In the spring of 1971, on the set of her daytime television program, Dinah Shore met a man she had never met before. At 55, she was one of the most familiar women in American broadcasting, a voice that had been coming into homes for more than 30 years. The guest was Burt Reynolds, a 35-year-old actor on the edge of the stardom that would arrive with Deliverance the following year. Reynolds would later remember that he felt the attraction almost immediately and that he was bold enough during that first encounter to invite her to spend a weekend with him in Palm Springs.
The attraction became a relationship, and the relationship became public. Reynolds spoke about it openly for the rest of his life. The age difference—nearly 20 years—ran in the direction the public was least prepared to forgive. A famous older man with a younger woman was familiar enough to be almost invisible; a famous woman in her 50s openly involved with a handsome man in his 30s was something else.
The columnists noticed, the comedians noticed, and the tabloids noticed. She refused to behave as if she had done something shameful. To understand how Dinah Shore could live that way, you have to go back more than half a century, to a small town in Tennessee, to a child weakened by polio, and to parents who refused to surrender to what the disease had done. She was born on February 29, 1916, in Winchester, Tennessee, as Frances Rose Shore.
Her father Solomon had immigrated from Russia; her mother Anna was American-born from a Jewish family that had made its way south a generation earlier. The Shores were one of the very few Jewish families in the county. When Frances was about 18 months old, she contracted polio. In 1917, there was no vaccine and no treatment worth the name; children who survived it were often paralyzed for life.
Doctors told Anna Shore her daughter might never walk normally and should be prepared for a life with a visible physical difference. Anna Shore listened and quietly decided the doctor was wrong. Day by day, she worked with her daughter, rubbing the leg, stretching it, and when the child was old enough to try to stand, putting a record on the family phonograph and making her dance every day. The little girl learned to walk.
By the time she was of school age, she could run and keep up with the other children. She was aware of the damaged leg for the rest of her life and learned to stand for cameras in ways that minimized it. The music that had played in that Tennessee bedroom never stopped. It followed her into the school choir, into the temple in Nashville where her mother sang, and into her own developing voice—a low, warm voice that she learned to use without straining, singing close to the microphone as if confiding in the listener.
When Frances was about six, the family moved to Nashville. During her teenage years, her mother died suddenly. The woman who had pushed her toward swimming, ballet, tennis, and music was gone before Frances became an adult. She finished high school and entered Vanderbilt University in 1934, where she studied sociology while continuing to sing.
She was active in campus life, involved in Alpha Epsilon Phi, served in women’s student government, and helped establish a campus singing tradition. She graduated from Vanderbilt in 1938 with a degree in sociology. Despite her father’s worries and his offer of a respectable position in Nashville, she moved alone to New York City, determined to become a professional singer. She rented a small room, took the subway to auditions, and waited politely through weeks that turned into months.
Two of those auditions became part of the standard telling of her story. Benny Goodman, the king of swing, listened and did not hire her. Tommy Dorsey, who would eventually hire a skinny Italian kid named Frank Sinatra, also said no. She did not go home.
She got a small unpaid slot on New York radio station WNEW, singing on early morning and late night programs for essentially no money in exchange for exposure. It was on WNEW that the name happened. She was in the habit of singing a popular song from 1925 called “Dinah. ” She sang it so often that announcers began referring to her as the Dinah girl.
When she was offered her first significant contract, she took Dinah as her professional name and never went back. Her closest family and oldest friends still called her Fanny. To the world, from about 1939 forward, she was Dinah. In 1939, she began appearing on a national radio program hosted by comedian Eddie Cantor, one of the most beloved entertainers in America.
Her career moved quickly. She signed with RCA Victor, her first records sold, and by 1941 she had her first big hit, “Yes, My Darling Daughter. ” By 1942, she was one of the busiest young female vocalists in America. When the country went to war in December 1941, Dinah Shore was transformed from a rising young singer into a voice that belonged to the country.
In 1944, she recorded “I’ll Walk Alone,” a wartime song written from the point of view of a woman whose man is away at war. Her recording went to number one and stayed there for weeks, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. She was also one of the most active USO performers of the entire war. She went to bases in the United States and overseas.
She sang in France after the D-Day landings, in field hospitals in Europe, for burn wards and amputees. Stories that came back from those hospital tours described how she did not perform at the men; she sat down, talked, asked their names, asked where they were from, and sang the songs they asked her to sing. She met her husband during the war. George Montgomery was a movie actor, a western star from Montana, serving in the Army Air Forces.
They married on December 5, 1943, in Las Vegas. She was 27. She wore a simple two-piece suit rather than a wedding gown because it was wartime. They would stay married for 20 years.
