Jack Benny arranged to have a single red rose sent to his wife every day after he was gone.
Radio entertainer and television funny man Jack Benny's on-air persona presented him as a penny-pinching skinflint who would sooner die than part with a dollar. Yet in real life, his character was anything but: the flesh and blood Jack Benny was a generous andkind man who treasured his friends, gave generously to charities, and dearly loved his wife.Jack Benny (real name Benjamin Kubelsky) was married to Sayde Marks (better known as Mary Livingstone, the character she played on her husband's radio show) for 48 years. Their marriage was far from perfect: by most accounts Sayde was a sharp-tongued, demanding, vain woman, and Jack was a philanderer. (After his death, Benny's widow claimed his signature gesture of holding one hand to the side of his face came about from his attempting to conceal scratch marks she'd inflicted on him after he fielded a phone call from one of his female admirers.)Yet despite her shortcomings (and his), Jack loved his wife and was devoted to her. As Benny's widow reported to McCall's magazine shortly after her husband died in December 1974, the entertainer's will specified one red rose be delivered to her for as long as she lived.'Every day since Jack has gone the florist has delivered one long-stemmed red rose to my home. I learned that Jack actually had included a provision for the flowers in his will. One red rose to be delivered to me every day for the rest of my life.'Sayde passed away in June 1983. The Bennys are interred next to each other in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.Despite the resemblance between the real-life posthumous daily gift of a rose from Jack Benny to his beloved wife and the above-reproduced poem about a deceased husband's sending a yearly bouquet of roses to his widow, the latter is not about the former. The poem is the work of James A. Kisner, a poet who has seen a number of his works published over the years. He wrote 'Roses for Rose' in 1998, and in 2001 it was included in Chicken Soup for the Gardener's Soul.Versions e-mailed to us in 1998 left off claims of its being a story about Jack Benny and his wife, and instead prefaced the piece's current beginning of 'Each year he sent her roses' with Kisner's actual opening:Red roses were her favorites, her name was also Rose. And every year her husband sent them, tied with pretty bows. The year he died, the roses were delivered to her door. The card said, 'Be my Valentine', like all the years before.By spring of 2006, that bit about the yearly gift being a Valentine's Day tradition of Rose's unnamed husband had been lopped off, with the item instead prefaced 'The person who did this was Jack Benny.' Fiction was thus combined with reality.Barbara 'hiJacked' Mikkelson
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