- For Mary Chase, to have written the plays she wrote, have them played on Broadway is a Testament to the content.

- She won the Pulitzer prize in 1945, for "Harvey".

- Whose Harvey?

- A white rabbit, six feet tall.

- Six feet!

- Six feet, three and a half inches.

Now let's stick to the facts.

- Mary, was paid a million dollars.

Which was the most amount of money ever offered to anybody for the rights to make a movie.

- She wasn't from LA, or New York, or Chicago.

She was from Denver.

- She always said she was happiest when she was writing.

- And she never stopped writing.

[bouncy piano music] - As strong and enduring as the Rocky Mountains they stood beside, as visionary as the views of the Grand Plains they looked across, the women inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame are trailblazers, whose work has improved and enriched our lives.

They are teachers, scientists, ranchers, leaders in business, education, religion, and the arts.

Women who have been recognized for their many contributions to our state, our country, and the world.

I'm Reynelda Muse.

And these are the stories of great Colorado women.

[bouncy piano music] - My name is Mary Coyle Chase.

I grew up in the early 19 hundreds in Denver, surrounded by Fairies, Sprites, and Pookas.

Now some people might call them imaginary creatures, but not my uncles.

- Every one of her plays had an imaginary component.

She wanted to get to the heart and soul of what it is to be a child, to have imagination, to have fantasy.

- Mary, developed her love of theater, at the age of old 11.

Her uncle gave her a dollar.

She decided to skip school.

She walked downtown to the Curtis Theater District.

She bought a ticket to see Macbeth, went to the top balcony, and she was mesmerized.

- I remember the first play I attended.

It was a matinee performance of Macbeth, at the Denham Theater in Downtown Denver.

My 11 year old self got the same exhilarating feeling, watching those characters on stage.

as I did listening to my Irish uncles' tails.

[bouncy violin music] - Her Irish background comes up a lot in her writing, and I think that's from stories that her uncles told.

- She, her parents, her three siblings and her four uncles all lived in a seven room shotgun house.

- Her home was very modest in comparison to a lot of others in the Baker neighborhood.

- At dinner time, all the family would gather in the dining room and the four uncles all told Irish legends, about Changelings, about Banshees, about Pookas.

Which is an Irish legend about a large animal that gets in all kinds of trouble.

[bouncy violin music] - Soon.

I was skipping school to attend more matinee performances, saving the money meant for my trolley fair, for tickets to the theater.

Spellbound, by the way the dialogue evokes such strong responses from the audience.

I soon realized how much I wanted to create engaging stories to be played out on the stage.

- And from that point on, she skipped school frequently, and went back and saw all kinds of theater.

[bouncy piano music] She said later that from that moment on, she wanted to be a playwright, but I think it took awhile.

- She always wanted to be a writer ever since she was a little girl.

[bouncy piano music] - She had trouble learning at the rate that other people were learning, 'cause she was such a quick study.

[kids talking and laughing] - Evidently, in the school she went to, she was kind of bullied, and felt ostracized.

She went to Fairmont School, which a version of it still exists in South Baker.

And she was a terror.

She was always in the principles office, she was always getting into fights on the playground.

And she went to, West High School.

- She had a childlike view.

I think she kept that all of her life, which I find a little fascinating, because really she wasn't a child for very long.

She graduated from high school when she was 15.

- She was very smart.

She needed to go and advance her education.

- She went on to the, University of Denver, the, University of Colorado.

- And tried to get in a sorority.

And every sorority turned her down.

Being rejected from the sororities, became the basis for a future play that she wrote.

And that was purchased by RKO, to become a movie.

And you can still watch it on television.

- She didn't complete a degree, although she was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Denver.

- After that experience at the university of Colorado, she was quite devastated, and decided that it was time to move on.

- She took a job with the Rocky Mountain News, at just the age of 17.

- At the time, it was very popular for women to become journalists.

And so she just decided she was gonna walk into the, Rocky Mountain News.

She asked the editor for a job and she must have impressed him in some way, because he hired her to be a sob-sister.

- At first, I was only given sentimental human interest stories.

Sob-sister features.

- Women usually, were shunned into a society beats or reporting, which might call soft stories.

- Where they would actually write all day about people who got divorces, and what was happening with the social climb and when dogs got lost and things like that.

- But I proved I could deliver on grittier news stories with some of my more daring exploits.

- She rose from a sob-sister to investigative reporting, which was much more in what she wanted to do.

And most famously she covered the coming together of the Moffat Tunnel, underneath the continental divide.

