Mary Leona Gage (April 8, 1939 – October 5, 2010) was an American actress, model and beauty pageant titleholder who was crowned Miss USA 1957, the first from Maryland to capture the Miss USA crown.

[1] When Ennis came back into her life in 1953, Gage, still only 14, married him in Wichita Falls; they moved to Manhattan Beach, Maryland (near Severna Park).

She was working in a dress shop in Glen Burnie, Maryland, when she met Barbara Mewshaw, a part-time model.

Mewshaw introduced her to the Walters Modeling Agency and helped her enter the Miss Maryland USA pageant.

[1] She told the head of the modeling agency that she was married and could not go to the Miss USA pageant.

[2] Both women flew to Long Beach, California, for the Miss USA pageant.

As being a wife and mother were clear violations of the contest rules, Gage was immediately disqualified and stripped of her Miss USA crown.

[3] The Miss Universe title ultimately was won by Peru's Gladys Zender, who also nearly lost her crown when she was revealed to be only 17 (under the minimum age requirement), but pageant officials allowed her to retain her title, as it was customary at the time in Peru for those that had lived past their sixth month during their birth year to unofficially use the higher age, meaning Zender was considered to be 18 (having lived more than six months as a 17-year-old).

In 1961, she filed for divorce from Covacevich and moved to Los Angeles, California, where she met her eventual fourth husband, an aspiring screenwriter, Gunther Peter Collatz.

[citation needed] In November 1965 Gage was found unconscious in a motel room, overdosed on barbiturates after an attempted suicide.

Gage lived in Southern California from the 1960s until her death from heart failure in a hospital many years after being diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.