Thinking the name would bring good luck, she was nicknamed Jinx by her mother Marguerite "Mickey" Crooks Falkenburg, an athlete and tennis player (Brazil women's champion in 1927), and the name stuck.

[2][page needed][4] All the Falkenburg offspring became known for their tennis abilities; younger brother Bob won the men's singles championship at Wimbledon in 1948.

Calling her "the most charming, most vital personality I have ever had the pleasure to photograph",[3] he took her picture for the August 1937 cover of The American Magazine, triggering similar offers from 60 other publications.

[5] As the face for its marketing and advertising campaign, her image appeared on billboards throughout New York, Pennsylvania, and New England., and she was featured in promotional ads at every store that sold Rheingold.

[5] The biggest hit was Cover Girl, a musical about the modeling business that starred Rita Hayworth, with songs by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin.

Falkenburg met John Reagan "Tex" McCrary when he came to photograph and interview her for a military publication after she opened in Hold On to Your Hats.

They married after the war,[2][page needed] on June 15, 1945, in a civil ceremony conducted by New York Supreme Court Judge Ferdinand Pecora, famous for investigating the 1929 stock market crash and its aftermath.

[12] This opportunity enabled Falkenburg to make a notable contribution to the implementation of President Franklin Roosevelt's cultural diplomacy initiatives in South America even as hostilities raged throughout Europe.

[4] Backed by some of his well-connected friends like millionaire financier Bernard Baruch, McCrary convinced David Sarnoff, the chairman of RCA, which owned NBC, to give the couple a morning show on the network's New York radio station, WEAF.

[17] In a cover story about the couple, Newsweek wrote: "A soft-spoken, calculating Texan, Tex McCrary, inched up to the microphone and drawled 'Hi, Jinx.'

[6] Their guests were a mix of popular entertainers such as Mary Martin, Ethel Waters and Esther Williams and public figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Truman, Bernard Baruch, industrialist Igor Sikorsky and Indian statesman Krishna Menon.

[6] "They developed an audience that was ready to start thinking at breakfast", wrote New York Times columnist William Safire, who as a teenager was hired by McCrary to do pre-show interviews of guests.

[20] In January 1947, McCrary and Falkenburg had their first network TV show, Bristol-Myers Tele-Varieties, also known as Jinx and Tex at Home, broadcast Sunday nights on NBC.

She flew in with comedian Bob Hope and songwriter Irving Berlin to do highly publicized Christmas shows for airmen and occupation soldiers.

[21][22] McCrary and Falkenburg's popularity grew, and at one point in the early 1950s they hosted two radio programs and a daily television show and wrote a column for the New York Herald Tribune.

[23] She covered many major stories of the day, including the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London and the wedding of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco.

[24] In 1958, she was the only female reporter on the press plane that accompanied then Vice President Richard Nixon on his trip to South America, where he encountered rock-throwing crowds in Venezuela.

[25] She also was on assignment and appeared on camera in the historic finger-poking televised "kitchen debate" in Moscow between Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Falkenburg is featured as a supporting character in books #1-3, set in World War II Burma, of a French graphic-novel series, Angel Wings.