Honey Bruce Friedman, a onetime nightclub singer and stripper best known as the former wife of legendary comedian Lenny Bruce, has died. She was 78.

Ms. Friedman died Monday in a Honolulu hospital after a long illness, said publicist Jeff Abraham.

Ms. Friedman was working as a stripper under the name Honey Harlowe (a.k.a. Hot Honey Harlowe) when she first met Bruce, then a fledgling comic, in a Baltimore hotel coffee shop.

He was, she later wrote, "the most handsome man I'd seen in my life." They were married in 1951.

At first, according to Gerald Nachman's book "Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s," Bruce tried to reform her and turn her into a respectable singer, called "The Singing Southern Belle, Honey Michelle." The couple did an act together, in which they both sang and teamed up on movie parodies such as one on "The Bride of Frankenstein," in which the monster picked Honey Bruce up in a pizza parlor.

Lenny Bruce, who became known as a First Amendment martyr for his legal problems over onstage language, later referred to his wife in his act as the "beautiful mama with the long red hair."

But the marriage, which was marked by extensive heroin use by both of them and also the birth of their daughter, Kitty, ended in 1957 after less than six years.

Ms. Friedman was portrayed by Valerie Perrine in the 1974 movie "Lenny," starringDustin Hoffman. Her book, "Honey: The Life and Loves of Lenny's Shady Lady," was published in 1977, at which point she said she had been "clean" for more than seven years after a 16-year drug addiction.

Born Harriett Jolliff in Manila, Ark., she grew up in Detroit, where problems with her stepfather caused her to run away from home as a teenager.

At 17, after falling into disreputable company, she found herself serving a year in a state prison. She later joined a carnival, where she developed a taste for show business and exotic dancing. After a brief and disastrous first marriage, she became a nightclub singer and a successful stripper in Miami.

In 2003, Ms. Friedman was one of the many people who signed a petition that paved the way for New York Gov. George Pataki to give Lenny Bruce a posthumous pardon for obscenity. He died in 1966 of a drug overdose.

Ms. Friedman, who had lived in Honolulu more than two decades, is survived by her husband, Jeffrey Friedman, and her daughter Kitty Bruce.

Honey B Friedman