And she had to dress as a man because women were not allowed up to cover the event.

While she was working for the Rocky Mountain News, Mary, met her husband.

- She always claimed that the first time she saw him, she thought to herself, that's the man I'm gonna marry.

- He was tall and handsome, but he was also a taciturn.

And Mary, was fiery and pretty soon they were a couple, they got married on a Friday night after work with only a handful of people.

Mary, worked at the Rocky Mountain News, until she was fired because she pulled a prank on her editor.

And then she thought, okay, I'm done.

And she stayed home.

And she began to have a family soon after.

Mary was always ambitious.

And even after she stayed home, she wanted to be noticed.

- She's a role model for young women.

She was one of the first working mothers when that was not even a phrase in our vernacular.

- I think she chased her ability to be a good mom, and to be a good wife, and to be a good career person, and really, really follow her dreams her passions.

- She was a wife, and a mother, and a writer.

- I know that she worked very diligently.

I know that she took herself off into a room.

- She called it a prison.

And every day she would write there for three to five hours, sometimes eight or 10, she tried out genre's like short pieces for magazines or a novel which was rejected by many people.

And then finally she decided, I'm going to set up a paper box stage, and she put spool threads on the stage for the characters and she moved them around.

That's how she started to write plays.

- She spent her days mothering and writing plays.

- At her time, there were almost no women in theater.

It was a male dominated industry.

- So you combined her love for stories with this supernatural world that she grew up in.

And I think Mary, had some magic that she wanted to share with people.

- The influence of the supernatural.

- Was so much a part of who she was and what she wanted to get across.

- The first play that she wrote that really got attention, was, "Me Third".

It was a comedy, but it was poking holes in the social structure.

- She lobbied the director who was in charge of the, Denver Federal Theater Project, which was going on during the depression years.

And it had been started by the, Roosevelt Administration.

And he said, yes.

And it was a huge hit.

It got all kinds of great reviews from the local people.

And she decided, okay, I think I'm ready for Broadway.

- "Me Third", was Mary's first play that was produced and directed on Broadway.

- Antoinette Perry, a famous New York Director and Producer was originally from, Colorado.

And she wrote her, sent her clippings from this fabulous production that was so well-reviewed.

And they said, "Come to New York, we're going to produce it."

- I contacted Broadway Director, Antoinette Perry, a Denver native, and the person after whom, the Tony Awards were later named.

With her friend Brock Pemberton, as the producer, Tony Perry, directed the play.

- She traveled to New York and they put it together.

They did all the things that you have to do to get a Broadway production going.

And it was a flop.

- It was not successful.

The critics did not like it.

- They thought the play was hackneyed and trite.

- It became a financial disaster for her and her husband, Bob.

- Mary, was devastated at the fact that it didn't go well and came back to Denver, and vowed that she would never write for Broadway again.

- The qualities that she really tried to put into all of her plays, were love, laughter, and beauty.

She often said to me, "Third" was a flop because it didn't contain all three of those.

- It didn't have a heart-line, Mary, realized that afterwards, and the heart-line became extremely important, to Mary.

That meant that she had to touch the audience with something deeper than just funny laughs and farcical moments.

- She told Bob, that she didn't ever want to write another play again.

He said, you've got to start writing immediately.

- Every day when she was walking her children to public school, she would see a woman who lived across the street from her, who she knew was a widow, and who had just lost her only son in World War Two.

- And she just saw her walking, you know, kind of numb.

- And every day she would lumber more slowly.

She was very sad.

And Mary, looked at her and she said, you know, I want to make this woman laugh.

- The entire goal was to put a smile on her face.

- I decided I needed to write a play, that would cheer people up during this gloomy and trying time in our country.

I wanted to make that woman across the street laugh.

- She decided she was going to write a play and she mulled it over for two months and couldn't come up with anything.

She thought about sex.

She thought about politics.

She just didn't know what she was going to do.

- Then one morning I had a vision, as I lie awake in bed, I actually saw a man in a white coat whom I somehow knew as a psychiatrist.

He was being followed by an enormous white rabbit.

I knew this rabbit was just a Pooka, and I was equally certain that he had attached himself to one of the psychiatrist patients.

Right then I knew I had my idea, and I worked on that idea for nearly two years, taking it through 50 revisions.

The rabbit of my vision became Harvey, invisible to all, but the good nature, albeit eccentric, bachelor, Elwood P Dowd.

- The combination of the humor and this underlying sensitivity.

It just makes it incredibly beautiful story.

That's unique, weird, cool, and just, and has no, there's no judgments in it of any kind.

