Radio stars (Oct 1933-Sept 1934)

RADIO STARS 9£ Mjl By JOSEPH KENT K ! VERY .-ingle night you listen to your radio, you're fooled not once, but a half dozen times. You're told, either directly or by implication, that such a thing is true about this or that person. Actually, it's the bunk. Day by day broadcasting is getting more and more shot with sly falsehoods. Why? Well, some people think it is good business. Glance at the movies, if you want a precedent. When Marlene Dietrich came over from < iermany and told Paramount officials that she was married and had a daughter. Maria, they told her that being a mother and a wife was not glamorous. Why couldn't she say she was single and heart-free? Marlene refused to do this. If she had to lie, she said, she would give out no interviews at all. In the end Paramount officials let her have her way. When Cecil B. DeMille was looking for a girl with virginal eyes for "This Day and Age," he selected Judith Allen. He asked her if she had been married and she said she never had been. He believed her. He needed a girl for the picture who could act like a virgin and he thought that the only kind of girl who could play the part was a girl who actually was a virgin. Later, after half the picture had been shot, it came out that Judith was married to a wrestler and that she was getting a divorce from him. DeMille took the hoax like a good sport and got all the publicity he could out of it. In the field of radio many legends have been created around radio personalities. Del Campo (left), Chilean tenor, has two press agents trying to push him to fame. You think you hear Rubinoff talking? No. It's Ted Bergman (center). The Three Keys (right) were ballyhooed to fame but couldn't hold it. For instance, there is one young woman on a famous XBC musical program who is supposed to be the apple of every college boy's eye. Maybe she is, but what the college boys don't know and what radio officials don't want them to know is that the sweet young thing is married to a middle-aged man who acts as her manager. He doesn't want anyone to know that they are married and vet he can't help making a noise like a husband. And sometimes, when interviewers come to see the sweet young thing, he forgets that he isn't her husband and invites them to "come up and see us sometime." And then there is another couple whose devotion to each other is a legend among radio fans. And devoted to each other they really are. But the world has been led to believe that neither of them has ever been married before. That's the bunk. The woman has been married once before, but it was a brief, bitter, unhappy marriage. You could write a book about the marriages of radio stars. Which of them are married and which aren't ? You think you know — but do you? A few stars, like George Olsen and Ethel Shutta, like Morton Downey, like Julia Sanderson and Frank Crumit (Continued on page 74) Have they fooled you? These Hill Billies who never saw hills! 18