Brick Top

The most widely popular singer of classical songs in the U.S. is grey-haired, beaming, 195-lb. Nelson Eddy. The 43-year-old baritone is one of the three most popular singers, in any league.* Last week he was well away in a new show as master of ceremonies and star of The Electric Hour (CBS, Wed., 10:30 p.m. E.W.T.). His job: to make listeners feel happy about the 160 electric-light & power companies which sponsor him. His method: songs and banter.

The devotion of Nelson Eddy’s millions of fans is so fanatical that his fan mail (85% from girls and women) is extraordinary even by radio-cinema standards. Eddy’s concert tours sell out way in advance, and he averages $15,000 a week from them. His radio salary is $5,000 a week, not including guest appearances. Another $60,000 to $80,000 a year accrues from his phonograph recordings, at least four of which have sold over a million discs apiece. With his movie income, his total earnings to date are about $5,000,000.

All this is a tribute to a great natural voice, a handsome face, and the exceedingly boyish Eddy personality. Women have been carried swooning from Nelson Eddy’s performances. Lacking anything like the artistry of an Antonio Scotti, Eddy has been content to let nature take its devastating course.

Wrong-Way Eddy. His reasons are quite understandable. He was born into a middle-class family of Providence, R.I. He was the awkward kind of schoolboy with blazing red hair who invariably lost his girls to sharper rivals. All thumbs at baseball, too clumsy for soccer, he met the only great chance of his athletic career (an emergency place on the relay team) by grabbing the baton and running the wrong way around the track.

Gangling “Brick Top” Eddy never went to high school. After his parents’ divorce, he went with his mother to Philadelphia, where he was working for an advertising agency when a friend, who had heard him roaring around the house, introduced him to the late baritone, David Bispham. Bispham thought Eddy had “a native voice as great as any baritone that ever lived,” trained the 21-year-old for his public debut in a musical play at the Philadelphia Academy of Music.

Very Good Eddy. Eddy’s hair was already greying when he put on a Los Angeles concert in 1933. The audience demanded 18 encores, and among the enthusiasts was M.G.M.’s Louis B. Mayer. Three Hollywood studios offered Eddy screen tests. M.G.M. won him, tinted his hair, and put him into Naughty Marietta in 1935, with Jeanette MacDonald. At the picture’s preview, Director W. S. Van Dyke turned from the raving audience to Eddy and asked: “Well, how does it feel to be a great actor?” “But I’m not an actor,” Eddy protested. “I know that,” said Van Dyke, “but how does it feel?”

Like many another successful man, Nelson Eddy thinks he was better fitted for another calling. Eddy’s conviction, shared by almost no one, is that he is a born comedian. His producers discreetly shelve scripts he painfully prepares for them. He idolizes the comic ease of Bing Crosby. His associates readily forgive Eddy such blatant clowning as hiding from the director under Jeanette MacDonald’s hoop skirts. Frugal, suspicious, Eddy is nevertheless as honestly congenial as a puppy dog.

This friendliness carries over into Nelson Eddy’s private life. He and pretty Mrs. Eddy (46), ex-wife of Hollywood Producer Sidney Franklin, enjoy their Brentwood home. Eddy works in the garden, cleans the chicken pens, cooks the chickens, shoots rats with an air rifle. Mrs. Eddy has a son, now in the Army, by her first husband; Nelson Eddy is bitterly disappointed that he has no children of his own.

When he built his home, he made a specific request—that the architect install, in a hidden recess in the fireplace (visible by removing a brass plate and turning on a hidden light), the five-cent boy’s top he played with as a schoolboy in Rhode Island.

* Others: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra.