Radio doings (Dec 1930-Jun1932)

THEY Do It With MIRRORS Written By An Artist Who Knows What He's Talking About. This Article Tells You Why Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, Al Jolson and Others Are Imitators — Not Inventors Another Fascinating Article by Ted White THE original Al Jolson was a Beau Brummel of the San Francisco theater who worked in white face and talked in an odd little lisp, as he moved about the stage in a sort of fox-trot. Every time I hear Al Jolson sing a song and watch him fox-trot around the stage, I can close my eyes and see Lee Lloyd, famous old San Francisco entertainer. Jolson didn't "lift'' Lloyd's style with deliberate intent, I am certain. But undoubtedly he saw Lloyd on the stage during his own San Francisco days, and an impression was stamped on his subconscious mind which later found expression in his own working style. As it emerges from Al's burnt-cork countenance, the lisping dialect sounds like darky dialect to most of us, but it bears no relation whatever to the real thing, and Al himself doesn't realize how much like Lloyd he would sound and look, if he performed in whiteface. No more than Bing Crosby realizes that his own habit of singing off-tempo, against the beat, which so individualizes him in the minds of many radio listeners, is taken directly from Jolson, himself! And so it goes. You can name a dozen first-rank performers, radio, stage or screen, whose particular style or manner of entertainment is credited to them, but was used by someone else long before this generation of audiences grew up. That someone else prob ably used an earlier model for his style, which proves just one thing — every entertainer's own, particular trick is a thing hard to define, and harder still to call his own. Yet a trick he must have. In these days, when the microphone has revolutionized the theatrical world, those of us whose job it is to entertain you, have had to originate a whole new technique. Many an old-time vaudeville singer who used to lean down over the footlights and hypnotize a house-full of audience into believing he was the world's greatest comedian, has found his whole outlook changed with only a small, square box upon which to focus his magnetism. That is why a host of new names fills the amusement firmament today, while the stars of only a few years ago are learning to adjust themselves to new orbits. Those who win out before the microphone have learned how to project a personality through it. What they achieve is comparable to what is known as stage presence behind the footlights — it is the something which makes them different from all the thousands of other voices and personalities on the air, so that listeners who turn a dial can sav "That is Rudy Vallee"— "That is Ruth Etting" — without a moment's hesitation. It's not only the voice which does it. but the manner in which the voice is used. I learned this early in my radio career, when I had painful experience with the fact that singing to the radio audience is a very different propostion from singing to the same hearers in a theater or a cafe. Radio hearers, so kind now and so generous of praise, didn't write me friendly letters in those days. The audience mail department was likely then to hand me a note whose writer remarked in no uncertain terms just how poor he or she thought Ted White was. Well — they must have been right, because I had not at that time learned what radio singing meant. I had come to Hollywood straight from Reno, where I had been fortunate enough to please the crowds who nightly filled the club where I sang. I had to work just as hard to please those night club audiences as I do before the microphone now, but it was different work. A night club entertainer has to have a large repertoire of widely varied songs, and as many ways of singing those songs as he has "customers" to please. At one time in Reno I knew 1200 songs by heart, which is more than I know now, and I sang comedy songs, ballads, popular songs, musical tunes and oldfashioned airs upon request. One night I had to sing a child's lullably to please a spifflicated lady customer in the night club whose escort loudly announced she was to have what she wanted in the way of music. A few moments later I was warbling a jazz number, and the lullaby lady was demanding I do something "sweeter and hotter." And then I went to Hollywood, and (Turn to Page 38) Page Twenty RADIO DOINGS