Mary Printz, an Ear for the Famous, Dies at 85 (Published 2009)

A long, long time ago, before the BlackBerry, before the fax machine, even before the answering machine, busy people relied on answering services to get messages from family, friends and clients. In rooms all over America, rows of women — for they were nearly always women — sat day and night at blinking, buzzing switchboards and plugging in, speaking up and writing everything down by hand.

At one switchboard, on the East Side of Manhattan, sat a young woman named Mary Printz. The name of the answering service has long since lost to time, but in the mid-1950s, when Mrs. Printz worked there, it catered to some of the biggest personalities in the city’s theatrical and business worlds.

Like her colleagues, Mrs. Printz gave her clients polite and impeccable service. But she did something more.

To Mrs. Printz, clients were not merely disembodied voices: they were flesh-and-blood people with whom she became indispensably, if often invisibly, intertwined. If they needed it, she would walk their dogs, water their plants, pick up their laundry, listen to their troubles and, when those troubles were especially bad, run right over with consolation in a bottle. In the process, she came to know every aspect of her clients’ lives, from professional successes and failures to affairs of the heart.

If the long, helpful career of Mrs. Printz, who died on Feb. 21 at 85, sounds a great deal like that of the Judy Holliday character in the hit Broadway musical “Bells Are Ringing,” it is no accident. One of Mrs. Printz’s clients was Adolph Green, who, inspired by her extraordinary ministrations, wrote the show’s book and lyrics with his frequent collaborator, Betty Comden. (The music is by Jule Styne.)

“Bells Are Ringing,” which ran on Broadway from 1956 to 1959, starred Miss Holliday as Ella Peterson, a delightfully dizzy answering service operator who turns her clients’ lives upside down and back again. Some of the show’s songs became standards, among them “The Party’s Over.”

Miss Holliday won a Tony Award for her performance, as did Sydney Chaplin, who played Jeff Moss, the client who falls in love with her. (A revival of the musical, starring Faith Prince, played briefly on Broadway in 2001.)

“Bells Are Ringing” was made into a movie, released in 1960. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, it starred Miss Holliday and Dean Martin.

In 1956, the year the musical opened, Mrs. Printz struck out on her own, founding the Belles Celebrity Answering Service.

The first message she took there was for the actress Hermione Gingold; other clients over the years included Candice Bergen, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Brooke Shields, Liz Smith, Spencer Tracy, Kathleen Turner, Tennessee Williams and members of the rock band Kiss.

Mrs. Printz ran the service until she died. Her death, at her home in Tappan, N.Y., was of congestive heart failure, a result of post-polio syndrome, her family said.

Every morning for decades, Mrs. Printz rose at 4 a.m. to drive to the Belles office, originally on East 53rd Street. She was at the switchboard in time to place the first round of wake-up calls. (“Good morning, Mr. Pacino; it’s 5 a.m.”)

When clients dialed PLaza 2-2232, the agency’s number for many years, they knew they could count on discretion and, when required, innovation. Some messages were routine — at least in the world in which Mrs. Printz’s clients moved — involving little more than having the service tell the chauffeur to be at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time.

Others required quick thinking. There was the time, for instance, that Mrs. Printz took a frantic call from Noël Coward, recalled her husband, Bob Printz, in a telephone interview on Friday:

“Mary,” Mr. Coward cried, “Marlene has just had a bottle of Scotch and is finished with it, and it’s Sunday; I don’t have any more. What’ll I do?”

Mrs. Printz dispatched her husband to see a bartender he knew, and then to meet Mr. Coward at the back door of his building. Crisis averted.

At its height in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the Belles service had almost 600 clients, with nearly two dozen operators working six switchboards. The company did not advertise; new clients were accepted by referral only. (Mr. Printz said his wife once picked up the phone to hear: “This is Lenny. Adolph asked me to call you,” and, later, after the hopeful caller had been admitted to her fold, “Be sure it’s ‘bern-STYNE.’ ”)

If “Celebrities and millionaires only” was not actually the official company slogan, it was certainly the unofficial watchword, Mr. Printz said. “No doctors and no TV repairmen,” he recalled his wife saying. “It’s too much trouble for the girls.”

Mary Selina Horn was born on April 8, 1923, in Grosse Pointe, Mich., and reared in Hampton, Va. Her father, Bill Horn, was an executive with a pleasure-boat company and a well-known speedboat racer. At 5, Mary contracted polio and was told by doctors she would never walk again. She walked, then ran, then danced.

After a year of college and a marriage that ended in divorce, she settled in New York. In 1953, she married Mr. Printz, a cocktail pianist, and looked for a night job so her hours would conform to his. She was hired by the answering service the next year, at 90 cents an hour.

Besides her husband, Mrs. Printz is survived by their two sons, William Horn Printz and Joe Printz, and a granddaughter.

The proliferation of answering machines in the 1980s and afterward curtailed Mrs. Printz’s business.

Today, the Belles Celebrity Answering Service, now on East 56th Street, tends a modest clientele of about 90 holdouts, among them, Mr. Printz said, Stephen Sondheim, Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen.

Of all the switchboard operators Mrs. Printz trained, few were better than Miss Holliday herself, who reported for instruction after she was cast in “Bells Are Ringing.”

Miss Holliday became so proficient, People magazine reported in 1979, that Mrs. Printz offered her a job.