TV Guide (September 11, 1954)

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ton was a good friend of one Alan Livingston, an executive of decision¬ making importance at Capitol Rec¬ ords. Livingston, who hadn’t heard the songs Livingston and Evans hadn’t yet written, decided Capitol would put out an album from the show and had Jus art department design a cover. “It was a rather peculiar feeling,” Evans admits. “They were not only planning an album of 10 songs we hadn’t even written, they’d even de¬ signed the cover with blanks for the song titles. And then they told us not to make the titles too long; other¬ wise they wouldn’t fit on the cover.” “Writing for Betty,” Livingston says, “is a real experience. If she likes the song, she cries. She is so pleased that someone has done something nice just for her that she just simply cries. If she doesn’t like a song, she gets spe¬ cific about it. She’ll just say she doesn’t like the ending. So we fix the ending and then she cries and then we know everything’s OK.” With Hutton now in full cry, as it were, Liebman took off for a Euro¬ pean vacation. But not Hutton. She arranged to do a personal appearance in Atlantic City during the first two weeks in August for the specific pur¬ poses of breaking in some of the new songs. She disregarded the personal difficulties she had been having with her husband, Charles O’Curran, whom she has since divorced, and arranged to have him stage her numbers. “Betty,” one of her closest friends explains, “is very businesslike. On top of that, she is a perfectionist. When she decides to do something, she goes all out. She did that two-week stand in Atlantic City and then rehearsed six weeks in New York—all for one TV appearance. And because she still thinks O’Curran knows more about staging for her particular style than anyone else, she made no bones about wanting him.” Just what effect the combined Lieb- man-Hutton technique will have on the TV industry is difficult to say. Certainly nothing like it has ever been tried before—a star of the first magnitude making her initial TV ap¬ How do you like it? Betty models a costume possibility for the show. pearance with an original book, an original score and an album produced by a major record company, all for a show which is set to die just 90 min¬ utes after it starts. “This is not like the movies,” Betty says. “With a picture, you have time to get set for the blow, to roll with it, good or bad. With this, we’ll have the news on the morning of Sept. 13, com¬ plete. Wouldn’t you know it would be a Monday ?”—Dan Jenkins 7