Marlo Thomas Is Carrying Her Family's Torch
Marlo Thomas has a lot on her mind. A script to read. A podcast to record. A book to write. Her new Williams-Sonoma collection of entertaining essentials. Women’s rights. Gun control laws. And always: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “I honestly can’t tell you where my thoughts of St. Jude begin and where they end. If I’m not in a board meeting, I’m on the phone talking to a corporate sponsor, working on a fundraising video, or speaking at a hospital event,” she says. Sleep is no escape. “I even dream about the kids and their families,” she adds.
Fighting for those who are desperate is Thomas’s birthright. It’s November 1937, and Thomas’s father doesn’t have the money to pay the $70 hospital bill for his wife, who has just given birth. Feeling hopeless, the struggling nightclub performer darts in to a church. He feels an inspiration to pray to St. Jude Thaddeus of his Catholic faith, the patron saint of lost causes. Danny Thomas proposes a bargain: Help the first-time father provide for his family, and in return he’ll build a shrine to the saint. He places seven of the 10 dollars in his pocket in the collection dish and heads back into the cold Detroit night.
Fifteen years later Danny Thomas is one of America’s most popular comedians. His sitcom Make Room for Daddy debuts in 1953, and during its 11-year run he perfects the spit take. He performs in Vegas, hanging out with buddies Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. He lives in an opulent Beverly Hills mansion with his wife Rose Marie and their three kids, and the most remarkable part of this story: Thomas keeps his side of the bargain. He starts raising funds for a hospital. Not a wing. Not a lab. He imagines an entire star-shaped medical center devoted to treating and curing children with cancer and other life-threatening diseases. And this vision materializes in Memphis.
“Health justice” is a recently coined phrase, but Thomas grasped the concept early. His parents emigrated from Lebanon and settled in Toledo, Ohio, a poor, multiethnic community. His mother relied on her sister to deliver 12 babies. Two died. He lost friends to treatable illnesses like appendicitis and influenza. “So my father sees firsthand the inadequacy of healthcare in this country: Rich kids go to the doctor; poor kids die,” says Marlo Thomas on a video call from her photograph-filled study in Manhattan.
She speaks of St. Jude with the passion of a parent. She’s proud of its achievements, and she wants everyone to support it. In 2019 donations were almost $1.8 billion. Thomas is grateful but not surprised. “It’s a success because it’s the real deal,” she explains. “St. Jude actually saves children’s lives. And we are exactly, 100 percent who we say we are. No patient pays for anything. No bill to anyone, ever. We want every child to get the same first class care.”
When St. Jude opened, on February 4, 1962, it was the first fully integrated children’s hospital in the South. The mission to provide travel, housing, and treatment to patients regardless of religion, race, or the family’s financial status required a huge fundraising effort. Two generations of the Thomas family have met this challenge through a savvy combination of harnessing Hollywood talent, using traditional grassroots strategies, and forming innovative retail relationships.
The “show must go on” mentality extended to the pandemic lockdown. Under Thomas’s stewardship, fundraising quickly pivoted. The traditional St. Jude Memphis Marathon Weekend moved from an in-person event to a virtual one, drawing participants from every state and 72 countries. On Giving Tuesday, the gaming community raised $3 million in 10 hours. Corporate sponsors stepped up.
While the hospital’s purpose is serious, the result is joyful. “Comedy built St. Jude,” Thomas says. “If you go, you’ll notice that you don’t hear crying there.” She recalls once giving a tour of the hospital and making the same observation in an elevator to reporters. Just then, with sitcom timing, the door opened and a woman with a screaming, crying child stepped in. Awkward. So Thomas leaned down and asked, “What’s the matter, sweetie?” The woman answered, “Oh, she’s driving me crazy. She doesn’t want to go home!”
In the Thomas household, laughter and service were givens. Like most kids in Beverly Hills, Marlo and her younger siblings, Tony and Terre, were given money on Christmas. Unlike most, they were then instructed to give it away. By 16, Thomas was going door-to-door with a gun control petition. The activism energized her. “I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and get more signatures.”
After earning a teaching degree from the University of Southern California, Thomas followed in her father’s footsteps as a performer, creator, and producer. Listing all her career achievements would fill an old-timey Manhattan phone book, so instead here is one highlight from each decade to show the breadth, depth, and quality of her work:
At one time Thomas did not believe she would ever marry, but in 1977 Marlo went on Phil Donahue’s Chicago-based talk show. They bantered and blushed in a real-life romcom meet-cute. When the show ended, Donahue declared,“You are really fascinating.” Thomas responded, “Whoever is the woman in your life is very lucky.” Soon she became that girl.