- I'd like to introduce the rabbit who made me famous, Harvey.

Harvey, now, where have you gone?

- It's a sort of an outrageous story.

Can you imagine invisible, six foot tall rabbit hanging with a middle-aged, slightly tipsy gentlemen, and all of the trouble that they get into, it's a good escape.

- It is just a play about this man, who has a friend, who's a rabbit that he loves.

- There's absolutely nothing about "Harvey", that is traditional.

It's all a surprise in every scene.

- By the end of the show, you really expect him to be there for the curtain call.

- This play had a heart-line that was missing when she did ,"Me Third".

Mary, had learned her mistakes.

She knew her craft.

- I think it's for that reason that it's lasted.

It operates on different levels.

It's not too high brow.

It's not low brow.

It's right in the middle.

The result is you get a wonderful comedy.

- Tony Perry and Brock Pemberton, thought it was marvelous, and produced and directed it.

That became a real breakthrough for her.

- "Harvey", ran on Broadway for a record four and a half years.

And then 77 plus years later, it's still a very, very popular play to produce.

Most recently in 2012, Jim Parsons, from the "Big Bang Theory", stared as Elwood P Dowd, and play was a hit.

- Certain stories, plays, events, touch something very deeply personal to the writer.

And that's true of all the great playwrights, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, a play is written and something about it then becomes universally connected to other humans.

- I received letters from people who saw it and had lost a son, or a brother, or cousin, in the war.

And they wrote; "This was the first time we laughed since we got the news about, Charlie".

Those letters were my validation.

I had done, what I set out to do.

And more validation came my way, when six months later, I won the Pulitzer prize for drama for "Harvey".

- Mary Chase, won the Pulitzer prize in 1945 for "Harvey", because she really touched the heart and soul of America.

As people were coming back from the war, they needed comfort.

They needed hope they needed some fantasy and some fun.

- People wanted to be cheered up.

- I think it was also a time when everybody wanted escape, they wanted to get away from all the sadness that was going on, and the timing was perfect.

- Mary Chase, was only the fourth female to win the Pulitzer prize.

And she won over, "The Glass Menagerie", by Tennessee Williams.

The audiences love to go to the theater, and watch his characters, but nobody could touch the soul like, "Harvey".

- It was a huge controversy.

And after she won, there were some that criticized Mary, saying that, you know, it was too light.

- Those who are critics, think that the reason that Mary's play, should not have won the award, was that the themes were more serious, in "The Glass Menagerie".

There were some press about her being a simple housewife, having won this award.

And therefore people started disbelieving that she even wrote the play.

- But those who advocate for Mary, believed that she was just right for the American times right then, and that she had presented a fresh approach.

She was able to present a form of comedy that was different.

She had deep emotions and messages, and I think that's her greatest achievement.

- Mary was paid a million dollars, for the rights to "Harvey", which was the most amount of money ever offered to anybody for the rights to make a movie.

That was record-breaking, and of course it made the newspapers, and everybody knew about it.

- And those days, a million dollars, was a lot of money.

She became one of the wealthiest women in Denver, certainly, one of the wealthiest people in, Denver.

- There is an extraordinary power of the imagination involved with theater, that we don't have in film and television.

When a playwright creates a film of their own work, it isn't always so successful.

This film was so successful.

And it was so authentic to the play itself.

- The most talked about Pulitzer prize winning comedy of our time.

And know at last "Harvey", comes to the screen.

- I think Mary Chase, was able to take "Harvey", into the cinematic realm pretty easily, because she was so clear on her characters.

She knew exactly who those characters were.

- They filmed in the early part of 1950, and Jimmy Stewart played Elwood.

- And he often said, that it was one of the best roles he ever had.

- I think the casting of Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P Dowd, just made it perfect.

- He was nominated for best actor for the Academy Awards and also as best actor for the Golden Globes.

He didn't win either one of them, but Josephine Hall, who played his sister, Veta, did win was the category of best supporting actress.

- I must thank that six foot, four and half inch, Harvey.

[crowd applauding and laughing] - Interestingly, both in the play, and for the film, Mary, tried to get Harvey, to be seen.

- She really had a need for Harvey, to be real, and for the audience to know that he was real.

- She tried with the play when they did previews in Boston.

And then again, she tried since she was one of the screenwriters, she tried to do this for the film and it was not agreed to.

But Jimmy Stewart, he insisted that the camera not be centered on him, but that they made it as realistic as possible for Harvey, to be there with him.

And so he was always a little bit offset so that it was clear that he was talking to Harvey, that Harvey was there with him.

