Music: New Pitch in the Persian Room

Comedienne Elsa Lanchester was between movies. Moreover, she was on three months’ vacation from Los Angeles’ popular Turnabout Theater, where she has reigned as revue queen for the past nine years (TIME, May 24, 1948). Husband Charles Laughton was off on a three-month tour reciting Shakespeare and the Bible. What should Elsa do with the time on her hands? A Hollywood promoter solved the problem for her. Last week, red-haired Elsa was making her first try as a chanteuse in the top-tab Persian Room of Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel.

She had tested her routine first in Montreal, then in Boston. Says warmly homely Elsa: “Boston was puzzled by anyone who even looks like me.” Variety’s Boston correspondent reported that her routine was “weighted down with too much sameness of material.” There was no reason for it to be. Since her teen-age days in a Soho supper club (where she sang a song that begins, “Chase me, Charley, over the barley, I’ve lost the leg of my drawers”), she had picked up plenty of material. Among other things, Elsa, onetime student of Isadora Duncan, confesses that “I am a bit of a dancer and make fantastic motions.” What did bother a little was the fact that “I can’t sing.”

Last week sophisticated Persian Roomers, used to such glamorines as Hildegarde, were finding Elsa a little on the puzzling side. Following a polished dance team, she came coyly onstage looking, as she calls it, a little “tatty” in an artfully simple dress, her red curls all over her head. Her first song, about a blooming romance in a laundromat, was delivered in a saucy, off-key voice something like a boy soprano’s. Then Elsa climbed on top of the grand piano to pitch a mildly off-color number called The Janitor’s Boy. The audience liked some of Elsa’s pitches, but they were a little letdown by the delivery: she made no effort to cozy up to the customers between numbers. Persian Room audiences have been trained on entertainers who glide around the ringside tables, wooing the patrons with vocal ardor and sentiment.

Elsa just wasn’t the type for that, but she had a lot of material to draw on, including, if necessary, Chase Me, Charley.