A brief portrait
Jeanne Marie “Tootsie” Benson lived a life that is mostly visible through the bright, overwhelming light that surrounded the family she belonged to. Born about 1959 and recorded as having died in 1991, Tootsie appears in public records and family lists as one of three children adopted by entrepreneur and team owner Thomas Milton “Tom” Benson, Jr. and his first wife Shirley Mae Landry. Beyond those anchor facts—1959 and 1991—the details of her day-to-day life, career path, and personal achievements remain scarce in the public sphere. In this article I assemble the documented dates, family relationships, and the contours of a life that, like a modest thread in a massive tapestry, is entwined with a larger, often louder family story.
Basic information
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name (commonly used) | Tootsie Benson |
| Full name | Jeanne Marie Benson |
| Birth year | 1959 (approx.) |
| Death year | 1991 |
| Adoptive parents | Tom Benson (b. 1927 – d. 2018), Shirley Mae Landry (d. 1980) |
| Adoptive siblings | Robert Carter Benson (d. 1985), Renee Benson Benham |
| Public profile | Limited; primarily documented as a family member within Benson family listings |
| Notable family developments after her death | 2014–2018 franchise succession disputes; Tom Benson’s death (March 15, 2018); later news involving descendants (through 2025) |
Early life and family context
Tootsie was raised in a household shaped by adoption and the steady ascent of an entrepreneurial patriarch. Tom Benson and Shirley Landry—married in 1945—adopted three children during their marriage: Robert, Jeanne Marie (“Tootsie”), and Renee. The Benson household carried the contradictions of private family life and public prominence: the intimate act of adopting children set against a backdrop of an expanding business profile that would eventually encompass professional sports franchises.
The family timeline includes stark markers of loss: Shirley, the adoptive mother, died in 1980; Robert, the adoptive brother, died in 1985; and Jeanne herself recorded a death year of 1991. Those losses are embedded into the family narrative and foreshadow later public dramas involving later generations, though Jeanne did not live to see many of those storms unfold.
Family map — the people around Tootsie
An orderly table helps show the family architecture that framed Tootsie’s life.
| Relation | Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Adoptive father | Thomas Milton “Tom” Benson, Jr. (1927–2018) | Businessman; owner of New Orleans Saints and later the Pelicans; central public figure in the family story. |
| Adoptive mother | Shirley Mae Landry (d. 1980) | Married to Tom Benson in 1945; adoptive mother to the three children. |
| Adoptive brother | Robert Carter Benson (d. 1985) | One of the three adopted children; predeceased Tom and Shirley. |
| Adoptive sister | Renee Benson Benham | The other adopted daughter; mother of Rita and Ryan; central to later succession disputes. |
| Granddaughter (Renee’s daughter) | Rita Benson LeBlanc (b. 1977) | Became a public figure within the Saints organization in later years; her life and legal troubles drew renewed attention to the Benson family. |
| Grandson (Renee’s son) | Ryan LeBlanc | Appears in family listings; part of subsequent generational developments. |
| Later spouse of Tom Benson | Gayle LaJaunie Benson (married 2004) | Named as heir to the teams in later succession decisions; central figure in the family’s legal disputes after Tom’s death. |
Viewed from this map, Jeanne “Tootsie” Benson sits at the center of a family whose public drama extends beyond her own lifespan. Her siblings, her parents, and their children create concentric circles of influence and, at times, legal contention.
A quiet life within a loud legacy
Tootsie’s recorded presence in the public record is primarily genealogical and memorial. Unlike some relatives who have taken visible roles in business or faced public scrutiny, she does not appear in the archives as a public executive, civic leader, or litigant. That silence does not mean a life without texture; it means that the life did not become part of the public newspaper of record in the way others in her family later did.
Silence in public sources can be a kind of privacy—an absence that preserves ordinary human details from becoming headlines. Tootsie’s life, from what the record permits us to say, was quiet against the roaring backdrop of professional sports ownership. It’s a paradox: to belong to a family whose fortunes move public institutions and headlines, yet to leave behind only a few firm dates and a name. The impression is of a small candle beside a stadium floodlight—visible, but overpowered by the larger lights that eventually dominated the scene.
Key dates and timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1945 | Tom Benson marries Shirley Mae Landry. |
| c. 1959 | Jeanne Marie “Tootsie” Benson is born (approximate year). |
| 1980 | Shirley Mae Landry Benson (adoptive mother) dies. |
| 1985 | Robert Carter Benson (adoptive brother) dies. |
| 1991 | Jeanne Marie “Tootsie” Benson dies. |
| 2004 | Tom Benson marries Gayle LaJaunie Benson. |
| 2014–2015 | Public succession decisions and legal disputes among Benson family members become prominent. |
| March 15, 2018 | Tom Benson dies at age 90. |
| 2025 | High-profile reports involving descendants (including a reported arrest of Rita Benson LeBlanc) renew public attention to the family. |
Numbers here help anchor a life to a sequence. The arithmetic of births and deaths—1959, 1980, 1985, 1991, 2018—creates a chronology that is clearer than the prose narratives around it.
Memory, legacy, and the public ledger
When public memory collects around prominent names, quieter lives are often recorded as entries in family lists: names that appear in obituaries and memorial rolls, but without the long-form biographies that headline-makers receive. Jeanne Marie “Tootsie” Benson’s presence in the Benson story is that of a named figure in a list of children—adopted, siblinged, sibling to later actors in legal and organizational struggles.
To think of Tootsie is to imagine a person whose contours are mostly inside family rooms rather than in press boxes; whose biography is composed of relational facts rather than public résumé items. Her life is part of a larger tapestry—threads that run through ownership, inheritance, public spectacle, and private mourning. The tapestry’s pattern is visible; the texture of each thread is less so.