- This movie did something that clicked with people.

I always find it interesting.

The younger generation, when I tell them, that segments of Harvey, were in the movie "Field Of Dreams" - Good evening, Mr. Dog.

Well, I turned around and here was this big six foot rabbit leaning up against the lamp-post.

- They were on Simpson segments, or they were in the movie, Donnie Darko.

Then they can relate.

Then they understand who, "Harvey" is.

She presented something that was unique and different, universal and memorable.

I showed it to my grandchildren the other day and they loved it.

She still maintained for her entire life, her regimen of writing.

Mary, had three major plays that went to Broadway.

- Mary Chase's, "Bernadine", open on Broadway in 1952 and ran for 157 performance.

- It was about her adolescent boys at the time and a dream of a perfect woman.

And "Mrs. McThing", was more of a children's fantasy.

- Mary, always said to her critics of that play, that she wrote it for children, and felt that she needed to help, with growing the next generation of theater goers.

And so "Mrs. McThing" and "Bernadine", were both her attempts to try to grow that audience.

Because this was this was important to her.

- Most of the people who wrote, who became famous in Denver, did not stay.

They became authors in New York or screenwriters in Hollywood.

She stayed her entire life.

- Choosing to stay in Denver, be with her husband, help continue raising her sons.

She didn't feel that she had to follow the glamorous life or move to New York, or, you know, do a lot of things that one might expect of someone who had just received the largest amount ever given for a screenplay.

- I think her messages that you can do it any place in this country.

You don't need to be in New York, and you don't need to be in Hollywood.

You just need to be an interesting person.

Who's curious about life and who has something to say about life?

- I continued writing plays and also children's stories.

Oh, none of them quite reached the height of, "Harvey".

But in all of my writings, I encouraged my audiences and readers to embrace their imaginations.

Question what's normal.

And to try to see the, the spiritual in the farcical, I guess I just did that best through, "Elwood and Harvey".

- When she finally got there, she had something very special that we all can admire.

Playwrights often resort to the whiskey and soda route, after they've been touted and become famous.

- Mary Chase, was an alcoholic.

- A lot of them don't conquer it, but Mary did, she did everything appropriate for controlling her habit.

- She had quit drinking long before I met her.

But if you are an alcoholic and you want to own it and use that to help other people, and certainly be honest with your family, she was right there.

Many of her friends were recovering alcoholics.

- The "House of Hope", was an organization that was founded by her and her friends to help women alcoholics, who needed support and treatment.

In 1978, the Bonfils Theater, held a benefit for the, "House of Hope" They did a local production of "Harvey" for two weeks.

And the first night was a Gala, where all the movers and shakers in Denver, were invited, who was star-studded.

After the play was over, there was a tribute to Mary, Donald Sewell was talking about Mary, when from the back of the room, a tall lanky gentlemen walked forward to the front of the room and lo and behold, it was Jimmy Stewart.

And the audience went nuts.

Jimmy, told the audience, how much he appreciated, Mary's encouragement when he was a young actor, and how "Harvey" had always been his favorite role.

And then he presented her, with a Steuben glass bunny and a chocolate bunny.

It was an event everybody still talks about.

- She speaks for your heart and to your innocence.

That's a wonderful role model, for everyone today.

- Mary Chase's, story is so important to us to say, we can be a good wife, we can be a good mom.

If we want to those things and we can pursue a career.

- And I think they should remember her for overcoming obstacles using her capabilities to get to where she wanted to be and never giving up.

- Talent is one thing, but really a life in the theater, it's just about work.

- It's a matter of both inspiration and perspiration.

And she had both.

- If you look in anthologies, that are out of comedy or of American drama, she's always listed in it.

- For Mary Chase, to have written the plays she wrote, have them go to New York, have them go on Broadway, to win the prizes.

She won all of it.

It's a Testament to the content.

- This play is still so popular after 77 years.

- Years ago, my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be..." She'd always call me Elwood.

"In this world, Elwood, you must be, oh, so smart or oh, so pleasant."

Well, for years I was smart.

I recommend pleasant.

- I think we're born completely perfect.

And then the world messes us up a bit.

And then we spend a lot of time trying to get out of the mess.

And I think that's part of what she's writing about that, something about Elwood.

He has some kind of childlike impulse that never left him, that we all need to make our lives beautiful.

- She brought a bright light to the stage.

And I think we need that too.

I think sometimes we just need to, we need to be able to laugh.

We need to be able to see that there's possibilities, that we hadn't seen before that, there really is Pooka!