Radio: Ugly Duckling

Still calling attention to her brass-trumpet voice, her buck teeth and her knobby arms & legs, Cass Daley last week became radio’s most popular comedienne.* The Fitch Co. is busy revising its Sunday night show (NBC, 7:30-8 p.m., E.S.T.) to play up Cass, play down the guest orchestras.

The daffy Daley was clowning on the four-a-day before anybody had heard very much of such loudmouths as Martha Raye and Betty Hutton. When the Fitch Bandwagon hired Cass as a summer replacement in 1945, the radio studio was filled with her admirers. To gain these old fans, Cass had to start young (she is only 30 now).

The Big Money. The daughter of an Irish streetcar conductor, she was ten when she earned her first money (25¢) for singing. The stage: a bread box in front of a Philadelphia store. Even then, her voice was hoarse, her hair stringy, her teeth protruding. But the Olney neighborhood liked her. By the time she was 17 she was singing in a Camden, N.J. nightclub, where she earned, as combination hatcheck-girl, vocalist and electrician, about $85 a week. The turning-point in her career came when she met a handsome, liquid-eyed insurance broker named Frank Kinsella.

Cass was a self-conscious girl trying desperately to be pretty. To hide her too-prominent teeth, she pressed her upper lip well down as she sang. Kinsella kept coming to hear her and tried to coach her back into the uninhibited comedy of her childhood. When she insisted on singing with a small mouth he dropped a plate in the middle of her act. Kinsella became so fascinated with the case of Cass that he gave up the insurance business, became Cass’s manager, married her.

The Big Applause. Under her husband’s guidance, Cass’s comedy became a staple of big time vaudeville. She wowed them with Bobby Clark in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936-37, stole the show at New York’s Paramount Theater. Her earnings jumped to $750 a week. When she toured England, the London Evening Standard gave her ecstatic notices.

She has appeared in five movies (Duffy’s Tavern, etc.) but is not as well known to cinemaddicts as some of the coon-shouters who got to Hollywood first. But in radio, Cass has found the big money ($2,000 a week) and the big applause.

When she comes on stage, she looks like a nice, terribly shy girl in a long white gown. After a moment’s pause and a demure curtsy, she suddenly chases the announcer, swings on the velvet curtain, howls a snatch of some unrefined ditty, walks on the side of her heels, pops her teeth and straddles the mike. Radio audiences miss much of this, but if television is just around the corner, Cass Daley’s success has hardly begun.

* Hooper rating: Cass Daley 18.3, nosing out Joan Davis, 17.3.