Truman's only child dies at 83

Career before marriage
Her stage career began in 1954, about the time she quit the concert stage.

“I learned my comedy timing from Fred Allen and Goody (Goodman) Ace,” she recalled. “You couldn’t do better than that. I’d still rather hear an audience laugh than do a serious play.”

Throughout her 20s, reporters were constantly asking about marriage prospects, but she said she was pursuing her career for the time being.

When she met Clifton Daniel at a dinner party in 1955, he was working in New York after a decade as a foreign correspondent. It was not until a month before their wedding in April 1956 that their romance became public.

“We had a lot in common,” he wrote in a 1984 memoir. “We were the kind of people who wouldn’t marry anybody our mothers wouldn’t approve of: a couple of citified small-towners, puritans among the fleshpots.”

She and Daniel had four sons; he died in February 2000. Son William died in September 2000 when he was hit by a taxi; he was 41.

She was honorary co-chair of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, the nonprofit partner of her father’s presidential library, and a governing board member of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Health issues had prevented her from visiting the library in recent years, but she remained actively interested in its operations, said Michael Devine, director of the library.

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