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WHEN THEY FACE the
Whaf happens whery Radio ar+is+s make fheir first appearances
WHAT happens when your favorite air hero or heroine deserts the ether for the boards, the rostrum or any old vaudeville stage? Are they nonchalant or do they quake with fear at the thought of facing an audience no longer invisible? This thought (the second this month and surely indicative of something) occurred to me the other day as I was peeling potatoes. Surely someone must know the answer to this perplexing question 1 said to myself. Some bright soul must have an answer for me, so I finished my potatoes (not small potatoes either), hung up my apron and was off.
The first person I ran into was Eddie Paul, who by a curious turn of fate remembered that I owed him |10. Dragging me into a nearby alley by main force he searched me. 1 knew he wouldn't find anything but as he searched an idea came to me. Here was the musical director of New York's Paramount theatres. Here was a man who might know the answer. Did he? He did indeed.
"For example," he said, "When Guy Lombardo played the Paramount for the first time he wasn't exactly nervous. True he dropped his fiddle when four of us had to push him onto the stage. He couldn't remember his first speech and he had trouble in saying 'Ladies and Gentlemen' but I wouldn't say he was nervous/'
I figured that the air was getting him so I inveigled him into taking me up to his ofllce, loaning me a cigar and another 1 10. There he unburdened himself of the following. (We're both leav
By BILL VA L L E E
• Amos (Freeman Gosden) 'n' Andy (Charles Correll) as they really look before they put on makeup for personal appearances
ing town tonight, so don't try to find us. And I mean it.) Bing Crosby has never done badly on the stage. Backed by a checkered career he has variously hidden behind scenery and Paul Whiteman. He charms and amuses when he's down in one but he can't get off stage. Yessir he has tried a dozen exits. He has used his little tricks like picking up his trousers like a skirt — posturing crazily, etc., but they all seem to leave him stranded especially following passionate love songs. Someone suggested a hook — executives of higher and lower grades have offered various other schemes and the midnight oil sales have gone up but Crosby still can't go out!
Walter Winchell signed up for a week with Benjamin Bernie, a friend. Naturally you wouldn't expect the hero of many a small keyhole to be nervous. No? He was so scared that he had to sit down all of the time he was a-stage! He couldn't take it standing up!
While we're on the subject of nervousness let's cock a listening ear toward the redoubtable Paul who sees to it that people are accompanied, taught the art of the baton (Crosby, Columbo and Vallee, et al), and in general lives up to his degree of Doctor of Music. He advances the theory that most stars are nervous every time they go a-stage. 6ut more important, he says this same nervousness improves their work; that they actually work better under a high tension. Interesting and quite plausible, eh?
Jane Froman is like that. She finds the switch from radio to the stage a
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