Music: Pipe Dream Girl

Quick as the turn of a dial is the process by which Radio makes its own artists. Oldtime success stories seem slow and labored compared with the meteoric rise of moonfaced Morton Downey, who has earned $4,500 a week with his ballading ever since young President William Samuel Paley of Columbia Broadcasting System used him to lure Camel’s cigaret advertising from National Broadcasting Co. Kate Smith’s story is another one based on tobacco. Her 240 Ib. and an easy, tricky way of singing had scarcely identified her with musicomedy when La Palina cigars snatched her up for a sum appropriate to her size. Joe White (“The Silver-Masked Tenor”), Jack Smith (“The Whispering Baritone”) and B. A. Rolfe (Lucky Strike Dance Orchestra) prove that the dial works two ways. They are yesterday’s capable headliners now without sponsors.

Sophisticates may take scant pleasure in the caressive, high-pitched crooning of Morton Downey but R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. counts as well spent the $108,000 paid him since June. Prince Albert, second largest Reynolds moneymaker, never had radio advertising until recently when 15-min. programs, copied almost exactly from the Camel quarter-hours, were sent out over N. B. C. The difference: Instead of a “Camel Minstrel” there is a “Prince Albert Dream Girl.” Alice Joy, another unknown, has been given the same expensive send-off that Morton Downey had. “Minstrel” Downey caused instant talk with his mellifluous falsetto which sounds like a woman’s. By last week, her third on the air, millions of people were listening to Alice Joy whose voice has a saxophone quality so deep that it might be a man’s.

Alice Joy’s start and “discovery” by radio are archetypal. Her start was sufficiently obscure. She used to be Frances Holcombe, daughter of a rural mail-carrier in Streator, Ill. At 9 she sang hymns for Chautauqua audiences, standing on a chair between two older sisters. At 18 she went into vaudeville, played every State but Texas as one of Will J. Ward’s Five Piano Girls. Then she married a Captain E. Robert Burns, Wartime aviator turned vaudeville pressagent. She settled down on Staten Island, had two children, went in for gardening.

Advertisers determine most radio careers. Charles F. Gannon of Erwin, Wasey & Co. (agents for Reynolds) “discovered” Alice Joy at a party this autumn, when he was in the midst of concocting the Prince Albert program. Quick to appreciate the husky, vibrant quality which makes some mediocre voices broadcast better than finer, better trained ones, Advertiser Gannon was just as quick to sell his find to Prince Albert for $3,000 a week, on a year’s contract. By the maxim that anyone who pleases the client is a radio success, Alice Joy is made. She sings over one of the biggest hook-ups in a series which will cost Prince Albert approximately $1,000,000. Her songs, like Minstrel Downey’s, are of the mellow, persuasive sort. An occasional old-fashioned ballad supposedly represents the real Alice Joy. a simple, ruddy-cheeked, home-loving girl who adores flowers and ivy-covered churches.