George M. Cohan - Family and Personal Life

Family and Personal Life

From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955), a musical comedy actress and dancer who joined the Four Cohans when his sister married. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). He married again in 1908, to Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death, living for several years at 6 Times Square in New York City. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the Broadway play George M!. Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931.

Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College, Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame, at New York University.

Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the former New York Giants.