Her father was a successful auto sales manager who for many years worked for a Roanoke car dealership, Harper Motor.

Two years later, heavily in debt and struggling to make a sizeable profit, he took his own life while away on a business trip by jumping out of a hotel window.

After selling everything to settle debts his widow was left with little money to support herself and her two children: John, her eldest and Marjorie.

Failing to find work in Melrose she moved to Boston, where she met and soon married Reverend Robert Bitzer, a Religious Science minister, in March 1929.

Bari later recalled other children at school in Boston made life miserable for her brother and her, making constant fun of their obvious Southern accents.

[citation needed] Sixteen year-old Bari was one of 14 young women "launched on the trail of film stardom" August 6, 1935, when they each received a six-month contract with 20th Century Fox after spending 18 months in the company's training school.

During World War II, according to a survey taken of GIs, Bari was the second-most popular pinup girl after the much better-known Betty Grable.

[11] In Foxy Lady (2010), an authorized biography by film historian Jeff Gordon written from interviews conducted shortly before her death, Bari suggested that, despite a 35-year career with over 166 film and television roles, a more promising career was sabotaged by unresolved problems with her domineering, alcoholic mother and her three marriages.

Bari's first child, a daughter with Luft, was born August 7, 1945, in St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, but died the next day.

On November 20, 1989, Bari was found dead in her home in Santa Monica, California, of an apparent heart attack.