Louise Groody

Louise Groody (March 27, 1897 – September 16, 1961) was an American actress and musical comedy performer whose Broadway career spanned from 1915 to 1933. Born in Waco, Texas, she was the eldest of four children — three girls and a boy — born to Thomas and Irene Groody. Her father, a Pennsylvania native, worked as a drug store manager and pharmacist, while her mother was originally from Louisiana; the two had married in 1893. During Groody's childhood, the family lived at various points in Houston and Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Groody entered the entertainment world as a teenager, working as a cabaret dancer in New York in 1915 before transitioning to Broadway that same year as a chorus girl. Producer Charles Dillingham took notice of her and cast her in a supporting role — Gladiola — in the 1915 musical revue Around the Map, based on a book by C. M. S. McLellan, where she performed Louis Hirsch's number "There's One Thing That a Coon Can Do." Over the course of her Broadway career she appeared in more than ten productions, the majority of them musical comedies, with four achieving runs of over 300 performances.

Among her principal stage roles, Groody played Barbara in The Night Boat at the Liberty Theatre in 1920 and Rose-Marie in Good Morning Dearie at the Globe Theatre the following year. Her most celebrated credit came in 1925 when she originated the title role of Nanette in No, No, Nanette, also performed at the Globe Theatre. It was in that production that New York audiences first heard "Tea for Two," the song most closely associated with her name. Two years later, in 1927, she took on what she considered her favorite role, Loulou, in Hit the Deck at the Belasco Theatre. Additional Broadway credits include the play A Church Mouse, The Metropolitan Players, the play One Kiss, and other productions across her nearly two-decade stage career.

Groody married actor William Harrigan on April 8, 1920; Harrigan was the son of a prominent lawyer. The ceremony had originally been intended for Newark, New Jersey Mayor Charles P. Gillen, but when he became unavailable, Police Judge Michael J. Quigley officiated instead. She subsequently married stockbroker William F. McGee, a union that drew her into a bucket shop scandal in which McGee's firm was accused of defrauding approximately four thousand investors of millions of dollars. Groody cooperated with investigators and demonstrated that she too had suffered financial losses in the scheme. She divorced McGee in 1923, shortly before he began serving a one-year sentence at Sing Sing Prison. On January 8, 1949, she married John G. Loofburrow (1902–1964), a former actor from Ohio who spent many years as the New York night editor for the Associated Press. The two remained together until her death.

The financial gains of Groody's successful 1920s career were significantly diminished by losses she sustained in the Wall Street crash of 1929. In the early 1930s she expanded her performing work to include vaudeville and radio. By 1941 her financial circumstances had recovered sufficiently for her to lease an apartment on Manhattan's Park Avenue. During World War II she joined the American Red Cross and served in the Allied Mediterranean Theatre of Operations. Following the war, she appeared in television drama productions and celebrity panel programs during the 1950s. Groody died of cancer on September 16, 1961, at her summer home in Canadensis, Pennsylvania.