Radio doings (Dec 1930-Jun1932)

The Girl Who Is SELDOM HERSELF Gail Taylor, of the NBC Matinee, Slips From One Personality to Another Like Quicksilver, Sings, and Gives Recipes and Household Hints Over the Air — All in the Day's Work. Gail Taylor takes one back a few years in the "Gay Eighties and the Naughty Nineties." by Louise Landis SHE'S a dignified prima donna at one moment; a rollicking, "high brown" gal the next; she can be a sharp-spoken wife when the occasion demands ; she has a hundred interesting recipes and household hints at her finger-tips, and she has been the heroine of at least a dozen exciting love affairs— But all on the air! Which is why meeting Gail Taylor for the first time generally means a surprise. The feminine star of the NBC Matinee, who plays as many as half a dozen roles, all different, in an hour's performance, in addition to carrying the soprano burden of the musical portion of this daily NBC program, isn't the changeable person you might expect. Like quicksilver, she shifts from one personality to the other before the Matinee microphone, but away from it she's very much Gail Taylor and nobody else. A slim, charming girl with large brown eyes and whimsical mouth, Gail is one of the most ornamental members of NBC's San Fracisco studio staff — and one of the most serious so far as purposeful energy is concerned. At 27 she has achieved what she decided she wanted of life when she was still a little girl in grammar school — to sing and act. Just when she was on the verge of gaining her ambition, Fate stepped between Gail and a Broadway musical comedy contract which seemed to be the door to all her dreams. When she recovered from that disappointment Gail bravelv started all over again, and now, in radio she has found an outlet for her own particular and unusual combination of talents — both singing acting. Moreover, she has reached an enviable place in an art to which more and more members of the theatrical profession are turning, and Gail who once looked with longing eyes on the stage, finds the same gaze sometimes on the faces of theatrical folk who watch her broadcast. No footlight performer could work harder than Gail does in the NBC Matinee, not to speak of the other programs upon which she appears as soloist. She is "Onyx" Cotton in the amusing blackface skit which she and Captain Bill Royle present together. She is the heroine of most of the dramatic sketches offered in the Matinee, and the prima donna in all the condensed musical comedies and operetta featured in this program. And she still finds time to experiment personally with the recipes which she offers her homewomen listeners — the big audience to which the NBC afternoon variety hour is directed. "When I first sang into a microphone eight years ago in Los Angeles, I never dreamed what radio was going to mean," Gail says thoughtfully, when you talk to her of the days when she was just beginning a career which makes her a veteran in the newest professional field. She was just 19, and, an eager, ambitious girl, with her heart still set on her musical comedy hope, she was not intensely interested, she admits, in her radio debut. "It was just a lark," she relates. "Nobody dreamed of paying radio art ists in those days — you were supposed to feel honored if your voice was good enough to be broadcast. To get up and sing into the odd little microphone was a 'stunt.' "The studio was tiny, thickly padded, and so nearly air-tight as to be stifling. It was on the roof of a Los Angeles building, and you reached it by taking an elevator to the top floor, then climbing a ladder and literally 'walking a plank.' " Singing is as much part of Gail's inheritance as her name. Both her father and mother were well-known choir singers in a Kansas City, Mo., church, where they met and were mar[Turn to Page 39] Page Eighteen RADIO DOINGS