She wanted to be an actress from the age of four and performed in dinner theater as a hobby. She was the wife of Daniel Greene, a Navy man stationed in the Territory of Hawaii when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. She was married to Chester Phillips in the 1950s, during which time she suffered a near-fatal bout of "polio and a serious abdominal infection". Both marriages ended in divorce. She had three daughters, Elizabeth, Kathy, and Virginia, and a son, Arthur.