Marvella Belle Hern was born in Lahoma, Oklahoma on February 14, 1933 and grew up on a farm outside Enid, Oklahoma. She was elected to the top position in Oklahoma Girls State, to the presidency of Girls Nation in 1950, and attended Oklahoma State University. In 1951, she defeated her future husband, Birch Evans Bayh, Jr., in a national "outstanding young orator" competition sponsored by the National Farm Bureau. She married Bayh in August 1952 and moved to Indiana, completing her degree in education at Indiana University in 1960, the same year her husband completed his law degree. When he decided to run for the Indiana House of Representatives in 1954, she began her career as a full political partner to him, which continued with their successful campaign for his U.S. Senate seat in 1962 and through his first two terms in the Senate. In 1967, she turned down President Lyndon Johnson's offer to appoint her vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee because her husband was launching his own Senate re-election campaign. In late 1971, as her husband was pursuing a campaign for the 1972 Presidential nomination, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Senator Bayh withdrew from the race as she underwent a mastectomy followed by radiation and 18 months of chemotherapy treatments. After her recovery, she became a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society, speaking all over the country to bring the detection and treatment of breast cancer into public awareness. In 1978, the cancer recurred and despite aggressive treatment, she died on April 24, 1979, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Her autobiography, Marvella: A Personal Journey, on which she had been working with Mary Lynn Kotz, was published January 1, 1979.