Radio stars (Sept 1933)

RADIO STARS Understanding J e a n n I e LANG The giggle, the baby-talk, the cute little face— they mask a determination and will power that are amazing Culver Service With Jack Denny, of Waldorf-As+oria fame. By DONALD COPPER LET me tell you about Jeannie Lang. In a college town, I could fill a lecture hall with that invitation, jeannie is the college boy's pal. They go for her like a cross-roads kid goes for pink lemonade. Whenever she meets them, she's a riot. Her fan mail reeks of fraternity crests and rah-rah devotion. You've heard that song. "She's an AU-American Girl"? That's Jeannie. Rather, that is the Jeannie the vv^orld knows, the hey-hey Jeannie with a hot-cha-cha that goes hand in hand with her frivolous voice. Actually, there is another Jeannie. Let me tell you about her. Fir.st, to complete her picture . . . but am I assuming too much when I guess that you're already one of her fans? Just in case you've missed her, she's the lass who chuckled and hummed through all the CBS Pontiac programs last winter and si)ring. Then the NBC's Musical Grocery Store hired her as a melodic cashier. Every time Jack Denny's orchestra at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York goes on the air, she's a featured soloist. But of course you've heard Jeannie. And probably she has sounded like a pert-nosed peddler of today's sauciest hymns. Without a care in the world, with no thought of tomorrow, with all bills paid and the bad ol' wolf simply miles and miles from her door. But this Jeannie . . . this other Jeannie ... is .something else again. 1 don't mean she's lugging a broken heart through life, or that some swain once went and done her wrong. Or that she supports an orphanage or is wasting away from some secret disease. No, none of the conventional "other person's" plots fit the Lang lass. But . . . YOU don't meet this other party until you shake Jeannie Lang by the hand. I wish you could do that, all you folk who have listened and looked through your loudspeakers envisioning nothing more than a sweet young thing with a bubble-water voice. That handshake, you remember it. Firm yet flexible, meeting and matching the power in your own fingers. It's a clue to the springsteel quality in her. Do you doubt it ? I don't blame you, for many people have. They have seen Jeannie enter a room looking so soft and fluft'y that football players fell over each other in their attempts to help her seat herself in a chair. They have seen her, half-devil and half-imp. with mischief in her eyes and on her lips, and said to themselves, that this girl can be of no significance, can have no mind of her own. Let me tell you this: Jeannie Lang has proved beyond all doubt that she is her own mistress and the directress of her own destiny. She has demonstrated a strength that not one girl in a dozen can match. This is what I mean : Have you ever been to a collegiate houseparty, the gay sort that sprinkled all America last June or any number of Junes before that? They're of a pattern, no matter whether in Maine or Montana. Giddy girls and ga-ga boys at the end of a disciplined year, a chaperone selected for her ability to keep her eyes closed, and gin or its equivalent ; these are the ingredients. Oh, yes, and — cigarettes. No self-respecting college boy in these wideeyed times goes without his "nails." What I'm getting to is this: (Continued on page 40) 9