Phyllis McGuire, the lead singer and the last surviving member of the McGuire Sisters, who bewitched teen America in the 1950s with top interpretations of “Sincerely” and “Sugartime” in a sweet and innocent harmony that matched car fins, bracelets and duck tail haircuts, died Tuesday at his Las Vegas home. She was 89 years old.
The Palm Eastern morgue in Las Vegas confirmed the death, but did not specify the cause.
Mrs. McGuire, with her older sisters Christine and Dorothy, achieved success overnight after winning the televised “Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts” contest in 1952. For the next 15 years, they were one of the most popular vocal groups from the country, singing on television variety shows by Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, Andy Williams and Red Skelton, on nightclub circuits across the country and on records that have sold millions.
The sisters symbolized a 1950s sensibility that supported an unrealistic standard of perfection, wearing identical coifes, dresses and smiles, moving with synchronized precision and mixing voices in healthy songs for simpler times. His music, like that of Perry Como, Patti Page and other stars who attracted the white middle class audience, contrasted sharply with the rock ‘n’ roll craze that was taking over the world in the mid-1950s.
In 1965, as the trio’s popularity began to wane, Phyllis McGuire’s image as the blonde girl next door was destroyed by published reports that romantically linked her to Sam Giancana, a Chicago mobster with links to the Kennedy administration and a plot by the Central Intelligence Agency to enlist the Mafia in what proved to be unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
Mr. Giancana and Mrs. McGuire, who were followed by federal agents for several years, appeared before a grand jury in Chicago. He refused to answer questions and was arrested for contempt. She testified that she met him in Las Vegas in 1961, traveled with him to Europe, the Caribbean and elsewhere and accepted his gifts in an ongoing relationship. She was aware that he was a renowned gangster, she said, but insisted that she knew nothing about his activities in the underworld.
“It makes me look terrible,” she told reporters later. “It would be different if I were alone, but I’m not single – I’m part of a trio. My sisters and my parents – they are heartbroken by this. “
The McGuire Sisters retired from public appearances in 1968, Christine and Dorothy to raise families, Phyllis to continue as a soloist. She appeared regularly in Las Vegas, where she lived for the rest of her life in a mansion with a swan moat and a replica of the Eiffel Tower rising through the roof.
After serving a year for contempt, Mr. Giancana was released and fled to Mexico, where he lived in exile until he was arrested by the Mexican authorities in 1974. Deported to the United States, he agreed to testify in a case against organized crime in Chicago, but was killed by an unknown assailant at his home in 1975.
Ms. McGuire did not apologize for her relationship with Mr. Giancana. “Sam was the best teacher I could have had,” she told Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne in 1989. “He was very wise about many things. Sam is always described as unattractive. He wasn’t there. He was a very handsome man. He was not flashy. He didn’t drive a pink Cadillac, as they used to say.
In 1985, the sisters got together for a comeback and performed for nearly two decades in casinos and clubs in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and elsewhere. They sang their own hits, 1950s pop hits and songs from Broadway shows, and Phyllis did impersonations of Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, Pearl Bailey and Ethel Merman.
“They take me back to the old days, the beautiful times,” Barbara Pattison, a Toronto fan, told People magazine when the comeback started. “They are not noisy and they are not far away. They bring back the beauty of music. “
Phyllis McGuire was born in Middletown, Ohio, on February 14, 1931, the youngest of Asa and Lillie (Fultz) McGuire’s three daughters. His mother was a minister at the First Church of God in Miamisburg, Ohio, and his father was a metallurgist. The sisters started singing in the church when Phyllis was 4 years old. They performed at weddings and other religious services, then at veterans’ hospitals and military bases.
Phyllis’s 1952 marriage to Neal Van Ells, an announcer, ended in divorce in 1956. They had no children. Dorothy McGuire died in 2012 and Christine died in 2019. She left nieces and nephews and her longtime companion, Edward Michael Davis.
While making Las Vegas her home, for years she kept an apartment on Park Avenue and then a home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
After winning Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts”, the sisters have been a regular on Godfrey’s morning radio and television programs for six years. They made the covers of Life and Look magazines and signed with Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca. His first hit in the Top 10 was “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight” in 1954. “Sincerely” (1955) and “Sugartime” (1958) were hits # 1; they and “Picnic” (1956) each sold more than one million copies.
The McGuire Sisters was one of many white groups that covered 1950s R&B hits, many by black artists, in what critics call the softer, though better-selling versions. They also sang for Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush and for Queen Elizabeth II.
In 1995, an HBO film, “Sugartime”, focused on the Giancana-McGuire case, with John Turturro as the mobster and Mary-Louise Parker as Phyllis. The sisters gave their last major performance in a 2004 PBS special, “Magic Moments: The Best of ’50s Pop”. They were included in the National Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 1994, the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame in 2009.
Long after a singer’s usual retirement years, McGuire remained in love with her career.
“I’m not afraid to live and I’m not afraid to die,” she told Vanity Fair in 1989. “You only live once, and I’m going to live it to the fullest, until I leave. And I will continue to sing as long as anyone wants. “