Early in her career, music manager, talent scout and record company executive Mary Martin received the advice to surround herself with genius. The Toronto-born dynamo, who landed in New York in 1962 with $60 in her back pocket, did something more than surround herself with genius – she cultivated it.
Ms. Martin, a determined advocate for the artists she believed in and a plain-dealing pepper pot with an informed passion for music and a sailor’s earthy vocabulary, died on July 4, in Nashville. She was 85. She not only worked with legends, she hung with them. In Toronto as a young woman, she got to know Mr. Helm, Robbie Robertson and the other Hawks. With her girlfriends, Ms. Martin took in their performances at Le Coq d’Or Tavern.
Spending time with Mr. Grossman and his wife, Sally, at the couple’s retreat in Woodstock, N.Y., she would lose swimming pool races to Mr. Dylan. “He was scrawny,” Ms. Martin said many years later. “What did I know? Scrawny people from Minnesota I guess are good athletes.” It was in the summer of 1965 when the Hawks’ Mr. Robertson was summoned to meet Mr. Dylan at Mr. Grossman’s offices. There the Canadian guitarist spotted a familiar face. “It was comforting to see our old friend, Mary Martin, who’d been raising the Hawks’ flag around the office for a while now,” Mr. Robertson wrote in his memoir,On Sept. 16, Mr. Dylan travelled to Toronto to rehearse with the Hawks at the Friar’s Tavern. Two weeks later, on Oct.
Many of Ms. Martin’s professional relationships with musicians and songwriters were not long-lasting, though the positive repercussions on the artists’ careers often were. She said the most important lesson she learned from Mr. Grossman was that the manager’s mission was to connect clients to the people in the industry who could help them and to put the artists in the best possible position to be recognized.
She was born Mary Alida Martin on June 15, 1939, in Toronto, the only daughter of insurance lawyer Craufurd Martin and homemaker Mary Alida Eleanor Martin , who went by Alida. She had two brothers, Anthony and Richard, who would “hang my dolls,” she said. Ms. Dexter wrote that the 26-year-old mousy-looking firebrand was “up to the top of her bell-bottom pants in the swinging big-time show business of New York.”