Show Business: Lacely Ugigimous

She is full of zing. She shakes with rhythm. Her dark eyes shine with irreverence in a pretty face of high cheekbones with a firm chin. She is a Negro girl who could be Johnny Mathis’ little sister.

Her name is Leslie Uggams, and she has been in and around TV for twelve years. She appeared with Arthur Godfrey, Garry Moore, Sid Caesar, Peter Lind Hayes, Bob Crosby. She won $25,000 as a contestant on Name That Tune. Mitch Miller, as Columbia Records’ artists-and-repertory man, saw her and signed her to a contract, starting her up the charts. As a TV performer, Miller invited her to sing along with him and finally made her a permanent star. It was a long pull. She was seven when she started, and she is 19 now.

As the star soloist on Miller’s sing-along program, she has proved herself the best girl singer since Rosemary Clooney. Her talent is evidence that not all teen-age singers are indiscriminately scraped up off the sidewalks and shoved into echo chambers. She has the range of mood and inflection to do everything from Clang Clang Clang Went the Trolley to religious songs at Christmastime.

The granddaughter of two ministers, she was raised on 164th Street in Manhattan’s Washington Heights area. Her father sang with the Hall Johnson Choir, and her mother was once a chorine at Harlem’s Cotton Club. For three years Leslie went to P.S. 169, then transferred to the Professional Children’s School; she was elected class president in her senior year. One fellow student was Heller Halliday, Mary Martin’s daughter, and the two were close friends. “My mother and Heller’s governess were good friends too,” Leslie adds. “There’s quite a difference between 164th Street and Hampshire House.” She has steadfastly held onto her own name even though announcers hacked it up for years. “And now we present Lacely Ugigimous!” they would say, or Higgins, Iggims, Smuggins, Smuggams and some times Uganimous. She says that she has the blood of both the Cherokee and Seminole nations in her veins and that her parents have told her that Uggams is an Indian word meaning “sweet one.” With her parents, she now lives in a glossy new apartment building near Lincoln Center. Buick, sponsor of Sing Along, handed her a Wildcat last year and will soon come through with another 4,000 Ibs. of rolling gratitude. She also gets $2,500 a week and her guest-appearance fee is $10,000. Her allowance is $20 a week. She is as frugal as Scrooge’s grand mother with the tangible cash in her purse, but with checks and charge accounts she is like Mrs. Everyman: she charges things and writes checks as if Parker Brothers had invented the game. And in the world she lives in, they probably did.