September 27, 2024
Before the ‘dumb blonde’ antics of Mean Girls’s Karen Smith, Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods or the singular-named marketing of Madonna and Cher, there was Dagmar.
She was a blonde Amazonian glamour girl from West Virginia who was made famous for her dimwit comedy on early 1950s television. Despite her name being mostly forgotten today, the starlet was, for some audiences, the first comedic woman they watched consistently on a hit show.
Dagmar’s career thrived during a time when women were expected to prioritize marriage and childrearing over gaining employment. She also owned her sexuality and curvaceous body, which, throughout her career, was dressed to the nines in form-fitting gowns with come-hither hair and makeup.
Dagmar always exuded an outgoing personality and often lovingly discussed her Appalachian roots to the press. Although it may not have been on purpose, her celebrity offered the public a different interpretation of a West Virginian.
“She was very unique,” said famed comedian Milton Berle. “There was only one Dagmar, and that was Dag.” Visually the television equivalent of Marilyn Monroe with the joking manner of Dolly Parton, she was described by The New York Times in 1950 as “having the voluptuous curves of a Venus, the provocative grace of a young Mae West and the virtue of a girl scout.” But she was more than just a beautiful woman. America’s “smartest dumb blonde” starred on the first late-night show, hosted her own variety program and is remembered as one of television’s first stars. Not too bad for a girl from West Virginia.
Long before she was known under the Scandinavian moniker, Dagmar was first named Virginia Ruth Egnor. Known as Ruthie by her family, she was born a Sagittarius on November 29, 1921, in Yawkey, West Virginia, and grew up in Guyandotte, a neighborhood of Huntington. She came of age during the Great Depression and took on household duties as a child to assist her parents.
“I helped take care of my brothers and sisters and washed a lot of dishes,’’ she recalled to The Herald-Dispatch in 1999. “We were lucky sometimes to have beans and cornbread.”
The young Dagmar found a passion for the stage early on and often performed in plays and operettas. She first worked at the local Walgreens as a teen to pay for dance lessons, then at a loan office — which she hated.
“I felt so sorry for the people who came in to borrow that I was miserable all the time,” she said.
After high school, Dagmar studied at Huntington Business College, but didn’t finish with any advanced degree. When asked in 1957 by journalist and game show host Mike Wallace if young women should attend higher education, she said, “Yes! If she has the chance … I think the more you learn, the better equipped you are for life.”
By the 1940s, Dagmar wanted to go back to the stage. She was residing in New York City under the name Jennie Lewis, which was changed due to her marriage and divorce from naval officer Angelo Lewis. She found opportunities in modeling due to her figure. She stood at five-foot-eight with a figure resembling the era’s beauty norms: large breasts, small waist and ample hips.
Dagmar eventually got her break on the famous comedy duo Olsen and Johnson’s vaudeville revue Laffing Room Only.
“I didn’t tell anyone it was my first show until a week before we opened,” she once told the press in 1950.
This opportunity led to a role as a nurse on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater, with whom she had a romantic relationship and later a long-term friendship. She told The Herald-Dispatch, “He’s the cutest thing in the world. I was a jerk not to marry him.”
She then got an even bigger break on the televised late-night variety show Broadway Open House as a girl singer named Dagmar who had a comedic habit of malapropisms. She performed while looking like an early 1950s glamour girl in tight gowns, wavy blonde hair and false eyelashes. The character’s name was thought up by show writer Lou Meltzer, who took inspiration from the beautiful Princess Dagmar of Denmark. The name stuck with the public, and she kept it until her death.
When Dagmar took on the role, the show’s host Jerry Lester instructed her to act dumb — and so she did. While reading essays, poems and plays and giving life advice, she purposefully fumbled her pronunciation to create innuendos. “A mush-room is a place to make love,” her character stated. And when commenting on how Jerry stood, she exclaimed, “Look at your pasteur!” In response to her lines, her co-stars would laugh and, at times, make sexist comments.
After its debut on May 29, 1950, the show was a success, and so was Dagmar. Although some complained about her revealing gowns and overt sexuality, she was beloved by audiences and garnered thousands of fan letters a week. “Jenny Becomes Dagmar — and a Hit,” declared a headline in The Richmond Times-Dispatch. What really set her apart was her talent for comedic delivery. She remembered her first time playing the role: “I didn’t know what to do, so I sort of lifted my eyebrows and staired [sic] straight ahead of me … I sort of increased my southern accent and ended each sentence with a question.”
