Music: Engaging Grandfather

Carl Brisson was last week fast becoming known as the “matrons’ Sinatra.” An elegant, dimpled, Danish grandfather, who admits to 46, he was packing ladies of ripe years into Manhattan’s swank Versailles nightclub. Carl Brisson has a strictly personal, purple-tinted baritone, and for the use of it he was taking down some $2,000 a week. His was a curious, belated success story.

Brisson was a sensation abroad for years, but he has never before scored in the U.S. Although his voice has velour on its chest, he is in no sense effete. Born Carl Petersen in Copenhagen, he stepped into the fight ring as a boy, rose to be “cruiserweight” champion of Europe. He stands 6 ft. 1½ in., weighs 178 lb., has a leonine head. His motion as well as his music gets them. He climbs casually all over the nightclub furniture, sings on his feet, on the back of a chair, on a table, on a customer’s lap. His eyes are Scandinavian blue, his smile broad and boyish, his manner unfailingly virile. In London in the ’20s he got the romantic lead opposite diaphanous Evelyn Laye in The Merry Widow. A string of stage and cinema hits followed; there were Carl Brisson fan clubs, chocolates, cigarets, bathing suits. Lord Beaverbrook ran Brisson’s life story in ten installments in the Sunday Express. Hollywood discovered him.

Brisson made a number of pictures for Paramount in 1934-35, played in one Broadway musicomedy, but failed to register and returned to England. When the war began, as an alien in England, he had to go home under armed guard after each night’s performance. He returned to the U.S. in 1941, went to Hollywood, discovered he was classified as a has-been.

He bought a ranch in California, could not make a go of farming. The Versailles gave him a week’s tryout at $200, then quickly quintupled his salary. Grandfather Brisson was in.

His son Fred, 31, is the U.S. Army captain-husband of Cinemactress Rosalind Russell. There is one grandson, Carl Lance, I. Carl Brisson’s devotees easily overlook these vital statistics.