Mary Hart

The paycheck for smiling at the camera

Mary Hart signed her contract with Entertainment Tonight in 1982, not knowing she would sit at that desk for nearly three decades. Before that, she taught English at a high school in Sioux Falls. But local television in Oklahoma City pulled her out of the classroom and put her in front of a news camera.

In 1970, she won the Miss South Dakota pageant and reached the semifinals of Miss America. That opened the doors to NBC in Los Angeles, where she co-hosted a morning talk show with Regis Philbin. The show lasted just four months before being canceled due to low ratings.

And the gamble paid off.

The network brought her back for an entertainment news segment that eventually took over the early evening prime-time slot. In 1982, she began a stretch in a format that essentially invented modern TV celebrity news. Hart earned a million-dollar salary reading Hollywood news with a permanent smile that never faltered.

Her legs insurance and her voice tone

Insured her legs for one million dollars in a publicity stunt that newspapers of the era devoured. That figure rose to two million a few years later. But her most distinctive trait wasn't strictly physical. It was her ability to keep up the frantic pace of the news without a single diction slip across thousands of episodes.

In 1991, a medical study published in the New England Journal of Medicine claimed that her voice triggered epileptic seizures in a woman from New York. The case was real. Doctors determined that Hart's specific tone activated an abnormal brain response in the patient.

That didn't stop her rise in the industry.

She kept her job while other anchors came and went. Her contract in the nineties reflected total influence over the show's content. After all, Mary Hart didn't just host. She decided who got onto the set and who was left out of exclusive interviews.

The golden retirement and the Dodgers' dugout

She left the show in 2011 after completing 29 consecutive seasons behind the teleprompter. Her departure wasn't a firing but a personal decision to pursue other projects away from the daily stress of live broadcasting. At that point, her salary exceeded five million dollars a year for just half an hour of airtime per day.

She tried to relaunch her career as a singer and dancer with a residency in Las Vegas. She performed at the Golden Nugget hotel and recorded TV specials showing that her musical theater training was still intact despite the years.

It was the end of a television era.

In 2017, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences presented her with a Daytime Emmy for lifetime achievement. Since then, she has been seen in the front row at Los Angeles Dodgers games alongside her husband, producer Burt Sugarman. She always sits in the same VIP seat right behind the catcher at Dodger Stadium.