Radio: Smart Stuff

Once a week, as a respite from soap operas, NBC offers U. S. womankind a program known as Luncheon at the Waldorf. Broadcast from the Empire Room of Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria, the show is aimed at matrons with better-than-average bankrolls, is as sedulously shallow as a column by Lucius Beebe. Clearly responsible for the tenor of the Luncheon is Actress Ilka Chase, who not only serves as aerial hostess but writes the scripts as well. Last week before a free-feeding audience of 50, Luncheon at the Waldorf was fluttering smartly through its third 13-week period on the air under the sponsorship of Camel Cigarettes.

Hostess Chase’s scripts are full of chitsy-chatsy on what the smart little child will wear, how to get along as a weekend guest, the importance of wearing hats that please men. Included in the verbal menu is a resume of Miss Chase’s gay activities since she was last on the air—luncheon with Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolf), cocktails with Condé Nast, dinner with the Grand Duchess Marie, etc.

Besides describing such elegant doings, Miss Chase brightens her Luncheons by interviewing a couple of guests of honor. She has gaily discussed man’s reversion to the ape with Harvard’s Earnest Albert Hooton, the worries & woes of picture-making with Walter Wanger, the business of editing fashion magazines with her mother, Mrs. Edna Woolman Chase, editor of Vogue. She is fond of titillating her listeners with attacks on too too noble women, descriptions of summer romances gone sour because “in the flush of the rush he may have neglected to tell you of his wife.”

Luncheon at the Waldorf was thought up by Miss Chase’s husband, William Murray, radio director of the William Morris (theatrical) Agency, originally had a hard time getting on the air because sponsors considered it too bright for day time audiences. Now it moves along so briskly that sponsors are thinking of letting the general public gape while the Luncheons are in progress. Only outsiders permitted to join the pressmen and sponsors’ pals who now attend the Luncheons are those who write in on very smart stationery. On no such stock was one of the letters Miss Chase received from a Midwest housewife, who wrote: “You and your mother must both reek of cigarette smoke. Such carryings on!”