Radio: Soap Singer

For 14 years Tenor Jack Smith has sung on the air almost as often, but neither as well nor as profitably, as Bing Crosby. An old radio hand at 29, Jack Smith has never had a sponsored show of his own, has sung for his supper on scores of sustaining programs. Last week, the biggest spenders in radio, Soap Makers Procter & Gamble, gave him one of radio’s best spots: a four-times-a-week Jack Smith Show (CBS, 7:15—7:30 p.m., E.W.T.).

In putting Jack Smith* in a spot that the Sinatras, Comos and Haymeses might well covet, P & G were counting on the fact that he is so unlike them: P & G thinks teen-age fans are not much of a market for Oxydol. No dreamy, draggy stylist, Smith sings with a jaunty bounce, the result of years of having to sound cheerful too early in the day.

He got his first big job at 16, as the tenor of a trio which followed Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys into Hollywood’s Cocoanut Grove in 1931. (Like Bing, he has never learned to read notes, but knows harmony from his trio days.) Tough times followed until he clicked with a one-song shot on Kate Smith’s program. Since then, Tenor Smith has sometimes appeared in as many as 19 programs in one week. Among them were several variety shows for P & G, who reckoned that he would go over with housewives who tuned out the bobby-sox favorites.

P & G, who have $11 million-a-year worth of radio enterprise (soap operas, Truth or Consequences, etc.), signed Smith for two years, and plan to blow $1,600,000 a year on the show—which is a lot of Oxydol. It is a good contract for Jack Smith: if P & G decide to drop him, they lose the right to the prize radio time (held for three years by Chesterfield)—and meanwhile Jack Smith can sing on as many other radio shows as he, and his fans, can take.

*Not to be confused with “Whispering” Jack Smith (no kin), husky-voiced radio headliner of the early ’30s.