Margaret Hayes

Margaret Hayes, born Florette Regina Ottenheimer on December 5, 1913, in Baltimore, Maryland, was an American actress whose career spanned film, stage, and television. She died on January 26, 1977, at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida, at the age of 63, following a battle with cancer.

Hayes was one of four children born to Clara Bussey and Jacob Lewis Ottenheimer, a man of varied occupations who worked as a songwriter, joke-book writer, and radio performer before becoming a real estate broker, and who had reportedly supplied material to the magician Howard Thurston. While attending Forest Park High School, Hayes joined the Emerson Cook Stock Company to develop her acting skills. She later enrolled at Johns Hopkins University with the intention of pursuing nursing, but her theatrical ambitions prevailed. At the university she joined a theatrical organization called The Barnstormers, becoming its first female member.

Her path to a professional name was circuitous. On the advice of columnist Walter Winchell, she initially worked as a model under the name Dana Dale, appearing in cigarette, automobile, and fashion advertisements. Though her screen test for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind did not result in the part, she secured a film contract regardless. Studio publicists then recommended the name Dana Edwards for her screen career, which she adopted before ultimately settling on Margaret Hayes for public use. Friends knew her as Maggie.

Hayes signed her first studio contract with Warner Bros. and later moved to Paramount Pictures. She was frequently billed as Maggie Hayes in her film work. Her most recognized screen performance came in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle, in which she played schoolteacher Lois Judby Hammond. Her other film credits included The Glass Key, Sullivan's Travels, Good Day for a Hanging, and the 1958 film Damn Citizen, in which she portrayed Dorothy Maguire Grevemberg, the real-life wife of Louisiana State Police superintendent Francis Grevemberg, appearing opposite Keith Andes.

Her television work was extensive. In 1956 she guest-starred as Dora Hand in three episodes of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. She made four guest appearances on CBS's Perry Mason, among them a 1957 episode, "The Case of the Nervous Accomplice," in which she played defendant Sybil Granger. She appeared in the October 18, 1957, episode of Trackdown, "The San Saba Incident," as a convict named Abby Lindon, and co-starred in the Tombstone Territory episode "Cave-In," which aired March 26, 1958. In 1961 she appeared in the Rawhide episode "Incident of the Night on the Town" as Mrs. North and guest-starred in the Bonanza episode "The Countess" as Lady Linda Chadwick. She later appeared in two episodes of Flipper in 1965, playing Congresswoman Helen Browning.

On Broadway, Hayes performed between 1945 and 1962, with credits that included the comedy Happily Ever After, Step on a Crack, and the play Little Women.

In 1947, following her marriage to producer Herbert B. Swope Jr., son of three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Herbert Swope, Hayes stepped away from acting and turned to journalism, eventually serving as assistant fashion editor for Life magazine. That marriage produced two children, a daughter, actress Tracy Brooks Swope, and a son, Herbert Swope III, before the couple divorced in 1973. Hayes had previously been married twice: first to Charles DeBuskey, with whom she had a daughter, Nan, born in 1937, before divorcing in 1939; and then to actor Leif Erickson, whom she married on June 12, 1942, eloping to Minden, Nevada. That marriage lasted 28 days, and Hayes received a divorce on October 2, 1942. In her later years she lived in Palm Beach, Florida, where she hosted a daily radio talk show on WPBR.