard, she won the Miss U.S. Television beauty
pageant in 1950 after singing a coloratura version of “Love Is Where You Find
It” in the talent competition. The prize was an appearance in Minneapolis
onstage with Milton
Berle, which led to an appearance on his television show, which in turn led
to her being featured on television with the cigar-smoking comedian Ernie
Kovacs, who would become her husband.
Ms. Adams made her Broadway debut in 1953, playing Rosalind
Russell’s sister in the Leonard
Bernstein musical “Wonderful
Town,” directed by George Abbott.
By the time she took her second Broadway role, in the musical version of the
comic strip “Li’l
Abner” in 1956, she was already known for her comic, vocal and physical
gifts. Though not as spectacularly curvy as Marilyn
Monroe, Ms. Adams bore some resemblance to her and was known to do a wicked
Monroe impersonation. So the part of the voluptuous and loyal Daisy Mae was a
perfect fit, and for her performance she won a Tony.
In the 1960s she took her talents to the movies, appearing largely in
supporting roles in battle-of-the-sexes films including “The
Apartment” (1960), with Jack
Lemmon and Shirley
MacLaine; “Lover
Come Back” (1961), with Doris
Day and Rock
Hudson; and “Under
the Yum Yum Tree” (1963), with Mr. Lemmon and Carol
Lynley. She was part of the enormous ensemble — including Sid
Caesar, Jonathan
Winters, Spencer
Tracy, Phil
Silvers, Mickey
Rooney and Ethel
Merman — in Stanley
Kramer’s “It’s
a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963), and she played the wife of a ruthless
presidential candidate (Cliff
Robertson) in the screen adaptation of Gore
Vidal’s political drama “The
Best Man.”
In 1962 she appeared on ABC with Duke
Ellington. In 1963 she also began a variety show, “Here’s Edie,” in which
she performed with the likes of Count Basie and Sammy
Davis Jr. The show received five Emmy nominations, but was short-lived.
“It was one of the first times that a black man and a white woman could be
seen together on a stage, singing,” Mr. Mills said. “And that was her choice.
That was her doing.”
In the 1970s and ’80s she returned to television, appearing frequently as a
guest star on myriad series, from “Fantasy
Island” and “The
Love Boat” to “Murder, She Wrote” and “Designing
Women.”
But of all her incarnations, she will be best remembered as the face (and the
legs and the body) of Muriel cigars. In a series of commercials that ran over 19
years while sales of the brand increased more than tenfold, Ms. Adams, usually
clad in the highest heels and the slinkiest dresses, danced with giant cigars,
caressed them and extolled their virtues, often with a come-hither moue and a
wink, and the whispered slogan adapted from Mae
West’s famous invitation to come up and see her.
“One thing about my mom; she was keenly aware of her sex appeal,” said Mr.
Mills, whose father was Ms. Adams’s second husband, the photographer Marty
Mills. “She knew men would be happy to spend time with her. But she was smarter
than the average bear.”
Edith Elizabeth Enke was born on April 16, 1927, in Kingston, Pa. — Adams was
her mother’s maiden name — and spent her childhood partly in Grove City, Pa.,
and partly in Tenafly, N.J. Her father was a banker until the stock market crash
of 1929; then he became a salesman. Her mother was a music teacher and an
English teacher who quit after American soldiers returned from World War I out
of a belief, born of her Welsh heritage, Ms. Adams once said, that a woman
should not take a job from a man. It was also part of the Welsh heritage, she
added, that young women were expected to sing.
Ms. Adams’s life was flecked with sorrow. Kovacs died in an automobile
accident in Los Angeles in 1962 and left her with an enormous debt to the Internal
Revenue Service, which she eventually paid off with performance dates and
commercial work. Their daughter, Mia Kovacs, died in another automobile accident
in 1982. Ms. Adams’s marriage to Mr. Mills ended in divorce, as did a third
marriage, to the jazz trumpeter Pete Candoli. Her son, of Los Angeles, is her
only survivor.
Among the most memorable performances of her career was a song she sang on
the final episode of “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour” in April 1960. The show was the
last in the long partnership of Lucille
Ball and Desi
Arnaz; their marriage had crumbled and they were no longer speaking on the
set. As part of the convoluted plot of the episode, Ms. Adams, with Vivian Vance
at the piano, performed a bell-clear, heartbreaking rendition of the Alan
Brandt-Bob Haymes classic “That’s All,” which reduced the entire crew to
tears.
“Say it’s me that you adore, for now and evermore,” Ms. Adams sang. “That’s
all, that’s all.”