We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Radio's Irma is the lady of a thousand legends.
all of them contradictory, all of them true. But they have one
source in common — her own great generosity of spirit
About eight years ago, a man named Ken Murray was looking for a leading lady for his show, "Blackouts." He had some very definite ideas in mind. The girl he wanted must measure up to these specifications: "She must be a blonde — with a body. I want a girl that will make every man in the audience want to climb up on the stage. If she can talk, fine — if not, I'll teach her. That isn't what counts."
He chose Marie Wilson for the part.
Three years ago a man named Cy Howard was looking for a leading lady for his new radio program, My Friend Irma. Cy, too, knew exactly what kind of girl he wanted. The one he had in mind must measure up to these specifications: "She must be a pretty, wide-eyed little girl, kind and sweet — but not sexj^ She must be able to look like a secretary and sound like a secretary. Gentle, naive, innocent."
He chose Marie Wilson for the part.
Marie has just finished her all-time record run in "Blackouts" in the middle of the show's eighth year. So Ken Murray must have been right when he chose her as his leading lady.
Marie has also just begun her third sponsored season on My Friend Irma, a program which finished last season in second place among all the shows on the air in terms of popularity with listeners, ahead of programs which cost five times its modest weekly budget. So Cy Howard, who writes the show must have been right, too, when he chose
By PAULINE SW ANSON
Marie to play the part of Irma.
But how is that possible — how is it possible that, both men, looking for such widely different types, both chose Marie Wilson and had their choices proved right?
The answer, of course, is that Marie Wilson is both of those girls, and a lot more.
She was a Hollywood legend fifteen years ago and she will be a Hollywood legend until she dies as — her friends insist — "the most beloved old lady in the poorhouse" somewhere about 1999.
Everyone in Hollywood has his favorite Marie Wilson story. Assembled, they're wildly contradictory— and they're all true.
She's a child in lots of ways, and will always be a child, and at the same time she's the little mother of all the world. She has a pink satin bedroom, with dolls piled on the bed. She ties pink hair ribbons on her adored Yorkshire terrier, Hobbs, and where Hobbs can't go to lunch, Marie doesn't go.
She was the dimwit girl in "Boy Meets Girl" in which she soared to stardom for the first time when she was seventeen.
She was "engaged" to a director, Nick Grinde, and when she went to Hollywood parties with him she would give him bewildering counsel.
"Don't drink anything but whisky tonight, Nicky," she would say. "Remember you have to drive."
Grinde took her once to visit Hugh Herbert, the actor. Herbert's house was then strictly in the flashy Spanish tradition, and the entrance foyer boasted a lily pond, complete with
My Friend Irma, witb Marie Wilson, can be heard on Mondays at 10:00 P.M. EDT over CBS.
Marie's been playing wide-eyed, naive blondes ever since her hit. "Boy Meets Girl."
63