In 1948, there were fewer than a million television sets in American homes; by 1955, there were about 35 million. For most female radio stars of the war years, the transition to television was a quiet no. Dinah Shore was almost perfectly built for the new medium; the quality that had made her radio voice intimate translated directly to the camera. She looked at the lens the way she had sung into the microphone.
In 1951, she got her own short 15-minute NBC program. The bigger canvas arrived in October 1956, when NBC launched The Dinah Shore Chevy Show: a one-hour prime time Sunday evening color musical variety program sponsored by Chevrolet, with Shore as host and star. Chevrolet took the wager against the conventional wisdom that a show built around a woman would alienate male viewers. It paid off.
The program became a durable national success and a showcase for early color television, running from the mid-1950s into the early 1960s; Shore continued under her own name through 1963. The television academy records multiple Emmy victories for Shore, including wins connected to the Chevrolet years. The Chevy show, like almost every major American television program of that period, was carried on southern affiliate stations where segregation was still the law. Black performers could appear on network shows, but they were not supposed to touch the white host, share physical space in ways that suggested equality, or sing duets with her.
Producers, sponsors, and affiliate managers understood these unwritten rules. There is a version of this story that features a specific dramatic 1960 incident involving Shore and Harry Belafonte that supposedly caused a national uproar, but solid documentation of that particular incident does not appear in reliable archives; it may be a confused memory of the 1968 moment when Petula Clark touched Harry Belafonte’s arm on her own special, which did produce a documented sponsor complaint. What is documented is that Shore consistently welcomed black artists onto her program. Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole appeared with her, sang with her, and were treated as colleagues and friends.
Belafonte later spoke of her with warmth, remembering that she never once made him feel his presence was a favor or a political gesture. Behind the camera, a different story unfolded. George Montgomery was, by conventional measure, an ideal partner. He was tall, dark-haired, handsome in the American way of western film stars, and unusually practical, able to build and fix things.
Their house in Encino became a showpiece of his craftsmanship; he designed furniture, built cabinets, and developed a small side business selling his work. They had two children: their daughter Melissa Anne, born in 1948, and son John David, adopted in 1954. For most of the 1950s, the picture was the famous Sunday night hostess, the movie star husband, the two children, the beautiful house. In May of 1962, Dinah filed for divorce.
The news came as a genuine shock; there had been no long buildup of gossip or visible scandal. Over the course of the marriage, her career had continued to expand while his had contracted. Yet both spoke about each other afterward with warmth and remained connected as parents and friends. The divorce was finalized in 1963.
Within months of the divorce, she married a building contractor and tennis player named Maurice Smith. The marriage was a mismatch almost from the start; the world of network television and Beverly Hills was not one Smith was comfortable in. They separated within a year and divorced in 1964. She would not marry again, living the remaining roughly 30 years of her life on her own terms.
Her career in the years after the Chevy show ended went through a quiet stretch. The variety show format was changing; the Kennedy assassination, civil rights, the Beatles, Vietnam, and the cultural churn of the decade had no patience for the polite Sunday evening entertainment of the previous one. In 1970, she came back, not in prime time but in daytime. NBC launched Dinah’s Place, a half-hour weekday morning show in which she invited guests into what looked like her home kitchen, cooked with them, talked with them, and occasionally sang.
It won an Emmy in 1973 and opened a whole new territory in American daytime television: the celebrity-hosted conversational lifestyle-oriented program. It was on that show, in 1971, that Burt Reynolds walked into her studio. He would write in his memoirs that she had greeted him as if they had known each other for years and that within about 15 minutes he understood he was in the presence of one of the most fully alive human beings he had ever met. He said she laughed from somewhere real and looked at him when they talked in a way that made him feel he was the only person in the building.
When the relationship became public, the reaction was not gentle. The tabloids ran cruel headlines and late night comedians made jokes. She never gave a defensive interview, never wrote an op-ed, never explained herself; she would smile and say something warm and vague and change the subject. Reynolds took longer to make peace with the reaction.
But on whether the relationship was real, he was absolutely clear for the rest of his life. He said repeatedly that the relationship was one of the most important of his life, that he had been in love with her, and in one of his last major interviews before his death in 2018, that not marrying her was one of the great regrets of his life. They were together as a couple from about 1971 to 1975. Reynolds later said he wanted to have children and struggled with the awareness that she would in the natural course of things be an old woman while he was still in middle age.
They separated as a romantic couple around 1975, but they did not separate as friends; they remained close for the rest of her life, spoke on the telephone, and stayed in touch after her diagnosis. When she died, he grieved her openly and continued to do so in interviews and memoirs for the remaining 24 years of his own life. After the Reynolds relationship, Shore settled into one of the most productive phases of her long career. She launched a second daytime talk program, Dinah, which ran from 1974 to 1980 and won another Emmy.
