Radio: Vocal Varieties

In Hollywood, where fame is half measured by the company one keeps, Peggy Webber is her own best company. In three years her lastex voice has supplied radio with 150 different characters on some 2,500 broadcasts.

Last week she was a fluttery French ingenue, an English schoolgirl, a Southern belle, a young bride, a cackling 85-year-old murderess, an Irish landlady, a Mexican shrew, a neurotic. She was also rehearsing her normal voice for a new role in Herbert Marshall’s The Man Called X (NBC, Tues. 10 p.m., E.D.S.T.).

Peggy, who is still shy of 21, started trouping early. As a toddling three-year-old—spurred by her engineer-father, once a Chicago singer—she danced and sang in Texas mining towns. At six, she hit the road for a West Coast vaudeville circuit. She was only eleven when she crashed radio in San Antonio. There she organized neighborhood kids into the Little Texans Theater of the Air over WOAI. Peggy wrote and managed the program, used her vocal talents for little boy roles and sound effects.

Small (5 ft. 2 in.; 105 Ibs.), bushy-browed Peggy picks up dialects as easily as Alec Templeton catches a tune. Whenever she is assigned a new one, she talks on the telephone with a Hollywood bit-player who speaks the dialect, instantly echoes his accent and inflection. Now she has more alter egos than she can possibly keep at work. Solution: she is writing five new shows to keep herself busy.