On the podcast Thomas describes the courtship succinctly. “We fell in love. We had dinner. We went to bed. And that was it.” When asked to select her two favorite photographs in her study, she instantly reaches for one of her and Donahue in Rome. The two sit on a sporty Vespa. Her arms are wrapped around his waist and her smile is radiant. The second photo is from Christmas morning 1990. At the time, Thomas and Donahue were living in Connecticut, while her family remained in California. She would cry during the holidays, feeling lonely, so that year Donahue cajoled her parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews into coming east. Thomas gave them all white terry cloth robes, which they wear in the photo. Instead of gifts, family members were asked to prepare something creative. A niece made a documentary. A nephew wrote a song. “It was a great Christmas,” Thomas says. “And then, six weeks later, my father was dead.”
Danny Thomas founded the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC) in 1957 to raise funds and awareness for the hospital, and he remained dedicated to this cause until his death. He made it clear to his children that building St. Jude was his promise and not their burden. Still, all three took up the cause willingly. “My father was very proud of his heritage,” Thomas says. “And he wanted to say to America, ‘You let us in, and see? That was a good idea.’”
Next he tapped his friends in entertainment, arranging benefit performances by Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe, and Sammy Davis Jr. Early on, Elvis Presley donated the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, to St. Jude. (Presley had purchased the Potomac as part of a tax scheme by his infamous manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Thomas flipped the yacht for $62,500.) St. Jude fundraisers would become some of Hollywood’s most glamorous galas. Bette Midler performed. Robin Williams, who starred in Dead Poets Society, which was produced by Marlo’s brother Tony, performed. One year Bill Cosby brought down the house. (When asked about the Cosby revelations and conviction decades later, Thomas said she was “absolutely floored.”)
These dinners took seven months to plan, and while a well-crafted, heart-wrenching video could move David Geffen to give an additional million dollars, St. Jude had even loftier goals. In 2004 Thomas launched the Thanks + Giving initiative, which targeted retail sponsorships around the holidays. “It was going to have to be a $100 million program or there was no point in doing it,” she says. Eight years later they blew past that goal. Meanwhile, individual St. Jude donors hold an astonishing 30,000 fundraising events annually that range from dog washes to yogathons to a SpaceX initiative led by commander Jared Isaacman. (Isaacman learned about the hospital from a LasVegas benefit—so don’t cancel those rubber chicken dinners just yet.)
When the hospital opened, the survival rate for childhood leukemia was 4 percent. Today it hovers around 94 percent. The over-all survival rate for childhood cancer has jumped from 20 percent to more than 80 percent over the same period. St. Jude has contributed to these breakthroughs. In 1996 St. Jude researcher Peter C. Doherty was co-winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine for work on the immune system. (Doherty now runs an eponymous institute in Australia that is helping to develop two Covid-19 vaccines.) In 1983 St. Jude also became the first institution to successfully cure sickle cell anemia (a condition that largely strikes children of African descent) with a bone marrow transplant.
Thomas speaks with ease about the research; phrases like “the four types of medulloblastomas” roll off her tongue. (And yet, she has never played a doctor on TV.) Her eyes flash with excitement when talking about the hospital’s new proton beam, which is used on brain tumors in children. (“It’s the tiniest beam on the planet!”) Just like her 16-year-old self, she seems energized by the cause.
When President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, the inscription concluded with “Ms. Thomas inspires us all to dream bigger and reach higher.” At the ceremony Thomas’s thoughts turned to her grandparents. She imagined them arriving with their scant belongings, happy to be in a country that offered opportunity. “I tried not to weep, but the tears were coming down my face,” Thomas says. “I kept thinking, This is the possibility of America. This is why immigrants are so important. We must remember that.”
America gave Thomas’s grandparents hope, and in return her family has given so much hope to others. With vision, dedication, and generosity, maybe some lost causes aren’t so lost after all. “My brother and I say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could turn St. Jude into a casino someday?’” she says, flashing one last gorgeous smile.
Photographs by Amanda Demme
Styled by Ryan Young
In this story: Hair by Steven Rice. Makeup by Eric Barnard. Tailoring by Jessica Yuen.
Lead image: Marlo Thomas, photographed at her Manhattan home. Akris sweater, Saks.com. Brunello Cucinelli pant, brunellocucinelli.com. Pomellato earrings, bracelet, and rings, pomellato.com.
A version of this story appears in the Summer 2021 issue of Town & Country.
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