When fame entered Dagmar’s life, she quickly found her footing as a celebrity by posing for numerous promotional photographs and giving interviews showcasing her charming personality, which was down to earth and outgoing, far from her decadent get-up.
Sexualized descriptions of her body were often included in profiles, and her name was synonymous with a voluptuous woman. It even became the nickname for a style of pointed, projecting car bumper guards. Perhaps in an effort to get ahead of public comment, Dagmar often made jokes about herself throughout her career. When asked if she was affiliated with a bust growing cream, she humored, “If I used that cream there isn’t a bed in the world I could get in. I’ve already outgrown the king-sized ones.”
Her West Virginia origin was also a common subject in the press. Statements about the location of her hometown were frequent, with some making quips about her Appalachian roots: “Unfortunately for her, she couldn’t be born in Ohio …”
LIFE Magazine’s July 16, 1951 cover story painted her upbringing as a snapshot of Americana by following Dagmar for a week during her visit to Guyandotte. She was captured sans her formal gowns in a button-up shirt and cuffed jeans while she bought her parents a new home, grabbed a hot dog with her siblings and wet her feet in the Guyan River.
During the flurry of her fame in 1951, which included a critically panned duet with Frank Sinatra, Broadway Open House ended its run. A factor in the show’s ending was Jerry Lester’s jealousy of Dagmar’s fame. “He had a problem with my popularity,” she recalled to The Herald-Dispatch. When this opportunity ended, it led to another that would put her solely in the spotlight: her own late-night variety show on NBC called Dagmar’s Canteen.
The show debuted on March 22, 1952, and began each episode with Dagmar, clad in a functional, less formal dress, performing a monologue to a crowd of military servicemen and women. After her monologue, Dagmar showed off all of her talents with comedic skits, interviews, songs, dance numbers and improvised crowd work that included flirty questions and quick kisses to young servicemen. Despite her wide range of skills, the show only lasted five episodes and ended on November 30, 1952. When asked why the show did not succeed, the conductor of Dagmar’s Canteen, Milton Delugg, replied, “Somehow it just didn’t come off; maybe people didn’t want to see a woman hostess …”
Dagmar never achieved the same success, but her relentless work ethic continued her career for decades. “When I left television, I started doing nightclubs,” she said in 1957. “Then, I started looking at scripts for other television shows. And I would rather have someone say, ‘What happened to Dagmar?’ than have him say, ‘Look what happened to Dagmar, doing a lousy show.’”
Dagmar’s new calling was on the stage in clubs and theaters and being herself on celebrity game and interview shows, such as The Merv Griffin Show and Hollywood Squares. In her spare time, she wrote two pulp novels about sexy spies.
Despite living and working in Los Angeles and New York City, Dagmar never forgot West Virginia and frequently visited the area. When “our own Dagmar” was in town, she received the red carpet treatment that included publicized meetings with town officials and a starring role in a parade. Soon enough she decided it was time to rejoin the Egnors after years of being away. She moved back to the region in 1997 after retiring from show business to the small town of Ceredo, which sits west of Huntington. “I have family here,” she told The Herald-Dispatch in 1997, “I just want to be near them.”
Dagmar lived in Ceredo for roughly four years until her death on October 10, 2001. During this time, she was inducted into the Huntington Civic Center’s Wall of Fame and received recommendation letters from her friends Milton Berle and Bob Hope for the honor. Bob, who had Dagmar as a guest on his first television show, The Bob Hope Show, wrote, “No one likes to be called any name that indicates a senior citizen status — a moniker like ‘pioneer’ for instance. Well, Dagmar may not like it, but she was a television pioneer.”
Just as she loved the area when she was alive, Dagmar showed her appreciation for her home state after death by making it permanent on her headstone at Woodmere Memorial Park Cemetery. Underneath her name and life dates reads: “Renowned TV star, Devoted to Family and W.V.”
The Mountain State is often associated with pepperoni rolls, rural scenery, and harmful stereotypes of its population; a glamorous and witty bombshell is far from its usual image. But that’s why remembering Dagmar is important.
Her stylish appearance, accomplished career and great sense of humor gave the general public a new perspective of a West Virginian. Once Dagmar gained fame, she could have easily disguised herself in a different persona, perhaps one that matched her exotic pseudonym. But she confidently remained the girl from Guyandotte, just with a better wardrobe.