She wrote cookbooks, recorded albums, and became involved in something that would be one of the most important legacies of her later life: women’s professional golf. In 1972, she was actually a tennis player and did not really play golf when Colgate executives decided the new event they wanted her associated with would be a women’s golf tournament. Six weeks before the first tournament, she took an intensive course of lessons with a professional, learned enough to survive the pro-am without embarrassing herself—and then fell for the game. In 1972, she lent her name and time to the new event at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California.
The purse was rich by the standards of the women’s game, and the tournament was called the Colgate Dinah Shore Winners Circle. It gave women’s professional golf a stage it had not really seen before. Shore showed up every year for more than two decades, stayed for the entire tournament, attended pro-am rounds, sponsor dinners, and awards ceremonies, and treated the players as the stars. Amy Alcott won the tournament three times; in 1991, after winning again, she went into the water beside the 18th green and Dinah joined her.
The tournament remained a major championship for decades, with Shore’s name attached through sponsorship changes; in 1983 it became a major of the LPGA. A parallel social gathering grew up around the tournament weekend: a gathering of lesbian women from around the country that became, over the 1980s and 1990s, one of the largest annual gatherings of lesbian women in the United States, informally called the Dinah. It was not organized by Shore, was not sponsored by her, and grew up around her tournament rather than through it. The distinction matters: Shore deliberately helped build the golf tournament; the lesbian social tradition that grew around the same weekend was not her work, but history attached meanings to the name that she never planned.
In 1975, Walter Cronkite appeared on her program and afterward praised the experience in unusually strong terms, saying he had rarely, if ever, been interviewed better and had never encountered anyone who had done more homework before sitting down with him. Listeners experienced the result as comfort, but behind the ease was the old discipline that had carried her from auditions to radio to live television. She read, studied her guests, and knew enough before the camera came on that she could afford to sound conversational once it did. Most performers of her level came to think of themselves as the product; she thought of herself as the visitor in the American living room.
In the spring of 1993, at 77, she learned she had ovarian cancer. She had been in good health for most of her life. The circle of people who knew remained small for much of the time she was ill. She underwent treatment, stayed close to family and friends, and continued to behave as much as she could like herself.
She kept the illness private from the larger public. She died on February 24, 1994, at her home in Beverly Hills, less than a week from her 78th birthday. George Montgomery, divorced from her for more than 30 years, was there, along with her two children. Burt Reynolds spoke publicly, saying she had been the love of his life and that he had been a fool not to marry her.
Frank Sinatra sent a message to the family, calling her one of the finest people he had ever known. A month later, the LPGA gathered at Mission Hills for the tournament that had carried her name. The week became a memorial; players and officials kept expecting to see her walking the fairways. The LPGA made her an honorary member of its Hall of Fame.
Donna Andrews won the championship by one stroke and jumped into the water by the 18th green, echoing the celebration Dinah and Amy Alcott had shared there a few years earlier. Her influence on television was practical: one of the examples the business could not erase. A woman had carried sponsorship, ratings, music, comedy, interviews, and a demanding production schedule across years of national broadcasting. Later executives arguing that audiences would accept a woman as the central authority of a program inherited a landscape in which Shore had already helped make that proposition less exotic.
Her tournament helped one week on the LPGA calendar feel as large as the sport believed it deserved to be, using her celebrity deliberately to direct attention toward players who did not have as much of it as she did. And she lived a specific kind of adult life in front of the American public: a working woman who was married, a working woman who was divorced, a working woman who kept working after her divorce, a working woman who fell in love publicly with a man 20 years younger and did not apologize, a working woman who chose at 48 not to remarry and lived the last 30 years of her life on her own terms. She did not describe her life as a demonstration of anything; she just lived it, and people watched. Her papers eventually came back to Vanderbilt, containing family material, school records, correspondence, professional documents, and television papers.
She had returned to the campus repeatedly over the years; photographs in the university archives show her among the people who had known her as Fanny Shore before the records, before Chevrolet, before the national audience. She began life with a body weakened by polio and a family unwilling to accept that weakness as a final verdict. She ended it in Beverly Hills with her children and her former husband close by after more than half a century of public work. In between, she sang, studied, auditioned, married, raised children, divorced, started over, interviewed, learned golf, loved people the public thought she should not love, and kept showing up.
Because she was a leap day child, she lived through only 19 actual February 29ths after the day she was born. The ordinary calendar tells the larger truth better: nearly 78 years of life, more than half a century of them spent making herself useful to an audience.